Purple Hibiscus

that went past, because his broad-shouldered form could not fit in the shed. Mama Joe wore a wool hat even though sweat had made yellow patches under the sleeves of her blouse. Women and children worked in the neighboring sheds, twisting hair, weaving hair, plaiting hair with thread. Wooden boards with lopsided print leaned on broken chairs in front of the sheds. The closest ones read MAMA CHINEDU SPECIAL HAIR STYLIST and MAMA BOMBOY INTERNATIONAL HAIR . The women and children called out to every female who walked past. “Let us plait your hair!” “Let us make you beautiful!” “I will plait it well for you!” Mostly, the women shrugged off their pulling hands and walked on.
    Mama Joe welcomed me as though she had been plaitingmy hair all my life. If I was Aunty Ifeoma’s niece, then I was special. She wanted to know how Aunty Ifeoma was doing. “I have not seen that good woman in almost a month. I would be naked but for your aunty, who gives me her old clothes. I know she doesn’t have that much, either. Trying so hard to raise those children well.
Kpau
! A strong woman,” Mama Joe said. Her Igbo dialect came out sounding strange, with words dropped; it was difficult to understand. She told Father Amadi that she would be done in an hour. He bought a bottle of Coke and placed it at the foot of my stool before he left.
    “Is he your brother?” Mama Joe asked, looking after him.
    “No. He’s a priest.” I wanted to add that he was the one whose voice dictated my dreams.
    “Did you say he is a
fada
?”
    “Yes.”
    “A real Catholic
fada
?”
    “Yes.” I wondered if there were any unreal Catholic priests.
    “All that maleness wasted,” she said, combing my thick hair gently. She put the comb down and untangled some ends with her fingers. It felt strange, because Mama had always plaited my hair. “Do you see the way he looks at you? It means something, I tell you.”
    “Oh,” I said, because I did not know what Mama Joe expected me to say. But she was already shouting something to Mama Bomboy across the aisle. While she turned my hair into tight cornrows, she chattered nonstop to Mama Bomboy and to Mama Caro, whose voice I heard but whom I could not see because she was a few sheds away. The covered basket at the entrance of Mama Joe’s shed moved. A brown spiraled shell crawled out from underneath. I nearly jumped—I did notknow the basket was full of live snails that Mama Joe sold. She stood up and retrieved the snail and put it back in. “God take power from the devil,” she muttered. She was on the last corn row when a woman walked up to her shed and asked to see the snails. Mama Joe took the covering basket off.
    “They are big,” she said. “My sister’s children picked them today at dawn near Adada lake.”
    The woman picked up the basket and shook it, searching for tiny shells hidden among the big ones. Finally, she said they were not that big anyway and left. Mama Joe shouted after the woman, “People who have bad stomachs should not spread their bad will to others! You will not find snails this size anywhere else in the market!”
    She picked up an enterprising snail that was crawling out of the open basket. She threw it back in and muttered, “God take power from the devil.” I wondered if it was the same snail, crawling out, being thrown back in, and then crawling out again. Determined. I wanted to buy the whole basket and set that one snail free.
    Mama Joe finished my hair before Father Amadi came back. She gave me a red mirror, neatly broken in half, so that I saw my new hairstyle in fractions.
    “Thank you. It’s nice,” I said.
    She reached out to straighten a cornrow that did not need to be straightened. “A man does not bring a young girl to dress her hair unless he loves that young girl, I am telling you. It does not happen,” she said. And I nodded because again I did not know what to say.
    “It doesn’t happen,” Mama Joe repeated, as if I had disagreed. A cockroach ran out from behind her stool, and shestepped on it with her bare foot. “God take power from the devil.”
    She spit into her palm, rubbed her hands together, drew the basket closer, and started to rearrange the snails. I wondered if she had spit in her hand before she started on my hair. A woman in a blue wrapper with a bag tucked under her armpit bought the whole basketful of snails just before Father Amadi came to pick me up. Mama Joe called her “nwanyi oma,” although she was not pretty