Chris Abani - GraceLand

Ugba (sliced oil bean seeds)

Akanwu

Palm oil

Salt

Fresh chilies, chopped

Smoked fish

Stockfish

Eggplant

PREPARATION

Boil the oil bean seed slices until tender (or buy already boiled in a bag). Using a big wooden bowl (wood helps seal in the flavor), mix the ahanwu and palm oil until you have a smooth paste. Add a couple of dessert spoons of water. Next, put in the oil bean seeds, a pinch of salt and the chopped fresh chilies. It is best to use one’s fingers to achieve the best mix. Fresh chopped onions are an option for some people. Add strips of smoked fish and stochfish and chopped eggplant. Serve the dish cold (or lukewarm) with cold beer, wine, palm wine or soda.

There is danger here. These people can go mad easily. The muse that inspires can, when turned counter, become madness. These people are griots, truth talkers.

Numbers, for the Igbo, had several applications, not entirely limited to mathematical inquiry, one such use being to differentiate people by energy configurations composed of numerical, quantifiable vibratory frequencies. These provide the key to decoding individual personalities, abilities and the vocation best suited for the petitioner. The Igbo believe that if one does not follow the life pattern determined by their energy grouping, they are living outside the dictates of their chi, or personal god.

Afikpo, 1977

“Are you sure we won’t get into trouble?” Efua asked.

They were standing in line to get tickets for the matinee showing of the latest Bollywood release. Though at thirteen she was three years older than Elvis, in this situation he felt as if he were the older one.

“Don’t worry. Everything is fine.”

“But Oye will find out dat you are using your dancing money to come to de cinema with me.”

“She won’t.”

It was a real dilemma; balancing the cost of the dancing lessons with their increasingly frequent visits to the cinema. There was the cost of the ticket, sweets and the obligatory bottle of cold, sweating orange Fanta — doubled; since he nearly always had to pay for Efua, it came to a significant amount. He was convinced that his dancing was improving more from studying the moves in the movies than from anything Mr. Aggrey taught him. The films also had soundtracks that ranged from the full orchestral grandstanding of the 1939 Technicolor hit Gone With the Wind through to the Bangra pop of Bollywood flicks. This music contrasted with the soul, jazz and highlife that filled his days, blaring from loudspeakers outside record stores or from neighbors playing their sound systems too loud.

He was getting really good as a dancer, and even the cynical Oye whooped with delight the night he staged an impromptu concert for her and Aunt Felicia on the front veranda. He could not afford to stop now, yet he could not afford to continue. The plan to get more money, when he hit on it, was so simple he didn’t know why he had never thought of it. Of course its execution required subtlety and time if it had any chance of succeeding, but he felt good about it.

First he offered to collect Oye’s letters from the post office on his way home from school. She hesitated initially, because waiting for the postman brought a special feeling to the day. But both Elvis and his father managed to convince her of the danger of waiting near that bend around which the lorries came barreling. It also made sense since he took her replies to the post office.

When she got used to the new system and began to let him open the envelopes for her, he moved on to the next stage of his plan. He stopped mailing her replies, using the postage money instead to pay for his movie adventures. He never failed to feel the pang of guilt, but the candy and Fanta assuaged that and he was soon lost in the movie, hardly aware of Efua breathing gently beside him. He was no longer strictly seeing movies that helped his dancing, although he did learn a few moves from the Bollywood flicks. But he was hooked, and the cheap, jerky silent movies of the motor park had lost their appeal.

The one hitch to his plan was that Oye would be expecting detailed replies from her pen pals from all over the world, a problem compounded by the fact that she received between one and five letters a week. To cover up, he would have to write the replies she so looked forward to. It proved harder than he had thought, and the need to keep varying the voices and contents soon exhausted him. Desperate, he began using scenes from the films he watched to make up the letters.

Oye’s Argentinean pen pal moved from the city to the pampas and began to ranch cattle as a pampas cowboy. He was a tough customer who kept the rustlers at bay with mild threats.

“‘Don’t make me shoot you, pilgrim’?” Oye asked, alarmed. “What does tha’ mean? When did José buy a gun and become a cowboy?” she continued. “He was a priest a few weeks ago.”

Elvis swallowed hard and kept his head down. And so the lies rolled off his pen. Scenes from Casablanca, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Gone With the Wind were rewritten to fit his letters. Oye’s suspicions seemed to him to have been allayed too easily and quickly, though, and he couldn’t shake his unease, convinced that she was setting him up. It niggled at him all the time.

And the stories he could cook up from the movies were finite, and with the constant reruns, Elvis was fast running out of material. When he started his scam, the plan was to still mail off a few letters so that Oye would receive some genuine replies and wouldn’t grow suspicious at the change in tone of the forged ones. He then meant to build up slowly until he wasn’t posting any of the letters from her. Things got out of control too quickly, and he stopped posting all her letters too soon. He would still go to the post office, stand in line so that he would be seen by any neighbors or relatives that might just happen to be around on their own business; then he ducked around the corner and out the back door. Hidden by the rampant bush that grew almost up to the back door, he shoved the letters into his schoolbag. Then, in the shade of a leafy tree branch right there behind the post office, he would begin forging the replies. He needed more input. Television was out of the question, as Oye might catch him out. There were all the books he read, like Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and the Hardy Boys adventures, but somehow he couldn’t bring himself to plagiarize an actual book.

He finally turned to his own imagination. And what a colorful place that turned out to be! A dog that spoke to its owners and saved them from every mishap resigned and bought shares in a beachfront bar called Sharky’s, run by a dolphin. A Sri Lankan pen pal was abducted by aliens in the middle of some secret ceremony performed by Arthur C. Clarke. A Catholic priest performed an exorcism on a home in Poland overrun by goose-stepping, machine-gun-toting goblins. A Cuban Santería priestess regularly turned into an invincible tiger to rout Castro’s secret police. An American pen pal, tiring of her job in the Department of Motor Vehicles, retrained as an astronaut and took a rocket to Mars, where she found out that the locals were blacks with a penchant for playing jazz on moon-rock saxophones.

The more elaborate the story, the more Oye enjoyed it and the more his conscience nibbled at him endlessly. At first he tried to deny the prods, masking them as a stomach ulcer. But then he began to have sudden and inexplicable vomiting attacks. Owning up to the truth, he decided to turn himself in. The next time Oye settled down with her tankard of sweet tea to listen to him read, he decided to test the waters.