I was a happy child. People sucked their teeth, grumbled, and shifted their eyes when I passed. But I didn’t care. There were chickens and pet foxes to chase, other children to glare back at, arguments to watch. The sand on the ground was sometimes damp with spilled camel milk; at other times it was oily and fragrant from overflowing perfumed-oil bottles mixed with incense ashes and often stuck to camel, cow, or fox dung. The sand here was so affected, whereas back in the desert the sand was untouched.
We’d been in Jwahir only a few months when I found Papa. That fateful day was hot and sunny. When I left my mother, I took a cup of water with me. My first impulse was to go to the strangest structure in Jwahir: The House of Osugbo. Something always drew me to this large square-shaped building. Decorated with odd shapes and symbols, it was Jwahir’s tallest building and the only one made entirely of stone.
“One day I’ll go in there,” I said, as I stood staring at it. “But not today.”
I ventured farther from the market into an area that I hadn’t explored. An electronics shop was selling ugly refurbished computers. They were small black and gray things with exposed motherboards and cracked cases. I wondered if they felt as ugly as they looked. I’d never touched a computer. I reached out to touch one.
“Ta!” the owner said from behind his counter. “Don’t touch!”
I sipped my water and moved on.
My legs eventually brought me to a cave full of fire and noise. The white adobe building was open at the front. The room inside was dark with the occasional blast of fiery light. Heat hotter than the breeze wafted out like the breath out of a monster’s open mouth. On the front of the building a large sign read:
OGUNDIMU BLACKSMITHING-WHITE ANTS
NEVER DEVOUR BRONZE, WORMS DO NOT EAT IRON.
I squinted, making out a tall muscle-bound man inside. His dark glistening skin was darkened with soot. Like one of the heroes in the Great Book, I thought. He wore gloves woven from fine threads of metal and black goggles strapped tightly to his face. His nostrils were wide as he pounded on fire with a great hammer. His huge arms flexed with each blow. He could have been the son of Ogun, the goddess of metal. There was such joy in his motions. But he seems so thirsty, I thought. I imagined his throat burning and full of ash. I still had my cup of water. It was half full. I entered his shop.
It was even hotter inside. However, I’d grown up in the desert. I was used to extreme hot and cold. I cautiously watched the sparks burst from the metal he pounded. Then as respectfully as I could, I said, “Oga, I have water for you.”
My voice startled him. The sight of a lanky little girl who was what people called Ewu standing in his shop startled him more. He pushed his goggles up. The area around his eyes where the soot had not fallen was about my mother’s dark brown complexion. The white part of his eyes are so white for someone who stares at fire all day, I thought.
“Child, you shouldn’t be in here,” he said. I stepped back. His voice was sonorous. Full. This man could speak in the desert and animals from miles away would hear him.
“It’s not so hot,” I said. I held up the water. “Here.” I stepped closer, very conscious of what I was. I was wearing the green dress my mother had sewn for me. The material was light but it covered every inch of me, all the way to my ankles and wrists. She’d have made me wear a veil over my face but she didn’t have the heart.
It was odd. Mostly, people shunned me because I was Ewu. But sometimes women crowded around me. “But her skin,” they would say to each other, never directly to me. “It’s so smooth and delicate. It looks almost like camel’s milk.”
“And her hair is oddly bushy, like a cloud of dried grass.”
“Her eyes are like a desert cat’s.”
“Ani makes strange beauty from ugliness.”
“She might be beautiful by the time she goes through her Eleventh Rite.”
“What’s the point of her going through it? No one will marry her.” Then laughter.
In the market, men had tried to grab me but I was always quicker and I knew how to scratch. I’d learned from the desert cats. All this confused my six-year-old mind. Now, as I stood before the blacksmith, I feared that he might find my ugly features strangely delightful, too.
I held the cup up to him. He took it and drank long and deep, pulling in every drop. I was tall for my age but he was tall for his. I had to tilt my head back to see the smile on his face. He let out a great sigh of relief and handed the cup back to me.
“Good water,” he said. He went back to his anvil. “You’re too tall and far too bold to be a water sprite.”
I smiled and said, “My name is Onyesonwu Ubaid. What’s yours, Oga?”
“Fadil Ogundimu,” he said. He looked at his gloved hands. “I would shake your hand, Onyesonwu, but my gloves are hot.”
“That’s okay, Oga,” I said. “You’re a blacksmith!”
He nodded. “As was my father and his father and his father and so on.”
“My mother and I just got here some months ago,” I blurted. I remembered that it was growing late. “Oh. I have to go, Oga Ogundimu!”
“Thanks for the water,” he said. “You were right. I was thirsty.”
After that, I visited him often. He became my best and only friend. If my mother had known I was hanging around a strange man, she’d have beaten me and taken away my free time for weeks. The blacksmith’s apprentice, a man named Ji, hated me and he let me know this by sneering with disgust whenever he saw me, as if I were a diseased wild animal.
“Ignore Ji,” the blacksmith said. “He’s good with metal but he lacks imagination. Forgive him. He is primitive.”
“Do you think I look evil?” I asked.
“You’re lovely,” he said smiling. “The way a child is conceived is not a child’s fault or burden.”
I didn’t know what conceived meant and I didn’t ask. He’d called me lovely and I didn’t want him to take his words back. Thankfully, Ji usually came late, during the cooler part of the day.
Soon I was telling the blacksmith about my life in the desert. I was too young to know to keep such sensitive things to myself. I didn’t understand that my past, my very existence, was sensitive. In turn, he taught me a few things about metal, like which types yielded to heat most easily and which didn’t.
“What was your wife like?” I asked one day. I was really just running my mouth. I was more interested in the small stack of bread he’d bought me.
“Njeri. She was black-skinned,” he said. He put both his big hands around one of his thighs. “And had very strong legs. She was a camel racer.”
I swallowed the bread I was chewing. “Really?” I exclaimed.
“People said that her legs were what kept her on the camels but I know better. She had some sort of gift, too.”
“Gift of what?” I asked, leaning forward. “Could she walk through walls? Fly? Eat glass? Change into a beetle?”
The blacksmith laughed. “You read a lot,” he said.
“I’ve read the Great Book twice!” I bragged.
“Impressive,” he said. “Well, my Njeri could speak to camels. Camel-talking is a man’s job, so she chose camel racing instead. And Njeri didn’t just race. She won races. We met when we were teenagers. We married when we were twenty.”
“What did her voice sound like?” I asked.
“Oh, her voice was aggravating and beautiful,” he said.
I frowned at this, confused.
“She was very loud,” he explained, taking a piece of my bread. “She laughed a lot when she was happy and shouted a lot when she was irritated. You see?”
I nodded.
“For a while, we were happy,” he said. He paused.
I waited for him to continue. I knew this was the bad part. When he just stared at his piece of bread, I said, “Well? What happened next? Did she do you wrong?”