My Mother's Gods

My mother has two Gods. One she shouts at, praying to in incomprehensible words, pouring spittle on my face in the mornings when I kneel before her to receive the blessings of the day. That same God lives in the small bottle of olive oil which she smears on my forehead for protection. She would shout loud enough for my step mother to hear, "Every evil eyes in this house that look at you will be blind, they and their children," and more spittle will mix with oil on my forehead.

This God is the one who makes people blind, consumes with fire whatever my mother does not like and bends the skinny legs of those girls who sit with my father at night in beer parlours.

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My mother's second God is kinder. More lenient. He is the one who permits pot-bellied men in my mother's food canteen to smack my buttocks because he uses them to bless us. The one who understands that body no be firewood on the nights my mother sneaks out of the house to Baba Ade's house when it is my stepmother's turn to sleep in my father's bed.

This God turned his face the other way that early morning when my mother and stepmother woke my half sister and I up to go with them to Abeokuta. On the bush path to the shrine when I asked my mother where we were going, it was my stepmother who answered,

"Wo, we want to teach you girls how to make your man have eyes for only you."

That evening when we returned, my mother prayed to her second God in hushed tones, begging him to make the charm work. And it worked.

My father's friend, the one whom he called for help the day it happened, told his wife, the woman whose mouth never closes. And she told everyone who cared to listen that my father's penis refused to come out of Cecilia, and that it was only when my mother and stepmother made him promise not to look at another woman, that the spell broke.

My mother went to church the next Sunday. She raised her hand when it was testimony time. She made the congregation shout hallelujah seven times. She told them about how God delivered her husband from a strange woman. Then she shook her buttocks side to side as she danced to the receptacle to put in a brown envelope.

What the congregation did not know was that my mother would go to Abeokuta the next day, shake her buttocks side to side while dancing, give the babalawo a thicker envelope and thank God for a safe journey when we got home.