The children in Adegoke compound always knew which ones were different.
It was not something the adults taught them. The adults, in fact, taught the opposite: that all children were equal in God's sight, that this sort of talk was backward, that these were things best left to people with too much time and insufficient education. The adults held these sensible positions right up until something happened that made sensible positions untenable, and then they went very quietly to see the right people about it.
The children, unburdened by the responsibility of sensible positions, simply knew.
Taiwo was Abiku. Everyone in the compound knew it, including her parents, though they spoke of it only in the oblique terms available to people who have decided not to believe something they believe absolutely. Mama Taiwo called her daughter "a special child." Baba Taiwo said she was "going through phases." What they meant was: this was the third time. They had begun to recognize the signs.
The signs were specific. They always were.
First came the appetite—not hunger exactly, but a quality of attention toward food that stopped just short of eating. Taiwo would stand in the kitchen doorway watching her mother cook with an expression of concentrated interest, would accept whatever was placed before her, would take one deliberate bite and then look at the meal as if it had failed a test whose criteria she had not disclosed.
Then came the questions about where they had gone, the other children. The ones who had been Taiwo's friends the last time. The compound had changed in the interval—new families, new children, old ones grown and moved away. Taiwo would ask about them by name, using names she had no way of knowing, and then catch herself and go very quiet.
Then came the singing.
Mama Taiwo heard it for the first time on a Wednesday morning in early October, when the harmattan was beginning to announce itself in the dryness of the air. She was in the back room folding laundry when the sound came through the window—high, threading, a melody that moved in intervals she could not quite follow, that shifted pitch in the moments when she was certain she had almost grasped the pattern.
She set down the laundry and went to the window.
Taiwo was in the courtyard, alone, sitting cross-legged on the ground with her face turned toward the old mango tree. Eight years old. Sitting with the stillness of someone much older, her hands open in her lap, her eyes half-closed. Singing.
The tree was reacting.
That was the only word Mama Taiwo had for it, afterward: the tree was reacting. Leaves turning though there was no wind. The nearest branches rotating slowly clockwise, as if something in the wood was trying to orient itself toward the sound. The tree was very old. It had been there before the compound was built.
Taiwo sang for eleven minutes. Mama Taiwo counted. She did not move from the window, did not call out, did not interrupt. The interrupting was something she could not have explained afterward, except to say that it had felt like something that would cost her.
When the singing stopped, Taiwo opened her eyes, looked directly up at her mother in the window—directly, without searching, as if she had known all along where her mother was standing—and said, quietly and without particular inflection: "They're almost here."
"Who?" Mama Taiwo said.
But Taiwo had already turned back to the tree.