Purple Hibiscus

They had hardly passed us when Papa Nnukwu shouted, “Look away! Women cannot look at this one!”
    The mmuo making its way down the road was surrounded by a few elderly men who rang a shrill bell as the mmuo walked. Its mask was a real, grimacing human skull with sunken eye sockets. A squirming tortoise was tied to its forehead. A snake and three dead chickens hung from its grass-covered body, swinging as the mmuo walked. The crowds near the road moved back quickly, fearfully. A few women turned and dashed into nearby compounds.
    Aunty Ifeoma looked amused, but she turned her head away. “Don’t look, girls. Let’s humor your grandfather,” she said in English. Amaka had already looked away. I looked away, too, toward the crowd of people that pressed around the car. It was sinful, deferring to a heathen masquerade. But at least I had looked at it very briefly, so maybe it would technically not be deferring to a heathen masquerade.
    “That is our
agwonatumbe
,” Papa-Nnukwu said, proudly, after the mmuo had walked past. “It is the most powerful
mmuo
in our parts, and all the neighboring villages fear Abba because of it. At last year’s Aro festival,
agwonatumbe
raised a staff and all the other
mmuo
turned and ran! They didn’t even wait to see what would happen!”
    “Look!” Obiora pointed at another mmuo moving down the road. It was like a floating white cloth, flat, taller than the hugeavocado tree in our yard in Enugu. Papa-Nnukwu grunted as the mmuo went by. It was eerie, watching it, and I thought then of chairs running, their four legs knocking together, of water being held in a basket, of human forms climbing out of ant holes.
    “How do they do that, Papa-Nnukwu? How do people get inside that one?” Jaja asked.
    “Shh! These are
mmuo
, spirits! Don’t speak like a woman!” Papa-Nnukwu snapped, turning to glare at Jaja.
    Aunty Ifeoma laughed and spoke in English. “Jaja, you’re not supposed to say there are people in there. Didn’t you know that?”
    “No,” Jaja said.
    She was watching Jaja. “You didn’t do the
ima mmuo
, did you? Obiora did it two years ago in his father’s hometown.”
    “No, I didn’t,” Jaja mumbled.
    I looked at Jaja and wondered if the dimness in his eyes was shame. I suddenly wished, for him, that he had done the ima mmuo, the initiation into the spirit world. I knew very little about it; women were not supposed to know anything at all, since it was the first step toward the initiation to manhood. But Jaja once told me that he heard that boys were flogged and made to bathe in the presence of a taunting crowd. The only time Papa had talked about ima mmuo was to say that the Christians who let their sons do it were confused, that they would end up in hellfire.
    We left Ezi Icheke soon afterward. Aunty Ifeoma dropped off a sleepy Papa-Nnukwu first; his good eye was half closed while his going-blind eye stayed open, the film covering it looked thicker now, like concentrated milk. When Aunty Ifeomastopped inside our compound, she asked her children if they wanted to come into the house, and Amaka said no, in a loud voice that seemed to prompt her brothers to say the same. Aunty Ifeoma took us in, waved to Papa, who was in the middle of a meeting, and hugged Jaja and me in her tight way before leaving.
    That night, I dreamed that I was laughing, but it did not sound like my laughter, although I was not sure what my laughter sounded like. It was cackling and throaty and enthusiastic, like Aunty Ifeoma’s.

    Papa drove us to Christmas Mass at St. Paul’s. Aunty Ifeoma and her children were climbing into their station wagon as we drove into the sprawling church compound. They waited for Papa to stop the Mercedes and then came over to greet us. Aunty Ifeoma said they had gone to the early Mass and they would see us at lunchtime. She looked taller, even more fearless, in a red wrapper and high heels. Amaka wore the same bright red lipstick as her mother; it made her teeth seem whiter when she smiled and said, “Merry Christmas.”
    Although I tried to concentrate on Mass, I kept thinking of Amaka’s lipstick, wondering what it felt like to run color over your lips. It was even harder to keep my mind on Mass because the priest, who spoke Igbo throughout, did not talk about the gospel during the sermon. Instead he talked about zinc and cement. “You people think I ate the money for thezinc,
okwia
?” he shouted, gesticulating, pointing accusingly at the