Sisi Jókò began bringing me leftover Ofada rice morsels wrapped in Agidi leaves–perhaps remnants from what her mother had managed to sell that day–in the third hour since Uncle Túndùn locked me away. The walls holding me captive were as dull as my sensory responses, splattered with what appeared to be the decayed remains of insects that had been smashed against the wall with the back of rubber slippers.
The stench of stale urine mixed with rain-soaked mud enveloped whatever sense of smell I had left, the room dark enough that the only way I could tell the distance from the dinghy wooden bedframe I sat on to the entrance of the room was by crawling, feeling my way through the darkness with my hands sliding against the wall.
And when I found the door in those first minutes—elation wrapping itself delicately around my heart as relief tore through the claustrophobia I’d been feeling—I’d pounded against it desperately, wailing as loud as my lungs would allow, in hopes that someone would hear. Minutes bled into each other, yet I assume no one heard my screams.
Until Sisi Jókò showed up.
I knew of her mother–the infamous rice seller whose husband had left her after she’d produced a sixth daughter for him, her husband who had displayed a show of enrage that day in the market, cursing his wife’s womb as incapable of creating legacies–his legacy.
I had asked mummy what he had meant, questioning why a man, who looked like he could barely afford the clothes on his back, acted as though it was an abomination for him to have no sons to carry his lineage on and take over his inheritance. I did not understand any of it, but mummy had smiled placatingly, shushing me as she asked Iya Jókò to keep the change, checking that the black nylon containing the food was secure before tossing it in her market bag.
Sisi Jókò and I were the same age, but her eyes–yellowed from years of managed malnutrition with deep brown irises–screamed how much they had been tarnished by the harsh realities of the life she lived. She had watched the scene with a guarded expression, appearing to partly be embarrassed by the obvious showcase of poverty and her father’s erratic behaviour earlier on, but also daring anyone—with her eyes—to look down at her because of it.
We were not friends, Sisi Jókò and I, but she was someone I’d spent more time observing than I should have, curiosity overpowering rationale those days I snuck out of the classroom to watch her saunter into the main staff room to sell her mother’s food every lunch hour.
There was something astute about the way she carried herself–as though she knew her current reality was only a passing phase that would eventually give way to the full manifestation of her. She moved with the assurance of the Osun princess–the water goddess Baba Gbénró told us stories about whenever he gathered the neighbouring kids together for night tales–stance leisure, hips swaying with the sensuality of a siren, commanding the unwilling attention of anyone who stood around. Sisi Jókò and I were not friends, but I admired her and in the recesses of my mind, craved the elegance she proudly wore.
I watch from the small crack in the door as she tenderly unwraps the leaves, the smell from the brown ayamase stew wafting through the air–warring with the smell of the small room that had become my prison–as she pours it onto the rice. My mouth waters for the first meal I would eat in what I had counted as two hours, as she tells me that tomorrow Chief Jẹ́miyótán will be coming to collect my hand as his fourth wife. I respond that I do not understand what she means. She tells me that even though I am a child, I should not think like a child; that if there is any time I need to wear a cloak of maturity, it is now.
From the time I’d spent covertly watching her on the school grounds, I knew she wore maturity better than was rationally expected from someone her age. Three months ago when she’d turned thirteen, she had caused an uproar in the market square when she’d glared at brother Lukmon–the randy son of the town’s popular chemist who had amassed an obscene amount of wealth whose source no one was confident to identify–and spat in his face, caustically warning him to stay away from her.
I had watched in part awe and confusion–awe as I wondered what well she seemed to draw her confidence from. I’d concluded that perhaps she had reached down into the deepest crevices of her growing womanhood and shoved this attitude to the forefront of her personality or maybe swallowed seeds of arrogance from those books she was fond of reading whenever she sat under the weather-beaten umbrella her mother sold food from.
Whatever it was, I was certain I wanted it as I watched her drag and twist Brother Lukmon’s right ear in response to his wandering hands. And now even as she implored me to be more mature, like her, I mimicked her form, pleading with my feet to become less wobbly and for my shoulders to adopt a more assured stance.
We were not friends, but there were one or two things I could learn from her, maturity the most palpable.
Wiping my face with the bottom ends of my plaid school skirt, I lean against the wall–the cleanest portion I can find with my hands in this darkness and roll a morsel of the soaked rice as she watches me through the gap in the door–the one we have used to communicate and pass food through since the third hour. I asked her how she found me. She smiles, pity colouring her usually expressive eyes as she tells me how she saw Uncle Túndùn cart me outside the principal’s office when she’d come to deliver lunch to teachers in the staff room.
It was a moment I would not be quick to forget; when he had violently dragged me away–his signature antiseptic scent overwhelming my senses as he shoved my slight frame into the back seat of his rickety Volvo–and dumped me in the uncompleted boys’ quarter at the back of his house.
Uncle Túndùn was Daddy’s older brother who had fully and rather forcefully immersed himself as head of our household since they announced Daddy’s death. I had been in school when the teacher came to quietly cartel me out of Mathematics class–giddy from the thought of being given a free pass away from Mr Ògúnmúkò’s perpetually browned shirt soaked in sweat and projectile spittle from his excitement during teaching.
The dead look in Mummy’s eyes as she sat in Daddy’s car outside the school gate–the one that Uncle Túndùn now drove, sitting in the driver’s seat with glee climbing up his lips–had stopped me in my tracks. No words needed to be shared; I just knew. They had called it a myocardial infarction. I did not know what it meant. Mummy had explained that it meant Daddy had lived with a bad heart for most of his adult life. I did not understand any of it, but there was only one thing I was certain of: my favourite person in the world was gone.
“Why your uncle is the one controlling any-everything for your family?” Sisi Jókò’s voice pulls me from relieving the pain I’d felt once I realised Daddy was not coming back. It was obvious even to a blind man that Uncle relished his new responsibility as the unofficial caretaker of the Adémúlẹ̀gún family since Daddy’s demise. Uncle Túndùn had moved into our family house, ready to take complete possession of Daddy’s properties–including his wife and daughters–almost immediately after Daddy’s wake.
Our quaint town was infamous for quickly burying its dead, its traditions dictating that the spirits of the dead must never be allowed to remain amongst the living for more than a week, lest evil befalls the town for weeks following their death. Mummy’s grief had frozen her so acutely that she gave Uncle free reins to do as he pleased. Uncle had pranced around the house as though it was now his, preparing himself to enjoy the spoils Daddy had worked so hard to achieve–the ones I could tell he so desperately craved to be his.
I knew something was deeply wrong the day he began having multiple closed-door conversations that only the men in the family were privy to. And then one by one, my sisters began disappearing across other cities outside our town. It was because Daddy’s money was dwindling and they needed to work to bring an income for the family, Uncle Túndùn had explained when I mustered up the courage—albeit very little, coming across more as timidity even—to ask.
I couldn’t ask mummy to explain what it meant to me because her sadness made her so lost in her head that I could no longer recognise her. So I took her lead and allowed Uncle to exercise his domain over us, even though something deep in my guts wanted to vehemently fight against it.
“Because my daddy is dead and I have no brothers, and Uncle is now the oldest man in our family,” I responded to her question simply, without delving into too much detail.
For the first time, I felt like I only existed for the ridicule of the men in our family. My mother had borne six daughters–we were enough for my father, who had never once disregarded us the way Iya Jókò’s husband had that day in the market square, but for the people of the Ìbàdára community, none of my mother’s offspring would ever be enough to control the properties and possessions daddy had left behind. So, they more than encouraged Uncle’s stepping in.
“Before I came,” She starts, voice as thin as the air that surrounds us. “I heard people talking rubbish in the town. My mummy said I’m becoming an Amebo like that Iya Alatenuje that is always coming to eat without paying. But me, I don’t care sha, as long as I can get any information I can use to my benefit in this place, I don’t mind.” She rambles on, voice rising and falling animatedly, and I smile briefly, the rising and falling of her tone as she embarks on her storytelling forming a worthy distraction for the erratic emotions that overwhelm me in this place.
“Anyway sha, what me I heard was that Chief Jẹ́miyótán is giving plenty plenty money to your Uncle if he allow you to marry him. They said Chief has been begging your daddy since you became a woman, but your daddy say no, that he wants you to go school first. But now that like you say, your daddy is dead,” She sighs dramatically for a second before she continues, “Sorry for your loss. But now that he’s gone, they said your Uncle said he will give you to him, but only if Chief gives him big money and Chief agreed for him. So now, they’re coming tomorrow to come and collect you so you can be doing wife for Chief.”
“Why Chief?” My voice is tiny and scared, even to my ears, as I roll the leaves as tidily as I can, watching them tumble until it reaches her left foot before she gingerly picks it up. That way, if Uncle comes to check in on me as he did in the first hour, he will not know I have engaged in the delicious rebellion her Ofada has afforded me. “Why me?”
The darkness is not enough to conceal the resigned movement of her shoulder, perhaps in a shrug to my question. “He’s rich, he has plenty of money like I talk. Ó lè ṣe ohunkóhun ti o fẹ ṣe. He can do what he wants in this town and nobody will open their mouth.”
Chief was a man of unnecessary ostentation. It was this confidence that fuelled his desire to collect women the same way he did trophies. And the more unattainable—in every sense of the word—the deeper and more depraved his craving. His youngest wife— they called her Overcomer because her mother had successfully waded through whatever obstacles the evil spirits put in place to deter her from childbirth—was only four years older than I was and already had two toddlers decorating her feet.
The year she’d turned sixteen, Chief had stormed into their family house with gifts that her greedy family had quickly clutched to chest, seeing no wrong in exchanging their only child for material things and food items that would leave the body system after nothing more than twenty-four hours. I’d been blissfully unaware of his intention to make me his wife, but things were starting to make sense. He’d played Uncle into his hands and taken full advantage of Daddy’s death and the destructive culture that defined our small town when it came to the propertification of women.
Chief Jẹ́miyótán and Brother Lukmon shared the same proclivities–the asinine idea that women were their properties and so could do with them howsoever they pleased. The only difference between the two men–apart from the glaring differences in their physical stature, where chief’s hard and protruding stomach always led the way when he walked, compared to the hungriness that lined Brother Lukmon’s frame–was that chief wore his misguided dominance of women more openly where Brother Lukmon craftily wove his as though it was him doing a favour to whatever unsuspecting woman he’d successfully latched himself onto. He was more dangerous in this regard, I suppose, because he was a master at manipulation, meaning he almost always emerged the victim to eavesdroppers and onlookers in whatever perversion he’d subject his female counterpart to.
Things started to change the day he began targeting Sisi Jókò and only escalated that day when she chastised him. She’d been the first person I was aware of who had stood up to him and his wandering hands.
“The way I knock that his coconut head eh? They’ve not born the person that will tell him to try that nonsense with me again.”
I chuckle as she vividly describes the encounter, the pain and disgust in her tone drawing me back to the present. Probably without realising it, Sisi Jókò has made the last three hours—a hundred and eighty minutes from my silent counting—in this hole bearable.
“Sister Overcomer…they said both times she want to born for chief almost kill her. In fact, mummy said that chief do usually force himself on her everytime until she carry belle for him. At least, that’s what she say Iya Alatenuje use to say.”
There was something about the way her tone had changed when she talked about Sister Overcomer’s situation–the sullenness and despair in her tone was tangible, as though I could reach out into the crack in the door and it would take physical form for me to hold.
It was how I knew she was telling the truth.
For all the gossip-mongering and peddling that defined Iya Alatenuje, there really was no smoke without a fire. Mummy had mumbled something similar, I remember now, a while ago when she’d come across Sister Overcomer in the market at the meat sellers; Overcomer who now looked like a shadow of her previous self, wearing the carriage and physical appearance of someone her mother’s age on her much younger frame as she tugged the hand of her two-year-old, the lump of her six-month-old tied to her back as she haggled with the seller. Mummy had shaken her head in pity, mumbling something about how Overcomer’s marriage to chief had destroyed her destiny.
“That poor girl…see how they’ve just turned this child into an untimely mother! K’olorun shaanu wa o!”
The meat seller with the elaborate slashes in his right cheek–three horizontal wide ones symbolising his origins–had simply chuckled in response to mummy’s outburst, muttering something about how at least her family would be happy that she’d become a wife. I did not understand the full extent of what it meant.
Until today.
Today, I found out that the same thing that happened to Sister Overcomer was about to happen to me.
“How can I have children when I’m still a child; when I have not even seen my monthly flow yet?”
“I…I have to come and be going now.” Her movements are jerky as she quietly places the lid over the cooler holding the food, rolling the ankara wrapper she would place on her head to balance the weight of the cooler as roughly as she can. “I think your uncle will soon come back.”
“Break the padlock for me. Jọ̀ọ́ now. Don’t let them take me away.” My attempt to rattle the door, to see if it gave way–at least enough to slide my petite frame through–falls empty and for the umpteenth time since I was dumped here, palpable fear gripping my throat as I begin to digest the truth of her words.
I will be forced to marry Chief, and no one is coming to help me.
Clutching the ends of the rusted chain that binds the door to its frame, she drags it forward, closing the communication gap that once existed between us.
“If I start to break it and your uncle come to find me, nko? Your uncle and chief, two both of them are very powerful in Ìbàdára. If they come and see that I’m doing what I’m not supposed to be doing, they will make my family and us suffer. I no want that.”
“Sisi, please. I’m using God to beg you.” I do not want the end she had described that had befallen Sister Overcomer to happen in my case. I was too young, the rest of my life still wildly ahead of me to be forced into brutal adulthood too early. I do not want to become a wife or mother before in the first year of my teenage years.
I shake the door rather violently, tears and mucus mixing and soaking the crevices of my face as I beg her to open the door because I do not want them to take me to go with Chief. I remind her that I am only thirteen and I have not even seen my period; I am only a child. I promised her tearfully that I would not inform Uncle Túndùn it was her who let me go, so long as she agrees to free me from this nightmare. I do not want to be here any longer now that I know his illicit intention for me.
Still, she refuses, justifying her selfishness with questions of what if they find out and punish her family as I hear her voice become more distant. I call her names in my hysteria–names that if mummy heard flow from my mouth, she would slice my lip open and stuff pepper inside it as her form of chastisement for whatever foul language poured out, emphatically reminding me that she did not teach them to me.
I want to smile as I remember, but my wails forcibly remind me that Mummy is not here to help me. That in fact, she does not care enough, because if she did, she would have fought against Uncle–I’m sure of it. She would have shown up as he’d dragged me into his car, stopping him from upheaving my status quo. But mummy was no longer the mummy I knew since Daddy’s passing.
She would much rather sit on the wooden chair on the verandah—the one Daddy always occupied at the end of a workday, to watch the sun kiss the moon as it began to bid goodbye to the once sunny day. She would sit and stare, mumbling words that were only audible to herself, tears streaming down her face, her grief heavier in its silence.
This mummy, I knew, had no care for anything else in the world than the loud sadness that had gripped her senses over the last two weeks. I scream louder as Sisi Jókò’s retreating footsteps become quieter, oscillating between screaming for help and counting the seconds I have spent in this room.
I’d always been adept with numbers and counting, looking forward to whatever puzzle we would solve in Maths, even though Mr Ògúnmúkò was my least favourite teacher. And here, locked away from the rest of sanity, counting down the minutes–as the temporary pleasure that zapped my insides when the numbers passed my lips–did its work in keeping my mind occupied and not focused on the horrors that lay ahead.
I stop screaming the moment I count three hundred minutes. It is of no use; no one is coming to help me. Not mummy, not Sisi Jókò.
The cream ceramic cup with the brightly coloured flowers delicately wrapped around its circumference has now become my focal point—the only thing weaving my sanity together—since I entered this fifth hour since Uncle Túndùn disrupted my current reality. I didn’t realise it at the time, but the cup—which had been the main character in the scrumptious meal Sisi Jókò had brought—must have fallen from the cooler on her head during her desperate escape.
I watch it intently through the barely there crack in the door, thoughts of breaking it into sizable pieces so I can reach out for a piece. For the first time in my life, I wonder if I could use whatever piece of the ceramic cup to draw blood from my body so that Uncle and Chief would find me worthless for marriage. Perhaps, if they come to see my bloodied pile lying helplessly on the floor, they would deem me invaluable and maybe I can return to sit with mummy on the rocking chair.
But I do not want to harm myself nor do I want to die because of them. And I know that from the tales that shrouded Chief in Ìbàdára, he would not mind receiving me as a broken mess–in fact, it would please him even more.
So I sit quietly, hoping and mumbling words of prayer I’ve heard slip out habitually from mummy’s lips whenever she makes declarations against her enemies. I ask a combination of deities–God and the universe–to come to my rescue and deter the plans of Uncle and Chief.
But I open my eyes and find myself still stuck within these walls, with no indication of any supernatural intervention.
It is now six hundred and thirty minutes since this room became my only sanctuary. My mouth is heavy as though filled with cottons, tongue soured from the ayamashe aftertaste and lack of early morning hygiene. It is now a Tuesday–I was certain—the day Chief is apparently supposed to come and collect me and I am violently reminded of the new day the moment the loud cock crows far away.
Sisi Jókò has returned with a bag of nearly burnt chin-chin. They were saltier and oilier than I expected chin-chin to be, but on this occasion, I cannot complain because my beggar cannot afford to be a chooser. I do not need to ask if they’re leftovers from the ones her mother fried this morning. Instead, I ask why she is taking care of me. When she tells me she cannot stand the idea of what will happen in the next few hours, I take the opportunity to plead with her to stop it from taking place. To do whatever she can to either break me out of here or distract Uncle or Chief.
“If you really want to take care of me, Jókòtọlá, you will fight Uncle and Chief when they arrive. You will not allow another tragedy to happen to me.” For the first time, I mustered enough energy to call her full name. I use it to remind her that no matter what the circumstances dictate, she is not like them, she is different. That she is the type of person to look injustice in the face and subdue it with her hands.
“Do you know my name?” I want her to remember me in case anything happens, either here or when I’m with Chief. I have now been forced to accept my reality.
She does not answer. Rather, she scrambles away as heavy and shuffling feet begin to pound on the floor closer to us.
They’re here.
“I’m sorry I cannot help like that. I…I pray God will keep you and protect you from all the evil and bad bad things they say chief normally do to women’s bodies…especially the young ones.”
They miss each other by a hair’s breadth, Sisi Jókò and the evil approaching. The heavy and pungent antiseptic smell suddenly overpowers the stench of urine and oil in the room and I know that Uncle has arrived with Chief.
Time seems to freeze as he slides the key into the rusted chain and turns it. My heart beats in tandem with each sound the chain makes as he unwinds it from my false prison before pushing the creaky door open. Relief wars with fear as my mind processes my freedom from the claustrophobia holding me captive, side by side with what awaits me beyond this door.
He smells like palm oil–painful and unpleasant just like his presence, overpowering as though he’d doused himself in a bucket of it just before coming over. It makes me want to throw up in my mouth, but I hold my faux confident stance, glaring at him with eyes full of hatred. I do not know him personally but I already hate him.
Chief Jẹ́miyótán looks to be the very personification of evil–like the villains in the cartoons Daddy would watch with us just before bedtime, there was something about his presence that bred discomfort. He was a very large man, taking up space in a way that made Unce insignificant and it scared me. Tears silently line the apples of my cheeks as my eyes meet his and for the second time since being locked away, I wonder if taking my own life would be a much preferable outcome than the hell I can envision that I am about to experience in Chief’s hands.
He licks his lips sloppily, eyes slowly trailing from my dirty feet to the matted cornrows on my head. The way his eyes linger makes me feel dirty, triggering a deep-seated desire to scrub my body with the hard sponge mummy always asks me to use on the back of the iron pot. I want to scrub until I am rid of the dirtiness of his presence and the filth I feel creeps through my skin as he continues to gaze intensely at me.
“Ẹ̀ríìfẹ́. You will make a lovely bride.”
Bunmi works in academia by day and spends the rest of the time in her imagination, concocting hilarious scenarios or romantic tales. Her short story, Palmwine Promises, was featured in Brittle Paper’s 2023 Festive Anthology. Her short stories appear in The Three Boats Magazine, Brittle Paper, The Kalahari Review, The African Writer Magazine, The Sprinng Literary Movement (forthcoming) and elsewhere. She has an unhealthy addiction to coffee and is a bibliophile with an overwhelming stack of cheesy romance novels.