Purple Hibiscus

“Yes,” we said.
    “Eh? You like coming to this bush place?” His eyes widened theatrically. “Do you have friends here?”
    “No,” we said.
    “So what do you do in this back of beyond, then?” he teased. Jaja and I smiled and said nothing.
    “They are always so quiet,” he said, turning to Papa. “So quiet.”
    “They are not like those loud children people are raising these days, with no home training and no fear of God,” Papa said, and I was certain that it was pride that stretched Papa’s lips and lightened his eyes.
    “Imagine what the
Standard
would be if we were all quiet.” It was a joke. Ade Coker was laughing; so was his wife, Yewanda. But Papa did not laugh. Jaja and I turned and went back upstairs, silently.
    THE RUSTLING OF THE coconut fronds woke me up. Outside our high gates, I could hear goats bleating and cocks crowing and people yelling greetings across mud compound walls.
    “Gudu morni. Have you woken up, eh? Did you rise well?”
    “Gudu morni. Did the people of your house rise well, oh?”
    I reached out to slide open my bedroom window, to hear the sounds better and to let in the clean air tinged with goat droppings and ripening oranges. Jaja tapped on my door before he came into my room. Our rooms adjoined; back in Enugu, they were far apart.
    “Are you up?” he asked. “Let’s go down for prayers before Papa calls us.”
    I tied my wrapper, which I had used as a light cover in the warm night, over my nightdress, knotted it under my arm, and followed Jaja downstairs.
    The wide passages made our house feel like a hotel, as did the impersonal smell of doors kept locked most of the year, of unused bathrooms and kitchens and toilets, of uninhabited rooms. We used only the ground floor and first floor; the other two were last used years ago, when Papa was made a chief andtook his omelora title. The members of our umunna had urged him for so long, even when he was still a manager at Leventis and had not bought the first factory, to take a title. He was wealthy enough, they insisted; besides, nobody among our umunna had ever taken a title. So when Papa finally decided to, after extensive talks with the parish priest and insisting that all pagan undertones be removed from his title-taking ceremony, it was like a mini New Yam festival. Cars had taken up every inch of the dirt road running through Abba. The third and fourth floors had swarmed with people. Now I went up there only when I wanted to see farther than the road just outside our compound walls.
    “Papa is hosting a church council meeting today,” Jaja said. “I heard him telling Mama.”
    “What time is the meeting?”
    “Before noon.” And with his eyes he said,
We can spend time together then
.
    In Abba, Jaja and I had no schedules. We talked more and sat alone in our rooms less, because Papa was too busy entertaining the endless stream of visitors and attending church council meetings at five in the morning and town council meetings until midnight. Or maybe it was because Abba was different, because people strolled into our compound at will, because the very air we breathed moved more slowly.
    Papa and Mama were in one of the small living rooms that led off the main living room downstairs.
    “Good morning, Papa. Good morning, Mama,” Jaja and I said.
    “How are you both?” Papa asked.
    “Fine,” we said.
    Papa looked bright-eyed; he must have been awake for hours. He was flipping through his Bible, the Catholic version with the deuterocanonical books, bound in shiny black leather. Mama looked sleepy. She rubbed her crusty eyes as she asked if we had slept well. I could hear voices from the main living room. Guests arrived with dawn here. When we had made the sign of the cross and gotten down on our knees, around the table, someone knocked on the door. A middle-aged man in a threadbare T-shirt peeked in.
    “Omelora
!” the man said in the forceful tone people used when they called others by their titles. “I am leaving now. I want to see if I can buy a few Christmas things for my children at Oye Abagana.” He spoke English with an Igbo accent so strong it decorated even the shortest words with extra vowels. Papa liked it when the villagers made an effort to speak English around him. He said it showed they had good sense.
    “Ogbunambala
!” Papa said. “Wait for me, I am praying with my family. I want to give you a little something for the children. You will also share my tea and bread with