There were only a few girls in Miss Cole’s Standard Two class that pleased her. They were her preferred few. When she talked to them, the rest of us drowned our yearnings in pools of laughter. The gang with whom I played on Trinity Elementary’s rubble compound, Maisy, Florence, Josephine and now Christiana, all belonged to Miss Cole’s preferred class. She stood in front of Christiana’s front-row desk after assembly one morning and patted her enormous hair. “Are you Pastor Coker’s granddaughter?” Her voice sent spirited waves through the classroom. Every girl propped up and sacrificed her undivided attention.

“Yes, Miss Cole,” Christiana rose timidly, “I’m his daughter.”

“I see,” she offered a warm smile and adjusted the gathers on Christiana’s uniform.

We all flashed a collective grin strong enough to put more cracks on the casements. 

From that day on, Christiana was a member of Miss Cole’s better class. 

There was a stocky barbed-haired girl in my class who like me, didn’t belong to Miss Cole’s preferred few. Mary had too many absences to make an impact on Miss Cole or anyone else for that matter - except me. On her present days, she focused every fiber in her body on extorting the privileges I enjoyed as a member of the most sought-after group of girls in the class. Maisy, the Arithmetic wizard, risked sharing her answers only with the gang. Christiana and Florence sat too far away from Mary, and Josephine was one of those girls you didn’t confront without mettle. I sat right in front of Mary, and I didn’t possess a fraction of Josephine’s mettle. Still, it was easier for her to make away with one of my belongings; an eraser, a new pencil, a full bottle of ink, than with the answers I received from Maisy. I resisted only until she rumpled her face and cupped her mouth, and summarily handed over the item. Sharing answers on the other hand, required the furtive action of bending down an exercise book towards a friendly spy’s desk and hope her skim is quick enough to escape the teacher’s attention. I successfully resisted the minute or so of Mary’s strike on my shoulder blades before Miss Cole’s attention checked her.

She secured her revenge whenever Miss Cole jested with her preferred girls. She pressed the tip of her fountain pen on my shoulder blade until I turned around and watched her evil giggle directed at me. Miss Cole attended weddings, birth celebrations and funerals, and returned to talk heartily about the parent that surprised her with a warm hello, a lift home, or a sit in their pew. My mother attended quite a few social occasions herself, but she never seemed able or willing to go where Miss Cole went.

Miss Cole was going around the classroom on a hot afternoon, inspecting our work, when she stopped by Maisy’s desk. I was still smarting from an unannounced hot mental I’d botched. She put her hands on her hips the way she always did to make an exclamation. “Where were you yesterday morning, little Miss?”

Maisy smiled.

“Did you know your parents were visiting my church?”

Maisy looked inside her breast pocket for something appropriate to say. Miss Cole took a step backwards. “Answer me now, silly girl.”

The classroom toppled over in laughter.

“I was sleeping.” Maisy said finally.

The teacher opened her mouth in feigned surprise. Desks covers clanked, pens squeaked against the cement floor, and green uniforms turned blue with spilled ink. I felt the familiar digging of Mary’s pen on my shoulder blade and foolishly turned around.

“Miss Cole doesn’t like you.” Her voice was merciless.

I do not know if it was guilt or anger, or a combination of the two that induced the nakedness I felt looking into Mary’s eyes. I saw in them a truth I could no longer deny. Tears blocked the images around me, and soon blotted the words on my exercise book. I was already sobbing feverishly when Miss Cole turned around and asked, at once shocked and distant, “What’s the matter with you now?” I quickly swiped a backhand across my face. I refused to make a fool of myself in the presence of the woman I most wanted to impress. “Nothing,” I replied boldly, and ducked my pen in the inkwell with a force that bent its sharp metal tip.

It was about this time that Holy Trinity Elementary began a fund-raising drive to replace the old timber Parsonage where Christiana Coker’s father lived with a concrete building. We’d all been hauling home little brown envelopes that only ended up suffering diverse fates; a large number of them, including mine, never made the trip to their addressees, while others were returned with pitiful sums of money. The official Thanksgiving Service was the last chance we had to return the envelopes. 

“If you don’t come to the service with those envelopes, don’t bother coming to school on Monday.” It was an order Miss Cole didn’t have to repeat. I’d already seen in the Service my opportunity to prove to Mary that Miss Cole did indeed like me. That was until she added something that hit me like a bolt of thunder. “And tell your parents they too must attend the service.”

Nga and Nfa in church?

My mind went into combat mode.

“My teacher said you must come to church with me on Sunday.”

Nfa regarded me with a calm smile. “Have you ever seen me go to church? On Sunday? ... or any other day... in my life?”

“No,” I answered, looking for arguments in the buttonholes of my father’s Oxford shirt.

He pointed to Nga picking rice in a calabash on her lap. “Have you ever seen your mother go to church on Sunday? ... or any other day... in my life?”

Nga released a nonchalant sigh.

“No,” I said, observing her disapprovingly.

“Have you ever seen Granny go to church?”

“No,” I replied impatiently.

He said nothing after that. But worse was Nga’s straight-out answer when I insisted on talking to her later. “Tell your teacher to come and make me.”

“Did everyone hear what I said,” Miss Cole’s voice was unrelenting.

“Yes, Miss Cole.” The chorus was as faint as the yellow piping on our uniforms. I simply gave a diluted nod. No one laughed, not a whimper.

“Have I made myself crystal clear?”

I felt her eyes on me. I joined the second courageous chorus, then unable to resist, turned around. Mary was smiling.

The days leading up to Thanksgiving Sunday were like planning a trip to an uncommon universe. I went around the house in utter daze, my thoughts anchored on a way to get my parents to church with me the coming Sunday. Even in the unlikely event that I succeeded in convincing them to go with me, what will they wear? Everyone I had ever seen going to church wore a suit and tie, or a dress. Even though Nfa wore Oxford shirts and sometimes even a tie to work, I had never seen him in a suit. Nga’s problem was even more complicated. I had never seen anyone go to church wearing the printed blouse and full-length wrap she wore every day, nor her roomy special occasion boubas. I spent some time in Nga’s sewing basket shuffling through the print-style fashion dresses she made. They were indeed of knee length. Yes! She could wear one of these! But wait, what will she wear on her head? Nobody ever wore a print- style dress with a church hat. They wore head ties with these dresses... And nobody wore head-ties to church. She would look ridiculous. Imagine Mary seeing her dressed like that!

By mid-week, I’d had to face the realities of my situation. I decided against mentioning anything to my parents about attending the service, and concentrate my efforts on my own trip. The strategy I used was one I knew always worked with my parents. I approached them separately. My mother was on the verandah sewing when I confronted her.

“Can you sing church songs?” she asked.

I brought out my hymnal and screeched the first stanza of “O Come All Ye Faithful.”

“That’s not the way they sing it on the radio?” she complained.

“That’s because you hear the organ on the radio.”

“Can you read their Bible?”

I brought out my school Bible and read from Genesis.

“At least you know how to read,” she said, and placed yet another hurdle in my way.

“Who’s going to take you to the Church?”

“I don’t need anyone to take me,” I returned, “it’s the same road I use to go to school every morning.”

The question I expected to follow was the one I realized would be the most difficult to answer, the one I purposely refused to confront all week. That Nga didn’t bring it up was no consolation to me. I knew that sooner or later one of them would ask it.

As it turned it, it was neither Nga nor Nfa but an Uncle who voiced the question. A client had called on Nfa while he was attending an afternoon meeting at the Mandingo Mosque. Nfa was a Surveyor with the Department of Surveys and Lands and had a private clientele, men and women who interrupted our play everyday to leave long and complicated messages about their land plots. All three of us children in the family, from Abdul the eldest, right down to me, were notorious for failing to deliver messages. We listened respectfully to a client’s message, then returned to our play afterwards, forgetting ever having talked to the individual. The client that came on that day, a heavyset man with pot bald head, seemed aware of our reputation. He kept pointing his finger around to get everybody’s attention, repeating his message several times, asking us to repeat what he had said, before finally stating that he would return before sunset the same day. As soon as the man left, Abdul ridiculed his wisdom of leaving a message when he was going to return anyway. I ran into the bedroom the three of us shared, tore off a piece of paper from an exercise book and wrote a letter to Nfa.

My Dear Father,

    While you were out, Mr. ........... came to see you. He wants you to hurry up with his plan for the property on 16 Kissy Mess Mess.

        Your daughter Ndamba.

 

Nfa returned after sunset accompanied by Uncle Sumaila. He read the letter with surprising glee. “Look at this,” he gave it to my uncle. “She writes perfect English.”

“She’s a young English Lady,” Uncle Sumaila exclaimed after reading the letter.

I felt as though I’d been transported into a sphere of rolling white clouds over a landscape of endless possibilities.

“Look here now all of you,” Nfa called to Abdul and Musu.

“I want everyone of you to write me a letter every time a client calls during my absence.”

Musu took the letter from Uncle Sumaila and read it. “Well,” she concluded, “since Ndamba likes to write, she should be the one to write down the messages.”

Abdul laughed with nonchalance, and offered to race Musu and I to the backyard.

“I’m going to church on Sunday,” I boasted abruptly.

Abdul cracked a giggle and disappeared through the back door, Musu trotting happily after him.

From the open front door, the horns of cars pressed hard into the measured silence of the living room.

“What about Ilakow,” It was Uncle Sumaila who broke the silence.

“I’ll go to Ilakow the Sunday after.”

“So you’ll go to Church instead of Ilakow. Uncle Sumaila pulled up his trouser legs and sat down.

“It’s Thanksgiving,” I corrected him, “not Church. We’re building a new Personage.”

My father sat down. “Are you a Christian?”

“No,” I chuckled.

They laughed with me.

“So why do you want to go to church?” Uncle Sumaila was still laughing.

“It’s not Church,” I insisted, “It’s our Thanksgiving service,”

“Who’s our?” Nfa asked.

“My school. Holy Trinity Girls School.”

Nfa bounce his head from side to side chanting his words. “Christian girls go to Thanksgiving Service on Sunday, and Muslim girls go to Ilakow.”

“No,” I chanted back, “Christian girls go to Church on Sunday, and Muslim girls go to Prayers on Friday.”

“Ah ha!” Uncle Sumaila turned to him. “Did she go to prayers on Friday?”

“Of course not, I cut in. “I went to school on Friday.”

“So, Uncle Sumaila replied slowly, “since she didn’t go to prayers on Friday, she should go to Ilakow on Sunday.”

“I agree,” Nfa answered quickly.

“No, you don’t understand.” I stood up. “Thanksgiving is not Church, it’s for everybody.” I was suppressing a sob, “If I don’t go, everyone in my class will be there except me, and Miss Cole wouldn’t like me, and all the girls will make fun of me.”

My father fanned his head gently. “Did you tell you tell Miss Cole that you have to go to Qur’an lessons on Sunday morning?”

“No,” I answered forcefully. “And it’s not my fault that I didn’t go to Prayers on Friday.”

“No,” Nfa said calmly, “It’s not your fault. “It’s nobody’s fault.

“Then let me go to the Thanksgiving service, please Nfa, please Uncle Sumaila. Next Sunday, I will memorize all my surats and go and read them for you. Uncle Sumaila, I’ll go to the goldsmiths shop and read them for you.

They laughed at me, the way parents laugh at their children’s folly.

Do you know how early church starts on Sunday?”

“Yes,” I answered quickly, “8 o’clock.”

Neither of them said anything or a while. They observed me indulgently. I knew I’d convinced them. They were soft-spoken cultured men after all, who put a premium on good relations.

As a got up to leave, Uncle Sumaila asked, “Who’s going to take you to the church?”

“I can go alone.” I replied confidently. “I can make my way to church, and I can make my way back home, too. 

When Thanksgiving Day came, I didn’t wait for Nga’s usual Sunday morning breakfast of bread and stew. By the time she dragged herself out of the bedroom, yawning and tying a wrap over her flimsy nightdress, I had pulled down several large portmanteaus to find the uniform she saved for special school functions. I would happily have gone on an empty stomach, had she not snatched off my hat. “You’re not going anywhere until you put something in your stomach.” She went back into the bedroom and returned with a tin of sardines.

“I’m not hungry,” I said, gripping my hymnal.

She put my straw hat on top of the fridge and pulled out a dining chair. “Put that book down and sit.”

The food in front of me looked like two barracudas inside a barge. I’d stopped liking sardines since I discovered Miss Cole’s preferred girls abhorred them, and the bread was left over from the day before. I moved my hymnal closer and began nibbling on the bread.

“When did you ever see me or your father leave this house before putting food in our stomachs?” Even had it not been a rhetorical question to accompany the act of stringing evaporated milk into the hot cocoa, I would not have spent time on it. She pulled a chair and sat opposite me. I bristled. Nga was the kind of mother who gave detailed instructions on how to eat. “Don’t swallow so fast. Chew that piece a little bit more before swallowing. Don’t make so much noise with the food in your mouth.” Managing to chew in silence, I pierced a hole in the side of the bread, to remove its plentiful gut, pieces of which I slowly rubbed into mothballs as I ate.

“Finished,” I exclaimed, jumping up after the last hurried gulp of cocoa.

Nga picked up the balls, opened them up into one large piece and put another sardine in it. “Eat this too,” she tipped the teacup towards her. “And send it down with the rest of the cocoa.”

I chew the bread guts like bitter cola and tossed back my head to empty the teacup into my mouth. She got up and retrieved my straw hat from the fridge’s roof.

I was almost out the door when I remembered my collection envelope.

“Go ask your father,” she said, swiping her palms down the sides of her thighs to suggest she had no money on her.

In the bedroom, I woke up Nfa with quick decisive pokes in his side.

“Why didn’t you ask for the money last night?” He pulled the sheets over his head.

“Get up Nfa, I’m going to be late for church.” 

He got up and yanked down his pyjama shirt. “Whose child are you anyway?”

I didn’t answer.

He reached for a pair of khaki pants hanging behind the door.

“How much are you putting in the envelope?” I was tiptoed to count the coins in his hand.

“Two shillings,” he replied, directing my shoes away from his prayer rug still opened on the floor from al-subr.

“Nfa, two shillings will not be enough to build the Parsonage.”

“Go ask your mother for the rest.”

I glanced nervously around the congested bedroom for a possible source of additional funds. Nga’s handbag sat temptingly against the window on a stack of metal portmanteaus.  Above it, cowrie shells dangled leisurely on black thread, perfuming the air around it with a mixture of Topaz and decomposed leaf. 

Before I could begin my appeal in the living room, Nga peeped inside the envelope, closed it and tucked it back inside my hand. “Tell your teacher this is all we have.”

“Miss Cole wants more than two shillings in the envelope.”   

“Then ask Miss Cole to give you the rest.” She was replacing the cocoa tin and Tate & Lyle box.

“Everybody in the class will take more money than me.” I began to sob.

“That’s because their parents have more money than yours.”

“Teacher said it is our responsibility to help build the parsonage.”

“Then give her what your father put in the envelope.” 

“The envelope has your name on it,” I knew very well that I was pushing my luck.

Nga stopped halfway between the dining chairs and the bulky Bosch, a half a tin of Peak milk in one hand, a soiled towel in the other. I crushed the envelope inside my palm, in case she tried to snatch it from me so she could take it to Nfa to read it for her. If I got caught lying, I would end up not going to the Thanksgiving at all.

“What’s wrong with your teacher?” Her veins bulged with the pitch of her voice. “Doesn’t she know we’re Muslims?”

“She said if we don’t take money for the parsonage, we shouldn’t bother to go to school on Monday.”

She tossed the milk in the fridge and banged it. “Then take off your uniform and get ready for Ilakow.”

I tucked the envelope in my pocket and hurried out.

I thick procession of churchgoers was coming down the street as I stepped onto the verandah. The morning breeze injected bumps on my naked arms. It could also have been rocking the young sun on the back of bananas leaves from the farm opposite, or MaMarie’s only pair of church shoes might have been airing prominently on her porch railing next door, or The Pratts from their three-storey garret adjacent our house, might have thrown a guarded smile in my direction, or maybe the Hastings boys might have seen me from their verandah, and gasped, “Look Mummy, Ndamba’s going to church.” I don’t remember any of that. My focus, like some lone member of a special task force, was on the group coming down the street: women in broad rimmed hats of gentle pink and limpid blue, the clanking of high heels that seemed to lift them towards the sky, and dresses that could only have been made in England. There were men in superior suits and striking ties, with shoes that moved the sun at its feet.

I leaped down the verandah steps in twos and pushed hard on the rusty old gate. It didn’t budge. Abdul hadn’t yet been out to open it. The thought of returning inside the house was nauseating. I inserted the hymnal under my armpit and pressed as hard as I could. The bolt still didn’t give. I ran back up the steps and tiptoed to see the procession. They had reached the Pratts’ gate. I rushed back down and pushed the gate some more, to no avail. I jumped up the steps again to look for the church people. They had gotten as close as MaMarie’s house. Sweat dripped down my armpits and soaked the hymnal. I was seized by the terrifying image of Nga on the verandah telling me to return inside the house because everybody going to church that morning had already left. I rushed back to the gate and summoning raw will, pushed until the bolt gave in.

It turned out to be a sparse group, not as numerous as I had imagined them from afar. I walked alongside them, stealing furtive glances at the faces underneath the brims and above the ties. The fact that I recognized none of them neither frightened nor discouraged me. Theirs were friendly faces, even if none bothered to acknowledge my presence. They looked like any of my neighbors; MaMarie next door, The Pratts, The Johnsons, even Miss Cole herself. I was comfortable in the group, feeling as though on every Sunday morning, instead of going to Ilakow to learn to read the Qur’an, I had been going instead to church. I was finally amongst people that mattered, those of whom Miss Cole approved. Like them, I was finally on my way to the right place, I was finally on my way to becoming somebody.

The lower end of Goree Street was ghostlike. Our only street pump was dry and deserted in front of the only thatched roof house on a street where almost every house had an upper garret. Our only spectator was an elderly man in a black fez and white kaftan, who was strolling out of Ahmadiyya mosque stringing his prayer bead. It was not unusual when passing by the mosque, for me to stop and peep into the rectangular brick openings of its cement fence. I recognized a face or two, an acquaintance of my parents’, someone conversant with Granny, or simply a face made familiar by its frequency on Goree Street. I seldom had names for them, only a zealous morning sir, an eager afternoon ma, a salutation in which, like every child, I felt a sense of belonging, of being out in the great wide outdoors of the streets and recognizing, amongst the masses of unfamiliar faces, a familiar one. That morning though, it didn’t matter at all that I didn’t recognize the man leaving the mosque. Recognizing him and greeting him would only have, as it were, blown my cover. It would have associated me with the wrong kind.

We reached Magazine Cut where, but for the presence of my cousin Mohammed Fadika, the silence was as eerie as that on Goree Street. He stood in green khaki shorts and naked torso under the extended umbrage of a plum tree, yawning and stretching his slender black body towards the calm morning sky. I avoided his gaze and focused my attention past his house and the Jenkins Street intersection, onto the quiescent sprawl of Foulah Mosque. When I was certain we were comfortably out of his sight, I discreetly turned around to see if he had noticed me. This was the picture I saw: he’d stopped short in the middle of his yawn, his arms stretched upwards, his mouth left ajar. In reply to his shock, I bloated and stiffened my lips, praying all the while that he didn’t shout out my name as he did every morning I passed by on my way to school. I don’t know if it was my look or his shock that suppressed his tongue.

A weird sensation enveloped me as I stepped onto the stenciled pavement of Kissy Road: that of feeling like a stranger in a familiar place. I had never imagined Kissy Road in the morning without the school children waiting for buses, the civil servants hailing taxis and lifts to work, and the Foulah man erect behind the grilled windows of his penny store. An Opel taxi drove by, pushing dust particles into the road’s decline towards the gutter. Its driver’s entire head hung perturbed out of the window. It was as if he was missing something, and in searching for it, ends up inhaling dirty smoke from his exhaust pipes.

The framed pictures that used to stare at me from Mr. Daramola’s Photo Studio across the street were now replaced by rusty rolled-down doors indented under the large colonial shingles of its three storey-brick house. The store next to the studio was owned by a robust Yoruba woman who usually sold the usual Lagos produce, such yam, brightly colored waist beads, shea butter and cramantine. That Sunday her store front was empty, the doors blocked with broad bars and large bolts. There were none of the daedal patterned dashikies that usually hung on the spiked fence of the office building next door, nor were there long lines of Mercedes Benz, Peugeot, Opel, and Land Rovers lined up at the mouth of Annie Walsh School.

I must have remained frozen for longer than I realized, for I started and noticed the procession with which I had come thus far marching ahead of me in two groups. One was disappearing into the swing doors of the church’s transept entrance, while the other continued to the concrete steps towards the vestibule entrance.

Often on my way to and from school, I stringed my eyes through the louvered slits of the swing door to get a peep of the church’s interior. Further down the road, I began sliding my palm on the whitewashed parapet until I reached the spot where the wall met the concrete steps into the school compound. It had never occurred to me to question the reason for two entrances to the church; not until that morning. I was halfway past the swing doors when I considered the possibly wiser path of using the vestibule entrance. With one hand holding down my straw hat, the other clutching my Hymnal against the donation envelope in my breast pocket, I made a quick turn back, but then, after only a few steps, began doubting whether, as a pupil, I was allowed to use that entrance. Stuck like a pariah in a conquered land, in the middle of the sprawling cruciform, I paced back and forth in the directions between the Clock Tower monument direction and Magazine Cut. The street had completely emptied of the people with whom I had walked to the church. My heart skipped several beats. Nga’s concern about deserted streets dawned on me and I shivered. I was saved by the appearance of a woman from the Clock Tower direction who promptly took the vestibule entrance. I ran towards her and like a chick after its mother hen strutted after her up the church steps.

The congregation was on its feet between rows of narrow wooden benches when I staggered into the aisle, struck as it were by an amazing cluster of beams. It was as though the entire fold was boxed inside a tinseled bubble. Chandeliers sparkled with lighted rods as though to keep out the early morning sunlight, while the metallic bars of ceiling fans hovered precariously above. I turned towards the window to avoid the lighted shafts. There were bloodied drops of red and berried blues on picture panes set further alight by twin set bulbs like huge termites on the wall. I could not move from my position in the center of the aisle, my feet glued to its vivid red runner where, like a girl turned to stone, I stood with my chin tucked inside my chest. I couldn’t even allow myself to think of the embarrassment I was creating by standing aimlessly in the middle of the aisle. The organ seemed to be sitting right inside my eardrums. I struggled against the backdrop of a variety of sounds that no more meant anything to me. It was nothing like morning assembly when we stood on rubble and sang to the open air around us.

I’d been standing in the middle of the aisle for what seemed like an endless amount of time when I felt a big hand on my shoulder, and, in a daze, followed its direction into one of the back pews. In front of me was a barricade of hefty bodies relentlessly spinning hot air around the room. My head began to spin with the flapping of the fans. I felt as though I was being lifted and tossed around and around inside of the building’s bubbly interior. The pictures, the lights, the organ, the voices all clustered inside my head and began a downward spiral towards my stomach. I felt the movement only a moment before I saw the blend of mashed bread, sardines, milky cocoa, spreading out over the red carpet like the map of a ravaged nation whose boundaries were still being redrawn.

I'd been standing in the middle of the aisle for what seemed like an endless amount of time when I felt a big hand on my shoulder, and, in a daze, followed its direction into one of the back pews. In front of me was a barricade of hefty bodies relentlessly spinning hot air around the room. My head began to spin with the flapping of the fans. I felt as though I was being lifted and tossed around and around inside of the building's bubbly interior. The pictures, the lights, the organ, the voices all clustered inside my head and began a downward spiral towards my stomach. I fell the movement only a moment before I saw the blend of mashed bread, sardines, milky cocoa, spreading out over the red carpet like the map оf а ravaged nation whose boundaries were still being redrawn.