Black Sunday. Tola Rotimi Abraham

to visit Mother’s boss, the proprietor of Oguntade school. He hadn’t paid Mother any salary for the last three months before the school closed, and it was her idea to take the whole family to his house.

      “I know that man made millions when he sold the school. Yet he refuses to pay me my arrears. If my pleas have not moved him, let him look into the eyes of the children he is starving,” she said before we left our house. And so, the six of us got in a bus and went to his house.

      It did not work.

      “I will pay you as soon as I get the money, madam,” the proprietor had said. “I cannot turn myself to money for you. My children are also hungry.”

      “So, will you now consider trying out my idea?” Father asked.

      We were sitting in the back, the very last row of the danfo bus, when they were talking about this. Mother was whispering. The quietness made her voice sound like she was about to cry.

      “It’s not like I have a choice,” Mother answered.

      LATER THAT MONTH, our parents asked me what I thought of their business plans. I promised to work in the business center as often as possible. They had taken to including Bibike and me in every discussion about the family’s finances. We did not give any opinions, we just listened and tried to look sad. Father’s plan was all we had left. Money for the business center came from selling our parents’ wedding bands and Nestlé PLC shares, the only other thing (apart from the house) Mother had inherited from her deceased parents. The money bought two used photocopiers, one desktop computer, one scanner, one laminator, and one printer. Father was excited to finally get his chance. He promised his business would bring in, every other day, what Mother had made in a month as a teacher.

      The trouble with his new business started early. Our photocopy machines were temperamental and unreliable. They made faint and unreadable copies, they leaked ink all over the place, they consumed way too much electricity and even more petrol whenever there were power cuts. Our patrons were infrequent and often needed services rendered on credit.

      It was during this season of hopelessness, when we were learning to wait for whatever money was to be made from the business center, to know whether there would be food to eat the next day, that an old work colleague, visiting the neighborhood and seeing Mother manning the typesetting business, had advised her, face contorting with the exaggerated sympathy usually reserved for victims of hit and run accidents, to attend Pastor David’s church.

      My sista! Please attend this meeting. You will receive a breakthrough. Your life will change.

      I was so happy when Father and Mother told me they had heard wonderful things about my Pastor David and were going to see for themselves. They attended a Wednesday miracle night the week after. Bibike and I stayed home with our brothers. Later that night at dinner, they spoke of all they had seen and heard. Stories of people who had been worse off than they could ever dream of being who experienced great change through the church. There was the illiterate taxi driver who found favor with an expatriate and became his personal assistant, earning a salary in dollars. And the man who won the visa lottery after he was prayed for and who was leaving for America soon. And another, a man once so poor he sewed boxer shorts out of his wife’s old wrappers, who, after prayers at church, won a government tender and made so much money, he bought three brand-new cars in one day.

      It was the very best day of my life. Even though I wished they had joined because they loved Jesus, I was happy that the rest of my family had finally come to the New Church. We were desperate for better things, feverish with expectation that church was the missing link.

      Andrew and Peter missed our old church, All Saints Anglican Cathedral. They were chubby, round-faced boys who had been doted on by most of the elderly congregants of the old church. Andrew had been nicknamed the King Himself, for his portrayal of King Herod at the Christmas play in ’94, and Peter delighted everyone with his recital of the First Psalm in English and Yoruba. It was something they did every year after that, until we left: Andrew was always the lead in church plays; Peter always recited long Bible passages from memory.

      My mother still struggled with being poor and needy. The women of the New Church discomfited her for this reason. They were, in many ways, unlike the women who attended the old church. Women from our old church, like my mother, had been raised as privileged Lagos girls, attended competitive all girls’ schools like Anglican Girls or Queens College, lived in London for a year, perhaps taking Cambridge A levels, or perfecting their typing and shorthand skills, then returned to steady careers and marriages. Most of the New Church women usually had little or no education. They came to Lagos from their villages for the first time as adults, courtesy of born-in-the-village husbands who had found work here. They were very dependent on these husbands and other male relatives in a way that our mother found annoying in the beginning, but later began to envy.

      Whenever they gathered together for prayer meetings in our business center, they generally had the same kind of conversations. Gossip, grievances, and barely concealed guile masking as prayer requests. “I asked my husband for money for food shopping and he did not give me.” “My brother in Germany has forgotten the family.” “My neighbor needs to come to the Lord. Her husband won’t stop beating her till she becomes a praying wife.” When they were around, Mother made a show of being a model Christian woman. Behind their backs, though, Mother mocked and mimicked these women. Bibike and I were glad to have Mother’s attention again, and so we laughed aloud each time she did. We were fakers, but we were happy.

      Pastor David’s church was growing. The New Church moved out of the public school into a new, purpose-built church building. For the first time, there was a separate youth church, called the Burning Citadel, and it was one of the first youth churches in Lagos to attempt being simultaneously cool and godly. Sunday services were called “hangout sessions” and midweek services were called “meet-up gigs.” There was an effusive worship band with electric guitars and large drums, which made Ron Kenoly and Don Moen songs sound super cool. The band took the music from “Malaika,” made famous by Miriam Makeba, and turned it into a song of Christian dedication. We sang, “My lifetime, I give Jesus my lifetime,” with contrite hearts. I no longer saw Pastor David and I did not care that much. I had Jesus, I had my family.

      Father found himself a new group of henchmen, similarly smooth-talking, broke men with big dreams and loud voices. They congregated almost daily in our business center. The business was getting better at this time, and Mother had even expanded it to include wholesale office materials and beverages.

      They were like Father’s earlier group of men. Loud, noisy dreamers. These dreamers, though, said bless you instead of good morning, and “I am a winner” when you asked, “How is your day going, sir?”

      One of Father’s closest friends was a young man named Pastor Samuel. He was one of the assistant pastors and was always in a suit no matter how hot the weather. He came to the house, to our business center, almost every day. He always bought a bottle of Coke, first wiping the rim clean with a white handkerchief he kept in his shirt pocket. Then he told stories of all the business deals he was about to strike. The stories he told Father were rivaled only by the ones he told as testimonies in church. He spoke of connections with military administrators in various states of the republic. One Sunday, Pastor Samuel presented to the church a “sacrificial thanksgiving seed” of an imported fourteen-seater bus. He announced that he was thanking God for connecting him with the highest-ranking military men in the state. We were so happy for Pastor Sam’s newest blessings. Especially because, like oil on Aaron’s head, they were sure to trickle down to us.

      Most days when Pastor Samuel visited Father at home, he paid special attention to us girls, dashing Bibike and me money. He was nice and friendly. He sat with us and talked with us, wanting to know what books we were reading, what music we liked, whether we had boyfriends. Mother hated the attention Pastor Samuel gave us and one day, after she walked in on him giving Bibike a foot massage, asked us to never speak to him again unless it was in church. Father agreed with her and began sending us upstairs whenever Pastor Samuel came to visit.

      When the military president died in June of ’98, things fell apart all over the nation. The chaos was particularly intense