“No,” Mama Ugo said. “I am an old woman but my body will still do as I say, though not without protest.” She laughed to herself as she reached for a chunk of blackened wood, her fingers coming dangerously close to the fire. Then she handed it to Chidera. It felt hard in Chidera’s hands but not so hard. She could probably break it if she squeezed it with enough strength. It left smudges of black in her hand.
“Mix that in a bowl with hot water, sharpen a stick, and you’ll have what you need,” the old woman said. She paused for a moment. “I can teach you how to make other colours, if you wish.”
Chidera looked at her father, her heart beating fast. Her father nodded.
“Come to my door on Saturday and Sunday of next week. I will teach you all you need to know.”
When the day came, Chidera was so excited that her legs shook as she walked to Mama Ugo’s house. She’d made the mixture using the block of charred wood and hot water, as Mama Ugo had told her. She then sharpened the stick and tested her new ‘pen’ on her math book, finishing the spider she had been drawing when her pen ran out. The result was even more beautiful than with the old pen. As she used her handmade ink, she found that she could manipulate its darkness. She could make it grey or black, depending on how much water she added or how much ink she used. She wondered what other things Mama Ugo was going to show her.
“Where did you learn to write uli ?” was the first thing Mama Ugo asked the morning Chidera showed up at her door on Saturday afternoon. She towered over Chidera like an ancient palm tree. She wore a blue and gold wrapper and a blue shirt. Her home smelled like oil and pepper.
Chidera stood at the door, not knowing what to answer.
“Hmmm,” Mama Ugo said. She stepped aside. “Well, Come in. I’ve made you some fried plantain.”
As Chidera sat down in Mama Ugo’s small main room, a plate in her hands, Mama Ugo went out and brought in several things. The small room was dark, though the sun shined through two curtained windows. She had one single mask nailed near the top of the wall. A pink wall gecko rested on it as it waited for insects to eat. There was a table covered with a white cloth that had several pictures on it. Chidera assumed the large one was of Mama Ugo’s husband who had died years ago.
“These are the things I will show you how to make colour with,” Mama Ugo said, pointing to the items she’d gathered in the corner. There were piles of sticks, leaves, a bowl full of dark berries and several other things Chidera couldn’t name. She sat down across from Chidera. “But before I teach you what I know, you must tell me where you learned to write uli. Who taught you?”
There was a long silence as Mama Ugo stared at Chidera with piercing eyes and Chidera tried to think of what she should say.
“Well…no one really taught me,” she said, wringing her hands, her plate in her lap. “I…well, the way I found out about it was… strange.”
Mama Ugo replied with a phrase many of us old folk often use: “I’m old. Nothing is strange to me anymore.”
Chidera looked into Mama Ugo’s dark brown eyes. Mama Ugo had long pretty eyelashes and the wrinkles on her face reminded Chidera of the lines she’d drawn for detail on her wall. She decided she could trust Mama Ugo. So she told Mama Ugo about the day she heard the three voices and saw only two women. She told her about the uli drawings on the trees, the ground, everywhere, even on the lizards. And lastly she told her about the leaf that never fell off the back of her hand. And when Chidera finished, she sat back and waited to hear what Mama Ugo had to say.
“Let me see your hand,” she said.
She squinted as she held Chidera’s hand close to her face. She raised it to her nose and sniffed. When she let go, Chidera did the same. She was surprised to find that the leaf still smelled faintly of flowers.
“You must go back there and leave three plantains at the foot of that uli tree,” Mama Ugo said smiling widely at Chidera, her wrinkles bunching at her cheekbones. “You’re very lucky.”
“Why?” Chidera asked.
Mama Ugo only shook her head in the way adults do when they’re not going to answer a child’s question.
“It doesn’t matter. You’ve done well. Come, I have much to show you.”
And so the teaching began. It lasted two days. And her parents allowed her to skip her chores so that she could devote all her time and energy to learning what Mama Ugo had to teach her. Colours, colours and more colours.
Nchala was a type of sandstone that could be ground up to make yellow. Mama Ugo showed her how to make white by baking a white clay called kaolin. Mama Ugo showed her how to crush tree leaves to make green. She made red by boiling the wood of a camwood tree. She pressed berries from a nearby uli tree and told Chidera how to let it sit and ferment for seven days to make a deep indigo dye.
“When I was young, we used to adorn ourselves and each other with dye,” Mama Ugo said on the second day as the sun went down. Chidera had just finished cleaning up after pressing the uli berries and preparing the juice for fermentation. “During celebrations, usually, like marriages, the New Yam festival, funerals. Some of the best artists were even asked to decorate the homes of chiefs or prominent people.”
“How come we don’t still do this?” Chidera asked.Mama Ugo shrugged, “Things change. Habits die out, even good ones. The world continues to turn, though.”
She was quiet as Chidera finished cleaning up. Chidera would take the pot of fermenting dye home with her. She wasn’t sure what she would test her new colours on yet. She didn’t want to paint her room. That masterpiece was done. I’ll figure something out, she thought.
“Now Chidera,” Mama Ugo said as Chidera was preparing to leave. “It has been a good two days, no?”
Chidera nodded. Her head was still swimming with colours and ideas of what she could draw with them. Or maybe the word now was “paint,” not draw. Aside from teaching her how to make colours, Mama Ugo had shown her how to make shapes appear shiny and more realistic, more three-dimensional. She was sad to have to leave Mama Ugo.
“Well, I have an idea of how you can repay me for teaching you,” she said.
Chidera gasped. There had never been any talk of payment. She didn’t have any money and her parents were poor.
“I didn’t know you meant for me to…”
“I want you to paint a mural on the front of my home, as they used to for highly respected people decades ago,” Mama Ugo said. “I may be a woman but I am still the eldest person in this village. I deserve respect. I will show you how to make it so that it can withstand the rain and sun.”
Chidera could only stand there in awe. She didn’t know what to say. Did Mama Ugo really ask her to paint the front of her house? Such a big space to paint, she thought! So much potential. The whole village will see! Am I good enough to even do such a thing? Would mommy and daddy allow me?
Of course they would.
“Will you do it?” Mama Ugo asked, trying not to smile.
Chidera nodded her head vigorously.
That night she was so excited that she couldn’t sleep. She could hear her parents talking and laughing in their bedroom. They had been very pleased when she told them about what Mma Ugo asked her to do.
“Now the whole village will see how talented you are,” her father said. “My daughter.”
“People already know,” her mother said. “I have customers from other villages now looking for me to buy my figurines with her drawings on them. They’re calling Chidera “The Girl with the Magic Hands.”
In her bed, Chidera grinned at this. There were actually people talking about her. Adult people. She giggled under her thin sheet. It was wonderful. She closed her eyes, still listening to the light-hearted chatter of her parents. Them talking so freely was something she’d never heard before she started to draw. So much had changed in so little time. She had thought it would all go back to the way it was when her pen ran out. But it wasn’t her pen that made the ‘magic.’ Nor was it those women she had seen in the forest.
“They just helped awaken something you always had in you,” Mama Ugo had told her before she left. “They knew exactly what they were doing.”
The next day, Chidera went to school as usual. Then she came home. She put three plantains in the green container she used to collect water and made her way down the dirt road to the well. She passed four women filling their container and went down the small path. This time she was not afraid. She felt she had friends here. Nevertheless, it would soon be dark, so she hurried.
She walked for several minutes before the forest began to crowd around her, the glowing uli shapes and patterns and symbols appearing as if the forest had decided to show her its deepest secrets. She inhaled the sweet air, looking around for the women. She didn’t see them but she saw the uli tree.
“Osisi Uli,” she called. No answer.
There was a light warm breeze as she stepped toward the tree. She took the three green plantains and put them at the foot of the tree. Then she stood up straight, looking up at the tree with its black berries. She reached into her pocket and brought out one of her mother’s figurines, which she had enhanced with her drawings. She’d drawn many many leaves on this one and tied a piece of string around it. Then she fastened it to one of the tree’s branches and whispered, “Thank you, Osisi Uli. For everything.”
She was about to leave when three berries dropped on her head. She turned around and smiled. Then she went and filled her container at the well and went home.
Chapter Four
People began to gather as Chidera’s painting took shape.
She waited till Saturday morning to start and worked all of that day.
“I want you to draw me music,” Mama Ugo said. “When I was a young woman, I had the sweetest voice anyone had ever heard. I still do, it is just that people see that I’m old and no one asks me to sing anymore. Humph , people can be so simple-minded.”
Chidera agreed.
“Will you…I would like to…can you really sing?” Chidera asked.
Mama Ugo smiled and sang a song that reminded Chidera of honey and ripe cashew fruit. The song did not have any words and it took only a moment for Chidera to recognize it. She wasn’t surprised to see several tiny birds fly onto the windowsill to listen. It was the very song that Osisi Uli was singing that day in the forest.“That’s the same song I heard! Are you…?”
Mama Ugo waved a hand at Chidera as she shook her head, “No, no, no. I’m just an old woman with a sweet voice. But I know of her. She was the one who taught me that song.”
Mama Ugo said no more about who ‘she’ was and Chidera didn’t ask.
“Do you know what you’ll draw now?” Mama Ugo asked.
Chidera shook her head, “Not yet but it will come, I think.”
She went outside and stood in front of Mama Ugo’s house staring at the wall, her worn out sandals covered with the red dirt that swirled around her ankles. She wore a long orange skirt that was too big for her narrow hips (her mother said she would eventually grow into it) and a yellow short sleeve shirt. It was a hot dry day and the sun beat down on her back. She was glad she hadn’t worn anything darker.
Mama Ugo’s wonderful voice echoed in her head. Chidera thought about what it would look like if the sound took physical shape. Behind her cars passed by on the road. Dust rose high into the air like a faint red ghost. From nearby, someone played highlife and someone else was laughing. A bird chirped and a grasshopper zoomed by. All these things helped her to paint a picture in her mind of music. The world around her was filled with moving sound.
An hour later, after she had gathered all of her many colors of homemade paints and had several sticks she had sharpened, she began to paint. She started with the indigo paint she’d made from the crushed uli berries. She drew bold zigzags and musical notes and swirls and circles and soft shapes.
And all these uli figures revolved around a circle with a symbol that looked like a square with all its sides caved in to make a sort of four-point star. Mama Ugo had told her that the strange star was the sign for the kola nut and the kola nut had always stood for someone of high honour. The circle around it Chidera imagined to represent the fact that Mama Ugo was a woman.
As Chidera drew, cars and people passing by on their way to the market and other places began to slow down, curious about what she was doing. Soon people were actually coming to stand there and take a good look. Chidera’s drawing of what she thought music looked like was indeed eye catching. She was so focused, she did not even notice that her audience was growing bigger and bigger each day.
Mama Ugo lives only a few seconds away from me. As I sat on my porch watching people pass by, I watched this girl, transform the front of Mama Ugo’s house into a work of art. This little girl, who was not very tall and not very short, who wore her hair in a short afro, who had only recently begun smiling and had never owned any earrings. This little girl brightened up the entire village. I myself went over to look at what she was doing.
“Chidera,” I said. “You’re doing a wonderful job. This is great.”
She merely grunted as she continued to work. She was way too focused to notice the people who watched her. Word began to spread about the beautiful mural that was taking shape on Mama Ugo’s house and that, every weekend, a girl would appear to apply more magic. The Girl with the Magic Hands.
The word spread around her school, too. Chidera was not the most popular girl at school. She was not one born with superb social skills, nor did she put on make-up or spend much time on her hair. She was still asked to draw on people’s hands but people paid more attention to the things she drew on their skin. Nevertheless as her classmates whispered behind her back about how Chidera could make magic with her hands, they began to also quietly respect her.
After she had worked for three weekends on the painting, now adding indigo details like loops and lines inside the kola nut symbol and making the circle around it appear to shine, a group of girls walked up to her.
“Chidera,” one of the girls said.
Chidera immediately smiled and turned around. She knew that voice. It was Florence. She hadn’t been spending much time with her best friend on the weekends for obvious reasons. They saw each other at school and often did their chores together on weekdays but weekends used to be when they had real time to just sit and talk or play.
“Good afternoon, Florence,” Chidera said, wiping some dye from her cheeks.
There were two other girls with her, Chinwe and Ngozi. Chidera greeted them too.
“I’m tired of not having you to play with on the weekends,” Florence said. But she was smiling. “Let us help you.”
Chidera thought about it. She was done with most of the difficult part. The details in heavy black. Most of what she had left to do was filling things in with colour. They could make more sharpened sticks, too. Then she had an even better idea: I can teach them, she thought!
From that moment on, she had help
and she became a teacher. Not surprisingly, it was Florence who loved to paint on herself most. She painted lines on her cheeks to accentuate her ‘lovely eyes,’ she drew a dove on each collar bone and carried a mirror around to marvel at herself whenever she felt the urge. Ngozi and Chinwe found enjoyment in mixing the colours and filling in shapes. Ngozi proved to be especially good at making things look three-dimensional. But it was only Florence that Chidera told about how she learned about.......
Read episode 9 The last episode!!!
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