Against the Odds. Ben Igwe

“In fact, if they ever cause my death, they would be the worse for it because I will promptly return as a witch and snatch away all who destroyed me. They cannot run me to death and stay alive here. They must join me in the land of the spirits. But what I cannot do now is to take my own life. If I do, what will I tell this seed that the gods gave to me? Those who caused my death would make sure he died too so they could take over Nnorom’s household.”

       Two

      Jamike and his mother lived off the products from their farms. Cassava, cocoyam, green bananas, yams, and plantain were their main foods. In a bad harvest, things were difficult for them. Uridiya would sell pepper, vegetables, and a small bowl of palm oil to buy a handful of crushed crayfish to give taste to their soup. Meat in their food was a rarity. If they wanted beef broth to season their soup, Jamike would take a pot of water or a bundle of firewood to the village butcher so he would give him some broth in exchange after he cooked meat for sale. But as a village boy, Jamike would go into the bush some nights with a palm oil lamp or a lit bundle of sticks tied together to pick snails following a heavy rain, or he would pick mushrooms the morning after. On Saturdays during the planting season he accompanied Uridiya to the farm and helped to make mounds for cassava or cocoyam planting.

      Other times he would go on insect-hunting excursions in the farms and low bushes in the village. Early in the morning sometimes, when dew had dulled and weakened the insects, Jamike would go into nearby bushes to catch edible insects like grasshoppers, praying mantises, crickets, and beetles for food. After Jamike removed their wings, Uridiya would fry the insects and put them in their soup.

      During the season for edible caterpillars, when greenish voracious caterpillars, like locusts, descended on trees and shrubs, a season that came around at long intervals, Jamike would climb trees to shake caterpillars off branches and leaves so that persons on the ground under the trees would pick them. Once he was on the tree, he would climb from branch to branch, shaking some branches with his hand and thumping his foot on others while he held strongly to another branch. When he came down, he would collect a handful of these wormlike caterpillars from each person.

      Sometimes a stingy villager would not contribute enough caterpillars to Jamike. Jamike would be upset and would show it. An old woman was once tightfisted with Jamike.

      “What is this you are giving me? I would rather not take any caterpillars from you than for you not to give me enough.” He attempted to walk away, refusing the handful the woman offered.

      “Go ahead, young man, and collect from others. By the time everybody gives you their share you will have more than enough.”

      “Mama, just give me a fair share from what you have. Don’t worry about what other people may give me.”

      “Are you ever satisfied, you little boy? Did you do any other thing except to climb a tree? You are not God that put caterpillars on the tree.” People standing around laughed as they watched the old lady and the young boy exchange words.

      “I am not God, but I am the one that climbed the tree. If climbing the tree is nothing why didn’t you climb it yourself?” Jamike was firm.

      “If I were a man I would climb it.”

      “Now you know you are a woman, please give me the caterpillars.”

      Another villager in the group who got tired of waiting for Jamike while he argued was getting ready to leave her share for Jamike at the foot of the tree.

      “Please don’t do that. The caterpillars will crawl away.” His simmering anger rose to a boil.

      “Please give me the caterpillars. If these other people leave without giving me anything I will seize this big bowl that you have,” Jamike warned.

      “I did not get all these caterpillars from here. I have been out all morning.” She gave him a little more.

      By early afternoon, before the sun got too hot, Jamike would have climbed over ten trees, and his sizeable calabash bowl would be filled with a big mound of caterpillars crawling in a slimy mass over one another, raising and shaking their tiny heads. When cooked and dried in the sun or fried they became delicacies for different types of soup. Sometimes Jamike and his mother would have more than they required, in which case Uridiya would sell some.

      During the rainy season, Jamike and the other boys went to the community pond at midnight to catch frogs. They carried lanterns or brightly lit bundles of dried thin sticks that showed the water of the pond under illumination. They would then surround the pond at different points. On noticing the light the frogs would attempt to jump into nearby bushes. As they tried to jump out, they would be apprehended. Each frog caught had its long legs broken so it wouldn’t jump out of the bag.

      As he grew older, Jamike began to hunt rabbits and squirrels with other young men in the village. Sometimes he followed older men on their hunt, carrying their hunting bag like an apprentice. After they slaughtered their catch for the day, he would go home with a leg, thigh, or even the head of a small animal. On these occasions, Uridiya would welcome and embrace her young son with a broad smile and shower praises and sweet names on him for bringing home meat for their soup. She would call him Nwachinemere, one who God takes care of, and Nwadede, my beloved. Jamike was proud to hear his mother call him those names of endearment.

      By the time he was ten, Jamike had appropriated one of Uridiya’s old machetes. He went to a relative who was a blacksmith and had the handle changed by the blacksmith’s son. He was proud of his machete. Early on Saturday mornings Jamike would spend a long time sharpening the machete at the grindstone. He used it to cut firewood in the bush and to cut palm leaves and twigs for their goats. Ownership of a machete was a mark of incipient manhood for a young boy in the village. As a weapon, he could use it to defend himself and his family, and he used it as a tool to work on the farms or at home. Every village boy was eager to own a machete, usually one that his father was not using anymore. He sometimes played with it and learned about its many uses from parents and relatives. Jamike had to learn fast. Having lost his father very early in life, he had to come to manhood faster than his age-mates if he and his mother were to survive in a widow’s harsh environment.

      Jamike started elementary school at about the age of twelve. It had not been but a few years ago that he wore his first pair of shorts. He was seven or eight and liked shorts that had belt loops. Before that age, he was naked in the village like every other boy or girl. Skinny Jamike wore his long oversized belt so tight in those days that it almost went twice around his waist. His mother always feared the boy would crush his intestines with the belt he drew too tight around his stomach.

      School was for anyone who could afford it. Most children of Jamike’s age in the village were apprenticed to learn a trade. Blacksmithing, bicycle repairing, and carpentry were popular choices. With meager capital received from the selling of farmland or cash crops, some youngsters engaged in petty trading. School meant fees, uniforms, levies, and numerous other requests by teachers. But Uridiya, a woman of determination, had sworn that Jamike would attend school whenever she could afford to put him there. She always said that since she did not know her ABCs, her only child must go to school to learn them. Through him, therefore, she would be enlightened.

      Harvest was bountiful the year Jamike started school. Uridiya sold vegetables, palm oil, palm nuts, kernels, and other crops to pay his first fees. Jamike even helped out. He gave his mother the little cash he earned from the baskets he wove and the crude kitchen knives he learned to make at the local blacksmith’s workshop. These he constructed with the help of the blacksmith’s son who was his age -mate and who was learning his father’s trade. It was generally the custom in the village for first sons to learn the trade of their fathers. Because Jamike occasionally visited the blacksmith to help fire the furnace for him, he was allowed to tinker with bits and pieces of iron and scrap metal. He learned to make crude kitchen knives and simple types of cutlasses for grass cutting. It became known in the village that he was talented in things technical.

      At school Jamike showed a remarkable brilliance that villagers did not expect from the son of a widow. At the end of every term, results of examinations were called and report