Becoming Abigail by Chris Abani Page B

its concept—an Elvis impersonator in Nigeria—and keeps him with strong storytelling and characterization . . . GraceLand marks the debut of a writer with something important to say.”
    —New Orleans Times-Picayune
    “ GraceLand paints an often horrific and sometimes pro found portrait . . . Though a work of fiction, GraceLand also serves as a history far more powerful and fantastic than any official account of Nigeria’s teetering progress toward democracy.”
    —Seattle Weekly
    “The book’s juxtaposition between innocence and bleak survival is heartrending . . . Sharp, graphic, and impossible to dismiss.”
    —Seattle Times

Becoming Abigail



This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
    Published by Akashic Books
© 2006 Chris Abani
    ePUB ISBN-13: 978-1-936-07020-6
    ISBN-13: 978-1-888451-94-8
ISBN-10: 1-888451-94-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2005934817
All rights reserved
    Cover photo by Pierre Bonnard, © 2005 Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York/ADAGP, Paris
    Akashic Books
PO Box 1456
New York, NY 10009
[email protected]
www.akashicbooks.com

Also by Chris Abani
    Novels
    Masters of the Board
    GraceLand
    Poetry
    Kalakuta Republic
    Daphne’s Lot
    Dog Woman
    Hands Washing Water

For Blair.
    And my nieces: Chinwendu, Nkechi, Natasha, Ibari, and Kelechi.

Lay It As It Plays

I
    And this.
    Even this. This memory like all the others was a lie. Like the sound of someone ascending wooden stairs, which she couldn’t know because she had never heard it. Still it was as real as this one. A coffin sinking reluctantly into the open mouth of a grave, earth in clods collected around it in a pile like froth from the mouth of a mad dog. And women. Gathered in a cluster of black, like angry crows. Weeping. The sound was something she had heard only in her dreams and in these moments of memory—a keening, loud and sharp, but not brittle like the screeching of glass or the imagined sound of women crying. This was something entirely different. A deep lowing, a presence, dark and palpable, like a shadow emanating from the women, becoming a thing that circled the grave and the mourners in a predatory manner before rising up to the brightness of the sky and the sun, to be replaced by another momentarily.
    Always in this memory she stood next to her father, a tall whip of blackness like an undecided but upright cobra. And he held her hand in his, another lie. He was silent, but tears ran down his face. It wasn’t the tears that bothered her. It was the way his body shuddered every few moments. Not a sob, it was more like his body was struggling to remember how to breathe, fighting the knowledge that most of him was riding in that coffin sinking into the soft dark loam.
    But how could she be sure she remembered this correctly? He was her father and the coffin held all that was left of her mother, Abigail. This much she was sure of. However, judging by the way everyone spoke of Abigail, there was nothing of her in that dark iroko casket. But how do you remember an event you were not there for? Abigail had died in childbirth and she, Abigail, this Abigail, the daughter not the dead one, the mother, was a baby sleeping in the crook of some aunt’s arm completely unaware of the world.
    She looked up. Her father stood in the doorway to the kitchen and the expression she saw on his face wasn’t a lie.
    “Dad,” she said.
    He stood in the doorframe. Light, from the outside security lights and wet from the rain, blew in. He swallowed and collected himself. She was doing the dishes buried up to her elbows in suds.
    “Uh, carry on,” he said. Turning abruptly, he left.
    The first time she saw that expression she’d been eight. He had been drinking, which he did sometimes when he was sad. Although that word, sad, seemed inadequate. And this sadness was the memory of