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CHAPTER 1
Redneck Arrival
If there's anything in the world I hate, it's leeches — filthy little devils!
— Charlie Allnut played by Humphrey Bogart in African Queen
A framed photo of my dad sits on a nightstand in my parents' guest room. The photo, black and white, depicts the jungle in the background, colored over in green crayon by my artistic seven-year-old hand. Or at least that's what my mom told me — that I had childishly defaced the photo. My brother said it had been a photography class project, and he had marked it up. Whoever it was, the interpretation is spot on: my dad's face and neck are colored in with a vermillion crayon. In the summers my dad always had a farmer's tan, which my mother claims as proof we were rednecks. My father stands, one leg on the bumper of a Land Rover, one elbow on his bent knee, holding a cigarette. A Winston, I can promise, because that's all he ever smoked, no matter where we lived. He wears khakis and a T-shirt. And Justin Roper boots, the one true sign of his Texas upbringing.
My father's aspiration was to own his own Phillips 66 filling station in Uvalde, Texas. He was a man of determination and hard work, so to get his proverbial foot in the door, he took a job with Phillips Petroleum Company searching for places to drill in oil-rich Texas and Louisiana with the local seismograph crews. Over time the company offered him a new job in worldwide oil exploration, and his gas station became a small, forgotten dream. Resembling John Wayne in both character and looks, he never looked back when offered the opportunity to explore the Everglades, the Sierra Nevadas, and eventually the African bush, Amazon jungles, and the Andes.
But before we went overseas, my dad worked for Kennecott Mines in Ely, Nevada. In Ely, the console TV's bigger screen only magnified the mountain reception's staticky picture. So we preferred the tiny twelve-inch in Mom and Dad's room. The little TV was the television on which we had watched the first moon landing, so maybe we had a soft spot for it. My folks had a little sitting area around a fireplace in their bedroom, and on snowy nights, which could be 365 days a year in Ely, that was the coziest spot in the house.
When Dad called to say we were being transferred to Africa, we were watching The African Queen starring Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn. That's the anecdote the family has always told, although now I find it too coincidental to be true. Still, I share the same anecdote, and I add how I remember it: The movie had reached the part where Humphrey Bogart peeled leeches off Katharine Hepburn as they sat in the eponymous steamboat. Or maybe it was Hepburn pulling the leeches off Bogart. It doesn't matter, leeches are leeches, and my skin crawled.
Watching African Queen, my mom sat on the black hard-backed chair she'd antiqued with early American eagle appliqués, and Marty lay on his stomach with his chin propped on his fists on the red shag carpeting. My sister, Suzanne, sat in the big cushy chair Mom had reupholstered herself using moss green, nubby fabric and thumbtacks as rivets. Suzanne sat sideways in the chair, leaning against one round arm, her legs hanging over the other arm. I was either splayed out on the red shag carpeted floor next to Marty or hanging off the end of Mom and Dad's bed.
When the aqua Princess phone on the nightstand next to Mom's side of the bed rang, I answered it. I answered every possible call that came in, dashing to the phone, hoping it would be Dad on the other end. But anyone was good news.
After I first said hello, I heard the long delay, then the swoosh swoosh like the call passed underwater, which it did. The words distant, like the ocean waves inside the pink nautilus shell Mom kept on the toilet tank in every house we ever lived in. I knew immediately who was at the other end of the line, whose voice I waited for. I held my breath because any sound I made could interrupt the response, could send back another round of echoes. I pictured the telephone cable as thick as our living room sofa laid down across the ocean floor, my dad's voice undulating all the way across the vast Atlantic, then across the United States to get to us in Nevada. It both came too slow and too quick for as far as the voice had to travel.
"Amy ... how would you like to live in Africa?" he said. My father always asked questions like he was elated about the idea.
My mom stood next to me; I had waved her over when I heard the long, transatlantic pause after my first hello. "It's Daddy," I had mouthed. He had left six months before, gone to see about a project, is all I knew. He often went on business trips, to the mines or to visit the drilling crews. I wanted to give my mom the phone, let her answer his question, but he was waiting for me. "Amy," he had said. He had asked me.
Would I have to leave all my friends again? All I knew of Africa was Tarzan, the boring Sunday afternoon TV show. And leeches.
My mom snatched the phone from my hand before the right question, the right response, could form in my head, before it could navigate all the way back to him.
We would travel from Ely, Nevada, a small silver mining town over six thousand feet above sea level with a population of 2,500, to Lagos, Nigeria, as close to sea level as you can get without drowning, with a population of over eight million people.
We sold all our belongings. Not that we had anything valuable. Mostly yard sale items appliquéd and reupholstered. We were allowed to keep our more sentimental possessions. My most paramount possession was my Barbie doll collection. I had never played with baby dolls, but Barbie didn't even go in the shipment. I packed Barbie and Ken in my Samsonite Naugahyde carry-on, slung the shoulder strap over my head and across my chest, and lugged them through all the airports between Nevada and Nigeria. Moving was unnerving enough; getting rid of all that was familiar was downright scary, so my family of twelve-inch dolls and the microcosm I had created for them would not be left in the hands of Mayflower movers.
Like Barbie, my mom retained her figure. Mom liked to point out that her own ballet-length wedding dress, now in the cedar chest, had an eighteen-inch waist. And Mom still had her eighteen-inch waist. The cedar chest filled with our baby mementos, winter sweaters, and her wedding dress, would go to Mommom and Papa's, Mom's parents' house in Uvalde.
I would no longer receive king-size bags of peanut M&Ms from Papa. Papa had kept me well stocked in the candy he claimed he picked from trees. He wrapped the M&Ms in brown paper sacks folded over and over then sealed with masking tape, my name and address written in blue-ink scrawl inside the square boundary of yellowed tape. Any packages sent to Nigeria would have arrived, if they arrived, long after any expiration date, so no one bothered mail anything other than an aerogram or thin, airmail envelope. When I was told my M&M supply would be cut off, I felt double-crossed and wanted to rethink this transfer to Africa, the land of no peanut M&Ms.
Mom chose her Singer sewing machine to take to Lagos and packed the Christmas decorations in better boxes to be shipped. Dad sent his hunting rifles to Granma's house in Texas. And we took our first ride in a jet airplane.
I didn't know it yet, but my family of five, all lined up in the middle seats of the 747 jumbo jet, would slowly disperse. Maybe I had a sense of their pending disappearance because I kept that Naughahydecarry-on, Barbie's tomb filled with all her belongings and companions, tight against my chest for the entire trip.
My father's new contract was with an Italian oil company, Agip Oil. In order to absorb the time and fear of flying in a 747 for the first time in our lives, the first time for us even to be on a plane, my mother decided we would learn Italian, and so she bought a phrase book. I learned one phrase on the last leg from Milan to Lagos: non lo desídero. I do not want it. To this day, it is all the Italian I remember. The first time I used it was after my mother pounded on the airplane bathroom door.
"Amy, what's taking you so long?" I could hear her panicked voice through the flimsy door.
"I'm doing Barbie's laundry," I replied. That miniature sink, the tiny faucets, the whole room Barbie-sized, I couldn't resist. Barbie sat spread eagle on the small, stainless steel counter watching me rinse out her ball gown.
"Amy!" my mom said. She tried the knob. I had failed to lock it. Her head popped in, and her eyes nearly popped out when she saw the damp Barbie clothes spread out around the room. "There's a line out here! You have to come back to your seat."
"I'm busy," I told her. I still had a couple of pantsuits to wash. The flight was terribly boring. Shouldn't Mom be glad I'd found something to do?
"Amy," she said first in panic and then from between gritted teeth, "the line is down the aisle. You need to come out now." She snatched up my carefully arranged, damp laundry and naked Barbie, then grabbed my wrist.
"Non lo desídero!" I told her as she pulled me from Barbie's Laundromat.
That was, more or less, how we ended up living in Lagos in 1971. My father says it was where, as Southerners, we had our eyes opened. But Mom says redneck eyes take forever to open, if they ever do. For me, there's a sliver of time when my eyes wouldn't close, even to blink, but not out of any kind of search for understanding. I wasn't that aware. More out of fear, of being afraid that if I blinked, one more person would disappear.
To this day, I can't smell diesel and not be reminded of the drive from the Lagos International airport on Lagos Island to our house on Ikoyi Island inside a compound that consisted of two large two-story houses for oil company families, the Griffins' and ours. In the back of the compound, behind a tall wall sat the servants' quarters. The Quarters, we called them. Our previous houses certainly had never had The Quarters, but instead were rundown rentals lucky to have a yard. Like the one-story, three-bedroom, one-bath house in Nevada, the greatest luxury being the new linoleum installed in the bathroom when the pipes burst one winter. To brighten up a dingy room, my mother made a lampshade from a coffee can spray-painted white and decorated with plastic daisies.
But here in Lagos, Portuguese for "lakes," we were on the western Africa coastline, made up of islands in the Bay of Guinea in the Southern Atlantic Ocean: Victoria, Ikoyi, and Lagos Islands. Our house was a two-story glass-sided contemporary complete with a gateman, a night watchman, a steward, a gardener who mowed the lawn with a machete, and a nanny. The latter just for me. Built-in babysitter. Non lo desídero. "It's not necessary," my mother told the oil company escort. "We're used to doing things on our own. We don't need help." By "help," she meant assistance, not servants. But they came with the house. We were no longer the beans-and-cornbread-for-supper Wallens.
My first nanny was our steward, Phillip's wife, Okinaya. She was so shy, she would hide in the servants' quarters and not come out, so I didn't really have a nanny at all. Then Mom hired Martha, who finally had to be fired because she drank all of Dad's whiskey, which was hard to come by. He bought bootleg from the slick Nigerian man who drove his long, black Chrysler New Yorker into the compound.
Standing in the hot, Nigerian sun, my father and our compound neighbor, Mr. Griffin, and other men gathered around the long trunk of the Chrysler and picked out cases to stock their supply of booze and cigarettes. I stood off to the side, peering into the trunk from afar, watching the clandestine act. Intoxicated by the nicotine from the cigs they'd lit up and the wafting aroma of whiskey as the J&B Black Label was tested, I watched my dad joke with his buddies, negotiate for an extra box of cigarettes or bottle of booze, and surreptitiously hand over rolls of quid. To my young eyes, something sneaky was going on. Where there's an American will for liquor in a Muslim country, there's a way to buy it. We had a new way of life, and it didn't include the Piggly Wiggly anymore.
My next and last nanny was Alice. I loved Alice, her bosom so deep, I would fall inside when she clutched me tight, and her bottom so big it jutted out like a table behind her. Alice could make me laugh even when there was nothing to laugh about.
It was Alice who looked after me. Here we'd landed in the land of perpetual summer, and I was not allowed to go barefoot. I was given a pair of flip-flops, and Mom told me never to leave the house without them on my feet or I would get hookworm. And a spanking. The hookworms, my dad explained, make their way from the soles of your feet, through your blood stream to your heart. Then they travel to your intestines, where they dine for years. Even under the threat of a spanking and little, yellow hookworms burrowing through the pink soles of my feet, I tried to get away with going barefoot. So, whenever I left the house sans shoes, Alice chased after me waggling the rubber thongs in the air. She would make certain those worms did not drill into my heart.
CHAPTER 2
My Baptism
There's always a light at the end of the sewer.
— Tudy Wolfe
The oil companies paid tuition for their transplanted employees' kids at the American International School Lagos, but the grades went only as high as eighth grade. My brother and sister were starting the eleventh and twelfth grades, respectively, so they were to attend The American School in Switzerland, a boarding school thousands of miles away from me. Non lo desídero.
This is when the disappearances started.
My siblings leaving for school was more than just something I didn't want. Their absence resembled a tearing in two of my world: a world I remembered in the States and a new world from which something very essential had gone missing. The world I would now live in had no ties, except my mother, to the old life. The life I'd had with my brother and sister at home, or coming home any minute now, was over. I would now become an only child. With a more-or-less single mother.
Losing my grip on my family felt temporary at first, time that had been stretched not to my liking. My dad had always traveled for work, so "gone to the bush" most weeks wasn't much different from "off on hot shot" in Louisiana. But my siblings away at boarding school, albeit speckled with holidays home in Lagos, confused me. No more coming home from school and sharing peanut butter sandwiches. A time warp of sorts had occurred. Like they'd gone to school, only it took so much longer for them to come home. Months. They'd gone to school halfway around the world. It seemed as though I was perpetually waiting. The days appeared tilted in the wrong direction. I didn't understand distance like "halfway around the world" yet. Time, when you're seven, is in increments of play vs. boredom.
"Come on, Amy, let's go." I heard my favorite words from my brother. I followed Marty everywhere. Any moment spent with him was pure mirth. It was the day before their first departure. Marty and I left the compound with its red hibiscus bushes growing taller than the bamboo fences, umbrella trees shading the grass, and big, fat bumble bees buzzing around the elephant ear bushes. We entered Omo Osagie Street, which swam with people, Nigerians on their way to market, tradesmen going house to house, sandals slapping the soles of pink-bottomed feet, bicycle bells dinging. Nigerian women balletically towered along the side of the asphalt, wearing brightly colored lappas, yards of fabric wrapped around and around their bodies, and baskets filled with you-name-its balanced perfectly on their heads. In contrast, the open sewer on either side of the road teemed with all of humankind's detritus, both fecal and random household trash. Debris piled high against the concrete walls of the surrounding compounds. Even here in the most exclusive part of Lagos, Ikoyi Island, with the green, yellow, and orange tropical birds fluttering, the palm trees fanning overhead, the ocean air just a few blocks over, nothing could escape the jungle heat, making the sewer's smell swell in the oxygen we inhaled.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "When We Were Ghouls"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Amy E. Wallen.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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