CHAPTER ONE

Standing in the middle of a shabby one room apartment with its decrepit furnishings of a bed, a mat, and a bench by the corner, Ejiro panted in grief, eyes bloodshot from crying. She began to pace about in confusion as the cry of a hungry baby overwhelmed her reasoning. She grabbed a pillow by the side of the baby on the bed. Enraged, she placed the pillow on the face of the baby and began to press as she yelled, “shut up!!!”

The baby’s frail frame struggled and kicked to be free, then gradually became still.

The door flung open suddenly as Mama Ejiro walked into the room

Ejiro jumped up from the bed, shocked, then calmly walked away from the baby.

“What is going on here?” asked Mama Ejiro. She noticed the stillness of the baby and rushed towards her frantically, picked her up from the bed and shook her vigorously as she yelled her name. “Oke!!” She ran towards an earthen pot of water, collected a cup full and began to sprinkle the water on her. “What have you done?” she asked Ejiro repeatedly.

Ejiro was seated on the floor, her arms wrapped around her chest, and her gaze fixed to the broken ceiling.

The baby let out a sneeze and began to cry. Mama Ejiro held her to her bosom and began to rejoice. “Thank God she is alive.” She searched for clean water and gave the baby to drink from a feeder. The baby drank the water greedily as tears seeped from the corners of her eyes. Mama Ejiro walked towards Ejiro who sat unshaken by the situation and gave her a resounding slap. “Wicked child! If I had done this to you when you were a baby, would you have been alive today?”

“It would have been better, mama,” she replied. “You should have killed me, mama,” she shouted. “Do you call this living? I am just a walking carcass. That slap is just a pat on the skin.” Like a demented fellow, she rushed behind the door, grabbed a rope, and gave it to her mother. “This will be better, mama. Strangle the worthless life out of me. Let me die.” She wept bitterly as Mama Ejiro looked away in pain.

“Mummy!” The voices of Ese and Efe came from outside. Two scruffy children between the ages of six and four years ran into the room. They looked hungry and exhausted, probably from playing too much. They held on to Ejiro’s tattered wrapper. “Mummy, we are hungry!!!”

“A good time for a proper meal,” she answered sarcastically. “Tell your grandmother to kill me so that you all can have a feast and please don’t forget to invite your drunkard father and his kinsmen,” she said in a rage and walked out of the room.

**

The misty atmosphere mixed with the cold morning breeze could not stop Ejiro from preparing for the day. Ardently, she kindled the fire outside the house to boil some water to prepare eba and the leftover amiedi soup for breakfast for her children. The deep smoke from the fire engulfed her eyeballs and encircled her heart as tears dropped. The cock crowed, leaving a ting of hope for a better day as uncountable questions on why her path through destiny was so rough filled her heart.

“Ejiro!” her mother called.

“Yes, mama.”

“You have to hurry up so that you don’t miss the trip to the farm. You know how hard it was for us to secure this opportunity for you.”

“I know, mama,” she said as she hastily prepared the meal.

Mama Ejiro, after months of perseverance and immense pressure on one of her relatives to help her get a job for Ejiro, was lucky and overjoyed when her relative secured a job for Ejiro at one of the numerous farms owned by chief Edafe, a wealthy and generous man.

“I will finish up for you. Go and get ready.”

“Thank you, mama,” she hurried excitedly into the room. As she watched her children sleep peacefully, a sigh of peace enveloped her heart. She looked intently at baby Oke, her angelic face and her tender body tucked in a safe corner of the bed as she slept without care. This brought Ejiro to her knees and she begged her silently for forgiveness. “Though these hands, manipulated by the misery of life, held a pillow over your face, but my heart could not allow it to press harder. Forgive me, my child.” She wept silently.

“Get your working tools. The pickup truck has arrived,” Mama Ejiro said.

The horn from the truck could be heard blaring as Ejiro picked up her tools and rushed outside.

The Hilux pickup truck parked outside was already filled with women of different ages and sizes, some had infants tied to their backs. Ejiro was welcomed by some of the women as they assisted her into the back of the truck. It sped off immediately through the misty weather.

The sonorous female voices filled the air as they sang to welcome the break of dawn.

Twenty minutes later, they all stepped out of the van into a vast bushy farm land. Mr. Kevwe, a tall, dark, middle-aged man welcomed them. He introduced himself as the supervisor and allotted portions for each woman to till.

Like a jackal, Ejiro tilled her portion of the farm land, undermining the scorching sun on her skin to the admiration of other women who were also impressed with her zeal to work. Though hungry and thirsty, the thought of going home with a handsome day’s pay filled her stomach and her thirst was quenched when she remembered how she had hawked palm kernel oil and engaged in sweeping the community center for a meager pay that could not buy a cup of garri for her children to eat. An opportunity like this to work in Chief Edafe’s farm land was like finding a piece of gold in a dumpster.

Getting a good paying job in Otu land was not easy. Farm owners and those with qualified certificates who worked in the community banks, schools, and hospitals were opportuned to earn good pay. It was every struggling woman’s dream in Otu community to work in Chief Edafe’s farm because of his generosity towards his workers.

The car wheel tied on a tree was banged with an iron rod by the supervisor to signal break time. Ejiro, tired and grateful for the break, raised her head to look around. To her dismay, not a single male apart from the supervisor was amongst them.

I thought the order of life was for man to till the earth while the woman brings forth children. In this part of the earth, injustice is king as women do not only bring forth children, they also till the earth to take care of their young while the men are either lazy, doing nothing or are present at a drinking spot drinking ogogoro and languishing away.

She sat under a mango tree, exhausted and hungry. She drank some water because that was all she brought for the trip.

“Take, my daughter,” said an elderly woman as she offered her some garri.

“Migwor, ma!” Ejiro said and grabbed the bowl from her, poured some water into it, and began to munch it hastily. She felt refreshed after the bowl of garri and was grateful to the elderly woman. She remembered her father, Mr. Obaro, a generous and loving farmer of repute. His generosity earned him the name Ovie Emu (king of food) by the villagers because no one went home hungry whenever they came in contact with him. She remembered her childhood days and her tall dreams of getting an education. She had hoped to become a teacher someday. Her father believed in her dreams and he worked tirelessly to make that dream come through as he took her every weekday on his bicycle from their home to school. Her mother, a petty trader, could not wish more for a better husband because her father, unlike some other urhobo men who practiced polygamy, refused to be involved in such act, even when her mother found it hard to become pregnant again after her. She and her mother were her father’s pride. The pressure from his family members to marry another wife fell on deaf ears.

The beautiful rhythm of her life changed to a dirge when her father was bitten by a snake in his farm land and never recovered from the snakebite despite being treated with the snake antidote and other potent medicines. This sparked anger and assurance in the villagers that he was killed on purpose. Her mother believed that his family members killed him through diabolical means because of their greed for his property.

True to her mother’s words, after the burial of her father, his family members immediately seized all his properties and threw her and her mother out, claiming she did not give birth to a male child, so she had no right over his property.

Ejiro was surprised that no one came to their aid, not even those her father once fed. When her mother reported the case to the Ovie, he promised to look into it but never did. Some people advised them to forget about the case because it was the tradition that a woman without a male child had no claim over her late husband’s property. Her dream of being educated was not only frozen but broken into pieces and melted away as poverty like a plague ravished her and her mother. They were lucky to have a small room over their heads which was given to them by one of her mother’s relatives. She watched her mother toil unprofitably and beg for food. Some days, water was the only meal they could afford. Her father’s grave became her succour. She would cry and sometimes blame her father for not fighting enough to stay alive for them.

She thought her life was taking a good turn at last when her mother convinced her to marry Mr. Benson, a school teacher in his early forties. He pledged to train Ejiro in school amidst other promises of a better life for them. She was only fourteen years old when she became Mr. Benson’s wife. Naïve and inexperienced on the duties of a wife, she learnt the hard way. Mr. Benson never kept any of his promises. Rather, he gradually and cunningly turned her into a glorified maid. Whenever she complained about his failed promises, he never minced a word to remind her to be grateful for marrying a man of his caliber.

Mr. Benson, a tall athletic man with a good command of the English language was full of pride simply because of his status as a teacher. Like a faulty gramophone, he kept repeating his achievements and experiences from the big city. Whenever he put on his khaki shorts and shirt, the world became his foot mat and Ejiro was seen as a rag that needed to wipe his buttocks clean. When she gave birth to Ese, her pain worsened. A teenager without help from her careless husband and no experience on how to take care of a baby, she suffered postnatal depression and some days thought of committing suicide.

Her mother came to her rescue when she visited and took care of the baby. Laden with the guilt of having lured her daughter into a life of misery after experiencing Mr. Benson’s ill treatment towards Ejiro, she decided to leave but not after a confrontation with him which led to a physical scuffle. Mama Ejiro emptied all her frustration and guilt on Mr. Benson as she descended on him, picked him up, and landed him on the floor to the dismay of Ejiro. She gave him a beating of a lifetime to the amusement of his neighbors and some villagers who were already irritated with his haughty attitude. Then mama Ejiro left, broken-hearted.

Some months later, Mr. Benson alongside some other teachers were laid off when an allegation of examination malpractices was leveled against them. He quickly blamed Ejiro for bringing him bad luck. “You must be a witch. It is your witchcraft that has caused this bad luck to befall me.”

He embraced the bottle and the local bar by the community center became his nesting place. He left Ejiro to fend for herself and the baby. In the midst of her troubles, she gave birth to her second child, Efe. Whenever she refused to give in to his sexual advances for fear of getting pregnant again, she became his punching bag. Whenever he beat her, he made sure she ran out of the house naked to the amazement of neighbors who sometimes came to her rescue and covered her nakedness with a wrapper.

When she became pregnant for her third child, there were complications in the pregnancy as she began to bleed at intervals. She was advised by the local midwife to stop rigorous jobs and activities until she gave birth. That was difficult advice to adhere to, because she needed to work to feed the children and Mr. Benson who shamelessly demanded food without providing any money. She then reduced her daily activity of hawking fried akara and bread to selling only the oribi (palm kernel oil) she made by herself, outside the compound. Mr. Benson was not pleased with the new change of her activity because the portion of food he used to get was now reduced. One unfaithful day when there was no food for him to eat, he pounced on her and beat her mercilessly which led to premature labour in her eighth month. Her water broke. Some concerned neighbors quickly rushed her to a local midwife who battled for hours to save both mother and child. Ejiro gave birth safely without complications and luckily the baby came out strong to the surprise of everyone.

Ejiro’s good neighbors rallied around and helped her offset the hospital bill but she refused to go back home for fear of her husband. She asked Mama Rukewe, one of her good neighbors who had taken Efe and Ese into her custody because Mr. Benson never showed up in his house after the incident, to bring her children to her. She was ready to wander off with her children.

When Mama Ejiro was told of Ejiro’s recent predicament, she went and took her and the children to live with her. Mr. Benson never tried nor bothered to look for them.

“Break is over. Back to work,” shouted the supervisor, effectively jolting Ejiro back to reality. They all scampered for their work tools and began to work.