And So I Roar by Abi Daré

Author:Abi Daré [Daré, Abi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2024-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

IYA

You see her in the looking-glass of your mind?

Good. I see her too.

See her skin.

Feel it.

Feel it in your hand like the buttocks of a newborn, the soft, party-cloth satin, the color of the sand around the mouth of a beach.

She’s smiling.

You see her teeths? The shape of a cowrie. The too-white color of the beads roundabout the neck of a queen.

Her name is Idowu, the last born of five, the only girl-pickin in her family. They live in a house the sliver color of the hair on my head, set back from the river of Dende, like a stone hanging around the neck of the river. She have four brothers. Those four boys have the curse of a angry madness and of the hard heart of Yeye, their mother.

But Idowu? Oti o. Not her. Idowu take up her father’s quiet spirit. She rather eat up her words and swallow it than to talk it. Her heart and mind be ever afraid to say what she think. Not like Adunni with her quick mouth. Not like Yeye, Adunni’s…what is English word for iya’ya? Or iya agba? Gran— What you call it? Ah. Gran. Ma.

Thank you.

Idowu is not like Yeye, Adunni’s granma, who have the kind of anger, the words of fire from a mouth so wide, it can roast up a elefant when she vex.

Now her father? Hmm. You ever meet a man that will just be looking you like mumu if you slap his face? Smash him with a branch of a tree or rub pepper on his back, and the man will not answer you one word. Lai-lai. Never.

Yeye and me, we are good of friends even though she is more old than me by a few years of age. Me and her been selling side by side for years. She sell puff-puff, hot and sweet, and I sell my zobo drink and other leaf drinks for medicines.

Around that time, Akin, my husband, a good man, he die of a blood-boiling sickness. I think you English people call it pressure high blood? High blood pressure? Ah. Thank you.

The pressure slap him in the heart, strike him dead in the middle of the night. The people of his village want to make me suffer for him dying, so I run to Dende, a small village not too far from Ikati.

I hide myself in Yeye’s house, and she—bless her sharp-mouth soul—she give me a place to sleep, food to eat. I share a room with Idowu, her girl-pickin, after her four boys were going away to live with a— What is English for babalawo? Medicine man? Healer? A man to make better their sick, angry mind?

Idowu was the beating heart of her baba.

I never seen a father love his girl-pickin like that. But since she was a small pickin, he be always saying it, talking in his quiet voice, saying that the beautifulness of Idowu is both a blessing and a curse. He didn’t tell a lie. Idowu, back then, was so beautiful, she always be pulling all sorts of mens to her like houseflies to shits.

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