Pt. 1 — Underskirts & Ripped Jeans: The Girl In Between
On a Sunday evening, your mother’s sister will show up at your front door with her Pastor and a team of church members, and for the first time in your life, you will ask her to leave with her guests. Moments later, your phone would ring. It’s your mother, summoning you to an urgent family meeting the next day. You are familiar with this rodeo. Family members show up unannounced, trying to dictate and run the life of a 28-year-old unmarried woman.
You’d show up five days later, on your own time because you frankly had had enough. You were no longer the shy, timid girl, hiding behind the endless piles of clothes that were wrapped around you because your aunt had convinced your mother that you were blooming too fast at twelve years old.
You had been raised to treat your pubescent body like a plague that needed to be curbed. At twelve, you had breasts and round hips that filled out your dresses. An anomaly in a lineage of women that started to bloom at ages thirteen and fourteen. The rules that followed came quicker than a sandstorm in the desert. No more playing with the neighbour’s son. No dancing in the rain. No hugging your friends. No trousers or dresses that clung to your figure. These rules seemed endless, too many to keep up with, some of them absolutely ridiculous but you always stayed in line, never deviating from the unwritten laws that governed your life.
Your mother bought you your first underskirt — the black shiny silky material that soon became your second skin. Only women wore underskirts in your family. Older, married women mostly. You hated it, hated everything that it represented, but you obeyed still, never questioning the authority that had been enforced on you.
Years later, you’d realise that your mom’s decision had nothing to do with you “growing too fast for your age” as her sister, Felicia had put it — but everything to do with the wandering eyes of her potbellied, now estranged husband.
By the next saturday, you’d be sitting on a single sofa, in your mother’s parlour. The same sofa that you had dusted and cleaned meticulously while growing up under the watchful eyes of Felicia, who insisted that you needed to be trained and groomed for marriage. Seated in the same parlour were your mother, Felicia, and her bandwagon of friends and church members that had strong-armed your mother into summoning you.
Felicia fondly referred to as Mummy Idara, — was your mother’s oldest and only sister. The matriarch of your mother’s family. As a tall, slender woman, she towered over everyone in the family especially during wedding ceremonies where she wanted to be seen. She owned the final verdict on major decisions after your grandparents passed. She would have made a great leader, if she wasn’t such a big meddler in people’s affairs. She always had to have things her way or no one else’s, and your mother shrunk under her influence.
“Ima, have you been possessed by the devil?” — came a soft, firm voice. Felicia’s cohort in matters like this — Aunty Kate. “Tell me why you would dare to turn your own family away. The same family that raised, fed and cared for you….eh answer me?!” You’d look Aunty Kate dead in the eyes without flinching. She’d notice your unwavering gaze and the confidence behind your big, brown eyes. It’ll rattle her and cause her to shift uncomfortably in her seat. Felicia would notice and clap her hands mockingly at your new defiance.
Bassey, the glutton — an elder from Felicia’s Heaven-Bound Gospel Ministries and the only man present at this family intervention, will open his mouth to speak and everyone will instinctively turn their noses in the opposite direction.
“Ima, what you did on sunday was very bad!” — he’d say with his heavily accented ibibio-english diction. Bassey had very poor oral hygiene. You’d wonder why no one cared enough to give him a dental set after all these years. You’d remember a day from your childhood when a senatorial aspirant had visited Heaven-Bound Gospel Ministries, and Felicia had slipped Bassey a mint, moments before he walked up to give the aspirant a special welcome. You realised he hadn’t chewed the mint when the aspirant turned around in disgust after giving him a handshake.
You would smile at the memory but your smile will be mistaken for impudence.
“What are you smiling at, ehn Ima? What is so funny about what he said?!” Felicia would say as she picks up her slipper to launch at you. A familiar move that in the past, signalled the onset of a beating. Aunty Kate would intervene on your behalf.
“Mummy please calm down…don’t let the devil in her push you around. We know it’s not Ima, it is the devil at work in her. We need…”
“Tueh” — Felicia would spit at the tiled floor. “ What stupid devil! Tell me? What stupid devil will make a child that I raised to disrespect me like that, and in front of my church members too? And what is this on your body? ”
Uduak? Have you seen the ungodly rags that your daughter is wearing? Won’t you say anything?
“She can’t say anything Felicia! — Bassey would say as he put down a glass of juice he’d been drinking from the entire time. “It’s too late! When we were begging her to remarry so that a man can train this child properly, she wouldn’t listen! Now look at the result.”
You had been quiet all along. Unbothered by all the ranting and faux concern about your well being, but Bassey’s words would strike a chord.
“Mr. Bassey?” — you would call out in an almost whisper!
“Let that be the last time you open your mouth and say rubbish about my mother”.
Mr Bassey would choke on his juice, Felicia would scream and fall back in her chair while Kate’s mouth would be left wide enough for a fly to buzz in and out without being noticed. Their shocked expressions gave you deja vu. A feeling similar to the one you felt the first day you committed the egregious crime of ‘talking back at your elders’. You remember it so vividly because your mother and aunt had been too stunned to speak.
To be continued…