by TJ Benson
I have been reading the Bible again, from the New Testament, to know how it feels now that I have abandoned the church. I read about the birth of Jesus and wondered about the shooting star that led the Magi to the town of his birth. As a child, I used to think shooting stars were burning planets. I would look out our church windows during night vigils and wonder what world had to end for the Messiah to be born. I’ve been thinking about Jesus a lot, that wanderer, the holiest vagabond, who would be lost from his parents and found in the temple. He would grow to travel the world, with or without people. No matter how far he traveled – until he was nailed up on the cross – he always returned home. But I shall never come home; I will never return to you, as long as I live.
Do not look for me. That is the first thing.
Secondly, you have to accept that I am a vagabond. It is not just you; I have disappointed everyone who ever thought I could become something. I know you are my father; don’t take it personally. I will never be your son, even though I have the best intentions and it doesn’t matter that I have the best intentions, but there was a time I wanted it to matter. I have tried hard all my life to be your son, but now I am a vagabond. That is what you used to call me, and now I finally agree. Vagabond, it is who I am.
Do you remember when I used to call you Baba, when I was a child? I called you Baba during that preacher’s convention in London because I needed to pee badly. But you took me to the bathroom and scolded me. You said I was embarrassing you, that next time I should call you “sir.” I didn’t understand, but now years later I know it was because of those of your white colleagues at the table. You were the only African preacher at the convention, the only black man, and I was tugging at your trousers, calling you Baba. When we returned to Nigeria many years later, after my convocation ceremony, I understood why you incessantly boasted to our family friends that your only son beat all the White men in a British University, “the Spirit of Knowledge works in this boy!”
I can tell you for free that it wasn’t the Spirit of Knowledge that made me nail 100% grades in every course. It was the Spirit of Fear.
I spent my graduate year being the professor’s pet, returning from the labs at 2am while my course mates attended each other’s game-nights, weaving themselves into each other’s bodies and lives. I would console myself, that none of them loved Jesus, so I was better than them. I knew what you expected of me. You wanted me to become the son who not only loved Jesus, but the son who was the first in our village to study overseas and succeed, the son who did not embarrass you.
If I was talking to you face to face, you’d ask me why I am bringing up the past . Your new wife will say I have the spirit of unforgiveness. But the truth is that I am sore, Baba. I don’t think you will ever hear from me again. Besides, you’ve always wanted to know what went on inside my head. You’ve always wondered how a promising young son like me, the fruit of a Godly union, would struggle to speak in tongues or forget to fast. As a child, there was no room for what I wanted. I wanted you to be human. I wanted you to be my father. But you were ‘God’s General’ as we call you in church. You were a Strongman in the Lord’s army. Nobody could advise you or suggest anything to you because you had the Holy Spirit and knew it all. You were never my father.
Now I must accept this and plan my life accordingly.
Know that I left Ringim because I was sick of you. You were a man of God, yet you used the corrupt police system as a tool for domestic discipline. It was embarrassing, being the pastor’s son who was arrested regularly, whenever we quarreled. Mummy tried to mediate, but she didn’t live long. She could not survive you in the end could she? Your prayers and miracles couldn’t return her from the grave, and you wouldn’t let me mourn her because according to you my grief was a mockery of God’s will; my crying wasn’t manly enough for you.
I had to leave Ringim because the police trips didn’t embarrass you, and I was getting embarrassed for the both of us.
Let me just say something here once and for all: I returned to Nigeria for National Youth Service only because I couldn’t pastor your small church in Brighton for you. I knew your plan for the campus fellowship, setting me to become a ‘disciple’ of. Those young Africans in our fellowship, they didn’t keep returning for the word of God—no. They kept returning because I organized monthly get-togethers with jollof rice and malt that held them together in the terrible winters. When you visited and I invited you to our get together, you embarrassed me in front of the flock you wanted me to lead. You said gathering in each other’s homes would lead us to sin.
Like everybody else, I was scared of doing my National Youth Service in Kaduna. I don’t watch network news like you but I see the kidnappings and the attacks happening there on Twitter. I accepted the deployment to Kaduna to be faraway from Lagos, faraway from you. And I won’t lie, it was so sweet to use the scriptures to convince you. I quoted Psalm 23 verse 4 for you—
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…
—and you had to swallow it! You tried to bribe your way through powerful church members in the government (and let’s just call it what it is, Baba— a bribe), so that I could be redeployed back to Lagos or Abuja at least. I was able to counter your efforts, I reminded them all that God’s Will was sovereign. God was not a God of confusion or mistakes. If it was his divine will that I was posted to Kaduna, then as his humble servant, I would have to obey. God had not given us a spirit of fear but of sound mind. Besides, what kind of example would I be setting as the only child of the founder of our church not heeding God’s will?
For the first time in my life I weaponized the word of God against you, and won. You had no come back for me, so a sad knowledge dawned upon me. I could live my life without you behind me. I would have to.
I didn’t expect so many memories to follow me all the way from Lagos to Kaduna. Maybe it’s because Hausa is in the air, like in Ringim where we used to live, where you established your first church. Maybe having to speak Hausa again opened those doors in my brain, brought back those grievances I had blocked out with the Holy Spirit. It turns out if you stop attending weekly fellowships, going out for neighborhood evangelism and following daily devotionals, a huge chasm of space and time will open up in your life for the past to come unburied. I would remember my classmates in primary school riding their father’s necks on graduation day or attending PTO meetings in high school every night and chew my pillow so I wouldn’t scream. I won every single prize in high school I could get. From best dressed student to best in Further Mathematics, each prize the hope to finally win your attention and come to my school to witness me win? I became the religious prefect automatically since I was a pastor’s son and the head boy and president of the chess club. I tried everything to win your love. When I joined the theater club, that was when you decided to become present in my life somehow. And you didn’t even complain. Your secretary called the principal on the phone to remove me, and that was that.
I rode around in my bicycle in Kaduna to run away from all these things, to keep busy. The ministry I was posted to was shut down. This coronavirus problem had entered the country.
It is very possible that those afternoon cycles through the spidery roads of Ungwan Rimi saved my life. In time, I came to know northern Kaduna more than my neighbors. My body would anticipate each sharp bend in the road or surprise hill before my brain did. It was hell-hot at the end of March, but there were days of cool breeze that washed me as I cycled through major streets in this ghost city, under trees filled with shrieking birds, the only sound. On Twitter, people mourned the way the city used to be busy and filled with human life and traffic, but I cycled with glee. As long as I wore my National Youth Service uniform, most soldiers enforcing the curfew would let me pass, assuming I was posted here as a doctor or nurse. Eventually the curfew was extended, and I would cycle down to Karji, over the River Kaduna, that artificial divide that demarcated the city into north and south. People who lived here longer than I did never moved around like that. I realized this when I met the Hamza’s.
It’s so funny now to think that the Hamzas lived just four houses away from me. It took two weeks before I finally met Faiza, the wife, at the Wednesday market. Wednesday and Saturdays were the only days in Kaduna when the lockdown was lifted for commerce. I can’t remember what I wanted to buy, but the shopkeeper didn’t have change, and asked me to come back later in the day. I told him I live on Sultan Road, far from here, so if I went home, I wouldn’t return to the market before curfew. I remember now. I had gone all the way down south of the city to buy wine. I hadn’t yet found the secret places where I lived, in the Northern parts of the city, where alcohol was sold.
I bought wine to mark Mummy’s death anniversary, like I did every year. He suggested I come back for my change on the next market day and I said ha, what will I use to hold myself until then? One small shop near my house provided me with water and coca cola at night when soldiers weren’t patrolling. I needed that change, however small. Then this woman behind me gave him smaller denominations for what she was paying and saved the day. I stepped out of the shop in a cold sweat, I would have had to let this bottle of wine go if not for the woman. And I promised myself ever since Mummy died, I must mark it, I won’t pretend like you, hiding her from the rest of the church. I don’t care if mourning was un-Christlike to the church.
I was about to hail a bike when the woman stepped out of the shop and said, “Shey you live on Sultan Road. My car is down the road, I can give you a ride. I live there too.”
She walked off before I could start stammering my thank yous so I rushed after her. In her car, she took off her face mask and started the engine. She asked me the usual questions Youth Service Corps members got asked. It took me a second to catch up because it was those early days of Covid when you could make all these assumptions about a person’s face until they took off their mask. What was your undergraduate degree in? Are you Batch A or Batch B? When she got to the where are you working question, we both laughed. I replied the government posted me to Kaduna, but coronavirus posted me to my house, and we laughed again. I saw her as older than me in the shop, but when she laughed she became a girl. A girl I could make laugh.
We were still laughing when a little girl in the back seat sat up with sleepy eyes. “Faiza, where are we?”
She laughed some more and I was confused so she explained, “I am Faiza, and this is my daughter. She has been learning to read, so imagine her shock when she recently saw “Faiza” on a document instead of “Mummy.” Her father finally convinced her Faiza is my real name so she has stopped calling me Mummy.”
I liked this family already. Something in me sagged when Faiza mentioned her daughter’s father.
“He must be a great dad,” I said, and Faiza turned from the stirring, just as we slowed into a traffic on KASU road, to flash a smile at me.
“The best. I am so lucky I married well.”
She continued driving, and her daughter returned to her nap. We didn’t speak until we got to my gate. I thanked Faiza for the ride and she shooed me with her hands.
“It’s nothing,” she said. “Just make sure you don’t catch Covid. This one that you’re not wearing a mask.” She laughed, driving away.
I thought about her for the rest of the day. Lockdown continued, there was so much time to think about her.
The following week merged into a single day which I spent struggling to identify the flavors in her Arabian perfume. Was it peach or jasmine? Something with citrus? I couldn’t tell, unless I saw her again. So, I saw her again. Same time, same shop on the next market day. She was so excited to see me because she thought it was a coincidence. She had told her husband about the nice corper who she had given a ride home, living right next to them, and her husband had asked her why she didn’t ask if I could give their daughter extra lessons in mathematics.
“I keep thinking I will come and knock on your gate but work, I am an essential worker at the radio station, so I forget every time I leave my house. Shey, you said your first degree is in mathematics?”
This is how I came to spend my afternoons at the Hamzas.
Maybe you will be happy to know this period made me realize that deep down inside my heart, I harbored the desire to be a father. Even though I never had one in the true sense. I certainly felt more fatherly to Faiza’s daughter than teacherly. They called her Baby Amira. I didn’t know what kind of math to teach Amira, I was bored of simple additions and subtractions. Faiza grew mildly worried that what I was teaching Baby Amira was too advanced.
“Faiza see, see, see angle!” Baby Amira would hold up her arm and bend her elbow and Faiza would take off her mask to laugh.
I didn’t want her laughter to stop. Faiza went to work more often as the lockdown gradually lifted. She had come to enjoy going just thrice a week. The only upside to working now that the lockdown was lifted was the removal of checkpoints. No more lewd remarks from the soldiers anytime she needed to drive through to work.
My workplace was still closed, so I kept my job teaching Baby Amira. Soon, Faiza started insisting that I stayed behind and had dinner with them. Talking to her felt like talking to Mummy, she looked at your face while you talked and never interrupted you. Her husband, the wonderful Mr. Hamza I had heard so much about, worked at the station too, producing the night programs. I preferred not to think about him. After dinner, Baby Amira would rush upstairs to her room to watch Cocomelon and Faiza would tell me stories from her National Youth Service days a decade earlier.
“I think I still have my uniform,” she said one evening, standing up from the couch and washing her hands. “Come, come and help me bring my old box down from the cupboard in my room, the uniform is still inside I am sure.”
I followed her through the hallways to her room, fascinated that this woman had finished this program a whole ten years ago! You didn’t pass down your height, father, so I couldn’t reach the box. When I turned back to shrug and make a joke about it, she had dropped her orange kampala gown to the ground and was looking steadily in my eyes.
Sir, if you think your son sleeping with an older married woman is the height of atrocity, I advise you to stop reading. You have taught me all my life to exalt my spirit over my flesh, that my flesh was to perish for me to be exalted, but when Faiza took me inside her, I was grateful I had a body.
Your opinion means nothing now. And besides, I didn’t try to take the wife from her family. Faiza even stopped talking to me two weeks after, she accused me of trying to tell her how to be a mother. This is what happened, though I am not trying to explain myself to you.
The Hamzas had this family friend who visited sometimes, and I noticed Baby Amira would get uncomfortable. While he waited in the living room for her parents, she would get distracted from her subtractions. I felt the need to make sure I waited until Faiza returned from work before leaving. One day he couldn’t wait for Faiza and as he left, he said something like, You won’t come and play with your uncle again because of lesson teacher to Baby Amira in Hausa. I know he didn’t expect me to understand the language. I don’t look “Muslim,” as they say. I told Faiza as she tried to undress me that evening, and she froze.
“Please say what you want to say and stop beating around the bush.”
I told her to please take Baby Amira to see a child psychiatrist, just to be safe, but Faiza slapped me before I could finish my sentence.
“So, you think I am a bad mother? You can take care of my child better than me? Get out!”
I got out, head spinning and swore never to set foot in that house again. I was not its resident guardian angel. God was omnipresent and omniscient, right? Then he could protect at least one child from a pedophile, if that was the case?
The city started opening up again, so I threw myself into it. The ministry I had been deployed to was still unsure about its operations, so I found a high school where I could teach. It was very strange returning to the work week; Monday became Monday again and Friday became Friday. There were Sundays when I raced frantically on my bike to teach, then the security guard would laugh at me. I didn’t like cycling anymore, too many people everywhere, too much time to cover distances I used to cover in minutes. I started taking the bus. The sun was often low when I got home and this served me well, better to be squeezed in a bus than on my bed thinking of Faiza.
One night I returned to see the outline of a man sitting in a car parked in front of my gate. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I knew it was Mr. Hamza, Faiza’s husband. I just knew it. I acted like I didn’t know.
I walked past him into the compound. In my apartment, I finally exhaled. Maybe I was imagining things.
Knock knock.
I do not have friends in this city, yet I walked to the door.
It was Mr. Hamza. All that could come out of my mouth was, “Excuse me sir, do you know me?”
“No one meets my girls unless I know them,” he said. He went on to recite my call-up number to my face and my mouth went dry. “I know everything about any man that crosses paths with my family.”
When he looked up, his eyes were moist.
“Thank you for the alarm you raised,” he said. “Baby Amira has been checked and nothing has happened…yet. The animal has this evil reputation for abusing children, that is why his company sent him here to Kaduna. If not for your intervention…”
I told him I didn’t know what to say, and he said he wanted me to resume teaching Amira. I told him I taught at a high school now, and he said he would increase my fees by 30 percent. Baby Amira was happier with me in the house, she considered me a big brother. What he wanted to pay was close to my salary at the public school I taught so I said fuck it and said yes Mr. Hamza.
I started teaching Baby Amira again. I was gentler this time, having taught teenagers. Just repeated things she had been taught in school that day. School for children had resumed, just that they closed at noon. The assigned driver picked her up from school then picked me up at mine and took us to their home.
I never saw Faiza again. She had switched work hours with her husband at the radio station; it was Mr. Hamza who relieved me from watching/babysitting Baby Amira, which I came to realize was what I was really hired for. Sometimes I considered reading some Bible stories to her when her parents were not around, just the children’s stories, parts like Joseph and his coat of many colors. I knew you would have loved that, I knew what you think of people who are of any religion but Christianity. You always wanted me to seize every moment I could to evangelize.
Just before the rainy season began, I waited for the driver by the gate of the school where I taught. He didn’t come. For some reason, I thought Faiza had convinced Mr. Hamza to do away with me. That would have been sad, meeting him made me realize I didn’t hate him the way I thought I would. I got a text from him, asking me to go to their house and wait for him, something had happened.
Maybe this was it, maybe he finally found out about me and Faiza. Oh God, what if something worse had happened? We never used condoms; she had faith in her contraceptive pills. For one fleeting second, I considered fleeing back to you, father. Then I steeled myself. Coming to this city was me leaning into chaos in the first place. I looked fate in the eye, and said, “Bring it on.”
I hailed a tricycle and paid for the three seats. The route unfolded differently, the rider plied inroads and untarred paths buses and cars wouldn’t take.
In no time I was at the Hamzas’ gate. I knocked. The security man let me in after ensuring I used the sanitizer at his desk. I asked about Baby Amira, and I was told to wait, that Mr. Hamza would come and explain. I started to worry again. Maybe this wasn’t about me. Maybe this was about Baby Amira. Had the Badaki man kidnapped her? When Mr. Hamza returned from wherever he was, his eyes were red. I didn’t have the patience to be polite. What was going on! When he spoke, his voice was hoarse. Baby Amira was sick, coronavirus.
“I thought scientists said the disease couldn’t affect children?”
Tears fell from his eyes
“I don’t know what to do.”
Watching this adult man cry shifted the ground under me. I always thought of Mr. Hamza as this regal prince, valiantly protecting his family. To see him powerless like this…he was about to sink to the nearest chair and I rushed to grab him by the forearms. I looked him in the eye and told him as solemnly as I could. “Nothing will happen to her.”
He looked at me and smiled a sad smile. “Baby likes you so much,” he said. “She keeps asking when will Teacher Corper come and teach me. She doesn’t understand that this disease doesn’t allow hospital visits.”
At this point, I could feel my own eyes brimming with tears. I said, “God will not allow anything to happen to your child. Your daughter will come home healthy Baba Amira.”
He opened his arms and pulled me into a huge hug. He was so tall and the smell of his sweat and tobacco-chocolate perfume made me feel confused and safe at the same time. I hugged him back and hoped he wouldn’t let go of me, just yet.
He kept saying, “you are a good man, you’re a good man.”
And his bass voice made me feel the beginnings of something in my trousers. I jumped back in fright, but he gently pulled me back into his arms, looking into my eyes and whispering, “It’s okay, it’s okay.”
Later that night, as I lay naked under his blanket, he apologized on behalf of his wife.
“She takes things to heart. What you said made her think she was a bad mother. I know how close you two were, so I apologize for her.”
Exactly how close did he know we were? I would never know this answer.
It would disgust you to know I ended up in his bed again and again. I told myself that he was the closest I could get to Faiza, it was the same bed after all, but I knew even then that I was lying to myself, I wanted him as much as I wanted her and just being in this house which held their presence, made me feel safe.
He never let me leave the house without having some tea. Amira healed and we became a happy family again. I should have known my time with him and Baby Amira was coming to an end when he asked for my CV. He edited it into more than I thought I was, so my accomplishments shone through. We had long conversations about how to present myself to potential employers, how to speak confidently to billionaires. He met them regularly at his second job, and our conversation never came around to what the work was. After a mock interview one day, where he played the interviewee, using my talking style to highlight my strengths, I marveled at him.
Two weeks later, I received a text asking me not to come because they were traveling. I asked when they would come back but I received no reply. I used the Baby Amira’s lesson hours to cycle through town, but it wasn’t the same. The world of spidery streets with birds chirping loudly in high trees that had embraced me was gone. People were everywhere now, wearing masks less and less. There were rumors of an antiviral vaccine that would be released by year end. One day, the world might be safe again.
On the fifth day of their absence, I got a payment quadruple what I was paid regularly to tutor Baby Amira from Mr. Hamza. I told the principal of the school I was teaching that I had a sore throat, so she let me go home immediately. I took a tricycle straight to the Hamzas. The security told me the family had moved to Dubai or India, he wasn’t sure. His face wore pity for me. A new family was moving in by the following week, he assured me. They had kids, so maybe I could get a job tutoring them.
I couldn’t breathe. “I forgot my iphone charger,” I begged. “Allow me to check their parlor.”
The security man unlocked the gate, letting me in. He pushed the door to the living room, and it creaked like no one had lived here for years. Everything had been scraped off, the furniture, everything. Just the milk paint on the wall.
I squeezed my eyes and tried to summon Faiza’s Jasmine scent and Mr. Hamza’s chocolatey tobacco. Maybe if I stepped into the kitchen or better yet into their bedroom, their cupboard, the bed. I stopped myself. What was I doing here? What did I hope to find in the empty bed of a married couple? I laughed a little laugh; the security man who had followed me joined and asked me what we were laughing at.
“You go take the coronavirus vaccine when e commot?” I asked him instead. He shrugged, and said maybe. The man said he might do it, in case Mr. Hamza came back to take him to be his security man in whichever country he had traveled to. He had heard you couldn’t travel without the vaccine, and the Hamza family had gotten it from a secret hospital. I went home to cry. I couldn’t. I am the man you made.
I have taken my vaccine; I know how you and the church feel about vaccines. I started this letter in anger, but it has become so much more, it has reminded me of the brief happiness I found in Kaduna. My time in this city has come to an end. Maybe I’ll travel to London since the borders have been reopened. Maybe I’ll move to Ibadan, it is huge but peaceful. Or maybe I’ll even come back to Lagos. You will never find me; the city is too big. I know Mummy would have wanted us to reconcile, but I know you, that is not what you want. I am just another tribulation for you to conquer, or maybe I am your prodigal son and you are waiting for me to come back to you.
I can see it in my mind, it would happen on a Sunday service in the mega church. I would be paraded in front of the church elders. Unlike the father in the parable you haven’t worried for my well being, and there will be no tears of joy at my return. It would just be another moment of glory for you, another conquering and I won’t give you that satisfaction. I won’t even give you this letter.
I started writing this long epistle because there is a part of me that hasn’t left secondary school, a boy who still writes letters you will never reply to. I now know all those letters were for me. Even this one. I left Lagos and stayed in Kaduna throughout the lockdown because I thought I wanted to be alone. I was just lying to myself. I left because I needed to be with good people. You might be disgusted with this family, but they are good people, saints.
You, sir, are not a good person, perhaps this is what I am trying to say.
Your Vagabond Son
TJ Benson is a writer and visual artist working in the urgency of transit, utopia, spirituality, intimacies and the unconscious self. He has been published in several anthologies, more recently in the Johns Hopkins Review and he has taught surrealism workshops for Lolwe, SSDA Inkubator & other programs. He has completed fellowships & residencies at the University of Iowa, Moniack Mhor Scotland and Art Omi New York and published three books of fiction.