Iya Promise

Nobody knew her real name.

To everybody on Ilaje road, she was just Iya Promise, the abacha woman. The one whose hips moved like a song even when no music was playing. The one whose smile arrived before she did, bright and wide, the kind of smile that made you feel the morning was personally delivering something good.

Every day without fail, she would tie her wrapper, balance her tray, and take that road like it belonged to her. And the moment the market women saw her turning the corner. B

efore she even reached them, they would start. Clapping. Stomping. Singing her song back to her.

Abacha-o! Abacha! Come buy from me! Sweet for your tongue, but the fire was free

She would laugh and swing her hips wider and the whole street would fill up with noise and joy, the kind that makes strangers stop and smile without knowing why.

What they did not know was that she had written that song herself. At night. Alone. When Promise was asleep and the room was quiet enough for the memories to come back.

She had been rich once.

Not comfortable-rich. Rich rich. The kind of family with a compound in Ikoyi, a generator that never rested, and aunties who wore aso-oke to other people’s children’s birthdays just to be seen. She had been soft then, soft hands, soft bed, soft future all laid out before her like a cloth that had never been worn.

She was seventeen when her uncle came into her room.

She would not think about the details. Even now, fifteen years later, her mind would simply go white when it reached that part of the memory, like a page torn from a book. What she remembered was afterwards, the cold floor, the silence of the house, the way the ceiling fan turned and turned and turned as if nothing had happened in the world.

She went to her aunt the next morning. She sat across from her at the breakfast table, hands folded, and told her everything in a voice so steady she surprised herself.

Her aunt looked at her for a long time.

Then she said, “You must have been dreaming.”

And reached for her tea.

She left that same week. No bag. No money. Just the dress on her back and something small and frightening beginning inside her body that she would not understand for another month.

She ended up in a single room in Ilaje, in a compound full of people who asked no questions because they had their own questions they were running from. An old woman named Mama Chioma lived next door. She did not ask where the girl came from or why her eyes looked like someone had wrung them dry. She just taught her how to make abacha.

Soak the cassava. Leave it. Let it soften on its own. You cannot rush it.

She learned to shred it thin. To rinse away the bitterness with patient water. To build the dish back up — ugba, palm oil, seasoning, crayfish — layer by careful layer, until something that started as a hard buried root became something people would cross the street to buy.

She thought about that a lot.

When Promise was born, small, loud, furious at the world from the very first breath, she held her in that tiny room and made a promise back. I will build something. From whatever this is. I will build.

The song came slowly, the way all true things do.

It started as something she hummed while she worked in the early mornings, grinding and mixing, Promise strapped to her back. Words began to attach themselves to the melody. At first she did not realise what she was saying. Then one morning she stopped and listened to herself and laughed, a short, quiet laugh, because it was all there. Everything. Hidden inside a hawker’s jingle like a letter folded into the lining of a coat.

I soak it in sorrow, I spice it with sense, What enter by force, I turn am to pence.

She carried her tray and her child since day.

She carried everything since day.

On Ilaje road, nobody ever heard it that way. To them it was just a happy song, the kind you forget you are singing until you realise you have been singing it for three hours. They loved her for it. They loved her the way people love someone who makes the morning easier without asking anything in return.

They did not know that “the fire was free” was not about cooking.

They did not know that “come buy from me” was a girl screaming into a room that had stayed silent for fifteen years, finally finding a way to be heard.

They did not know that every morning when she swung her hips down that road and threw that bright smile to the world, she was not performing joy.

She was choosing it.

Over and over and over again, against everything that had tried to take it from her.

Iya Promise dey come-o, make way, make way. She carry her tray and her child since day. Nobody know but God dey, ehen. And the abacha sweet o come buy again.

They would clap. She would laugh. Promise would run out from behind the stall, gap-toothed and eight years old, and jump onto her mother’s back, and Iya Promise would stagger forward dramatically and the whole street would roar.

And if sometimes, just for a second, something moved across her face that was not quite a smile, something older, and heavier, that lived just beneath the brightness like a stone beneath clear water, nobody noticed.

Or maybe they did, and they loved her too much to say.

SONG

Abacha-o! Abacha! Come buy from me!

Sweet for your tongue, but the fire was free

I soak it in sorrow, I spice it with sense

What enter by force, I turn am to pence!

Iya Promise dey come-o, make way, make way.

She carry her tray and her child since day.

Nobody know but God dey, ehen.

And the abacha sweet o come buy again.