Yefon: The Red Necklace (25 page)

Yenla was too defeated to explain. She stared straight ahead like a soldier before a war. Could the evil of witchcraft be the cause? Had she eaten something? Ma spoke to the Fai of the compound and gave him a hen to consult with the ancestors on why they had called a young one. They said she ate a poisoned fruit from some one’s farm, but the medicine wasn’t meant for her, so they couldn’t invoke vengeance.

After we buried Asheri’s little cadaver, everything lost its
taste. Food tasted like brick. The desire to go to the city became a forgotten story—a childhood fable that I dropped. I was tired of the countless disappointments, and this one was the breaking point.

I was depressed for months after that. Her little laughter among the
bvey
s was all but a memory now. I felt for Yenla the most. Everyone deals with death in his or her own way, and I knew she was living with a broken heart. She was an excellent mother while it lasted and we all knew that, but the death coupled with her divorce just did her in.

That's how I felt too. I was over Pa’s death, even though in some ways he was still in my life, but I think Asheri’s death was the last straw for me. I checked out.

Life was too bleak, too hopeless. Even Kadoh’s jokes didn’t make me laugh as hard any more. Nothing did. I don’t think I smiled before Christmas that year.

That didn’t include the plastic smile I had plastered on my face at the parish every day as I listened to the white people speak about foolish problems that made me wonder if they knew what the word problem meant.

I was going to be a maid at the parish for the rest of my life. If I was lucky, I would fall in love with a butcher or a tailor. Those new trades were stable in those days. I was done. I divorced myself from life. I woke up every morning wishing I were dead.

I felt as if life repetitively robbed any chance of happiness from under my feet, and no matter what choices I made, the result was always the same—sorrow and depression.

-15-

THE WIND OF CHANGE

In the late 1950s, the call for independence was the new thing that everyone was crazy about. Even farmers who didn’t know what independence meant were speaking about it. Nationalists were at every corner in the village. You could see them at the market square, the churches, and local neighborhoods—they were everywhere. Political rallies were held all around the village, and the nationalists told stories of how we would become free from the white people and run our affairs autonomously.

Many people were afraid. They weren’t sure how the black man could assume the white man’s role, and some even feared that the blacks wouldn’t be as just as the whites. Teachers, preachers, and politicians spoke about independence and the main source of this information was a powerhouse of elites who had travelled to Hamburg, Germany, and many other places for school. They belonged to political parties in the city like the Kamerun National Congress (KNC) and the Kamerun National Democratic Party (KNDP). Pa Sakah, Pa Lafon, and Pa Kilo were among those men.

None of this was any of my business, until one day when Father Tony called for me while I was serving tea to the priests. I walked to him dutifully with my head and chest up, holding my silver tray.

“Yes, Big Father, you called.” I answered.

“Do you want independence?” he asked me.

That question came as a surprise, and I was not sure what to answer. “I don’t know what that word means, Father,” I responded politely.

“It means the black people will rule themselves, and the whites will go away. Do you want the whites to go away?”

My
sha
η
g
began to burn on my chest and I was confused, about what the answer was supposed to be, especially because he looked up at me expectantly. “No,” I replied stammering, a heavy sweat forming above my brows.

“Good,” he said and that was the end of the conversation.

I quickly dashed out and was able to breathe once again when I was out in the corridor. About five maids were fired that
weekend. It turns out they had said they wanted independence, and they had lost their jobs.

I was afraid. I didn’t want to lose my job, but I didn’t care if white or black people were in control. I had seen black people in action. For instance, I wasn’t allowed to go to school in my own land, and those in power were dark like me. I didn’t really think anything would change. It all seemed like a charade, and so I stayed out of politics and focused on my job.

In 1959, there seemed to be a Yefon bug that bit all the boys in my village. Overnight, I had become the most wanted bachelorette on the market. I had absolutely no clue what had changed. But something did. Had they forgotten that I was the ugly stubborn girl unfit for marriage I asked myself as I scrubbed my body thoroughly at the
Nsar
lagoon one morning. There were about thirty overzealous marriage requests ranging from the up-and-coming gentlemen in town, the lecherous new butcher at the parish who gave me a little extra meat every time I was in his store, the dramatic big stomached men with missing teeth, and even a Fulani lord on a
nyambara
! I mean it was outrageous! And Ma was disappointed the thirty times I turned them down.

I wasn’t one of those girls. You couldn’t make me do anything. Everyone knew that, and now that I think about it, maybe they had gotten used to it so much that they became blind to it.

During the traditional wedding of one of my older cousins, Nsokika, I ate almost twenty pieces of
bvey
meat and ended up sick during the festivities. Meat was rare, and I got greedy when I saw that I could eat as much as I wanted without anyone stopping me. I shat the whole thing out in the housefly-infested pit toilet in their compound. That was when I learnt about greediness.

It was also on this day that out of boredom I went to my mother’s room and looked through her wrappers. There I saw some of Pa’s clothes. Out of curiosity, I started looking through them. They still had Pa’s strong pine smell, and it reminded me of how much I missed him.

I smelled the fabric for a while, and as I touched his
Mfu
fabric, I felt something strange come over me. It was almost as if
there was someone else in the room. My
sha
η
g
began burning on my chest, and I looked behind only to vaguely see a thin shadow pass behind me. I shrieked in fright and dropped the loincloth. Tiptoeing closer, I looked around the area for any sign of life but nothing seemed to be there. Then I walked to my room, hastily begging the gods to have pity on me for I was not interested in seeing any dead spirits.

I fell into an abysmal sleep where I hallucinated that I was in a distant sunny land with tall iroko trees, clear water streams, and puffy clouds. Brightly colored birds flew gracefully over wild flowers. Pa was alive again. He smiled at me and beckoned me to meet him by the stream. I ran up to him with my eyes focused on him so that I never lost him. He pointed at my
sha
η
g
, and I touched its beads. It reminded me that I was special. I tried to speak but I couldn’t open my mouth, so I looked at him, and somehow, I communicated telepathically about how dead I felt.

Smiling at me, he pointed straight ahead, and when I looked I saw the
mbve’
. As I approached it, I heard my name muffled in the howling of the wind.

“Wake up! Wake up!” Ma shook me roughly. More furious than ever, I jumped up almost yelling. Ma looked baffled as I looked around my bedroom. Kadoh was with her. The smell of
khatikatih
was fresh in the air, and as she moved about, I could hear the sound of xylophones and
mba-cha’s
from the festivities a few compounds away.

“I brought you some medicine,” Ma said.

The scowl on my face softened, and I opened my eyes slowly to see what medicine it was. Untying the hem of her wrapper, she brought out a bag of herbs. “Yenla, bring me some water.”

Yenla returned shortly with an old calabash of water, and Ma mixed the herbs inside and gave it to me to drink. Reluctantly, I held my nose and drank it, praying it never touched my tongue.

The thing about bitter medicine is that you think you can handle the taste until the stuff actually touches your tongue. Twisting my face into a bitter scowl, I downed the medicine. A shiver ran through me from the intense taste that slapped my taste buds. It took two whole minutes for the taste to lessen.

“Thank you, Ma”, I said looking at her and she nodded.

“Have some rest now. The medicine man says he will come and see you himself in the morning.”

We didn’t have to be best friends, but we had learnt to coexist amicably. She stayed in her lane, and I in mine. We crossed paths only if we really had to, like now.

A little after dawn I overheard Ma talking with someone outside her hut. Even though they were whispering, I could hear the age and wisdom in the man’s voice.

“She is possessed by the evil spirits of the river.” I heard him explain in a mysterious voice. Maybe he was talking about my sister or someone else. I had nothing to do with it, and so I rested comfortably.

“The goddess of the river is very powerful, and if we don’t stop it, Yefon will continue falling sick.”

What were they talking about? At the sound of my name, I leaped out of bed like a man caught cheating by his wife. Crawling slowly towards the door, I listened attentively. I heard Ma snap her fingers over her head three times and yell, “Abomination!”

I eventually crept by the door and looked outside. The voice I had been listening to belonged to Sango, the sixty-year old medicine man with a bone on his long red beard and black markings on his rugged face. His teeth were a dark yellow, and he looked like one of those African antiquities found in European museums.

“So what do we do?” Ma asked, shaking like old underwear. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought that Ma cared about me, especially, given the fright in her frail eyes. Maybe she did; she brought me treatment after all.

“I will cut her and put some medicine inside her body that will protect her,” he stated as Ma nodded attentively.

I didn’t wait to hear the end of it. The words “cut” and “me” were enough to drive me out of the house like a vampire running from sunlight. The
mbve’
! Quickly, I ducked out of the window and ran until I arrived at the
mbve’
where I eventually passed out, tired.

-16-

THE HIDDEN TREASURE

I woke up in a dark musty place with a feeling of being watched. Carefully squinting my myopic eyes to adjust to the lighting, I identified my watchers. An old bush rat and a few of its descendants idled around me. They were probably wondering if I was alive or dead and whether they should lick my salty face or not. I quickly leaped up in fear. They disappeared into their ancient cracks.

Poor broods, I thought, but then, not really, because I had bigger problems. Where the hell was I and why was I here? Squinting some more, I spotted a few more wide-eyed old rats staring at me from an upper ledge. Were they malevolent ghosts in rat form? Why did they stare me down like that?

Feeling the floor blindly, my fingers ran over a small rock, which I stroked repeatedly on the rocky wall in an effort to light the whole
mbve’
. The wonders of fire! I rejoiced to myself as the spiritual rats escaped, their small paws hitting against the floor. There was a small innocence about their fear.

I shifted myself to an upright position and looked around. The misty air tasted like cold rainwater.
What was this place, I wondered? A termite biting on my hand fully woke me and I screamed, slapping my hands all over the place. I hated crawlers.

The jaded light from the pregnancy of dawn called my attention and I managed to make my way to the mouth of the
mbve’
like a blind man, grabbing on to anything that my poor hands could grab. I almost fell twice but I propped myself against the wall for support. Slowly, a little too hesitantly, I rose. The strong smell of ground country onions, or
shirrum
^*
, hit my nose. Stretching my body a long
aaaaaahhhh
sound escaped my chapped lips.

I walked outside and a refreshing beauty welcomed me. The breeze calmed me and a quiet peaceful serenity came upon me. It couldn’t be later than four a.m., and that godforsaken
kiyuu
was nowhere in view. Slowly a smile formed on my lips. So there
was a place in the world where mornings were quiet and peaceful. I admired the deepness of the forest and the dark roughness of its trees. I had always been mystified by the rich silence of the forest.

I had a bad hangover and realized that I was wearing the same bluish clothes from yesterday. The whole medicine man incident from the night before filled my thoughts and then I realized I was in the
mbve’
—Pa’s
mbve’
. His sage words instantly echoed in my head, “one day you will need privacy,” and I loved him even more in that moment.

Yes, I needed privacy more than ever. I thought about home. Boring home. Ugh. Should I return? Everyone would be asleep now. Ma would be snoring like an aged frog. My brows quivered at the mere thought.