Against the Odds. Ben Igwe

bespoke her condition.

      Widows in the village most often were helpless. This is the reason malevolent persons would pounce on a widow’s farmlands, fruit trees, or domestic animals such as dogs, goats, sheep or her fowls, attempting to dispossess her. Ironically, it was the close relatives of the widow’s deceased husband who were the first to try to disinherit her, especially if her children were minors.

      Uridiya was forty-five years old, tall and brown skinned. She looked far older than her age due to hardship. Her cheekbones, set on a slightly square face, highlighted the wrinkle on either side of her drawn cheeks. Before her mourning outfit became regular wear, she used to sometimes walk around bare-bodied to the waist, her flat breasts pendulous and her one-piece loincloth knotted firmly with a cloth string around her waist. Above the cloth and below an exposed navel were many rope-like rings of red and black beads that adorned her hips and swung with the undulating movement of her buttocks when she walked.

      Everyone in the village knew Uridiya well. Wherever she appeared, persons around would be aware of her presence because she would be complaining beyond conversational tone about what someone had done to her. Sometimes she walked briskly barefooted along the village dirt road wringing her hands at man’s inhumanity, cursing, and invoking the god of thunder and other evil spirits to visit quickly and snatch away all those oppressing her. When rain threatened, thunder roared, and lightning flashed in the sky, Uridiya would raise her hands to the sky and entreat,

      “The strong one! No living person doubts your work. Anyone who crosses your path does not stand again. Whoever doubts you does so to his or her peril. You know those who are after Uridiya, I don’t know them.” She takes a pause and then continues. “What am I saying? I know some of them. I beg that you come down and do your work on them. Strike them so all will see and know that you do not want mistreatment of anyone. We know that nothing will happen to anyone who does nothing wrong. Follow the evil ones; follow them even if they run into a rat hole. They are the reason why the world is not good.”

      Jamike was Uridiya’s only child, born to her late in life. She became pregnant just as her husband, Nnorom, was seriously thinking about taking another wife, after years of barrenness and the concern and pressure of his relatives to take another wife. In their imprecise counting, the villagers said that it was nearly two decades after her marriage that Uridiya gave birth to the boy, Jamike. Fate, however, was cruel to Uridiya and the baby, for her husband, Nnorom, died just two years after her son was born. He fell to his death off a palm tree. Villagers considered this an abominable way to die. Such deaths were believed to be the handiwork of Amadioha, the god of thunder, showing his wrath over an offense against the god.

      When Jamike was young, Uridiya always carried him on her back with such a narrow piece of cloth one would think the boy could fall off, but he clung hard on her shoulders. When he was older and able to walk, she would hold him by the hand along the uneven road, she walking briskly, he holding, crying and running to keep up and sometimes stumbling. Uridiya cursed along the village road whenever she was aggravated. Because of that, the villagers said she was on the verge of becoming a lunatic.

      “No,” she would protest, “I am not a lunatic. I am never one to talk too much. You turned me talkative after my husband died.” Then she thought for a moment, “No, after you killed him.”

      After Nnorom died, villagers did not believe Uridiya would survive his death. Her grief could not be controlled. Passers-by would look at her and shake their heads in pity as she flung a sick and tired child, Jamike, on her shoulder from one native doctor to another. If she tied him to her back, the boy’s neck and head would feebly tilt to one side or another. People close by would ask Uridiya to situate the child right before he would break his neck. She carried eggs, lizards, white-feathered fowls, and tortoises to divining priests for ritual offerings to propitiate Jamike’s chi so he might live.

      Uridiya and Jamike eked out a harsh existence. Living for them was based on small quantities of farm products. Cassava, cocoyam, and green plantain were staples. Uridiya sold some of these, including pepper, small quantities of palm oil and palm kernel, vegetables, and ripe banana, to buy other things like crayfish, kerosene, onions, matches for the hurricane lamp, salt, soap, and other commodities. Whatever she could not afford they did without.

      When Jamike started elementary school, he would come back from school and there would be no real food available. Dropping his raffia school bag, Jamike would look into every pot in Uridiya’s dingy kitchen in search of food.

      “Is there nothing to eat in this house today?” Uridiya would keep silent. She heard him.

      “Mama, I am asking you.”

      “Jamike, find something to eat and leave me alone to think about my life and my world. Crack some nuts. Palm kernel is food. It is not always that one has to have a full stomach.”

      Jamike would gather and crack palm nuts for kernels to chew. If there were dried slices of cassava, he would either eat them so or soak them in water to soften before he ate them. During harvest time Uridiya would bring out cocoyam for him to eat before she would leave for the market. Without taking off his school uniform Jamike would put the cocoyam in the fire to roast. Once it was ready he dipped it in peppered palm oil and ate zestfully. Soon a bulge would appear on either side of his stomach like a well-fed lizard. Jamike was full and ready to do his errand. Uridiya would always attach a chore to after-school meals. She educated Jamike on her philosophical belief that wherever there is something to eat, there is also something to do. Jamike would speed off to get palm fronds and twigs for their two goats or go to the stream to fetch water. He could do his little homework or prepare materials for his school handiwork for the next day. Sometimes he went into the forest to cut sticks for building or mending school fences.

      Despite their condition of poverty, Uridiya had a strong faith in her god and an indomitable will to survive with the only seed, as she called Jamike, which God gave to her. She believed the god of Nnorom would not allow this one seed of his to be taken away. Nnorom, she said, never harmed anybody while he lived, nor did he commit an abomination or anything forbidden by custom or tradition. She could not understand why the god of thunder chose to take him. The divination priest told those who went to the oracle to seek the reason for his death that it was on account of some oath he took but did not fulfill in his previous life before he reincarnated. The Priest said Nnorom would have reincarnated as a stump of a tree but for the intervention of benign fate. If his parents had appeased the god when he was born he would still be living.

      To make sure that Jamike would not suffer the same fate as his father, Uridiya sold off many of their farmlands to appease Amadioha. The chief priests of the god carted away most of Nnorom’s property, as is the custom when the god of thunder is responsible for someone’s death.

      Most mornings when Uridiya visited her farms there was an unwelcome activity in one or two of them. It might be that a villager who farmed the portion of land adjoining hers had encroached beyond the boundary with one or two tongues of hoe strikes. It might well be unintentional or even intentional just to see if they could get away with a little piece of her farmland. Sometimes youngsters in search of firewood had removed dried palm fronds that covered germinating seeds. If she found out, then it was time to call up the neighborhood to witness the hatred visited on her. Villagers farming in the vicinity would stop work for a moment to listen to what problem the widow had to warrant her yelling. They knew immediately that someone had wronged her.

      In the evening when she returned from the farm, there was always something that would cause her voice to be heard beyond the rampart that surrounded their family com pound. It could be that someone had made use of a little bit of her meager pile of firewood or taken water from her clay storage pot, or that someone had left the barn open for goats to eat her little quantity of cocoyam. Each day, at some point, she would scream and curse the machinations of evil people against her. Some days, though, Uridiya would walk along the road silently, saying nothing to people she passed on the way. If Uridiya were greeted while in this mood, she would mutter a response to herself, saying, “How can you greet me when you too are in the plan to have me dead?” She was suspicious of everyone. When she walked along the village dirt road in silence, Uridiya was in her own world.

      “What