The streets began to fill. The street kids were up and had scattered into the day, like chickens feeding. Some moved about groggily, already drunk on kabire. One recounted his dreams to others at the top of his voice, gesticulating maniacally. Another was kneeling and trembling with prayer, his eyes shut as if he would never open them again. One man screamed and pointed at two kids, who were holding his wallet. No one was interested. His pocket was ripped to the zipper, leaving a square hole in the front of his trousers. He pulled out his shirt to hide his nakedness, then hurried away, an awkward smile straining his face. There was no sun, only a slow ripening of the sky.
The twins started to wail and to attack Mama’s breasts. Baba spanked them hard. They sat on the ground with pent-up tears they were afraid to shed. Naema broke the spell. She came out and sat with me on the containers, grabbed my hands, and tried to cheer me up. “You are too sad, Jigana,” she said. “You want to marry the gal? Remember, it’s your turn to take Baby out.”
“Leave me alone.”
“Marry me, then—me am still here.” She stuck out her tongue at me. “I’m your sister too—more beautiful. Guy, do me photo trick . . . smile.” She was well rested and had slept off her initial shock at Maisha’s departure. Now she was herself again, taunting and talkative, her dimples deep and perfect. “You all must to let Maisha go.”
“And you?” I said. “You only listen to Maisha.”
“I’m big gal now, guy. Breadwinner. If you want school, I pay for you!”
She blew me a kiss in the wind. Maisha’s creams were already lightening her ebony face.
Before I could say anything, Naema erupted with mad laughter and ran into the shack. She almost knocked Baba down as she burst out with the bags of food we had forgotten. She placed them on the ground and tore into them, filling the morning with hope, beckoning all of us on. Baba bit into a chicken wing. Mama took a leg. The rest of us dug into the sour rice, mashed potatoes, salad, hamburgers, pizza, spaghetti, and sausages. We drank dead Coke and melted ice cream all mixed up. With her teeth, Naema opened bottles of Tusker and Castle beer. At first, we feasted in silence, on our knees, looking up frequently, like squirrels, to monitor one another’s intake. None of us thought to inflate the balloons or open the cards that Maisha had brought.
Then the twins fell over on their backs, laughing and vomiting. As soon as they were done, they went straight back to eating, their mouths pink and white and green from ice cream and beer. We could not get them to keep quiet. A taxi pulled up and Maisha came out of the shack, dragging her trunk behind her. Our parents paused as the driver helped her put it into the car. My mother began to cry. Baba shouted at the streets.
I sneaked inside and poured myself some fresh kabire and sniffed. I got my exercise book from the carton and ripped it into shreds. I brought my pen and pencil together and snapped them, the ink spurting into my palms like blue blood. I got out my only pair of trousers and two shirts and put them on, over my clothes.
I avoided the uniform package. Sitting where the trunk had been, I wept. It was like a newly dug grave. I sniffed hastily, tilting the bottle up and down until the kabire came close to my nostrils.
As the car pulled away with Maisha, our mourning attracted kids from the gangs. They circled the food, and I threw away the bottle and joined my family again. We struggled to stuff the food into our mouths, to stuff the bags back inside the shack, but the kids made off with the balloons and the cards.
I hid among a group of retreating kids and slipped away. I ran through traffic, scaled the road divider, and disappeared into Nairobi. My last memory of my family was of the twins burping and giggling.
Fattening for Gabon
Selling your child or nephew could be more difficult than selling other kids. You had to keep a calm head or be as ruthless as the Badagry-Seme immigration people. If not, it could bring trouble to the family. What kept our family secret from the world in the three months Fofo Kpee planned to sell us were his sense of humor and the smuggler’s instinct he had developed as an agbero, a tout, at the border. My sister Yewa was five, and I was ten.
Fofo Kpee was a smallish, hardworking man. Before the Gabon deal, as a simple agbero, he made a living getting people across the border without papers or just roughing them up for money. He also hired himself out in the harmattan season to harvest coconuts in the many plantations along the coast. He had his fair share of misfortune over the years, falling from trees and getting into scuffles at the border. Yet the man was upbeat about life. He seemed to smile at everything, partly because of a facial wound sustained in a fight when he was learning to be an agbero. Ridged and glossy, the scar ran down his left cheek and stopped at his upper lip, which was constricted; his mouth never fully closed. Though he tried to cover the scar with a big mustache, it shone like a bulb on a Christmas tree. His left eye looked bigger than the right because the lower eyelid came up short, pinched by the scar. Because of all this, sometimes people called him Smiley Kpee.
A two-tone, blue silver 125cc Nanfang motorcycle was the last major purchase Fofo Kpee made that month when our lifestyle took an upswing and the Gabon plot thickened. He planned to use it to ferry people across the border between Benin and Nigeria to boost our family’s income.
I could never forget that windy Tuesday evening when a wiry man brought him back on the new bike to our two-room home that faced the sea. I rushed out from behind the house, where I was cooking Abakaliki rice, to greet Fofo Kpee. His laugh was louder than the soft hum of the new machine. Our house was set back from the busy dirt road; a narrow sandy path connected them. On either side of the path and around our home was a cassava farm, a low wedge in between the tall, thick bushes, clumps of banana and plantain trees, and our abode. Our nearest neighbors lived a half kilometer down the road.
I was bare-chested and barefoot, wearing the sea-green khaki shorts Fofo had just bought for me, and my feet were dusty from playing soccer. Yewa had been building sand castles under the mango tree in front of our house when the bike arrived.
“Smiley Kpee, only two?” the man who brought Fofo exclaimed, disappointed. “No way, iro o! Where oders?”
“Ah non, Big Guy, you go see oders . . . beaucoup,” said Fofo, a chuckle escaping his pinched mouth. He turned to us: “Mes enfants, hey, una no go greet Big Guy?”
“Good evening, monsieur!” we said, and prostrated ourselves on the ground.
The man turned away, ignoring us, his large eyes searching the road, his narrow forehead set in wrinkles. He had a small pointy nose. Although his head was clean shaven, his high cheekbones lay under a thin beard. He was in a tight pair of jeans, sandals, and an oversized, dirty-white corduroy shirt that hung on his lean frame like a furled sail, in spite of the wind. If not for his commanding height and presence, he could have been any other agbero at the border.
“My friend, make we go inside, abeg,” Fofo Kpee pleaded with him. “Sit down and drink someting. Heineken, Star, Guinness?” He turned to me: “Kotchikpa, va acheter him de drink.”
“Rien . . . notting!” Big Guy said slowly and firmly, barely audible above the sea murmuring in the distance.
Apart from the invitation to drink, we didn’t understand what they were talking about. But this didn’t worry us. Having an agbero as an uncle, we were used to people coming to harass him for various things at all hours of the day. So we knew he would laugh his way out of the man’s harassment now.