Before I turned sixteen, my mother invited me to learn to cook. In response to my disinterest, she asked what I would do when I was married. I told her it was not my des- tiny to cook for a man. When the opportunity for marriage came my way, I questioned whether it was not a sort of cage, a place to snatch a woman’s freedom by the cooking, the cleaning and minding of children and the man. I saw that men could leave the house and return to sit for a dinner made to their liking, lots of pepper to taste—not suited to children. Marriage could snatch a woman’s power to object to the Friday nights that are for men alone or to the children who would come of other women— becoming known to the world as the men lived or when they passed. It could cause wives to be diminished to the status of children with the threat of violence if they misbehaved. It could cement them in the formal status of wifehood, scheduled to dance with their husbands at official occasions. I could not imagine my grandmothers wanting those things for me.
When we would suffer some ailment as children, my maternal grandmother would re- assure us, “It will be better before you marry.” Although not marrying was implied, she never said there was a choice not to. She never said some women made better wives or might not meet men’s expectations, nor what to look for in a partner, and since my grandfather died too early, I never observed her as a wife. She never told me not to trust the sweet mouths of men or that their words would not be love stories. Yet I imagine she might have been telling me to give myself all the time in the world to heal my wounds before marriage. And if they could not heal, I would have to keep to myself.
My daughter is not the get hurt type. She walked at nine months, her first full steps in pursuit of my friend’s cat and the flowers (not so) in her reach. She has since then been reaching for flowers. Before she walked, she climbed. One morning, I woke to find her missing from our bed. I discovered her seated in her high chair next to the bread pan and happily eating a slice. Instead of my grandmother’s words of comfort, my stories to my daughter are meant to match her bravery and to locate her in her tribe. She took the stories I gave her to heart: “be nobody’s darling”, “see beyond your feeding spoon”.
She was the most fearless, not-backing-down little girl I’ve known.
She was different than I. My little girl self—held my rage inside, until provoked by my sister. She knew how to draw my tongue, how to draw me into a fight. In my quiet, I climbed trees and nestled myself in their limbs for daydreaming, for imagining myself with impossible long hair and a fantastic white dress, even if I had a sneaking suspicion of the implications of marriage.
I don’t remember being told I was beautiful in my youth, but I knew beauty mattered. It could determine if you were liked at all. When I would fall and cut or bruise myself as a little girl, my mother would tell me I was spoiling my chances of entering Miss Jamaica. She never said I would be too short for Miss Jamaica. My people are short. My grand- mother thought that stretching put us in danger. To protect my mother’s unborn babies’ from having umbilical cords wrap around their necks, she had a stool made to prevent my mother from having to stretch to reach the kitchen cupboards. We cannot stretch beyond our reach. There were no remedies for one’s height or nose, my hair could be straightened, but the other things could not be fixed, if those were not right for Miss Jamaica. I recall feeling diminished by boys in my pubescent years telling me I would be better off bagging my face. My body, they could relate to.
My mother was vigilant about looking good and vigilant in warning us about how looking good turned men’s attentions your way. I am fretful about what my daughter wears. We had a family visitor once who my mother decided was giving too much attention to her little girl. She called me away from the family to the washroom early one Saturday morning during his visit, to learn to wash underwear. I was questioned about his behaviour toward me, warned that something was not quite right and that I needed to be careful. I was left feeling ashamed that I had done something to attract his attention. I felt guilty for my obliviousness. My mother always complained that I was never paying attention and walking directly into madmen on the street. I had enjoyed his attention since it was my sister who was typically everyone’s favorite. Years later when he visited again, I observed him carefully for any signs he might be a pedophile. I saw none.
Our household had a domestic helper when I was little who was courted by a man who would sit on a rock across from our house, play his guitar and sing songs to her. I associated him with the church next door and romantic love. In that same yard, with its several houses, and no front gate, I recall a stranger walking up to me, taking my hand and leading me to the back of an empty house at the end of the lot. I remember the helper appearing and there being an exchange between them. It may have been a quarrel. I don’t recall any discussion with my mother later on. I had not yet begun primary school. I don’t recall any sense of distress on my part. Did my grandmother know such men? Did they marry? Did they think little girls wounded by them could? Maybe my grandmother’s lesson was that there isn’t time enough for healing before you do.
In the long arc of time taken for healing, I found men worthy of marriage, but I did not choose them. They were all from someplace else. The first was a believer, stable, wrongly employed and not kind enough. His job had him surveilling my people and jailing them in an imperial war in our region. He did not fit my politics. I think he withheld his resources because he believed the stories his colleagues told him of local women trying to take your shit. The next was an artist, a traveller, free thinker. He was not manly enough. He came to visit in hurricane season and could not wield a machete to clear the banana trees uprooted by a small storm. What use did I have with such a man when hurricanes were sure to come? Then there was Femi, the dreamer, the knower, the giver of stories, who had nothing wrong with him at all.
Femi was not like my people. His foreparents were not shackled on their journey to the West. History did not mean for us to meet. But I believe, if you follow the path and take care at the crossroad, you can defy history.
His parents travelled all the way from Yorubaland to America, where he was born and schooled in our tragedies. I left my tiny former slavery island for America, where I found him and offered him some comfort for having come and seen. Eventually, he told me to call him Femi. My middle name also means love. He said his other name was too easily used as a weapon. Femi is the name he gives potential lovers so they cannot use his other name against him. I had been given that other name, he said, because I wasn’t “wearing the uniform”. Instead, I appeared as “boujee black”, and my light skin did not fit his image. First time I saw him, I thought he was beautiful, though badly dressed. He wrote me an apologetic letter: “Dear M, the incongruence between the first time I saw you and the first time I became aware of you boggles my mind…I assumed you not to be of my earth, or roots, as you say.” I did not call him Femi since he did not choose me to be his lover.
First call, “Hello, this is…,” he assured me he was aware of me. First not-a-date, a meal together, we talked about patriarchy. I told him I was bothered by how boys are not brought up to be good partners to women. He said he was perplexed by the assertion that male identity should be rooted in their attachment to their lovers. Was I thinking as a woman who thought about how one becomes a wife? First proposal, he gave me a wooden ring which made an incomplete circle. It was wooden, he said, because his spiritual head did not do metal. I was meant to keep it until our circle was complete. A longtime friend decried its value, declaring I accepted it because I had no sense of the need to leave something precious to my daughter.
His first disappearance sent me driving seven hours across America’s unfamiliar high- ways to find the familiarity of friends. I would have driven halfway around my island by then. Halfway there, fear welled in my throat. I did not see then that my decision to go was giving myself permission to leave him. He may have seen, in my refusal to await his return, an unfamiliar lack of respect for wifehood. I should have stayed. I should have waited. I should not have chosen to go.
We couldn’t agree on who wronged who. And such was our life until we couldn’t agree. Before then, he gifted me stories and comfort, which I loved for the way they turned reality on its head. He heard me. We might have been equals. But he did not want me to be free. He believed in marriage and partnership. He promised not to let me do all the work. He believed marriage was worth giving up your freedom, and so he married straight out of college. They built their little family far away from their home base. He was no stranger to separation from his people, and so he did not understand my longing for my own. Marriage was for two people after all. We were inseparable, consumed, “bench and batty”, an elder observed. And in our union, my alienation deepened. He gave me no one to whisper news in my ear, no one to put a wedge between us or intervene on either’s behalf. He would not repeat the mistakes of a first marriage. When they split, so, too, did beloved friends. They took her side, he said.
He did not tell me stories of why he believed in marriage. Femi told me stories of mothers who gifted elephants, his peace and power animal. They flew off bridges to other places. He told me stories of daughters who mothered and gave solace to their fathers, when their mother left to other places. He gave me stories of women gone mad loving him. He roused my suspicion with stories of mothers who gifted their daughters, and girlfriends who stayed overnight when I was not around. In the story he gifted of us, we found each other in another lifetime, on home base, and were bonded in common cause. We conspired against the missionaries and burned their church together. Yet we could not find footing to keep us together, ultimately driven to different sides of the world by familial over romantic love.
My people value marriage. They marry. They called a meeting when my sister announced divorce. My grandparents married, until death parted them, though my mother’s mother was really known to me as a woman without a husband. I remember the day of my grandfather’s funeral, but not my grandfather. We children played “red light” under the carport, the gate was the base. White hibiscus bordered the fence. Pink hibiscus closed in the carport. Flowers closed in the verandah. They were never thick enough to close you in. You couldn’t hide there, but the flowers nurtured fireflies, known to us as peenie wallies. The street where my grandmother lived with my grand- aunt and where we spent much of our childhood was called Geranium Path. They watered the flowers in the evenings.
My mother chose wifehood until she did not. Sometimes, she seemed happier with a garden than a ring (which none of my parents ever had). I have seen women blossom in their aloneness when their husbands go, and I have also seen them despair their loss of status and companion. Maybe such a woman would have been undone by the boy who showed up as a son at the man’s funeral. Maybe she knew all along. Maybe his death gave her room to find her own, other lovers. Maybe, by the time grieving and finding new life ended, she decided all she needed was the Lord. I understand the need to be respectable and with a ring on your finger. We grew up on it. The National Family Planning Board even had an ad that showed the woman without a man and plenty children begging from door to door. She eventually met a primary school friend at the door of a middle-class home with “two (children), is better than too many”, and a husband to boot. To the begging “maths brains” from primary school, the woman extolled, displaying her ring finger, I’m no longer the girl you knew, “I’m Johnson now.”
Among the stories I tell my daughter is that of an Igbo woman about one’s Ikenga (representation of one’s chi) and marriage. She said one’s Ikenga could change throughout life, but that it takes form at marriage because marriage requires you to live with a different personality for it to work. She also said that when a woman gets married in her tradition, she does not take her husband’s name because it was not given that one would always be a wife. You are, however, always a daughter. You do not take your husband’s name because the possibility of returning home is permanent. My daughter dropped the last of her double-barrel surname when she was five. She announced it to her grandma. The next day, I asked my daughter her name. She gave me all the names I had given her. She said she was planning to change them, but changed her mind, because then, all her friends would think she was a whole new person.