The Spiderweb

                                     

I shut the door behind me. Against my father's raging voice. To be honest, my father does not need a loudspeaker to address a hundred thousand congregation. The problem is not what I have done wrong, but his voice. It draws the whole neighbours to our compound each time he is scolding us - myself and my siblings. You would see the flock of pepeye coming to peck their mouths into the matter. If this sun crashed in our compound, I bet, they would still find their way here.

"Baba Folashade. Leave this girl. I thought we have talked to her. She said she will scrub it off!"

That's my mother's voice from inside. She's been holding my father from flinging me at the wall. A thunderstorm that he is. Huge in aspect with stubborn muscles.

 I didn't know how Granny saw the drawing at my upper arm. A spiderweb which I had asked my classmate to draw for me. She drew the same for herself but I thought I, Aponbepore, would rock it better. It was Granny that gave me the name Aponbepore, a girl whose skin rivals a palm oil. I like that.

But I didn't like how Granny told my father, "You don't look after these your children. Didn't you see the mark on Folashade's skin. Alantakun of all things, eh! She is calling bad luck upon her head."

I was coming from the kitchen to serve his food on the dinning when I heard them and I had paused.

"Maami" my father said, "you mean Folashade has drawn something on her body..." He was trying to call me but Granny asked him to be patient. 

I  saw Granny showing or rather reminding my father about the traditional tattoos on her arms and legs. 

"These marks you are seeing" she was touching the fading marks, spiralling patterns, on her both arms "during our own youthful days, there was nothing like the kind of marks seen on children of nowadays and our men were attracted to us. Now they have abused everything. You see the gombo marks on your father's face. That's what fetched him his work easily. The company manager had the same marks. He's also from Ogbomosho."

I remember asking Granny why Grandpa had those marks. Granny said, according to her own grandfather, marks were drawn on faces or bodies during slave trade so that parents could identify their enslaved children when they finally met.

Now Granny said that spider, especially, is a bad omen. Getting entangled in its web in dream or real life is a bad luck that takes a very powerful herbalist or cleric to cleanse. Drawing it on the body poses more ill luck.

My mouth was agape. But spider web, to me, is a beautiful work of art. I started falling in love with it when I saw the spiderman movie. Such beautiful creature is now a villain to us. Granny had not finished with my father.

"I asked you to put our ancestral marks on these children's bodies to prevent them from bad luck, you refused. You said we are now in a civilized world. The ones they are drawing on themselves is now what?"

"But..but Maami the world has gone far from all that."

"The Same thing I told you about Yemi when he arrived from America with the same marks, with earrings and nose ring. You said it's because of his job as a modern day musician. He even plaited his hair... when he is not a Sango worshipper. How can he ever reason like a real man? How can his head be correct? A true son of Yoruba soil does not emulate a woman. "

Uncle Yemi is my father's cousin. I can't forget the day he introduced his wife to Granny. It was then I realized I was dark-skinned. Uncle Yemi's wife looked like the snow I saw in American movies. Granny later invited uncle Yemi, told him to look for a decent lady, not that Asewo. Uncle Yemi argued that she's not a prostitute. Granny said a lady could not be so light-skinned and be faithful to her husband. "When she is not Oyinbo," Granny asserted. I think uncle Yemi's wife must have bleached her skin to be this light. She was almost like Afin, like Funke, an albino friend of mine in my present class, JSS3.

Funke was always sitting at the front of the class. She told me she couldn't see the board from the back. Sometimes I lent my notebook to her. Her first few weeks in school, all my classmates always avoided her, forbade her, like a curse. And when they realized she's very bright like her skin they started associating with her. 

Funke once told me a story about her family. A story that left a mist of sadness on my skin, that pushed out the ocean in my tear gland.

 It was a story of how her father treated her. How he took her siblings out for picnic or to amusement park without her. "You, don't leave this house till we come back," She quoted her father's warning. That's acceptable for her skin. But he would go ahead to call her useless, good-for-nothing child. He called her white cat. This had caused fights between her both parents. He never payed her school fees nor cater for her needs. Said there wouldn't be any use for her education. Said people of her kind were never employed in companies. Thanks to her mother for sponsoring her academy.

I was telling Granny about it one day. 

"But Funke was very gifted in bead-making o," I said, "When I noticed she didn't come to school for days I went to her house, I learnt that she had killed herself with a rat poison."

Granny grabbed her head in both hands, "Ohh, gbele-gbele oo!" she exclaimed in a language that portrayed shock and pains.

Granny said people of her kind were regarded as idols in the past. Unique beings. She said she must have committed suicide due to depression. I couldn't help but hurl curses on her father. Granny did too. These killing of oneself happened in our neighbourhood on two different occasions.

One was Prof Dee. He always had with him a book and pen, writing numbers, from vehicle plate numbers to house numbers. Some men had tried snatching his book. They blamed themselves they did. He hurled stones at them, chased and pounced on one of them like a mad dog. We learnt that Prof Dee was a graduate, but couldn't secure a job for years and began indulging in smoking, drinking and hard drugs. He always sat alone, looking like a dummy. After a while, he began to speak to himself on the street, laughing at nothing in particular. But, before then, they said he had been a gambler, a lotto addict. This must be the reason he wrote numbers. Many a time his family had captured him but he would always escape. One day, he was speaking to the wall, arguing with a non-existent being. He butt the wall nonstop, like a crazy he-goat, until his head shattered. He collapsed at the spot. Dead.

There used to be a girl, Dammy, about nine years old, three compounds away. Dammy was as quiet and calm as a neglected pool. But this pool was better left neglected, or else she became a turbulent ocean. When her peers came to her, she bit them or tore their cloths with an unbelievable force in her arms. She ran like a mechanical thing when angry. Occasionally she screamed herself out and ruffled her hair, and when calm again, she began breathing heavily. People said she's possessed, that she inherited the witchcraft from her mother. Her father refused to let her mother take her away after a quarrel that led to depart. He said she's a prostitute and could initiate her daughter. One day Dammy had broken a mirror and pierced herself in the heart.

After her death, we learnt from a doctor that Dammy had been suffering from a mental illness. That her condition must have gone worse because of her mother's absence. Worst because she wasn't given a medical attention. The family had, although, taken her to different churches for deliverance. The doctor said it was their ignorance and superstitious belief that killed her.

That brings back to mind the case of my spiderweb. I don't know if to call Granny's belief as superstitious too. But I think, surely, Granny knows quite a lot of things about life.