Chris Abani - GraceLand

“Listen, Elvis, I have to go and deliver dis stuff.”

“Okay,” Elvis replied, still not moving.

“And you need to leave.”

Elvis got up reluctantly. He was tired and did not want to battle the buses to get back home, but he had no choice.

Outside, Redemption hailed a taxi.

“You better get a cab too,” he warned. “You are carrying a lot of money.”

“Sure,” Elvis replied. “Redemption?”

“Yes?”

“Why did we have to tie those packets so securely? How will people who buy them open them?”

“Dey are for export; to States. A courier will swallow dem. Depend on de person capacity dey fit to swallow like between two hundred and four hundred. Dat’s around two to four kilos. Dat’s why we packed dem like dat. So dey don’t burst in de stomach, and de last glove make it easy to swallow. Ah, here’s my cab.”

Redemption opened the door, then hesitated.

“Do I need to tell you not to tell anyone of dis?”

Elvis shook his head.

“Good.”

Then he was gone. Elvis stood for a while watching the taillights of the cab disappear in the early-morning Lagos fog. He then turned and headed for Maroko on foot. He needed to think.

The molue did not come to a complete stop, but Elvis jumped off anyway, running for a short distance with the momentum. The huge sprawling area in front of him, full of the cry of commerce, was Tejuosho Market, one of the biggest in Lagos. Armed with a few hundred naira from the fifteen hundred Redemption had given him, he was on his way to buy some new clothes, as the ones he had were falling apart and not really suitable for his nightclub gig. He paused and lit a cigarette before entering the crush.

The market was for the most part comprised of open-air stalls. Everywhere, traders squatted or sat on floor mats. The closed stalls further into the market, housing the electronics and clothes shops, were known in local parlance as imported side.

He navigated the colors — yellow gari, red tomatoes and chilies, purple aubergines, brown and even orange bread, dun groundnuts, yellow-green guavas and red-yellow mangoes. Stalls with children calling in husky voices “Coca-Cola! Is a cold!” while hunkered over wooden boxes housing chunks of ice nestling bottles of Coca-Cola, Fanta, Sprite and plastic bags of cold water under wet blankets of jute sacking.

Pausing by a cart selling secondhand books, he rifled though, looking for something to buy. There was a set of dog-eared Penguin Classics. Elvis pulled a Dickens out, A Tale of Two Cities , his favorite, and read the first line: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Smiling, he closed the book. That was the perfect description of life in Lagos, he thought. There were also novels by West African authors: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart ; Mongo Beti’s The Poor Christ of Bomba ; Elechi Amadi’s The Concubine ; Camara Laye’s The Radiance of the King ; Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter ; and thrillers like Kalu Okpi’s The Road and Valentine Alily’s The Cobra . He’d read them all and ran his fingers along their spines nostalgically. He settled for a torn copy of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and a near-pristine copy of James Baldwin’s Another Country . He paid the asked price without haggling. Books, he felt, were sacred and should therefore not be bartered over.

Elvis’s attention was captured by a bookseller in a stall to the left of the cart. The bookseller was a short man, with a bald patch and round stomach that made Elvis think of Friar Tuck from Robin Hood. He smiled. Bookseller Tuck, as Elvis mentally christened him, was calling out to passersby: “Come and buy de original Onitsha Market pamphlet! Leave all dat imported nonsense and buy de books written by our people for de people. We get plenty. Three for five naira!”

Elvis drew closer. A small crowd was gathering, and some were already buying the pamphlets. The bookseller’s assistant, a slight boy, looked harried as he tried to keep an eye on the inventory and operate the cash register. These pamphlets, written between 1910 and 1970, were produced on small presses in the eastern market town of Onitsha, hence their name. They were the Nigerian equivalent of dime drugstore pulp fiction crossed with pulp pop self-help books. They were morality tales with their subject matter and tone translated straight out of the oral culture. There were titles like Rosemary and the Taxi Driver; Money — Hard to Get but Easy to Spend; Drunkards Believe Bar As Heaven; Saturday Night Dissapointment; The Life Story and Death of John Kennedy and How to Write Famous Love Letters, Love Stories and Make Friend with Girls. The covers mirrored American pulp fiction with luscious, full-breasted Sophia Loren look-alike white women. Elvis had read a lot of them, though he wouldn’t admit it publicly. These books were considered to be low-class trash, but they sold in the thousands.

“For dose of you whom are romantic, dere is Mabel De Sweet Honey Dat Poured Away and How to Avoid Corner Corner Love and Win Good Love from Girls,” Bookseller Tuck called. Spotting Elvis holding the books he had bought from the secondhand vendor, Bookseller Tuck turned to him.

“You, sir, you look like educated man. Here, try dis one,” he said, passing Elvis a book.

Turning it over, Elvis looked at the title: Beware of Harlots and Many Friends . Smiling, Elvis flicked it open at random, stopping at “24 Charges Against Harlots.” He scanned them quickly, jumping numbers.

1. The harlots live dirty and dangerous lives.

2. They corrupt young men, make them live immoral lives and feed them chronic disease …

4. Almost all that had married left their husbands without sufficient reasons, and the unmarried ones have refused to marry in preference to harlotism …

11. No single harlot is healthy in this world, that is why they are smelling.

12. Harlots drink beer too much and smoke cigarettes in like manners, and no single harlot is beautiful, that is why they always paint themselves with beauty make up’s and yet you can easily know them. Wash a pig, comb a pig, dress a pig, it must be a pig.

Elvis shuddered and closed the book and handed it back, opting instead for Mabel the Sweet Honey That Poured Away . Paying for the book, he hid it between the Dostoyevsky and the Baldwin and headed deeper into the market.

He passed the smell of trapped antelopes, and of savannahs coming from the basket and rope weavers. The melee of buyers and sellers haggling loudly, trading insults and greetings and occasionally achieving a trade, was thick around him.

As he made a turn and entered the imported side, he could see behind the market, sprawling away into the swamp, a rubbish dump: a steaming compost of vegetables, broken furniture, jute sacking, discarded hemp ropes, glass bottles, plastic bags, tins; the usual. And perched on top, cawing awfully, hunched like balding old men, were vultures.

He stopped in different shops, feeling the fabric for something that was stylish yet promised to be cool, ignoring the rude calls of the traders.

“If you dey buy, buy — if not, move on!”

“Hey, dis man, why you are rubbing my cloth like dat? Dis is not towel, it is fine Italian silk. Move away!”

Haggling was not his strongest suit, but he did his best when he saw a nice black shirt-and-pants combo that would be perfect.

“How much?” he asked.

“For what?” the trader replied, uninterested.

“For this,” Elvis said, pointing.

“Is not for sale.”

“Then why is it hanging here?”

“Ah, see dis man O?! Is dis your shop?”