Dirt [UNFINISHED]
My feet are hovering at a right angle over the wet sand. I am one years old, and my mother gently but firmly pressed my feet into the sand, but my one year old strength resisted the gritty substance.
I refused to participate in this rite of passage for toddlers. My mother had to be an intermediary.
Other things were like that too. While other children were comfortable with sticky fingers from an unwrapped Honey Bun, or juice dribbled on the chin, or snot running from noses, if a drop of frosting hit my pinky finger I ran to the closest running water and soap to wash it off.
I held my hands, in a crooked formation, as far away from my clothing, my other untarnished skin until I could remove the wet stickiness.
The adults laughed at my contorted hands, my face mired in disgust.
You know she can't have anything on her hands! Get her to water quickly! They teased, while I was embarrassed simultaneously at the intrusion of substance on my fingers, and the necessity to remove it as soon as possible.
Why is she like this? Recalling the sand incident, even when she was a baby she didn’t want sand on her feet!
The sand wasn’t about the sand. The frosting wasn't the frosting.
It was this (interference? violation? questioning?) of how clean, or dirty I wanted to be. It was my need to be private with what was happening with my body, and my need for perfection.
It got worse after a trip to Nigeria when I was nine.
We prepared for the trip for weeks. We got vaccinated against malaria and yellow fever, nervous when the doctor poked the shot in my glute. My father took us to get passport pictures at the local Kinkos, and our passports appeared magically in a few weeks. My mother shopped for sundries, stuffing our carry-ons with crossword puzzles, coloring books and small electronic games where the batteries didn’t last. They prepped us for the plane ride itself. How does it feel to fly? I asked my father. It goes fast, like a car.
When my ears adjusted to the dropping plane pressure, the flight attendant showed me how to pop my ears by pinching my nose and making a dizzy Gillespie face.
I stood next to a fellow passenger on the flight from Amsterdam to Lagos, and he turned to me. Are you going home? Home is what my father always called Nigeria. It was home for me too. I said yes.
He said, I’m going home.
The green treetops grew bigger as we landed, closer to the concrete tarmac. As a second generation Nigerian in the 90s, I had two images of Africa. One the safaris, the starving, swollen-bellied children, topless women carrying plantains, pastries and palm leaves on their heads. The other was my families’ image, the parties full of jollof rice and Sunny Ade and giant geles, our home filled with art: masks, canes, baskets that my father collected and delivered to our home. Nigeria was Saturday morning when I woke up to the smell of fried plantain sitting in grease and paper towels on the stove, and my father grabbing our hands to dance to the old Prince Nico Mbarga song “Sweet Mother I never forget you, for dey suffer wey you suffer for me yeah”. Nigeria was my industrious and meticulous father, who got up early every day, ironed his shirts and pants because he had to be neat, sprayed cologne on before fixing our lunches, and headed out to work before 7 am.
When we landed in Lagos, the passengers all clapped. Our coming home was complete.
We stayed in Lagos, and after about ten days, we travelled to Calabar to stay with another cousin in their white, six bedroom, five bathroom home. My little sister and I had a room to ourselves. I clutched my Brown skinned, afroed cabbage patch doll, which is got new for the previous Christmas.
The house was without running water, however. Outside, there was a spigot. One of the house girls filled a bucket with water. They placed it on the stove next to the boiling chicken for dinner, cutting through the shredded vegetables and placed it on a stove to boil and poured into the same bucket and carried it to our bathroom for our (presumably) daily bath.
Because of the steps, it was necessary for someone to be told that it was time for our bath to prepare the hot water. There was no sneaking off quietly in the bathroom to have a secret, private session. The whole house knew when I bathed.
It was inconvenient. So, I may have skipped a few. Not uncommon for small children, at least where I grew up/how I was raised. But since someone had to prepare our bath daily, my cousins took notice.
After a few days of monitoring the missed baths, they inquired, are you going to bathe today?
No? I don’t need one. I did it yesterday.
If you don’t bathe you are dirty (pronounced DE-TY). That’s what my cousin said in response. In addition to the cumbersome bathing practice, there was one night I went to bathe with the freshly drawn and warmed on the stove water, and there was a giant slug in the bottom of the tub. I stepped away from the tub, didn’t tell my parents, and went to bed.
After the first comment, my cousins paid closer attention to the little time I was spending in the bathroom presumably bathing. They would walk past me and plug their nose up in anticipation of the smell emanating from my body. They scared me into my compulsive showering.
They were teasing, I knew intuitively. We bathed only once every other day, they bathed daily. I wasn’t used to not having running water and washing from a bucket, so I decided not to bother.
As we left for home after that first trip to Nigeria, I discovered my cousins swiped my brown, Afroed cabbage patch doll. They were pranksters. That’s why they were fixated on my bathing.
On the return from Nigeria, I was obsessed with being clean. I took two showers a day, one in the morning, one at night, to ensure that no one could turn their nose at me. My mom always asked, why are you taking so many showers? Just her noticing was embarrassing; I’d rather not talk about what I’m doing in the bathroom with anyone. But my mom watched me like a hawk, recalling the sand and the frosting, worried that my cousins’ words affected me negatively.
I was home from college for the summer and a group of college boys lived next door, and I visited them frequently. One day, I was about to go next door and I showered quickly.
Why are you taking another shower? You showered this morning?
I am sure she thought I was going over there to have sex. I wasn’t. I was just a lonely kid excited to have people my age to hang with, since my high school friends were in the respective college towns and I was stuck at home.
My shower practices opened up a bunch of assumptions about my evening habits. I could wash the evidence of them off, but even the act of bathing revealed what I had done. I just wanted to feel confident while I sat on the lumpy couch of a college boys, surrounded by miscellaneous roommates and cheap beer.
I wanted to hide whatever it was I was doing, because I didn’t want to be watched. I needed my independence. She wanted me to get dirty as a child if that meant I was letting loose and having fun, and she wanted me to remain unclean if I was planning to engage men sexually and in her mind, prematurely. As a child I was prematurely meticulous about the messes I was going to make, and as an older teenager, I knew she was watching me closely to see what mess I made, or wanted to make.
[show how you be in your own little world until someone points it out then you feel exposed. don’t like being on display, being raw, being vulnerable. sometimes people don’t need to be in your business. but is privacy really privacy when people can see you habits? clearly right there on display]
As a child, people monitored when I got dirty, and when I got clean. My agency was limited, and I needed to break free.
I always knew how I wanted to feel, the textures I wanted on my skin. I just wanted everyone to leave me alone about it.