CHAPTER 1
Sometimes, It Is Not a Teacher That You Need
From high above, in my kponyungo spirit form, I’d watched my daughter Onyesonwu.
I was the size of four camels, lean and strong like a snake, coiled horns, magnificent jaw and made of wind and fire. With my fiery eyes, I watched her walk into the desert with five others: the boy who loved her so purely he would die for her, the girl who would become her greatest champion, the girl who had just killed her abusive father, the girl who knew my daughter would be a legend, and the boy who was just following that girl. I stopped watching when they were miles away. I couldn’t bear to see my Onyesonwu leave the town of Jwahir forever. She was twenty years old, the same age I was when Daib raped me.
I opened my eyes. Now back in my physical body, I understood I was completely alone.
• • •
Secrets. I’ve always kept them. Onyesonwu did not know this part of me. Not for months yet. She already had too much to carry; I didn’t want to give her more.
Days before she left, I’d unlocked something. I didn’t do it for her. I did it for myself. I’d known she was on the cusp of leaving, that she would soon do that thing she couldn’t resist doing. I was watching her more closely than she ever suspected. I know my child. And I was excited for her. And I hoped for her, too. Yes, I hoped she would finally do what she needed so dearly to do: Leave Jwahir and go after the man who’d raped me to create her. She was his downfall. I knew all this in my heart. But I also knew her leaving would destroy me.
I brought her to Jwahir when she was six. Soon after, I met my second husband, the blacksmith Fadil Ogundimu. He was a beautiful strong man who loved both Onyesonwu and me with compassion and ferocity. Again, I was happy for a time. Then Fadil died of a heart attack when Onyesonwu was sixteen. To this day, I wonder if Daib, Onyesonwu’s biological father, a powerful sorcerer, the man who’d raped me, somehow facilitated Fadil’s heart attack. I will never know. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Regardless, Fadil was the greatest thing to ever happen to me and my daughter. And then
he died. So I have lost my heart before. Onyesonwu was my spirit. Her leaving was unbearable. And what made it different was that I’d known she would go. Soon.
Nights before she would do the thing that drove her into the desert accompanied by her friends, I walked into the desert. I did not go West, this time; I went East. The night was cool and lit by a near full moon. As I walked, the wind felt good. No one was out this way. Back then, on moonlit nights, there were storytellers in the square. They told bloody tales about the West. So the people out and about gathered in the square.
The way I went was quiet, just the way I needed it to be. By the time the dirt road faded to desert, very few had any reason to come this way, I was beginning to prepare. With each step I took onto the soft sand, I grew more anxious. It had to work. But the fact was, I had not done this in decades. When I left my village to marry my first husband, Idris, I left the kponyungo behind. I buried everything I had manifested on the salt roads with my brothers and father. The knowledge, experience, memories. I’d never told Idris a word about any of it. I’d wanted to become someone new, a normal woman.
I laugh now because trying to be a normal woman in a world where most of your people were slaves was foolish. However, in that pocket of fragile peace, I thought I could live my life. I was so stupid, silly, and naïve. But I tried. In that brief time I was with my husband Idris, I felt somewhat normal. We were in love.
I’d left my strange past (including the odd death of my father) behind. I’d left my aloof mother. And then my aloof mother died. My brothers both came to tell me. They had already buried her, had all the ceremonies, met with other family members, mourned her passing. “We didn’t think it would be . . . healthy for you to know,” they said.
I will never know what they meant by that because I didn’t ask, and they didn’t offer me any details. All they said was that they found mother at home in the garden she’d always paid others to maintain. They declined spending the night or even meeting Idris. Neither of them would look me in the eye; I remember that.
I was sad for some time, but the mystery of her death and the fact that I’d left home behind so that I could be new protected me. And then, months later, the Nuru came and destroyed my new life. They destroyed my village. Idris hid and survived, but they destroyed him, too. The Nuru general who led it all destroyed me.
Still, I didn’t reach for the kponyungo. My daughter came into being, grew up to become a fierce sorceress, and still I did not reach for the kponyungo. But that day, I felt like I was at the end. I walked into the desert, in the opposite direction my daughter would soon walk and never return from. I wasn’t afraid to be alone. It wasn’t me grieving my dead husband, it was losing my child, my focal point.
Onyesonwu held me to this world. Without her, I was nothing. I clung to the weight of her. If only to be there for her if she somehow needed me. And so I walked into the desert to unlock something I’d put away long ago.
I looked for the highest sand dune and scaled it. At the top, the wind whipped my bushy hair about. A stream of sand flowed low around my ankles. I bent down and held a hand in it like one would cup water in a shallow river. I rubbed the sand in my hands like salt and then threw it behind me. I sat down in the sand stream, feeling it begin to collect in the bottom part of my garments. I was wearing the periwinkle garments women wore when they held conversation. I had not worn these in two decades, since that day when I nearly lost my soul.
“Are you still there?” I said in my whispery voice. “It’s been a while.” I had eaten a hearty meal hours earlier with Onyesonwu. Roasted goat meat, fried plantains, coconut curry soup and palm wine. We had talked into the night about many things, except her training with the sorcerer Aro; we discussed what we knew was coming, and the violence in the West. It had been a nice evening. Both my mind and stomach were full, but to do this, it was best to be empty.
A powerful gust of wind blew. I gasped. Exhaled. Looked to the sky. And then I was flying. That easily. The kponyungo had been waiting. I shot up, leaving my body below, still and relaxed. As I flew, I opened my great mouth and roared so loudly the air around me combusted. “YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORRRRR!!” Great coils and blooms of flame burst, lightning crashed, boomed, zapped, and crunched, glorious explosive forces. I flew higher. I was the great lizard beast made of flames and lightning and wind. I roared again. I had not heard my voice in two decades. I’d been so suppressed in my body, in my physical mind. I flew higher. Faster. Oh it was cathartic. Inside, I wept. Why had I waited so long? Why had I been afraid of this? What had happened to me? Where had I been? After that evening, I became the kponyungo every day.
I hung on to it. When Onyesonwu left, I hung on to it more. I considered following her, but I held back. There was something I knew it was time to do first. Two women started coming to see to my well-being the day after Onyesonwu left. The Ada was the town priestess and the wife of the sorcerer Aro; she was one of the most highly respected woman in Jwahir. Nana the Wise was nearly 100 years old and an Osugbo Elder, which made her the most powerful woman in Jwahir.
My daughter had
left because she’d done something Jwahir wouldn’t forgive. In a rage, right in the middle of town square, she’d used juju to force people there to experience all that had happened to me and the other women that day. Eyes unable to turn away from mass rape and murder. Onyesonwu wanted them all to feel the sense of urgency she felt for the Okeke people in the West. It was a terrible thing she did. There were children in the town square that day. And now I wondered if Nana the Wise and the Ada were here just to make sure I didn’t do anything as destructive as what Onyesonwu had done.
I waited until my daughter had been gone for five days. The Ada and Nana the Wise wanted to stay over this night. They must have sensed something. But I insisted that I was fine by myself. “Come and stay with me in six days,” I told them. And in this way, I became the kponyungo and left my body for the first time in the safety of my home. I sat in the living room, the portrait of Njeri, my husband Fadil’s first wife, staring at me. On the floor with my long legs crossed. I wore loose colorful clothing. I made sure one of the windows was open, so the air would remain fresh. Then I closed my eyes. I flew away. And I was gone the entire night.
When I was on the salt roads, I was never gone for more than two hours. Now, I was free. I was alone. During these days of renewal, I never flew west. I went east. Many times, I flew up, toward the stars. Then on the sixth day, before the Ada and Nana the Wise came to stay with me, I went to see the sorcerer named Aro.
• • •
Aro was the Osugbo Elder and great sorcerer who became Onyesonwu’s teacher. She only had to nearly kill him first. I would come to understand how it came to that; he is a hard-headed man. He was the one who ushered her to the path of her destiny. I was aware of their fraught teacher-student relationship, though I did not know the fine details. It was not my place to know that part of it. But I also knew Aro in a capacity outside of my daughter’s world. You could not be who I am and have no encounter with a man like him in such a small town. By the time my daughter left, he had
locked in on me and I on him. He could probably smell me, sense what I was doing.
During those five days alone, once on my way back to my body, a vulture flew beside me for some miles. I slowed so the vulture could keep up. I often flew with birds, usually hawks, owls, and eagles. They could see me, and they didn’t fear me. I think they enjoyed the warm air currents I gave off. I’d once had three hawks fly with me for miles, spiraling around me playfully. One had even flown right above my body, and my flames didn’t harm it. But this day, the vulture flew beside me and I’d glanced and caught its gaze. What I saw in its eye startled me.
It was not the knowing eye of a great bird. Have you ever known someone so well that even when veiled, all you had to see was a glint of their eye to know it was them? Maybe it is your father’s eye or your mother’s or best friend’s or worst enemy’s. You just know it when you see it; that is how strong the connection is. Well, I recognized Aro immediately. I knew it was him. And I knew that he was not the same as me. Where I had come out of my flesh to become the kponyungo, he had changed his flesh to be a vulture.
I roared at him and he made a raspy, drawn-out hiss and a grunt. This startled me so much that I lost my sense of direction for a minute and flew upward. I righted myself and this must have been enough for him because he banked to the left and flew off.
• • •
It was time to go see him. I walked to his hut on foot. I never felt more alone than I did on that walk. I’d awakened in an empty house. My daughter was far away and moving farther by the day. My parents were long dead. My brothers, I didn’t know if they were alive and I did not think about them. My first husband Idris was dead to me. My second husband, my beloved Fadil was truly dead. What did I have now? I had what I was walking toward. So I walked, carrying the weight of my reality. With each step, more tears fell from my eyes. My vision blurred and still I walked. ...
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