Into the Go Slow by Bridgett M. Davis

Author:Bridgett M. Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
Published: 2014-07-03T04:00:00+00:00

Saturday morning, Godwin’s teenage wife Theresa led Angie along a muddy road. Theresa carried her baby high on her back, while her unborn child strained against the cloth wrapped tautly around her. Angie held the ponytail of hair that Brenda had helped her buy. The sun was high; Brenda had predicted they had about three hours before the rains returned.

Theresa offered to walk her to meet the hair-braider, felt the walk would do her good, help the baby to come. Angie had a flash of terror that Theresa might go into labor while on this walk. She hated that she wasn’t like Ella in that way, couldn’t imagine saving a life.

They walked slowly as Theresa was so big she could just manage to waddle forward. They passed plots of land where houses were under construction. Mounds of wet, red earth piled high next to hills of gravel. A backhoe stood idle. They arrived at a construction site where the entire frame of a house had been built, standing naked in the hot sun. A slab of concrete had been poured around the base. In the middle of the concrete—what would one day be the house’s front porch perhaps—sat a tin-roofed shanty. Theresa took twenty naira from Angie and moved toward the lean-to. Angie followed, but at its threshold Theresa stopped her with a raised hand. “Come out,” she said.

Angie waited as Theresa entered. Two minutes later Godwin’s wife stepped back outside, transaction complete. She waved goodbye, slowly began to waddle away. Angie hoped she’d make it back home safely.

Suddenly a woman stepped out of the shanty, shrouded in a sheer fabric covering her head, and a faded wrapper tied across her waist. She moved toward Angie. Her face was all but hidden, a thin scar snaking across her forehead and a tiny ruby sparkling in her aquiline nose. The shrouded woman stared at her with startled almond eyes and let out a high-pitched scream. Angie dropped the Asian hair.

“Ah! Ah! Come back!” the woman called out to Theresa. “Too much, too much!”

Angie’s hair, no longer wrangled into a gel-slicked ponytail, had been washed and air-dried into its true self—thick, kinky, unruly. She was used to this woman’s reaction, had seen it at high-end salons and basement shops alike: women who insisted that her hair was too much to handle. Hair-washers who begged not to be given the task of combing it out. Stylists who charged extra for the added labor. Shop owners who closed down while a poor hairdresser worked on her hair until long after darkness fell. She, tipping extravagantly by way of apology.

Theresa turned around. “Aunty. Abeg.” Her baby started to cry.

The woman glared at Theresa, so swollen, bulbous. Finally, she nodded.

“It is fine,” said Theresa, who again turned to leave. Angie bent down and picked up the fallen hair.

The woman entered her shanty, came out carrying a straw mat, pillows, scissors, a comb, and a jar. She placed the mat in one corner of the yard, put a pillow on it, and instructed Angie to sit.

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