Purple Hibiscus

a backyard snob to most of my class girls until the end of term. But I did not worry too much about that because I carried a bigger load—the worry of making sure I came first this term. It was like balancing a sack of gravel on my head every day at school and not being allowed to steady it with my hand. I still saw the print in my textbooks as a red blur, still saw my baby brother’s spirit strung together by narrow lines of blood. I memorized what the teachers said because I knew my textbooks would not make sense if I tried to study later. After every test, a tough lump like poorly made fufu formed in my throat and stayed there until our exercise books came back.
    School closed for Christmas break in early December. I peered into my report card while Kevin was driving me home and saw 1/25, written in a hand so slanted I had to study it to make sure it was not 7/25. That night, I fell asleep huggingclose the image of Papa’s face lit up, the sound of Papa’s voice telling me how proud of me he was, how I had fulfilled God’s purpose for me.
    DUST-LADEN WINDS of harmattan came with December. They brought the scent of the Sahara and Christmas, and yanked the slender, ovate leaves down from the frangipani and the needlelike leaves from the whistling pines, covering everything in a film of brown. We spent every Christmas in our hometown. Sister Veronica called it the yearly migration of the Igbo. She did not understand, she said in that Irish accent that rolled her words across her tongue, why many Igbo people built huge houses in their hometowns, where they spent only a week or two in December, yet were content to live in cramped quarters in the city the rest of the year. I often wondered why Sister Veronica needed to understand it, when it was simply the way things were done.
    The morning winds were swift on the day we left, pulling and pushing the whistling pine trees so that they bent and twisted, as if bowing to a dusty god, their leaves and branches making the same sound as a football referee’s whistle. The cars were parked in the driveway, doors and boots open, waiting to be loaded. Papa would drive the Mercedes, with Mama in the front seat and Jaja and me in the back. Kevin would drive the factory car with Sisi, and the factory driver, Sunday, who usually stood in when Kevin took his yearly one-week leave, would drive the Volvo.
    Papa stood by the hibiscuses, giving directions, one hand sunk in the pocket of his white tunic while the other pointed from item to car. “The suitcases go in the Mercedes, and thosevegetables also. The yams will go in the Peugeot 505, with the cases of Remy Martin and cartons of juice. See if the stacks of
okporoko
will fit in, too. The bags of rice and
garri
and beans and the plantains go in the Volvo.”
    There was a lot to pack, and Adamu came over from the gate to help Sunday and Kevin. The yams alone, wide tubers the size of young puppies, filled the boot of the Peugeot 505, and even the front seat of the Volvo had a bag of beans slanting across it, like a passenger who had fallen asleep. Kevin and Sunday drove off first, and we followed, so that if the soldiers at the roadblocks stopped them, he would see and stop, too.
    Papa started the rosary before we drove out of our gated street. He stopped at the end of the first decade so Mama could continue with the next set of ten Hail Marys. Jaja led the next decade; then it was my turn. Papa took his time driving. The expressway was a single lane, and when we got behind a lorry he stayed put, muttering that the roads were unsafe, that the people in Abuja had stolen all the money meant for making the expressways dual-carriage. Many cars horned and overtook us; some were so full of Christmas yams and bags of rice and crates of soft drinks that their boots almost grazed the road.
    At Ninth Mile, Papa stopped to buy bread and okpa. Hawkers descended on our car, pushing boiled eggs, roasted cashew nuts, bottled water, bread, okpa, agidi into every window of the car, chanting: “Buy from me, oh, I will sell well to you.” Or “Look at me, I am the one you are looking for.”
    Although Papa bought only bread and okpa wrapped in hot banana leaves, he gave a twenty-naira note to each of the other hawkers, and their “Thank sir, God bless you” chants echoed in my ear as we drove off and approached Abba.
    The green WELCOME TO ABBA TOWN sign that led off the expressway would have been easy to miss because it was so small. Papa