Say You’re One Of Them (23 page)

The chief gave Jubril a bad look, as if to say, If you had behaved well you would have been the one to benefit from that seat. Jubril had watched the drama from a distance, with a mixture of pity and jealousy and then repulsion. When the sick man had struggled with Emeka for the blanket, Jubril felt like helping Emeka. But he did not know what to do. How could he have helped with one hand? How could he have dared to speak with his Hausa accent? He had prayed for the man silently and wished that Allah would keep death far from him, at least until he got to his destination.

Jubril began to feel a strange affinity for the sick man: the malaria had twisted his tongue, making him babble, and Jubril had to speak as little as possible and feign an accent for the sake of his disguise. He watched the people watching the man, and on their sympathetic faces he could see that the man might not make it home alive. The spike in his fever had put a chill on the struggle for space in the bus, and the refugees now spoke in hushed voices. Jubril really admired how Emeka had rallied to help the sick man and talked people out of their spaces for him.

Yet, seeing how one man got the sympathy of the whole bus, Jubril began to feel jealous. What could he do to endear himself to these people? How could he get everybody to arrange for a place for him to sit or ask the chief to give him back his seat, without giving himself away? And then he could not bear to look at the sick man on the floor. He reminded him of so many corpses he had seen on the way here. In his mind Jubril tried to distinguish the dead from those who were in the process of dying, like this man. He could not.

He kept looking at the ceiling of the bus. Now his revulsion for the sick man was so strong that he preferred to look at the TV sets. They were not as frightening as before, though when he looked at them his sensibilities were not as unguarded as when he looked at the women. He paid attention to the knobs and the rings around the knobs. He wished the darkness of the TV screens would descend on his recent memories, and he wished those memories, which kept pressing to be recognized, were fastened and caged like the TVs.

“Well, if he die,” Tega said, pointing to the sick man, “we must decide quick quick
wetin
we go do wid de corpse,
chebi?
”

“You want steal de corpse or de dead man space too?” Ijeoma said.

“We must take the corpse home,” Emeka said.

“No, I tink we must give his space to anoder person!” Tega said.

“It’s our tradition to be laid to rest in our ancestral land,” Emeka said.

“No need to carry dead body home when so many
dey
stranded,” Tega insisted.

“But he has paid his fare,” Madam Aniema said.

“And the Luxurious Bus insurance covers his burial, you know,” Emeka said.

“Who go claim de body
sef
dis
wahala
time?
Na
major crisis we
dey
now.”

“I’m sure you be Musrim,” Ijeoma said. “Dat’s why you want buly
am
quick quick.”

The bus was silent.

The word
Muslim
formed in many mouths, but nobody had the will to say it aloud. Instead they turned and looked at Tega carefully and then examined their neighbors. It was as if a sacrilegious word had been uttered in the holy of holies. Jubril looked down and bit his lip. He felt that all eyes were on him but kept telling himself they were not talking about him. In his ears, the silence was like an eternity. He closed his eyes and waited for blows to land on him.

“
YOU
WANT
INCITE
DEM
to kill me,
abi?
” Tega said, finally finding her voice. She was breathing hard and pulling at her cornrows as if she intended to tear out the beads. Her eyes met the dangerous stares in the bus with credulity.

“She is not a Muslim!” Emeka announced, and the whole bus was behind him, scolding Ijeoma for calling Tega a Muslim. They told her a fight over storage space was too small a matter to elicit such bad will toward a fellow Christian. They berated her for ingratitude to God, for she was seated, when others would have to stand for hundreds of miles during the journey home. The cacophony seemed unending, with some insisting that Ijeoma must apologize to Tega and to the whole bus.

“My people, my people,” Chief Ukongo said, standing up and thudding his stick repeatedly to calm the situation. When everybody kept quiet, the old man cleared his throat. “This matter is getting out of hand. Let no one say
Muslim
or
Islam
again on this bus. We have suffered too much already at the hands of Muslims. . . . If the man dies we shall take him home, period.”

“Yes, good talk!” one man concurred.

“Chief, you go live forever!” another said.

“Make nobody mention anyting
wey
be against God’s children!”

“Yes, let’s watch what we say on this bus,” Madam Aniema said.

As the conversation reverted to the bus’s insurance policy, Jubril began to breathe again. He did not know how he had managed to remain on his feet at the mention of the word
Muslim
or when people had searched the faces of their neighbors. Though he had looked down immediately, he had expected someone to grab him and tell him he was a fraud. He expected someone to pull his arm out of his pocket. It was as if his mind had stopped, for he did not hear Tega protesting her innocence or the chief diffusing the people’s anger toward Ijeoma. The point at which he started hearing again was when someone said, “Yes, good talk!”

Now Jubril wedged the bag between his knees and used his left hand to wipe the sweat that trickled down his forehead. It was not enough, so he pulled a shirt from his bag and mopped his face and neck and tried to pay attention to the conversation around him. When he returned the shirt to his bag, he felt the piece of paper that bore the name of his father’s village. It was like an energy boost. He thought of taking it out and looking at it but decided against that. He wriggled his toes in the canvas shoes to be sure they were not numb and shifted his weight from one leg to the other. He looked about the bus and even smiled at the chief, who did not smile back.

He listened to the chatter around him as one might a fairy tale, both hopeful and afraid of the awesome possibilities. He was surprised that a bus company could insure its passengers against injury, accident, or cost of burial, whereas the politicians who promised the people better health care never delivered. It was as if this bus and its company existed in a dream world. Since the motor park he had run to was already south of Khamfi, in his mind Jubril began to associate all the new things he had experienced so far with the myth of the south. In his imagination, he saw the south as more developed than the north, even if it was inhabited by infidels. He saw well-paved roads and functional hospitals. He saw huge markets and big motor parks full of Luxurious Buses. He thought about big schools with colorful buildings and well-fed children. He believed this was precisely the sort of place to escape to. He needed a place to hide and to heal, and from the little he had heard from these Christians he did not think he had made a mistake by running south.

THE
MORE
JUBRIL
LABORED
to suppress thoughts of his journey so he could focus on maintaining his disguise, the more his mind revolted. When he was not dwelling on the circumstances of his escape, his mind wandered further back into his past, to some distant event that was tangled up in his flight from Khamfi.

For example, the dread of each stage of the journey, not knowing if he would make it to the next stop, had forced him, in the past two days, especially in Khamfi, to harbor thoughts he had never considered important and that he even would have considered heretical. Though he had no recollection of his home in the south—or of his infant baptism there—and would probably never have thought about his father’s ancestral home if not for the crisis, his heart pined for it now. Yet, the prospect of being both a Christian and a Muslim still felt like an aberration to him. If someone had told him a month ago that he would be standing here, trying to blend in with a crowd of southern Christians, he would have considered it an insult or a curse and called down Allah’s condemnation on the fellow.

Like his multireligious, multiethnic country, Jubril’s life story was more complicated than what one tribe or religion could claim. He had lived all his life in Khamfi and was at home with his mother’s people, the Hausa-Fulanis. He had always seen himself as a Muslim and a northerner. Looking at his skin color, he had no problem believing he would fit in where he was going. There were many on the bus who were fairer than he was. He could have been from any ethnic group in the country. What worried him was that he did not know enough about Christianity to survive in this crowd. It seemed like an insurmountable obstacle. So many times, he cleared his throat and grabbed his Marian medal with his fingers and stroked it, his whole attention focused on it, as if the Muslim in him now shared the same Catholic adoration he had considered idolatrous in Khamfi. Though Mary was accorded a lot of respect in his religion, he had always thought the Catholics went too far by making thousands of sacramentals about her and setting up shrines. The advice of Mallam Abdullahi, the man who gave Jubril the medal, flashed across his mind: Don’t feel too bad wearing the medal, as Maryam in the Koran was the mother of Prophet Isa, Jesus. Though Jubril would rather not have been wearing the medal, this theology was good enough for him—and, besides, his rescuer had assured him that all Christians who saw him wearing it would think he was Catholic and let him be.

JUBRIL’S
MOTHER
,
AISHA
, a sad willowy figure, like Jubril, had told him a long time ago that he was born in his father’s village, Ukhemehi, in the delta. His father, Bartholomew, a short taciturn man, used to be a fisherman and farmer. Jubril’s maternal grandfather, Shehu, was a cowherd who had migrated with his cattle from Khamfi in the north, away from the widening Sahara, to the rain forests of the delta. One thing had led to another, and Bartholomew fell in love with Aisha. Their relationship soon became a community concern, not because the two friends were doing anything wrong but because no one in that area would dream of having a serious friendship with a Muslim lady, much less marry her. Shehu agreed with the villagers: he did not want his daughter to marry in the south or to change her faith. The Ukhemehi people were fine with allowing Shehu and his family to cultivate the land and graze their cows, but the prospect of this beautiful girl and handsome young man coming together unnerved the community, and people were already gossiping about them as if they had been caught sleeping together.

Bartholomew was a chorister in his village church, Saint Andrew’s Church, and a member of three pious societies, Saint Anthony of Padua, Legion of Mary, and the Block Rosary, in addition to being a member of the Catholic Youth Organization, to which every youth in the church belonged. So, naturally, when he started getting close to Aisha, pressure came from all these affiliations. But he could not stop. Things came to a head when the two rebelled against the jingoism of the community and started running away from home for days on end to Sapele and Warri and Port Harcourt.

When Father Paul McBride, an optimistic, outgoing Irishman, noticed that his church was heading for a major scandal, he called on the two and counseled them. When he was sure of the depth of their love, he spoke to their parents. It was not long before they married. Though Aisha’s people were staunch Muslims, their tradition did not consider a woman converting to the “People of the Book,” as Jews and Christians are known in the Koran, apostasy. Aisha converted to Catholicism and was christened Mary. Jubril was the second child of this marriage.

And, just as at his brother’s infant baptism three years before, when Father McBride insisted on Yusuf (Joseph), a saint’s name—something, according to him, without the traces of paganism the missionaries associated with native names—at Jubril’s baptism, he picked Gabriel. He entrusted the child to the patronage of Saint Gabriel, the archangel.

They were a model family, a point of reference for intertribal and mixed marriage. In fact, in his homily at the wedding, Father McBride had reminded the congregation that the couple was a symbol of unity in a country where ethnic and religious hate simmered beneath every national issue, and he challenged the whole village to emulate the couple’s openness. Perhaps the myriad tribes and religions in the country could be welded together by the love within such marriages, Father McBride thought, and the respect accorded in-laws would at least instill tolerance. He did everything to support the marriage. Because Bartholomew and Mary were poor, Father McBride begged money from the white tycoons of nearby multinational oil companies to help celebrate the diversity of this marriage, building them a house and supporting their needs.

But these were hard times. Due to decades of oil drilling, the soil was losing its fertility. Rivers no longer had fish, and, worse still, repeated oil fires annihilated hundreds of people each time. Shehu, fearing for his cows, moved away from the oil-rich villages to other parts of the south soon after the wedding.

When ancestral worshippers began asking people to bring animals to sacrifice to Mami Wata and other deities whose terrains were supposedly desecrated, Father McBride told his faithful to forget the pagans. The problem deepened when little children began to develop respiratory diseases, and strange rashes attacked their bodies, and the natives started running away to the big cities.

One day, without warning, Aisha escaped with the children to Khamfi, her father’s original home. Yusuf was five and Jubril two years and three months. Bartholomew was crushed, and his resulting depression left him open to the taunts of the community. To protect their Catholic marriage, Father McBride advised Bartholomew to follow his wife to Khamfi, offering to foot the bill and arranging for a nearby Catholic parish to hire him as a laborer. But Bartholomew refused to go for fear of recurring religious and ethnic cleansing in the north. His only hope was that the children would come back when they were old enough to ask about their roots. He remarried promptly, even after Father McBride told him his wife’s action was not sufficient reason to annul the marriage; he became a member of Deeper Life Bible Church.