Blackass (18 page)

Furo lifted his head, stared sightlessly at the TV screen, and the newspaper slipped from his grasp, fluttering to the rug. His cheek muscles began to quiver and his eardrums ached from the force of the pounding in his head. He raised his hands to his neck and rubbed. His mother was searching for him. His family was spreading his name around. They had the right name but the wrong image. They had right on their side, but this was wrong. He should have known it would come to this. If anyone he knew, the Haba! people, if they saw this! Mr Obata, Arinze, the receptionist, everyone who knew his name. If Syreeta saw it! But why – why did the running never end? Because he had to settle his debts, that’s why. It would never end as long as he owed his family. Theirs was a debt of semen and milk, of blood and sweat and tears. A debt he could neither repay nor escape. But he would try.

So now he had to change his name.

Furo picked up the newspaper and gazed at the face bearing his name. Tired face, tired eyes, tired mouth, and black skin: that’s all he saw. That person wasn’t him. He had moved on beyond that. The only problem was, even as he’d forgotten how he used to look, he didn’t know what he now looked like. White skin, green eyes, red hair – black ass. Mere descriptions for what people saw, what others saw in him, and not who he was. He had to find out who he was.

It was time to see his face.

Furo ripped out the missing person announcement, and after burning it in the kitchen sink, he washed the ashes down the drain. He returned to parlour, folded the newspaper, replaced it on the table, and switched off the TV. Entering Syreeta’s bedroom, he shut the curtains before pulling off his boxers and singlet. And in this state of naked grace – stripped of the past, curious about the present, hopeful about the future – he strode to the tall mirror over the vanity table and stared into the face of his new self. A face whose features had altered less in dimension than character, and whose relation to the selfie in the newspaper was as close and yet as far apart as the resemblance between adolescence and adulthood. His face had sloughed off immaturity. Then again, the unexpectedness of his skin shade, eye colour, and hair texture was the octopus ink that would confuse his hunters, as even he wouldn’t have recognised himself in a photo of his new face, and so neither would his parents nor anyone who based their looking on his old image. He knew at last that he had nothing to fear. He was a different person, and right here, right now, right in his face, he could see he looked nothing like the former Furo.

Afterwards, Furo trotted off to his bedroom, spread his new clothes on the bed, and planned what he would wear on Monday. He couldn’t wait for many things. But most of all, he couldn’t wait to start work tomorrow. He was excited about his first real job. After he finished secondary school, he had worked for almost two years as a supervisor in his father’s chicken farm, but counting eggs didn’t count as a job. His next job had come after university, when he served the entire year of his national youth service teaching mathematics to junior secondary students in the sun-blasted and fly-plagued Kebbi State. That, too, wasn’t a real job. He hardly showed up for class as he spoke no Hausa and his students barely spoke English, and all he remembered of that wilderness were the fun and games he’d had with his fellow youth corpers. He was still hopeful then, full of big dreams, eager to succeed. He had prospects that many of his students, who were mostly sons of nomadic herdsmen and farmyard hirelings, could never hope for. He had received an education they could only dream of. Besides, he had his parents back home in Lagos, centre of excellence, to return to. But now he knew better, and in the period since he departed Kebbi he had many times wished he’d learned from his students how to milk cows and slaughter goats and plant onion bulbs, learned a handiwork to keep his mind off his own helplessness. That, at least, unlike his stinking stint at the chicken farm, would have been something to busy himself with until he found the job he deserved. Unlike his father, he would never stop fighting, never stop moving forwards, not now, not after he’d survived the hard long years of joblessness whose only purpose was to show him how easy it was for hope to shrivel. How disappointment became a hole with an endless bottom.

That was in the past. He had a job, a new life, and it was time to choose a new name. He had been trying out names as he chose his clothes for work, but none yet sounded right, none felt like his to keep. At first he considered taking Kalabari names, and then Itsekiri, Efik, Yoruba, but he soon gave up on Nigeria. In his new life he was American and his new name would confirm that. A new name from the new world for the new him – that sounded right. Yet he was still nameless and it was already night, and Syreeta would soon return. And so he arranged his Monday clothes on hangers and put them away in the wardrobe, then cleaned his shoes and set them by the bedroom door. After placing his passport, wallet and folded handkerchief on the bedside table, he left the bedroom. In the parlour he switched on the TV and tapped the remote control till he reached a music channel showing a 2pac and Biggie video. Reducing the volume to a murmur, he settled on the settee to make his decision.

‘Starting with names from A: Abe, Brad, Carl, Dave, Eddie, Frank …’

Frank felt right – easy to pronounce, easy to remember, and the same first letter as Furo. Good rule to apply for Wariboko. He needed a surname that would let him keep his initials.

‘Wayne, West, Williams,
no
… White …
Whyte.
’

Whyte, too, felt right, felt like his, and, in a slow voice that burred in his ears, he said both as one: ‘Frank Whyte.’ His eyes watered as he stared at the flashing lights on the TV screen. ‘Frank Whyte, Frank Whyte,’ he repeated, blinking to clear his eyes.

He had found his name.

‘I am not done with my changes.’

—Stanley Kunitz,
The Layers

It didn’t matter to me if I liked Tekena, but for the sake of what I wanted, I needed her to like me. And so, when I met her on that overcast Sunday afternoon, the first thing I said was, ‘You’re pretty.’ Even as I intended to win her over with flattery, I was surprised by my reflux of pleasure, the rush of gratefulness at her acknowledgement of my appearance when she responded, ‘You’re pretty too.’ Sunlight and water to a blossoming flower, likewise our sense of well-being is both nourished by the shine of other’s eyes and the gurgle of our self-regard. Who I was as a person was more than what I looked like, but then again, how people saw me was a part of who I was.

I soon found myself liking Tekena more than her brother, whose name I didn’t mention until she and I were eating ice cream at The Palms. You see, Furo had come across as a bit of a user. I know now that he was desperate, that on the day we met he was facing a predicament and had needed whatever help he could get, but something about his request to move in with me, the ease with which he asked such a thing of a stranger, had struck the wrong chord with me. His sister could be accused of taking advantage of a private mishap to build her popularity on social media, and in person I found her as chatty as I’d expected, and maybe too trusting of strangers bearing gifts, but at no point did she strike me as manipulative. Not in person, not towards me.

Thus I liked her. She was after all a recognisable Nigerian type, not much different from me in background and social standing. We were both members of that caste of young adults who grew up in the ruins of Nigeria’s middle class. We were born into the military dictatorships of the ’80s and ’90s; we attended the cheaper private schools or the better public ones; we read the same Pacesetter novels and watched the same NTA shows; we lived in cities. Unlike the majority of Nigerians in any age bracket, we spoke English as a first (and sometimes only) language, and our inbred accents were two to three generations old. Because of our parents, who were educated and devoted and fortunate enough to hold on to their salaried positions through all those decades of martial austerity; our private dictators, who beat their children with the same whips they used on the poorer relatives they took in as house helpers; our role models, who were so convinced of ‘what was what’ that they affirmed a preference for butter over margarine even when they could only afford Blue Band for our school lunchboxes; our protectors and providers, who were neither middle class nor working class, neither wealthy enough to jet overseas on vacation nor deprived enough to cease the Christmastime pilgrimages to our family hometowns; our lifelong teachers, who instilled in us their deep-seated humiliation over the failures of Nigeria as well as their bitter nostalgia for the administrative competence of colonial rule. That was it: in Tekena’s voice and gestures, in many things about her, I saw the same contradictions that had shaped me. Shame and arrogance. Pragmatism and sentimentality. Thoughtless violence and unthinking sacrifice. Red blusher and black skin …

The thing is, on seeing Tekena my thoughts flew to my mother. She, too, wore red blusher in my childhood memories. My sentiments about my father are less conflicted: he left when I was eight. My mother stayed to be condemned to failure in raising her son. Because the success of a man, our people say, is the father’s doing. You are your father’s son – you follow in your father’s footsteps. Manhood and its machismo are attributed to the seed, which then follows that the failure to make a man is the egg’s burden.
Your papa born you well
, they will sing to a man in praise, but when he disappoints so-and-so’s expectations of XY manliness, it becomes
Nah your mama I blame.
My say is this: when you live in a worldwide bullring, bullshit is what you’ll get. If they say I cannot be my mother’s son, then it must be that I’m her daughter.

After we sat down in the food court of The Palms to eat our ice cream, I began asking Tekena about her brother. I lapped up all the details she gave of his disappearance, which it turned out weren’t much, not enough to slake my thirst. She had awoken on that Monday morning to find he had left the house for the job interview he’d only mentioned to her when he was ironing his clothes the previous night, and since neither she nor her father had thought there was anything odd about his long absence, he wasn’t missed until her mother returned from the office and asked after him. That was when Tekena went into his bedroom and found his mobile phone. And the rest, as she said, was a disaster. From Tekena’s tweets I already knew that she and her parents had no inkling of the change that had happened to Furo, hence I made no mention of my meeting with him. As I uttered suitable noises of sympathy in response to her recounting of the grief his disappearance had wrought upon the household, I couldn’t help asking myself, what if Furo had remained behind after he found himself transformed? This was the question I wanted answered, and one I would have to find out for myself.

There and then I decided I would ask Tekena if I could pay her a visit her at home. Before I could find an opening to put the question, something happened. This was some time later, after we’d left the food court and gone upstairs to catch a movie. We were waiting in line to buy our tickets at the box office when a man walked up to us. I had seen him coming, and I suspected he was trouble, though I’d thought his trouble was my companion’s to rebuff. I was wrong. It was me his potbelly was jiggling towards. He had an enormous one, which he carried with as much pride as the tablet-sized smartphone clutched in his left hand. He looked to me like some local government chairman, one of those gruff-voiced goons who had moved on from extorting bus conductors and now made their money in ballot-box bullying. I was already irritated by the way he smirked at me, and I was tense on account of how close he was standing, but when he said, ‘I like your hair o,’ raising his hand at the same time to stroke my locks, the violence of my shudder shocked me as well. I sensed Tekena’s look of vicarious horror before she struck his hand away and said in a furious tone, ‘Leave my girlfriend alone!’

Crudity is a disease that money exacerbates rather than cures. And that man was an exemplar of the condition. Leave my girlfriend alone, Tekena said. A statement that left no wriggle room. A less vulgar man, if he were still intent on wooing a woman whose animosity was so evident, would have first apologised for his forwardness, and then he might have offered one of those flattering lies or I’ve-seen-you-before lines that constitute the arsenal of impromptu courtship speech. Not our man. He was too hippopotamus-skinned. His own response was rank aggression. ‘Which kin’ girlfriend?’ he sneered at Tekena, and when she threw him a glance that told him to go and die, he said with a filthy laugh: ‘Una be lesbo?’

Tekena, for all her playfulness on Twitter, was a Lagos pikin. She could give as good as she got. Brinkmanship, one-upmanship, fuck-that-man-up-ship – these were acquired skills in a city where even beggars cursed you out at the drop of a coin. Thus the overboard-ness of her response, which she began by hooking an arm around my waist in a suggestive manner before saying to the man: ‘And so what if we’re lesbians? How does that concern you? Abi you think sey if we want man nah you we go come meet? You, ke? With this your big belleh that can even crush a cow?’ These words were delivered in a tone of sweetened poison, and for some seconds after she spoke, the man was as stunned as I was. He recovered first, and opened his mouth to bellow, but thinking better of it, he walked away. ‘Smart move!’ Tekena called out after him.

A woman defended me from what I used to be.

Womanhood comes with its peculiar burdens, among them the constant reminder of a subordinate status whose dominant symptom was uninvited sexual attention from men. I hadn’t foreseen this fact of my new identity. Bus conductors whistled at me on the street; drivers pulled over to offer me rides to bars; and when I went shopping for my new wardrobe in Yaba market, the touts grabbed at my hands and laughed off my protests. All manner and ages of male called me fine girl, sweet lips, correct pawpaw, big bakassi. Landlords wanted to know if I would soon marry, if I had children, if my father or my boss would stand surety for me. A woman is not expected to live alone, to walk alone in peace, or to want to be alone.