Our First American by E.C. Osondu / Fiction / Untitled Books

“It was said that white people did not like pepper in their food, but Mark was an exception. He ate the same spicy foods that we ate… The people on the street said that any white man who eats pepper would never leave Lagos.”

Photograph: © Radarboy

Our First American by E.C. Osondu

The first American we really got to know up close was a guy called Mark. He lived on our street with a prostitute named Beauty. She was what we called a club girl. She visited various Lagos nightclubs to drink and dance with men and would go home with any who offered her enough money. Sometimes the men would drop her off in the mornings. On other occasions a motorcycle taxi would drop her off at the street entrance. She would enter the street through the smaller pedestrian entrance, clutching her bag in one hand and her high-heeled shoes in the other. She would stop over at the neighbourhood corner shop to buy cigarettes. You could tell from the way she walked into the street whether she had had a successful night or not. She either walked in with a swagger, her buttocks swishing, or on bad days came in with drooping shoulders. On days that her night had not been good, she tore into Mark as soon as he opened the door of their one-room apartment.
         "You this useless American man, simply to get up from the bed and open the door is too much for you, look at how long I have been knocking, eh, and I have been out all night searching for what you and I will eat."
         "Honey, I am sorry, I didn't hear you."
         "Don't honey me; you have been sleeping while I have been going all over Lagos from Lido to Scala to Kakadu Night Club looking for business, just look at me, I am all bones because of you."
         "Take it easy, my baby."
         "Who is your baby, eh, please, I am not your baby, if I was your baby you will take care of me the way other big Americans who live in big mansions in Lagos take care of their girlfriends. Or do you think I don't want to sit at the owner's corner of an air-conditioned Mercedes Benz and give orders to my personal driver to take me round the big department stores and the jewellry and clothes shops?"
         "Hey, baby, come on, calm down, you are pretty upset this morning, huh?" Mark would say lightly, and laugh.
         "Laugh at me, laugh, it is not your fault. It is my fault for taking you into my house when the bank sacked you, all the small girls you were fucking up and down when you were working at the bank, where are they today? Eh, tell me where are they? If not for me, Beauty, you will be sleeping under the bridge like a common street boy. I don't blame you; it is my bad luck that I blame! All my friends who are doing this type of my business, they have all married their American boyfriends and left for Kuwait, Venezuela and Houston. Here I am still suffering to feed you in this one room."
         "Come, baby, let me roll you some real good grass, it will help you step down."
         We would hear them light up, and the smell of marijuana and incense would float out of their room like the Harmattan haze. A few minutes later we would hear them making love very loudly.
         The men on the street with dirty towels tied round their waists and holding toothbrushes and cups of water pretending to be brushing their teeth, who had all the while been listening and enjoying the exchange, then would launch into a discussion about the lovers.
         "White people know how to love their women, jare. If it is our own people, he would have taught her a lesson with a few strong slaps and kicks, but I hear that white people, once they are in love, they are in love. They don't believe in marrying many wives like we do."
         "It is true, my brother, I worked with one of them, Engineer Kennedy, when I was a driver with Exxon Mobil, before I was retrenched. Him and the wife, they were always kissing, every minute they kissed, when the man was going to work they kissed, when he returned from work they kissed again, after eating they kissed, and they were kissing right before my very two eyes. And do you know they had no children? The woman had a small white dog that sat on her lap from morning till night like her baby while she smoked long American cigarettes."
         "Someone told me that Mark used to work with a bank but was sacked because he spent all his time with club girls and would go to work late after drinking through the night. Sometimes he would not come to work at all. I hear the bank sacked him because he was running up huge tabs in the nightclubs, and club girls would come to look for him in the bank and would sit in the banking hall with their heavily made-up faces, smoking cigarettes."
         "Just imagine a white man living with a club girl on this, our dirty street," one of them said. "All the white people I know, they live in big houses in the European quarters. The streets there are well paved, and they don't suffer power outages like we do here. The street names in the part of Lagos where they live are beautiful: McIver, McPherson, Bourdillon, Boygues, not like our own streets that have rough-sounding names like Ajangbadi, Okokomaiko, and Dadakoada."
         "But why can't the man find a job? He is not like us, he should be able to get another job, the white people like themselves, they are not like us, who do not like anyone who is not of our tribe."
         The men would talk till they got tired. One of them would then bring up the story they had heard on the radio about a politician caught in London with bags of stolen state funds. Once again the conversation would become animated. At this point one of them would recall that he had somewhere important to go, and the men would then disperse.
         At about midday we saw Beauty going to the corner store to buy some bottles of beer and packets of pasta. She swayed her hips from side to side; the men looked at her and scratched their jaws while the women looked away and hissed. She came back to the house and brought out her cassette player and her stove and began to prepare her pasta sauce. She was dancing to the music from the radio as she cooked. It was the music of Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti--one of his more obscene songs, in which he sings about what a man and a woman do behind closed doors and how their six-spring bed creaks noisily. Her neighbours blocked the ears of their children with their fingers and dragged them into their rooms. Mark sat on a low bench, rolling a marijuana cigarette while reading a fat novel. His hands were stained a dark brown from the marijuana. Beauty was dancing for him.
         Twice she snatched the book from his hands while telling him to watch a sexy sway she was executing. It was said that white people did not like pepper in their food, but Mark was an exception. He ate the same spicy foods that we ate and would on occasion go with a bowl to the roadside food vendor, Mamaput. The people on the street said that any white man who eats pepper would never leave Lagos. This seemed to be true for Mark.
         And then one day, Beauty threw out Mark's things. She was coming back from down the road where she had gone to buy marijuana when she saw Mark talking with a girl who lived on the same street. Her name was Bridget, and she was an undergraduate at the University of Lagos. They had been discussing one of the novels Mark was reading. He was always reading fat books that were sold cheaply on Lagos sidewalks. They were still talking when Beauty stumbled on them. She pulled up her trousers, clapped her hands, and screamed, "Come and see this small girl prostitute husband snatcher that wants to take my man."
         "Come on, Beauty, we were only talking about books," Mark said, trying to placate her.
         "You shut up your dirty mouth there, I will face you later, let me finish with this small ashewo first! So you and your mother have been planning on how you will steal my man, you people are no longer satisfied with calling me names behind my back and whispering when I pass, you have shown your hands, me, I will show you people today."
         She grabbed Bridget by the front of her dress and tore the dress, exposing her breasts. The girl began to cry. People in the compound came out and forcefully pried her hands off the girl, but not before she had left a bleeding mark with her nails on the girl's face.
         She went inside the room and started throwing out Mark's things, beginning with his cheap paperback novels and his sneakers and his faded New York Yankees baseball cap and his faded jeans and his checkerboard. She dumped them outside, screaming while she tossed them out, cursing her neighbours for being backbiters, husband snatchers, witches, and wizards.
         Some of the people who had lived on the street for a long time swore that Mark was going to come back. They said they had seen it happen so many times in the past, and Mark always came back in the middle of the night.
         Not too long after that, we saw Mark on television and on movie posters. When Beauty threw Mark out, he had gone to a popular hangout for artistes near the National Theatre called Abe Igi to see if he could locate some old friends from his banking days who drank there. An actor informed Mark that a movie producer who specialised in shooting quick movies with video cameras that were sold in Lagos traffic was looking for a white man to play the role of a colonial missionary in an upcoming movie titled The Cross and the Pagans. Prior to this time, the filmmakers had cast albinos wearing wigs in the roles of white men. This time, they wanted to use a real white person. Though Mark had no formal training as an actor, he got the role and played it well. The producers of the movie invested a lot of money promoting the movie on radio and television and also plastered every available space on major streets with posters.
         That same week Beauty walked into the street brandishing the movie poster with Mark's photo on it. She slapped her thighs and held up the poster.
         "Was it not you people of this street that said my man was an idler? Come and see him now, he has become James Bond, go to Scala Cinema tomorrow and see my man in action. Those of you who are rejoicing that he has left me, our love is still strong, let me tell you, he will walk back to me with his two legs."
          People on the street pretended not to be listening, but we were all ears. Some of the men and women were making comments in whispers.
         "Some women have bad luck," a woman called Sisi Yellow because of her skin colour said. "They will suffer with a man for a long time so tey, but as soon as they tell themselves they cannot take the suffering anymore and move out of his house, the man's luck changes. When I was living on the other side at Ajangbadi it happened to a woman I knew. She had seven children and was drinking garri and wearing the same brown cloth every day, but the day after she left her husband, he won five hundred thousand naira from Face-to-Face Pools."
         "Beauty may be lucky; the man loves her. White people's love is forever. Once they love, they love."
         "Not in this case. Do not forget she threw the man out gabadaya, she even tossed his slippers out, and in our culture it means she no longer wants to see his two legs in the house. And she also swept her house after he left; it means she is done with him."
         "That will be too bad, I mean after all they went through together. Remember the time the man nearly died of typhoid fever right before our eyes, and she could not afford to take him to the hospital, and he was drinking boiled traditional roots and herbs?"
         "The man is not going to remember that. Men do not remember the good that women did for them. But do one bad thing to them, and they will not forget it, that is what they will be saying each time you quarrel."
         Beauty must have overheard some of the comments because she began to sing a popular Fuji song, "Let my enemies live long and see what I will become in future."
The film was a success. It was so successful the cast toured the entire country. The film was shown in schools and was commended by the military head of state as a great work with cultural authenticity.
         Beauty told people on the street that Mark was going to come back to her when he returned from his tour. She even said he had sent her a message through another actor.
         The tour ended, and Mark did not return. We heard he was on location shooting another film on the slave trade and was playing the role of the evil and notorious slave dealer Captain Wilberforce Bomberbilly. It was also said that he had commenced a relationship with an actress and had even moved in with her.
         Beauty told anyone that cared to listen that Mark visited her in her dreams every night and had reassured her that he was coming back for her with gifts of gold and lace and high-heeled shoes. Her business was not going too well either, because each time she met a man at the nightclub, she began to tell him about her white boyfriend turned popular actor Mark. Her stories made the men yawn, and the other girls began spreading rumours that she had lost her mind. This was after they saw her standing alone in the dark talking aloud to herself: "Come to me, my lover, why did you leave me, come let me show my new style of bedmatics, come to me, my lover. I have always known you will come back to me." A few of the girls laughed at her, but one of them went to her, took her by the hand, and led her back to her house.
         One morning she came back with a taxi and crammed her things inside, cursed out everybody on the street as witches, wizards, wasters, rumourmongers, bad luck people,and gossipers. And then she left and never came back again.
         As for Mark, he actually married the actress and took her to America, but we heard they got divorced after a few months. Mark came back. People on the street said they were not surprised. Any white man that eats pepper must return to Lagos.
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E.C. Osondu's new collection of short stories, Voice of America, is published by Granta
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Monday, 20 December, 2010

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Issue 44 / May 2012

“It was said that white people did not like pepper in their food, but Mark was an exception. He ate the same spicy foods that we ate… The people on the street said that any white man who eats pepper would never leave Lagos.”