The Thing Around Your Neck

You thought everybody in America had a car and a gun, your uncles and aunts thought so too. After you won the American visa lottery, your uncles and aunts and cousins told you, in a month you will have a big car. Soon, a big house. But don't buy a gun like those Americans. They trooped into the shantytown house in Lagos, standing beside the nail-studded zinc walls because the chairs did not go round, to say goodbye in loud voices and tell you with lowered voices what they wanted you to send them. In comparison to the big car and house (and possibly gun), the things they wanted were minor - handbags and shoes and perfumes and clothes. You said OK, no problem. Your uncle in America said you could live with him until you got on your feet. He picked you up at the airport and bought you a big hot dog with yellow mustard that nauseated you. Introduction to America, he said with a laugh. He lived in a small white town in Maine, in a house by a lake. He told you that the company he worked for had offered him a few thousand more, plus stocks, because they were trying to look diverse. They included him in every brochure, even those that had nothing to do with engineering. He grinned and said the job was good, was worth living in an all-white town for, even though his wife had to drive an hour to find a hair salon that did black hair. The trick was to understand America, to know that America was give and take. You gave up a lot but gained a lot too. He showed you how to apply for a cashier's job in the gas station on Main Street and he enrolled you in a community college, where the girls gawked at your hair. Does it stand up when you take the braids out? All of it stands up? How? Why? Do you use a comb? You smiled tightly when they asked those questions. Your uncle told you to expect it; a mixture of ignorance and arrogance, he called it. Then he told you how the neighbours said, a few months after he moved into his house, that the squirrels had started to disappear. They had heard Africans ate all kinds of wild animals. You laughed with your uncle and felt at home in his house, his wife called you nwanne, sister, and his two school-age children called you auntie. They spoke Igbo and ate garri for lunch and it was like home. Until your uncle came into the cramped basement where you slept with old boxes and books and pulled your breasts, as though he were plucking mangoes from a tree, moaning. He wasn't really your uncle; he was a distant cousin of your aunt's husband, not related by blood.