Chapter IX
IX
The school Ebun chose had a policy that all the girls were required to cut their hair.
She expected resistance from Eniiyi. Eniiyi’s hair, when stretched, reached her mid-back.
But her daughter agreed to being shorn of her glory as if it were nothing, as if she had been waiting for the opportunity all along. And it was left to Ebun to do it.
Each day, Eniiyi would come to her. “Are we cutting it today?”
And each day, Ebun couldn’t quite bring herself to do it. “Not today, maybe tomorrow.”
And the next day, on and on, until September 13 was only a week away. Ebun knew her child; if she didn’t act soon, her daughter would take matters into her own hands and end up looking like a patchwork doll. So one early morning, she opened Eniiyi’s bedroom door and beckoned to her.
“Oya, let’s do it.” She didn’t have to say what “it” was. Eniiyi sprang out of bed.
She sat her daughter in the bathroom they shared and smoothed a towel over her shoulders.
She ran her hand one more time through Eniiyi’s hair, and then she lifted the hair up, using a crab to hold it in place.
Eniiyi’s birthmark was there on the back of her neck, brighter than ever against her otherwise dark skin—the detail Ebun had used time and time again to reassure herself that Eniiyi was her own person; but it was easy to forget its existence, hidden as it was beneath her daughter’s voluminous hair.
She reached for the scissors. Even as she started cutting, her daughter did not flinch. Eniiyi seemed to be shedding the burden of living with her grandmothers and mother, the burden of living the life of another, and the burden of carrying all their hopes and fears.
As her daughter’s tightly coiled locks fell to the ground, so did Ebun’s tears.