Everyone in Umueze knew that Mama Chidinma had a gift.
It wasn't the kind the village pastor dispensed every Sunday morning, pressing his sweaty palms against the villagers' foreheads and screaming "receive!" Blowing his stinking breath into their faces.
No. Mama Chidinma's gift was quieter than that. In fact, older than the pastor. It was the kind of gift that lived behind the eyes and moved like groundwater — slow, invisible, unstoppable. Searching hearts and recognizing lies.
It was the kind that always knew when someone was telling the truth.
As a girl, her own mother had caught her stealing eggs from the kitchen. Since then, she couldn't forget that look on her mother's face that day. It had burned itself into her memory like a scar. It was a look that told that her mother already knew everything but was simply waiting for her to say it. Somehow that gift had passed from her mother to her like an inheritance she never asked for.
By the time Mama Chidinma was of age and had her own family, her gift had become a legend. You dare not bring a crooked story to her doorstep. She would offer you a seat, pour you water from her clay pot, and listen to every word with her hands folded in her lap. Then just one steady look at you would shift everything and have you shaking.
Then she would say, "Now tell me what actually happened." Just like that, you'd spill the beans. It wasn't magic. It was like a superpower.
Her husband, Ifeanyi, had learned this the hard way when he hid a second wife in Aba for three years. Her fellow traders at the market had learned not to cheat her. Even the local government chairman, who arrived one election season to campaign with bags of rice and a rehearsed smile, had looked at her, immediately collected his rice, and left without finishing his lie-filled manifesto.
She was a proud woman. Proud of all her accomplishments and the reputation she has built. Although none of them could be compared to the pride she had in her son Tobenna. He was her only child. An overgrown teenage boy. Tall, broad-shouldered, with the exact sharp eyes that melted hearts just like his father's. Unlike her other kids, she made sure Tobenna never lacked. She worked through rain and sunny days, just to make sure of that. Tobenna was like an investment to her and she couldn't wait to reap her reward. band her reward. Her proof that her sufferings in giving birth to a child finally had a purpose.
Little did she know that Tobenna had a habit of bullying other boys around him. And he was notorious at it.
His favorite victim was the village orphan named Chukwuemeka.
A tiny-stature boy quiet as dawn, who lived alone in the small mud house his parents had left behind since he was eleven. Nobody knew if he had relatives. He only surviby ved doing labour works for the villagers. Life taught him harshly how to move like a man who didn't want to take up too much space.
His only friend was Nnamdi, another orphan who was two years younger; they had grown up through poverty and were bound by the understanding that the world had placed them in the same category and they might as well face it together. They both spent Christmas together.
Nobody paid much attention to Chukwuemeka and Nnamdi, which was perhaps why Tobenna and his friends chose him as their victim.
Then one Tuesday afternoon at the village stream. Tobenna and three of his mischievous friends ran into Chukwuemeka and Nnamdi. Chukwuemeka had greeted them quietly and kept his eyes down the way he always did around boys like Tobenna.
Yet something about that irritated Tobenna. He began taunting and shoving Chukwuemeka around until it became something uglier. By the time it was over Chukwuemeka was face down at the edge of the stream, bleeding from his head. Scared that he was dead Tobenna and his friends scattered into the bush.
By evening Chukwuemeka was found by the village security. He was admitted at the General Hospital in Umueze,where he was in a coma.
This ignited a fire in Umueze. The angry mob moved through the street like a living ants in line, women wailing, men shouting, eyes filled with anger. They wanted justice to have a face.
Tobenna and his friends had pointed at Nnamdi, Chukwuemeka's only friend. All because he had no one to speak for him. No one to pound the table on his behalf.
Since Tobenna was Mama Chidinma's son, the ignorant villagers believed that he was telling the truth. Besides, the security men had caught him crying beside Chukwuemeka's body by the stream when they rescued him.
Nnamdi swore on his dead mother's grave. He swore on the God he barely believed in anymore. He had no hand in Chukwuemeka's predicament. He called out Tobenna and his friends. But nobody listened.
Mama Chidinma on the other hand had sat her son down in her parlour with the lights off one night.
"Sit down," she said.
Tobenna sat.
"Did you do it?" She had asked.
Tobenna had cooked up a story carefully, detailed, almost convincing about how he had been home all afternoon. Even asked his mother to ask the neighbours.
Mama Chidinma sat very still and listened to every word. But as she looked at the face of the boy she had bled for, prayed for, starved for. She knew the way she always knew, completely and without mercy.
The silence between them stretched for seconds. Then she looked away in pain.
"Go to your room! And don't discuss this with anyone."
The next morning she stood before the angry mob who had gathered in her compound to know the truth and accused Nnamdi.
"He has always been trouble," she said, her voice carrying the full weight of her sixty-one years catching lies and an integrity that nobody had ever questioned. "He has been lying."
Without arguing, the crowd believed her. Of course it was what they had done for years.
Nnamdi was about to be taken away that afternoon. When the village drunk, a wiry old man named Ohaeri who smelled of ogogoro from morning to night and slept most afternoons under the udala tree near the stream, marched his way to the middle of the mob and began to shout.
"It's a lie. The human lie detector has malfunctioned today." He yelled. He had seen everything.
The mob had paid him no attention at first. They laughed. Someone threw tantrums at him. Accusing him of being drunk. But Ohaeri was not drunk that morning. His eyes were clear and his voice was steady.
"Tobenna! Tobenna! Tobenna!" He called Tobenna's name in front of everyone. "Tobenna is guilty. I can show you all." he said. "Follow me to prove it" he turned and walked out of the compound "Come. I will show you!" He continued yelling.
And for the first time, the people obeyed him. Although it was mostly out of curiosity. Ohaeri walked directly to the river, the exact spot where the water reeds grew thick. The ground was still visible with footprints that showed struggling. He crouched down and pointed and something half buried in the dark mud.
Catching the morning sun was a thin golden bangle.
The crowd went quiet. Everyone knew that bangle. It was a gift from the king to Mama Chidinma who had gifted it to her son Tobenna. Tobenna had worn it for years everyday. Someone bent over and picked it up from the mud.
The village security men concurred that that was the exact spot they had picked Chukwuemeka up from. The silence that fell over Umueze that afternoon was a different kind of silence. Not the silence of confusion. The silence that explained everything before it arrived.
Mama Chidinma was dumbfounded when the mob returned to get house that morning with the bangle.
She didn't utter a word.
There was nothing left to say. The proof was there already.
She handed Tobenna over to them. And the security men whisked him away.
Mama Chidinma on the other hand was punished. Not with a fine or prison. They simply stopped believing her. Like a fire that dies gradually. The knocks on her door stopped coming. The neighbours who had brought their disputes and their suspicious husbands and their wayward children found other doors to knock on. When she spoke at gatherings people never listened again.
The reputation she had spent sixty-one years building was dismantled completely by one reckless attack at the stream by her own source of pride.
