On Black Sisters Street by Chika Unigwe

heart.
    Titus, for his part, let his wife get away with chasing his out-of-wedlock children out of the house. He was grateful to her for stayingwith him when he’d had nothing, steeped deep in a penury that he could only fantasize about escaping. Many women would have left for less. Besides, he appreciated having a wife who did not nag him about where he had been, whom he had been with. What man wanted to come home to a nagging woman? She accepted him for who he was, and he knew well enough to be thankful for that.
    So when the seeds of his trysts sprouted and were collected by their mothers who came knocking at his door, he let his wife handle them. She had earned that right. And if sometimes his mind wandered to those children he would never get to know, he showed no signs of it.
    EFE FELT SHE OUGHT TO HATE HER BABY; AFTER ALL, SHE’D NEVER asked for him. He kept her at home and was a visible sign that she was damaged goods. Now there was very little hope of marriage to a rich man rescuing her from the pit she lived in.
Which kin’ man go marry woman wey don get pikin already?
If the man who got you pregnant did not want you, there was no chance of any other person doing so. Her mother would be disappointed. Her mother, who always said she would make a good wife. “You were born a wife,” she told this daughter of hers who did not think anything of getting up early to help her mother with breakfast. “Some women, they enter marriages half-formed. They need to be honed. But you are perfect. You will enter marriage already finished.” There was no way that would happen now. She would never be the perfect wife her mother had hoped for her. She could not be revirgined. Could never be unpregnant. She was chipped.
    At the beginning, Efe had good days and bad days. On the bad days, she woke to a dreary blankness that did not clear no matter how bright the sun shone. On those days, her baby wailed constantly and she wished she had never met Titus. Her head screamed at her tohate their baby. On the good days, her baby gurgled and smiled and the world was right. As the weeks wore on, the good days became more and the bad days receded. It was not long before she realized that, try as she might, she could not hate her baby. She forgot the pain of delivering him. Forgot that she had not planned to have him. Forgot the humiliation at Titus’s house. She forged new memories with the baby that had nothing to do with before he was born. When he cried, she rushed to soothe him, cooing to him, “Don’t cry, my child, don’t cry, your mommy is here,” until he stopped. She let him drool all over her and waited with excitement for the first tooth to cut through at five months. When he got ill from cutting the tooth, she held his hands and talked to him until she ran out of what to say, and then she fell quiet and prayed for his fever to break. She cried when her milk thinned and she could no longer breast-feed him at six months. She loved him, astounding herself with the force of her love. She thought she now knew why women went on to have more and more children. It was easy to forget the pain associated with the delivery. She delighted in the solidity of this child whom she had brought into the world and often would pick him up just to convince herself that he was there, that he had not gone up in smoke.
Jus’ to be sure him never disappear like money-doubler trick
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    Efe was still determined to provide her son with the kind of life she had dreamed for him when she thought she would be able to get Titus’s help. Every morning before she went to her cleaning job at an office in GRA, she whispered in her son’s ear so that only he could hear, “I promise you, I shall get you out of here. I don’t care how I do it.” She had never been more serious about anything else in her entire life.
    Everybody called the baby L.I., the initials of his name, because his grandfather, in one of his clearer moments, had come out of his drunken