Dreams, Miracles and Jazz (Picador Africa) is a wide-ranging anthology of African writing. Edited by Helon Habila and Kadija Sesay, it is aptly subtitled New Adventures in African Writing. The following is an extract from The Miracle Worker by Sefi Atta.
Makinde’s only contention with his new wife, Bisi, was that she gave too much in tithes to her church. Ten percent was not enough for Bisi. She had to prove just how born-again she was; each time she visited the Abundant Life Tabernacle, she placed a little extra on the collection tray for the married women’s fellowship — a haven for gossips, as far as Makinde was concerned.
Makinde was a panel-beater. He worked on a lot on the corner of a Lagos street. Bisi sold bread and boiled eggs to bus passengers at a nearby depot. When she abandoned her colourful “up-and-downs” for black dresses, Makinde didn’t object. When she stopped speaking to his non-Christian friends because they were sinners, he didn’t say a word. When Makinde broke his hand after a motorcycle taxi almost ran over him (he dived into a nearby gutter holding his head for protection; the slime in the gutter masked a bed of rocks), Bisi fasted two weeks for his hand to heal. He ate her share of meals and recovered with his small finger permanently bent at a right angle.
Bisi was prone to zeal, Makinde thought, so on that afternoon when she came to his lot with his usual lunch of bread and boiled egg, and she saw the windscreen of an old car that had been sitting there for years, and she fell on her knees saying it was a vision of the Virgin Mary, Makinde barely raised his head from his sandwich to acknowledge her. He had cleaned the windscreen with an oily rag to get rid of some bird droppings that offended him. The rain had fallen lightly that morning, and Bisi wasn’t even a Catholic.
She ran to the bus depot to tell the passengers that she’d seen a vision. About a dozen of them came back to confirm what she had seen. A few, mostly men, walked away joking about Nigerian women and their pious ways. The rest, mostly women, stayed to stare at the dirty windscreen. They trembled and burst into tears. It was a miracle, they said. There was a clear figure all right; one small circle over a bigger mound, and hues of rainbow colours around the small circle. More bus passengers joined the onlookers as word of the vision spread. Soon they were enough to make his work impossible. Makinde drove them away.
All his life he had worked; at least, from the time his mother had stopped handfeeding him. He started off by selling oranges on a tray; he had never attended school. At age ten, he began his apprenticeship with his father, a self-taught mechanic. Makinde pumped tires, and plucked nails from tires and patched them up, before graduating to changing spark-plugs. He was not the best mechanic in Lagos, but he was one of the few that people could leave their vehicles with without fear that spare parts would go missing.
He was amazed by some of the clients he encountered: Mercedes owners, who had access to his country’s elusive oil money. Yet these wealthy people were frugal when it came to paying for work. They handed Makinde small change with soft plump hands, while Makinde couldn’t even remember the colour of his own fingernails. He had black oil under them, and cleaned his hands with petrol dabbed on rags like the one he’d used on the windscreen. He ate “zero-one-zero” to save money: nothing for breakfast, one big lunch meal, nothing for dinner. This was the real miracle: he was still poor.