The code name I gave my mother was the Black Mamba, because we’d just learned about the snakes in school. The movie the teacher showed us that day featured a seven-foot-long snake that looked like a slender woman in a skintight leather dress, slithering across the Sahara in pursuit of a bush squirrel.
In my journal, the night we learned about the snakes, I wrote:
Dear God,
The Black Mamba has been really mean to me lately. Yesterday she told me that if I didn’t clean my room no one would want to marry me.
My brother, Nana, was code-named Buzz. I don’t remember why now. In the first few years of my journal keeping, Buzz was my hero:
Dear God,
Buzz ran after the ice cream truck today. He bought a firecracker popsicle for himself and a Flintstones pushpop for me.
Or:
Dear God,
At the rec center today, none of the other kids wanted to be my partner for the three-legged race because they said I was too little, but then Buzz came over and he said that he would do it! And guess what? We won and I got a trophy.
Sometimes he annoyed me, but back then, his offenses were innocuous, trivial.
Dear God,
Buzz keeps coming into my room without knocking! I can’t stand him!
My mother slept all day and all night, every day, every night. She was immovable. Whenever I could, I would try to convince her to eat something. I’d taken to making koko, my favorite childhood meal. I’d had to go to three different stores to find the right kind of millet, the right kind of corn husks, the right peanuts to sprinkle on top. I hoped the porridge would go down thoughtlessly. I’d leave a bowl of it by her bedside in the morning before I went to work, and when I returned the top layer would be covered in film; the layer underneath that hardened so that when I scraped it into the sink I felt the effort of it.
My mother’s back was always turned to me. It was like she had an internal sensor for when I’d be entering the room to deliver the koko. I could picture the movie montage of us, the days spelled out at the bottom of the screen, my outfits changing, our actions the same.
After about five days of this, I entered the room and my mother was awake and facing me.
“Gifty,” she said as I set the bowl of koko down. “Do you still pray?”
It would have been kinder to lie, but I wasn’t kind anymore. Maybe I never had been. I vaguely remembered a childhood kindness, but maybe I was conflating innocence and kindness. I felt so little continuity between who I was as a young child and who I was now that it seemed pointless to even consider showing my mother something like mercy. Would I have been merciful when I was a child?
“No,” I answered.
When I was a child I prayed. I studied my Bible and kept a journal with letters to God. I was a paranoid journal keeper, so I made code names for all the people in my life whom I wanted God to punish.