Page 54 of Death of the Author

“Oh, it’s strange.”

23

Interview

Tolu

The first time Zelu smoked weed was my first time, too. It was during one of our family visits to my father’s village in Nigeria. We’d spent a week in Lagos, then a week at the palace in west Yorubaland, and now we were in the southeast, Igboland. After residing for days in a small palace, being in our parents’ house in the village was a relief. Especially for me, the oldest son. So many expectations and duties. It was aggravating. I was about fourteen, and Zelu was nineteen. Everyone else was inside for a meeting with the extended family. I was outside, sitting on the front steps. Zelu was beside me in her wheelchair.

I have no idea who she got the joint from. Maybe our cousin Osundu. He would have had access to that kind of thing. Osundu was the shadiest guy we knew. At the age of twenty-five, he would have been in college if it weren’t perpetually closed due to strikes. He drove a kabu kabu to make ends meet and lived in Lagos in one of the shittiest apartments I’d ever seen. He more than likely had some kind of side hustle going.

Inside, all our relatives who had descended on the village for the family gathering were shouting and laughing. It was hot in there, and I’d come out for a breath of air. Zelu was already out there. She was in her first year of college, and I remember she’d come home different. She’d taken out her braid extensions and twisted her hair. My father hated it, but both my parents had seen this hairstyle before, so they weren’t all that surprised. It wasn’t her look that threw me off, though; it was how she seemed so much more... herself. She was reading all these books by authors she’d discovered in her classes; she’d even written some of their names on her chair—Zora Neale Hurston, Jamaica Kincaid, Ijeoma Oluo, Zadie Smith, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ta-Nehisi Coates. And she was always talking politics. She seemed so smart to my fourteen-year-old self. I kind of avoided her. So when I saw her sitting there, I nearly went back inside. She grabbed my leg.

“Where’re you going, Tolu? Come sit with me,” she said. “That meeting’s going to last forever, so might as well get some fresh air now.”

When she brought out the joint, my eyes must have gotten huge, because she burst out laughing. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

“Is that... are you going to smoke that?”

“Of course,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“Right here?”

“Why not?”

I looked at her like she was crazy. “Mom and Dad.”

“Uh, no one’s coming out of there for a while.”

“Doesn’t it smell?”

She shrugged and brought out a lighter. She lit the tip and then took a hit. She looked relaxed, and I remember it smelled kind of pleasant, too. Behind us, I could hear our grandfather saying, “Igbo, Kwenu!” and everyone responding, “Ya!” The meeting was starting.

“Want some?” she asked, holding it out to me.

Ten minutes later, we stepped into a room full of relatives: cousins from seven years old to forty-five, our father’s parents, aunts, uncles, five of our father’s sisters, three of his brothers, their husbands and wives, our siblings,and our parents. Grandfather was watching the room as his brother offered a platter with broken kola nuts, peanut sauce, and alligator pepper to people. We sat in the back, and as we did, I had to stifle the most powerful urge to laugh I’d ever felt. Everything was funny—the musty hot smell of the large meeting room, how serious everyone looked, Grandfather’s gravelly voice, the way his brother carefully held the tray before all the elders first, the overworked air-conditioner in the front whose hard effort was not paying off, even the enormous spider sitting in the dark corner near the ceiling on the far side of the room. The audacity of that spider. It was horrifying, and no one was paying attention to it. My stomach cramped from stifled laughter. Oh, the pain. When I glanced at Zelu, the sight of her made it worse. She was in the same state, tears in her eyes.

Zelu and I sat beside our grand-auntie Nnenna and grand-auntie Grace, both Bible-thumping members of the local chapter of Mountain of Fire. They looked at us and frowned. We must have smelled so strongly of all the weed we’d just smoked. The room felt like it was the size of a cathedral. Things also seemed to have slowed down so much that I could see between the cracks. I let out a soft giggle.

“It is good to see you all this Christmas,” my grandfather announced in the front. “My son Secret has traveled the farthest with his family to be here. All the way from the United States. Let us welcome them.”

Everyone clapped and smiled. It felt like there was a moment when everyone in the room turned and stared at me, and I grinned, despite being totally creeped out. I heard Zelu snicker beside me, and that set me off again. I was so strained holding back laughter, I was sure my nose would start bleeding from the pressure. Zelu leaned toward me and whispered in my ear, “It’s like...” She paused, her shoulders shaking. “It’s like something is inhabiting my brain, like a little person, and that person is talking to me and threatening to betray that I’m high!”

I got up and mechanically walked to the door, making sure I did not meet anyone’s eyes. When I got outside, I let out the largest burst of laughter I’ve ever had in my life. Large, but not loud, because the meeting wasright behind me. Finally, I didn’t have to control my face or breathing. I snickered and giggled for at least ten minutes. Everything around me wasso, so, sofunny. The disheveled house across the compound, the owl hooting from nearby that probably made someone cross themselves, the pencil-thin palm trees gently swaying in the breeze, the very fact that I was high in a southeastern Nigerian village.

I eventually went back in and sat in my spot beside Zelu. We’d both mellowed out. And this was around the time that our grandfather started yelling at our cousin Osundu for stealing a generator. Osundu was forced to stand up and ask forgiveness.

“What the fuck,” Zelu muttered.

“How do you steal a whole generator?” I whispered.

“From your own uncle!”

We both giggled, grabbing each other’s hands and squeezing.

“Osundu,” our grandfather was saying, “what do you have to say for yourself?”

Osundu stood in front of everyone, tall and lanky, in his dirty jeans and red T-shirt, a smirk on his face. “I am innocent,” he said.

---