I grew up in a house that entertained more silence than laughter. As a kid, I stayed at my grandmother's place at Ogui. As I grew older, I realized the problem wasn't her house, it was the family that lived inside. I think the first time I heard someone mention this was when I was around twelve.
My uncle had just been buried. He was only thirty-seven when cardiac arrest took him to the grave. At the wake, I heard my aunt whisper to another relative, “It's the curse again.” Hearing that word “curse” from her put me frightened me.
When I asked my mother later about it, she dismissed it at first.
“People like to talk nonsense when they don't understand something,” she said, folding the black dress she had worn from the funeral.
During my teenage years, I noticed that pattern. It's as if every generation of our family was marked. My grandmother's brother had drowned mysteriously in a river; two cousins died at separate car accidents within months of each other; an aunt lost her life to a disease the doctor couldn't even name. They tried explaining it but was always unable to finish it.
Despite all these, life went on. We celebrated birthdays, children were born, weddings took place. In the midst of all these laughter, we couldn't deny the fact that we accommodated fear within us.
My father claimed to never believe in it. He was a practical man. Maybe this was due to the fact that he was an engineer, so this made him trust more on calculations , blueprints and things he could measure.
“There’s no curse,” he would normally say with all confidence. “There are coincidences, there are bad choices, there's poor health. That's all.”
He died the year I turned twenty-three. A road accident on a hide way he had driven more than hundred times before. The police said it was a brake failure. My relatives did not say a word.
After his death, I tried to escape from it. I moved to Abuja, took a job in a publishing house. I told myself if I made different choices, lived in a different place, surrounded myself with different people, I'd be safe.
But somehow, the family jinx still caught up with me.
Two years after I left, my cousin Ifeoma called me on the phone, crying. Her younger brother had collapsed during a football game at the university. Another “sudden” death.
“I hope you see it now,” she sobbed on the phone. “It is never going to end.”
I wanted to comfort her but I truly didn't know what to say. What if she was right?
Then, there came a day I was cleaning out my grandmother's room after she passed. I came across a box with a journal in it. The handwriting inside belonged to her father, my great-grandfather.
Inside the journal, he wrote about strange happenings like how lifestock kept disappearing mysteriously, how his brother was found foaming at the mouth after a quarrel in the village, how his children would wake up screaming at night.
The part that scared me the most was the part that read:
>“The priest warned me not to take it. But the land was looking too fertile for me to just let it go to waste. I agreed to the terms. All I was thinking of that moment was wealth. Now, I realize that blood was the price I payed for abundance.
I couldn't believe my eyes. Was this the root of our problems? Some ancient bargain struck before any of us were born?
For weeks I couldn't sleep. All I kept thinking about was what I had read in that journal. I had heard of stories like this but I thought they were just mere stories, I didn't believe such really happens.
I didn't tell my mother about the journal. She was already too old to put up which such kind of news. Bringing such knowledge to her could really destabilize her and that was the last thing I needed for her. But I kept it with me, hidden in a drawer in my apartment. Some nights I'd read the pages again, hoping for some clue about how to break it. But I didn't see anything.
Even as I write this now, I don't know if there is a way out. I don't know if we are cursed or if tragedy likes to repeat itself in families. I don't know if my grandfather's bargain was real or that was what he presumed to be the reason for his endless losses.
I couldn't ignore the fear reading the journal had resulted to. But there was this belief I had, the belief that whatever bargain that was made ends with me as far as I didn't agree to it.
