I hissed the words at her. “This, your America, it will kill you.”
I was six years old when Kambili was pink and soft. Dad and Mum were loud with their joy—after five years of trying again, waiting again, Kambili was their prize at the end of those frantic years. Daddy’s trophy. Mummy’s answered prayer. Mine to watch and care for.
Mummy had returned from the hospital that Sunday after mass while Daddy fried yams and egg sauce in the kitchen. I could still taste the hot honeyed Lipton tea stinging my mouth when Daddy waltzed out to the parlor, swaying to highlife music from Oliver De Coque, his happiness hung on his neck and lips, on the bridge of his nose. I wanted to pull his neck to my chest, hear his laugh close to me, tickling me till I was bouncing and laughing too. I reached out, my arms wide open in their endless regard for him, wanting, even at six, to be picked up and lifted in the air. But then the gate rattled, the car honked, and Daddy and I knew that Mummy was back. She stepped out of Baba Kunle’s yellow taxi, with grandmama behind her, both of them smelling of white powder and fresh baby.
When Kambili was five months old, I snuck into her room as Mummy fried akara in the kitchen and I pierced her tiny baby shoulder with a razor. I watched her baby blood spurt into the sheets, and I screamed, and she screamed, and I ran to fetch Mummy. When Kambili turned two, her body caught that strange baby fever, so that she burned for days and days until Mummy and Daddy moved us to the hospital with her. Daddy stopped work; Mummy’s eyes grew hollow with tears, her voice thinned from prayers. Mummy forgot how to speak or touch my face or ask me if I was hungry.
“Daddy, do you want to go and play?”
“Not now.”
“Daddy, can I sit on your back?”
“Not now, Ojuigo; play with your toys.”
“Daddy, will you tell me a story?”
“Keep quiet. You are bothering your mother and sister.”
Even at eight years old, when I did not know that blood could boil under the skin, or that my small heart, still learning to see the world, could carve out its own shape in hate, I wanted Kambili out of my life.
Kambili was their prize at the end of those frantic years. Daddy’s trophy. Mummy’s answered prayer. Mine to watch and care for.
These days I wake up with a fear so biting I want to scream. I see Kambili in my dreams—on the streets, where suddenly, she disappears. First her body goes, leaving her head floating in a sea of crowded faces. She appears again but strides away quickly. I try to call out to her, but my words are stuck in my throat, my tongue glued to the roof of my mouth, and I am unable to speak.
I want so badly to pull Kambili to myself and hug her tightly. I want to tell her that I am sorry, that she will be fine in this America of her dreams. My sweet Kambili, my darling baby sister. I want to tell her that she has won: that I, Ojuigo, who never does anything for myself, or goes anywhere, have finally left Port Harcourt. That, finally, at forty-five, I have boarded an airplane heading to her precious America. I want to tell her that the seats are tight, and the air is cold and stale, and the plane engine is loud but not loud enough to drown the sound of my heart beating, the same way it beat that Sunday morning when she first arrived home with Mummy.
*
After Kambili got better at the hospital, we became inseparable. When she lost a toy and nothing Mummy did could appease her wild wailing, it was me who calmed her down. It was my name she mentioned first when her eyes opened from sleep: “Oyugo. Oyugo.” And when she began school at four and began to poke at the boys in her class, it was me whose words of “bad, bad” made her stop. By the time I was sixteen, Kambili was ten, but the years were the only thing that stood between us. We had the same stretch of long legs, thin and slightly bowed, the same dust-coated black hair. When we laughed, the sound came out the same way, light and bubbling like stew boiling in low heat. During the holidays we ran errands together, washing, sweeping, molding ourselves into marriageable women. But, when we walked down the street to buy garri or run Mummy’s errands, the local boys, the ones who played football all day, who Daddy said were good-for-nothing hooligans, often stopped to whistle at Kambili. It was always Kambili, never me, even on days I stuffed my socks in my bra and pushed my hips to the left and to the right, forcing them to sway.
The day I turned eighteen, Mummy and Daddy threw me a birthday party. Being eighteen meant I had become an adult, responsible, a thing that could now exist in the world on its own. Being eighteen was an edge I had over Kambili, this fraught independence with which I could do whatever I wanted. I was going away to the university and had packed my whole life inside my worn-out leather box, including my savings from over two years. My plan for self-actualization was thorough and complete. But it was also the day that America was planted in Kambili’s mind.
You see, it was Uncle Titus, Mummy’s cousin, who pulled Kambili to his seat, then told her she reminded him of a white woman he once knew.
“My beautiful niece,” he’d said, as he dragged her down to his thick thighs.
“How is schoolwork going?” he continued. “Let me guess, you made the principal’s honors list again?”
Kambili nodded, pressing her head to his chest. “My favorite uncle,” she said. He laughed.
Soon, the room filled with talk about whose child would be a doctor and who would study law. Then Uncle Titus told Kambili that if she worked hard enough, he would send her to America for university, instead of Nsukka, where I was heading to. He, himself, had been to Germany once, and he had once nearly married a white woman. He often recounted his overseas trip with a haunted hunger in his eyes.
“Those women are fresh and supple, like tomatoes from Jos,” he’d said, and the room roared into laughter.
“Bia, are they more beautiful than us, than your wife?” Mummy had asked, eying him wryly, always the kind of woman to center herself in whatever seemed like competition. But Uncle Titus waved her off and wrapped his hands around Kambili.
It is true that Uncle Titus lived in Germany, a long time ago. After twenty months scrounging the streets, the German police had late one night barged into his studio apartment. They’d dragged him out and put him on the next flight back home. They said it was one of his so-called white women friends that exposed him; he had no papers, though I never understood why someone could be treated so badly because of a piece of paper. But at least returning to Nigeria favored him and his business. His crushed German dream had become a recurring anecdote, brought up to his wife during their quarrels, or in family meetings.
“America! America!” Kambili sang the words all night.
“Uncle Titus will take me to America. Ojiugo, don’t worry, I will come back and get you when I go,” she rattled on in the room we shared after the party had ended. I wanted to tell Kambili that if Uncle Titus had enough money to send any human to America, he would have changed his overused car long ago. But I did not. Instead, I asked her to shut up and go to bed. America my foot!
You must know that I tried, but somehow I could not wave away Kambili’s American dream, not even one year later when Uncle Titus invited Kambili to his shop, locked the door, pulled her in his grip, and stuck his fat tongue in her throat. When she reported the incident to me—her words sandwiched between tears—I wanted to tell her that I also knew about Uncle Titus’s tongue, that I knew the weight of his grip, the way it locked you in so that fighting was pointless, the way it felt to have his whole body pressing into you, his face hair rubbing roughly against your skin, the smell of stale fish clinging to his breath. But I said nothing. Instead, I held her hand and we cried and cried.
After my degree at Nsukka, I returned home to Mummy’s failing business. Daddy had been forced into early retirement, but Kambili still talked about this America. By this time, it had become clear that neither Uncle Titus nor Mummy would be able to fund this dream, and so, grudgingly, she had written the entrance examination to the university and gotten admitted to study pharmacy.
That was when we both met James.
It was that year I returned home after my degree. Mummy sent me to drop some provisions for Kambili in her hostel one Wednesday even though she was home every weekend. It was inside the green-striped shuttle to Akpan Road where the college of medicine was situated that I met him. James had been coming from town, too, heading to see his aunt who had just had a baby.
This was how we found ourselves seated beside each other, me with my eyes peering out through the window, him on the aisle seat, angled away from me. It was mostly a quiet ride, except for that long broken Achalla road where the bus bumped through the holes and our bodies pushed against each other three times. By the time we reached a traffic stop, I looked up and found his eyes on the book placed on my thighs. Those lazy doctor eyes, those heavy lashes. He commented about my book and then my smile and we chatted like old friends for the rest of the trip. I could have married him that day; in my mind, I’d already planned our wedding.
When we got down from the bus, James insisted on helping me carry the bag of provisions I brought for my sister; he said it did not seem right to leave me out there in front of the hostel, that he was already late so we might as well finish the conversation from the bus. So we walked and talked the entire three hours we waited for Kambili to arrive. Then she did. And that was the end of our brief romance.
Kambili was eighteen. He was twenty-seven. But in less than three months, James decided he would marry her, that he would wait for her to finish school—the whole drawn-out courtship. A good man, I tell you, through and through.
But Kambili was not interested. It did not matter that James came to the house every Saturday offering hot drinks and political banter to Daddy. It did not matter the number of times he brought bushmeat for Mummy from his trips to Benin. All Kambili thought about was America—who had traveled, who had been denied a visa. Her longings, her childlike chatter about white men and big malls and fast food; I did not understand this love for big malls and fast food—did we not have those here at home? It is true that our country was corrupt, that there was poverty, but how many times did that poverty crawl into our home and touch us? We had food on the table, we had each other, and Kamibili had James. Yet America stood between them like a giant mountain until, one day, James began to feel that he was courting America. So he did what any rational person would do. He took Kambili to lunch one evening and offered her some clarification. He told her about his plans to take a residency in Enugu once they were married. He told her about the three children they would have—two boys, punctuated with a girl. They would live somewhere around St. Finbarr’s Avenue and he would be a good husband to her, a good provider. That was the day their romance began to die. It was the day Kambili took her feelings for him and poured them in the gutter. Eventually, James stopped showing up on Saturdays.
Daddy was heartbroken. But we handled the matter the same way we handled the incident with Uncle Titus—with silence. Yet I was sore and dying, because you see, James was mine first. I met him first and liked him first. He belonged to me first.
Kambili knew I was the opening to their fledgling courtship, that I stood at the entrance of it, watching it unfold like one who offered their favorite toy to the sad child. She saw the way I chatted about James that afternoon when he left us at her hostel. And then, when he called me to ask for her phone number two weeks later, she heard the sound of my sobs from the bathroom. Yet when she confronted me about it, I laughed and said, “Nonsense, what am I doing with a man from Mbaise? You know me,” I said to her, “I like my men thicker, fuller. Besides, what will I do with a doctor and all their overnight duties? Nne, go out with him. Honestly, he is not my type.”
It is true that my love was shy, that placed beside Kambili, I did not stand a chance of James choosing me. I know that well. Still, you must admit, I stepped away for her—I offered him up when she sought my blessing. When he sent her jewelry and cakes and long text messages, it was me who pushed her to respond, admonished her to be grateful, to consider his prospects. On those nights, we sat on the bed and put the phone on speaker and laughed at his gentle desperation, giggling as though we were joint recipients of his attention, as if his love was one of those buy-one-get-two-free cosmetic products.
When they broke up, I wondered about that bus ride and how it was all for nothing. Why could Kambili not just be happy? What is so wrong with building a life with James in Enugu? Why did she think her destiny was overseas? The day I confronted her about it, she laughed and told me to dream big, to get out of our small life and to think in dollars.
Now here I am on this plane, thinking in foreign currency, wondering if the eight thousand dollars I wired to Dago had covered the preliminary processing fees. The total sum was thirteen, but we had sold the car and borrowed from the church to raise the eight thousand. I had about seven hundred in my waist pouch. My husband, Emmanuel, is back in Port Harcourt with our three sons, full of his endless complaints, but I do not care. I married him when I was thirty-two, long after James had left the scene, the same year Kambili flew off to America. Emmanuel did not see why I had to leave now, why the car had to go, why Mummy and Daddy talked about selling their small land in Ogoni.
How did we get here?
By the time Kambili turned twenty-four, she had applied for the American visa lottery three times, and three times she lost. She then applied for one visiting visa to see our distant relative who is a priest in Georgia, and then for an F-1 student visa, all of which were denied. She went to Ghana, then South Africa, looking for entry points to Europe or Canada, paths that could lead to America someday. Still, nothing worked. Until she met Kola. That detestable Kola.
The moment I saw him, I knew he would be trouble. But he had America written all over him. It was there in his accent, the way his words slurred, shuttling between his Ibadan roots and Texas life. They met at a club, and after just three months of dating, Kambili brought Kola to the house. I remember clearly how Kola told Mummy that her egusi was dope. He sat there at the dining table, as if he were one of us. He threw around his slurred sentences, as if an American accent were money you could take to the bank and save. I saw through him, but Kambili did not. And nobody could steer her away from her American ticket.
One evening, unable to hold myself any longer, I told Kambili that she would not know what love was if it hit her in the face. I told her that if Kola did not have his green card, she would not have paid him attention. I saw the tears pool in her eyes, her face carrying the whole weight of her surprise. Then she told me I could not get a man to look at me longer than two hours, that I was so used to not getting things I did not know how to want them.
“I’m sorry for you,” she said. “You hate yourself. Is it my fault that you are settling for Emma?” I slapped her on the face, and then I slapped her again and asked her to leave my room, but she sank to the floor and started to cry.
“Let’s not fight, big sis, please; I don’t want to fight with you,” she said. I, too, began to cry, and we both sat there on the floor weeping as though we had lost something irrecoverable.
The moment I saw him, I knew he would be trouble. But he had America written all over him.
Months later, I was chopping vegetables for dinner when she burst into the kitchen, waving and spinning and singing. It turned out Kambili had gotten a visiting visa to her America. Six months on Kola’s invite. They had been planning it all along—that he would go back and send her an invite because he had his papers. I did not trust Kola and his papers, so I hissed the words at her.
“This, your America, it will kill you.”
“As usual, you are jealous. Jealousy will kill you.”
“Abeg, I wish you would just disappear.”
We did not speak for one week after that fight. By the time I was ready to forgive her, she was at the airport saying goodbye to Mummy. Six months after leaving, Kambili did not return. The visa had expired but she said it did not matter, that Kola was working something out, that they would get married quietly and come home at Christmas for a proper ceremony.
But this marriage, this wedding, it never happened. By the second year, Kambili’s calls stopped coming. Her numbers changed and there was no way to reach her. For five years we did not know if she was living or dead, if she was in prison or free, if she was married or single. For five years we did not know anything. No trace of Kambili.
But we did not stop hoping and praying. Mummy raised petitions for her at mass. Daddy stopped telling people about his daughter in America. And I married Emmanuel and had three boys. That was how we coped, in our own different ways. Until one day, like a carcass washed up by the sea, Kambili resurfaced. From nowhere she called, her voice sounding heavier on the phone—fuller, grown-up. That week, we killed a cow and threw a party. Our Kambili, who was lost, had suddenly been found.
She told us Kola had left, uprooted himself from their shared apartment and reemerged in Maryland with a very white wife. But she was strong and a fighter, so she stayed, went to night school, scrubbed the floors, missed meals on some days, stayed in the church for months when she couldn’t make rent, and now teaches in a community college. She told us about Charles, her friend from church who was mentoring her and other immigrants, helping them find their footing. It was like a victory chant, this Americanization of Kambili: Leave your family, scrub and grind hard enough, and you will emerge from the pile of struggles new and sparkly. When I asked Kambili what she did to legalize herself, she told me not to worry. She promised to give details once she returned home.
Daddy told cousin Cheta and cousin Pete and everyone else at the weekly catechist meeting who cared to hear. His daughter had beat the system.
“Just find a way in,” he told Okafor’s son. “Once you get in and you work hard, America will treat you well. You can go through school, but it is so expensive; it’s a waste of money. Go on a visit. As long as you work hard, you will make it.”
On those Sunday evenings, our uncles would gather with the plumber and mechanic and neighbors and they would listen to Daddy and send dreamy messages to their children to apply for visas. America was on the horizon.
The only thing people looked forward to more than Daddy’s stories was Kambili’s return. There was one final step in the processing of her papers, but it was a mere formality. That was the way she said it, and then she would laugh her soft Kambili laughter from when she was still a girl. America may have made her grown and hard, but her laughter was still thirteen years old. When we talked, I could still see her in our living room, her legs crossed over each other as she read a book or listened to tracks from her Walkman. She sent us dollars and American souvenirs. But she never showed up herself.
It was hard to keep count of the Christmases Kambili missed. To make up for it, we stayed together through phone calls and video chats. Mummy had a partial stroke. Daddy took over the shop. I had Emmanuel and the boys. But every last Sunday of the month, I went home and we all video called together, laughing and screaming and healing ourselves.
The weekend when she did not call in, we did not think too much of it. Maybe it was her other job, the one she did at night in the mall. Maybe she was sick, Daddy suggested; “You know Americans and their colds.” The next Monday, when Charles called to ask if we had heard, we thought, at first, he was getting married. Kambili had mentioned the Jamaican lady he was dating and how she came and collected Charles from all the other protégés, right under their noses. One moment he was helping the Jamaican to process her papers, and the next thing they were living together. But Charles was not getting married. That was not why he called. His voice was frazzled and hurried. It took a third time telling us to connect the dots in my head. Kambili. Hospital. Fighting for her life.
They say that it was a mistake, that Kambili was never supposed to be in that place, because on Saturdays she worked her other job in the mall, after which she got her groceries and went home or to the salon to get her nails done. But this time she went back to school. Then she called Charles and announced that she was coming over and bringing wine, because her visit was long overdue in this there’s-never-enough-time America. They were not sure if she was waiting for the bus or had cycled to school, but it happened in the sports center. Whether she was standing or sitting, they did not say, they could not know, but that was where it happened. The students were on the pitch, running and screaming and throwing their ball. They say it happened fast. Two players fighting, screaming. It got heated. One of the teammates brought out a gun, there was a struggle, hands were raised to the air, then to the side. Three shots were fired. Kambili dropped to the ground.
My Kambili, who could not stand the heat of the kitchen and would instead find convenient errands to run when it was her turn to cook, who cried for three days when she fell on campus and scraped her knees, who needed me in the lab with her each time her blood had to be drawn, who chose to study pharmacy when she could have easily gotten medicine because she hated the sight of blood. How did she, after avoiding suffering all her life, lie under the weight of a bullet? My miracle sister, who forced her way into the world when Mummy was told she could not have any children after me. Kambili, who conquered bad relationships, conquered rape, defeated Nigeria, just lying there, in the hospital room, fighting for her life.
We waited and waited; then we got the news. The doctors had scraped and cleaned, pulled out the bullet. All that remained was for Kambili to open her eyes and be well. I thought about her there, under the blade, with the pipes running through her, the knives and needles, the silence—how she could not hear Mummy’s tears and prayers or my scolding, my asking her to be okay. You better survive this thing, Hapumkambili, I thought, tracing out the full length of her name on my tongue. Get up and put the devil to shame.
We have not had a full conversation in our family since Charles’s call. Our words are in phrases and fragments. Daddy no longer hosts guests on Sunday evenings, no longer reads the papers or watches the news. The house, on days I visit, sounds hollow and empty. We did not know in those first two weeks whether to grieve or pray. And by the time we did, there was no other option, I had to leave, so we made all the plans that have brought me here, where I will meet with Charles and Obioma, Kambili’s former schoolmate, who lives in Brooklyn. She is coming to pick me up at the airport; then we will drive to see Kambili where she lies cold and tagged, awaiting a relative to claim her.
Tochi Eze is a Nigerian writer. She holds a degree in Law, and an MFA in Creative Writing.
