Chinelo Okparanta - Under the Udala Trees

The kitchen was a wide, well-lit room with two large louver windows. The panes of the windows were open, and sunlight was filtering through.

Mama looked up at me, responded to my greeting very solemnly. “Good morning, Ijeoma,” she said, and returned to stirring her tea.

I remained at the doorway. I said, “I’m sorry for interrupting you. I’ll come back when you’re done.”

She shook her head. Still looking down at her tea, she said, “You may stay. I was just thinking that today might be a good day to speak with you about things.” She pointed at the empty chair at the table. “Come, take a seat,” she said.

I moved toward the chair, pulled it out, sat.

Mama spoke again. “Now that you have had the week to settle in, we must make a schedule for you. There’s nothing more important now than for us to begin working on cleansing your soul.”

THOSE INITIAL SESSIONS, the lessons took place right there at the kitchen table, with the two of us seated across from each other. They took place in the evenings, after Mama had closed up the shop, but before supper.

That first session, Mama opened the pages of her Bible. Page one, chapter one, verse one. She began:

1Na mbu Chineke kere elu-igwe na uwa.

2Uwa we buru ihe toboro n’efu na ihe toboro nkiti; ochichiri di kwa n’elu obu-miri: Mo Chineke nerughari kwa n’elu miri.

1In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

2The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.

Her voice was gentle and calm. There was a steady cadence to it as she went down the page and then back up to chapter two. I followed along with my own Bible, Papa’s old one, as we made our way through.

20… but for Adam there was not found a helper suitable for him.

21So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place.

22The Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man.

23The man said,

“This is now bone of my bones,

And flesh of my flesh;

She shall be called Woman,

Because she was taken out of Man.”

24For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.

She repeated that last part:

24N’ihi nka ka nwoke garapu nna-ya na nne-ya, rapara n’aru nwunye-ya: ha ewe gho otu anu-aru.

She said, “ Nwoke na nwunye. Man and wife. Adam na Eve. I ne ghe nti? Are you listening?” She was shaking her finger, a reminder and a warning.

I nodded.

She said it again: “ Nwoke na nwunye. Adam na Eve. Man and wife.”

I nodded but remained quiet, keeping my eyes steady on her. The look on her face was the look of a person watching a gradually sinking boat from afar. She seemed about ready to scream at the captain of the boat, but she seemed also to understand that if she screamed, the captain could not possibly hear. Not from so far away. So she talked softly instead, as if in prayer, as if prayer might have the effect that shouting could not.

I listened to her, watched her brow furrow, her lips tighten and loosen, tighten and loosen again.

Before the session began, Mama had handed me a black prayer scarf and instructed me to tie it on my head. “The mark of true penitence,” she had said. I tugged at the scarf now.

“ I ne ghe nti? ” she asked. “Are you listening?”

I nodded.

“ I na aghota? Are you understanding?”

I nodded again.

She smiled at me, tugged at my headscarf, perhaps to pull it forward to cover more of my hair. She patted me on the head.

“The bottom line, Ijeoma, my dear,” she said, “is that if God wanted it to be otherwise, would He not have included it that other way in the Bible?”

She closed her Bible and announced that we would stop there today. The session must have lasted all of fifteen minutes in total, but the discomfort of it made it feel as if it had lasted for much longer.

She rose from her chair. Over at the cupboards, she pulled out two plates and walked with them to the stove. She dished out the rice and stew at the stove and brought them back to the table for us.

We ate silently that evening. Afterward, we both retreated to our rooms.

THE NEXT MORNING, I met Mama again in the kitchen, at breakfast time. We sat together at the table, soaking our slices of bread in tea, when her eyes narrowed at me, and she said, “It’s not easy getting set up in a place. You really must understand that it took me all this time to get it looking the way it does now.”

I replied that I understood, and I thanked her, though at the time I had not yet understood, and was not yet to the level of gratitude, because I was still smarting from her desertion of me and the memory of all that time at the grammar school teacher’s when my mind tortured itself with all the possible reasons for why my own mother had thought it best to abandon me.

“All that work and now here we are with our very own home. A new life with new memories to be made. I can tell you I’m no longer having those terrible nightmares.”

There was something desperate and pleading in her face as she spoke. In that moment it was as if she were the child and I were the parent; she was seeking validation, trying to convince me of why I should be proud of her.

“That’s good, Mama,” I said. “I’m glad the nightmares are gone.”

“It’s unfortunate,” she said, looking forlornly into her cup of tea. “If only I had finished setting things up a little earlier, I might have prevented…” Her voice tapered into silence.

I stared silently at her.

She lifted her head from her cup and, with a forced sprightliness in her voice, she said, “I was thinking of making okra soup for supper tonight. I don’t sell okra at the shop. Would you mind picking up some okra at the market for me?”

I nodded.

“The market is not far from here,” she said. “Out our own road, a right onto the main road, and you will see the church steeple. Walk in the direction of the steeple, and not a couple of kilometers beyond that you will start to see signs of the market — the open umbrellas and zinc sheds, the items hanging out of the vendor stands.”

We were done with our tea and bread by now.

“ Oya , I’m off to the shop,” she said, rising from her seat. Her handbag was on the countertop near where we sat. She reached for it.

I stood up along with her and cleared the table, collecting our saucers and teacups and placing them in the sink.

I had not yet begun to wash the dishes when Mama said, “I meant to say earlier how sorry I am that I left you there for all that time.”

I turned to face her. She was holding her handbag and fumbling in it for the okra money. When she found the money, she stood there holding her bag in one hand and the money in the other. Finally, instead of just giving me the money, she took some steps closer and pulled me into an embrace. “I’m really, really sorry,” she said.

My first thought was that it was strange to be in Mama’s arms like this. There was a distance between us that had not existed before, not even in her initial embrace when she had come to collect me from the grammar school teacher’s. There was a strain. She was my mother, and I should have leaned into her embrace, should have relished it like I did the day she had come to pick me up from the grammar school teacher’s — and like all the days before she sent me off there. But things were different now. In this moment, she felt more like another warden than my own mother, more like a husk — more an emblem of motherhood than motherhood itself.