I stared at my mother as she whispered, “I’m coming, mama. Right away.” Then she’d put the phone down and gone quiet and still. When minutes had passed and she was still frozen and staring off into space, I touched her shoulder ever so lightly with my right hand and whispered, “Mama, are you all right?”
My mother erupted into screams, tears, motion. Slapping and punching the air. My chair sensed the danger and it immediately zipped me across the room to safety, where I watched my mother lose her shit for the first and only time in my life.
DNA was like this now. And this time, I knew to move myself away.
“Why?” his brother asked. “Why would you give up your cattle to become trash?”
This seemed to snap DNA out of it. The word “trash” or maybe it was the sharp way his brother said it. Like a machete. DNA blinked and then grabbed his brother by the collar and started shaking him like a ragdoll. “I am NO TERRORIST!” He looked his brother squarely in the face. He shook him some more. “You believe what you see on the screen posted by people you’ve never met over your own heart? You know me, brother. I WOULD NEVER.”
“I know what I saw with my EYES,” his brother said, tearing himself from DNA’s grasp. “The whole thing was recorded. I saw it live.”
DNA laughed ruefully. “You yourself told me that footage can be manipulated! Anything digital!”
“That was the first thing I checked for!” he snapped. “I know the digital fingerprints of manipulations. That’s not hard to detect with the right tools. Which. I. Have. What I saw had NOT been manipulated.”
“Did you see the whole thing?! All the footage? What kind of journalist isn’t interested in context?” He turned to the crowd that had gathered inside at all four entrances. DNA squared his shoulders, and I stepped to the center of the space, looking around, unsure of what he was about to do. More people were coming in, joined by his mother who’d picked up her cracked phone. She stood behind DNA’s brother.
“I just wanted to be left alone,” DNA said, looking defiantly at me. He turned slowly, addressing everyone around him. “You all know me. Everyone here knows the business of everyone here. We’re family. I didn’t want to leave for the cities, I didn’t want school, I wanted what our earliest forefathers wanted: A wife who was simple like me, children who’d do whatever children did and my cattle. THAT IS ALL. I don’t want big money, big houses, big land, big items. I wanted to grow up and then old as what the gods made me, on the land where the gods put me.” He glanced at me and then turned back to his people. “THAT’S ALL. You all kept bringing me complicated wild women, you wanted . . . ah, why would I of all people turn terrorist? Does that even make sense?!” He rubbed his sweaty face with his rough hand.
“Why don’t you stop with the hysterics? Tell us what happened,” a woman in the crowd shouted.
“Otherwise what?” DNA asked. “If I don’t explain will my own village cast me out?”
“You are all over the clan networks,” an old man said. “They will come for you, son.”
“Only if someone here tells them I’m here, Chief Mohammed,” DNA said. “I’m not a terrorist.” He turned to his mother. “Mama, I’m not a terrorist. I only want peace.” He turned to his brother. “Gololo, you’re one of Nigeria’s top investigative journalists and you’re wrong.”
As he told his people what happened, I pulled the sleeves of my shirt over my wrists and straightened my long dress to cover my metal feet. I adjusted the black veil I’d wrapped over my head and then I hoped for dear life that when their attention finally shifted to me, as it inevitably would, they wouldn’t decide I was an abomination worse than a desert djinn and try to beat me to death as people had sought to do in the Abuja market.
I waited.
* * *
—
DNA was quite the storyteller, thankfully. They did not try to kill me.
All the time he spent alone with his steer in the desert, thinking and not using words, must have sharpened his usage of them when it was time to speak. He told of the incident in the farmer town. He pulled his people in. He enchanted them. He softened then opened their minds. By the time he finished weaving yesterday’s violence into the tapestry, I’d relaxed. No one who’d truly listened could dispute that he’d been wronged.
That night he stayed with his brother and his brother’s wife. They had me stay with his mother. As I wondered and wondered what DNA was talking about with his journalist brother, his mother wondered about me.