Chapter summary
Mama Bolu warns Folasade, whose memories reveal Karo’s childhood lesson in calculated survival and vengeance.
MAMA BOLU
Wednesday Mama Bolu shut the store at two, which she never did, and sat on the stool behind the counter with her hands in her lap, looking at the telephone.
She had known since Tuesday that she would have to call. She had told herself it was none of her business. She had told herself the girl was twenty-two, a grown woman, a student, and that a market woman has no right to read a child’s face. But there are things you know in your body before you know them in your head, and her body had spent all of Tuesday afternoon feeling cold.
At ten past two she dialled the number in Isara. It rang for a long time. Folasade answered with a breath, as she always did, as if she had run in from the farm.
“Bolu? Is everything well?”
“Everything is well. I want to ask you something and I want you to be calm.”
“I am calm.” She was not.
“Your daughter came to my shop this morning, and yesterday, and she asked me a strange question. She asked me to call her before I speak to anybody. About a woman. A woman who came and asked about her on Sunday.”
There was a silence at the other end so long that Mama Bolu thought the line had failed.
“Say nothing to anybody, Bolu,” said Folasade at last. “Not to the police, not to the pastor, nobody.”
“Folasade, what has she done?”
“I do not know.” The voice was quiet. “I know only that she was six years old, that day. I know what I let her see. I should have carried her face into my wrapper, and I was too proud, and she watched the whole thing, every blow, like a girl who is being taught a lesson. And I did not stop her learning it.”
“She is a good girl.”
“She is my girl,” said Folasade, which was not the same thing, and both of them knew it.
“What should I do?” “Nothing. Pray.” A breath. “I will call her tomorrow. Early. Maybe if she hears my voice.”
“And if she does not listen?”
“Then God help whoever is standing in her way,” said Folasade. “And God help her.”
Mama Bolu sat on the stool with the telephone against her chest for a long while after the line went dead. Outside, the afternoon went on without her. A bus honked. Somewhere a baby cried. She opened the shutter at three and sold bread to a man who did not know what he had come in for.
Loose Ends · Continue reading
Continue to Chapter 25
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Five contextual images are AI-generated editorial illustrations for this fictional serial; no generated image depicts a real event or named person. Editorial design by akinakingbogun.com.
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