Ogechi Misspelled

Block Nine

We called it Block Nine because that was its number on the district map. Some of the kids in Block Twelve called their section Little Garden, and a group in Block Six had painted a mural of a sun on the perimeter wall and called themselves Sunrise Corridor, but we never named ours anything. Block Nine. You could love it or not.

I loved it.

The block was eleven buildings around a courtyard that had once been a parking lot. You could still see the painted lines under the patchy grass and packed dirt, where Mrs. Adaeze grew tomatoes in plastic buckets and where the little kids played a game that was half soccer and half argument. The buildings were four stories, brown brick, identical except for what people had done to the balconies. Bisi’s family hung laundry on theirs — sheets and wrappers and school uniforms drying in the wind like a country’s worth of flags. Yusuf’s grandmother had plants on every surface, so many that her balcony sagged and his father had reinforced it with lumber taken from somewhere nobody discussed.

The perimeter wall ran along the north and east sides. The south and west opened onto the avenue, where the transit line ran, and where the Wellness Center stood, white and clean and air-conditioned. You could see the wall from almost anywhere in the courtyard if you looked up, but you learned not to look up.

Ogechi, Which Means God’s Gift

My name is Ogechi Nwankwo, and on every form the district has ever sent, it says Ogech Nwanko. Two letters wrong, three if you count the missing i. My mother corrected it five times. She went to the Wellness Center with my birth certificate and stood at the intake window and spelled it out: O-G-E-C-H-I. The woman behind the glass typed something and said it would be updated.

It was not updated.

At school — we called it school, though the sign outside said Youth Development Facility — my name on the roster was Ogech N. I answered to it. Everyone answered to whatever the roster said. Chiamaka became Chiamka. Oluwaseun became O. Seun. Nneka became Neka, which sounded like a different person entirely.

My mother stopped going to the Wellness Center about the name. She just started using it more at home. Ogechi, come eat. Ogechi, your shirt is inside out. Ogechi, what are you writing in that notebook?

She said it like she was polishing it.

Bisi Does Hair

Bisi Adeyemi could do anything with hair. Cornrows, twists, bantu knots, thread wrapping so tight and even it looked machine-made. She did hair on the bench by the courtyard most afternoons, and whoever sat between her knees became the center of a small gravity — other girls drifting over, leaning on the wall, trading the kind of talk that sounds like nothing and means everything.

“Hold your head still.”

“I am holding it still.”

“You’re not. You’re following my hands. Stop anticipating.”

Bisi had a client list, unofficial, kept in her head. She charged in favors. A plate of her mother’s chin-chin for a full set of medium twists. Help carrying water when the courtyard pump was down. First dibs on the good spot by the wall where the afternoon light came through warm and golden.

She never talked about what came after. None of us did, exactly, but with Bisi the silence had a particular quality. One afternoon I asked her if she’d ever thought about doing hair outside the block, professionally, in a real salon. She was midway through parting my hair with a rattail comb and her fingers paused for a half-second.

“I think about what I’m doing now,” she said.

The comb moved on. The part was straight and clean.

Yusuf Draws Maps

Yusuf Diallo kept a notebook full of maps. Not real maps — he’d never been anywhere to map — but invented geographies drawn with a mechanical pencil he guarded like currency. He mapped cities from the school library’s small, outdated collection. He mapped a place Mrs. Adaeze described in the evenings — a harbor, hills, a market that went on for kilometers — adjusting it each time she added a detail, erasing the harbor when she mentioned it was actually a river mouth, moving the market south when she said you could see the water from the fish stalls.

He also drew maps of Block Nine. Every building, every path worn into the courtyard dirt, the exact location of the pump, the bench, the mural Fatimah had painted on Building Three’s east wall. He drew the perimeter wall as a thick black line along the north and east, and what was beyond it he left blank. Not white — blank.

“What’s past the wall?” I asked once, though we could see past the wall — the tops of buildings, the transit line, the edge of something industrial.

“You know what’s past the wall,” Yusuf said, and went back to shading the crack in the concrete where the grass came through.

Chiamaka’s Brother

Chiamaka Eze had a brother named Tobenna who had been Transferred three years before I started keeping this notebook. I knew Tobenna only from the way people didn’t talk about him — the way Chiamaka’s face would do something complicated and brief whenever someone mentioned older siblings.

She kept his things. Not all of them — the district had collected most of his belongings during the Transfer process, which was standard, which was policy. But Chiamaka had hidden a few things before the collection: a pair of sneakers he’d customized with fabric paint, the laces replaced with a cord of green and white. A notebook with his handwriting in it, though what he’d written I never saw and never asked.

She wore the sneakers sometimes. They were too big for her. She stuffed the toes with newspaper, and nobody mentioned it.

“He’s placed,” she’d say, if you forced the subject. The word placed like a lid coming down on a pot.

Once, only once, she said something else. We were sitting on the bench in late afternoon, watching Bisi do hair, watching the little kids argue about whose turn it was. Chiamaka said, “He used to sit right here.”

That was all. We sat in it without trying to make it into anything else.

Morning

Mornings on the block had a sound. Not one sound but a layering that started before light and thickened as the sun came over the perimeter wall.

The pump handle, first. Whoever was up earliest, filling containers for the day. The handle had a squeak on the upstroke that Yusuf’s father kept meaning to oil and never did.

Then the birds — not many, but a few that had found the courtyard’s trees and declared them sufficient.

Then voices. Mrs. Adaeze talking to her tomatoes, which she did without embarrassment. Bisi’s younger brother kicking a ball against the wall. Chiamaka’s mother singing something I never caught the whole of, just a phrase that repeated — ndo, ndo, ndo — which means sorry or patience or endure, depending on who you ask.

By seven the courtyard was full. Kids heading to the Youth Development Facility in uniforms that were clean if not crisp, adults heading to the Labor Assignment Center at the avenue’s end, where the day’s work was posted on a board and you went where the board said. My mother always checked the board at six-thirty, though the board never changed her assignment.

Nneka and the Library

Nneka Obi read books the way some people eat — not for pleasure exactly, but out of a need so basic that the question of whether she enjoyed it never came up. She read everything in the Youth Development Facility library, which wasn’t large, and then she read it again, and then she started on the reference books nobody touched.

She read the District Resident Handbook, all 240 pages. She read the Healthcare Protocol Manual. She read the Labor Assignment Guidelines and the Youth Development Outcomes Framework and a ring-bound document she found in the back of a supply closet titled Resource Allocation Model: Managed Districts, Year 12 Onward.

None of us asked what she found in those documents.

Once she looked up from whatever she was reading and stared at me for a long moment. I was working on the assignment about community nutrition planning. Not fear on her face. Not anger. Something closer to what your face does when you’ve stepped in cold water.

“Do you want to talk about it?” I said.

“No,” she said. And then: “Not yet.” And she looked back down at the page and I looked back at community nutrition and the afternoon light moved across the table between us.

Love, or Something Near It

Fatimah Bello was in love with Yusuf, and Yusuf was in love with his maps, and I was in love with watching both of them pretend these things weren’t true.

Fatimah was the one who’d painted the mural on Building Three — the tree with impossible birds. She painted on walls with house paint she mixed herself, on scraps of cardboard, on the backs of used assignment sheets. Colors that shouldn’t have worked together — an orange that was almost red next to a blue that was almost green — and somehow they held.

She found reasons to be wherever Yusuf was. She’d bring a sketchbook to the courtyard when he was drawing maps and sit close enough to talk but not so close that it was obvious, which made it more obvious, which everyone knew except Yusuf, who was mapping the courtyard’s drainage pattern and couldn’t be expected to notice human weather when he was tracking actual water flow.

“He’s an idiot,” Bisi said, doing Fatimah’s hair one afternoon.

“He’s focused,” Fatimah said.

“Focused on drains.”

“Focused is focused.”

It went on like this for weeks until one evening during the long slow dusk — the light hitting the buildings at the angle that made even the brown brick look warm, the courtyard emptied of kids and filled with older people on overturned buckets — Fatimah showed Yusuf a painting she’d done of one of his maps. The buildings became mountains. The courtyard became a valley. The perimeter wall became a river, and beyond the river were places he hadn’t mapped yet, green and detailed, as though she’d been to them and come back.

He looked at it for a long time. Then he looked at her.

“You put things past the wall,” he said.

“Someone had to.”

I wasn’t there for this. Bisi told me, midway through doing my hair, without looking up.

What We Knew

The Wellness Center tests happened twice a year. We lined up in our uniforms with our sleeves rolled up. The nurses were kind. They gave us juice after and told us everything looked fine. But the machines they used were more complicated than health required, and the data went somewhere that wasn’t the clinic’s file room, because the file room had six cabinets and the data was enough for sixty.

The phrase “Youth Development Outcomes” was in the handbook, on the posters, in the speeches at quarterly assemblies. Your development outcomes are our highest priority. It had the shape of a promise. But a promise tells you what you’re getting, and this one never did.

Fracture

One afternoon in September, during the quiet hour when school had ended and the labor assignments hadn’t changed shifts yet, Nneka came to the courtyard and sat on the bench next to me and said, very quietly, “They’re going to move us in March.”

“All of us?” I said.

“Everyone from Cohort Year. That’s what the framework calls us. Cohort Year.”

Nneka was looking at her hands. I was looking at the courtyard. Bisi was across the way doing someone’s hair, and Fatimah was painting on the wall of Building Three, adding more birds to her mural, and Yusuf was at his usual spot with his notebook open, and Chiamaka’s mother was singing ndo, ndo, ndo from an upstairs window, and the tomatoes were growing, and the pump handle was quiet for once, and the afternoon light was turning the brown brick to gold, and I was so angry I couldn’t move.

Not the cost — the cost I’d always felt. The price. The specific transaction. That all of this was happening inside a container, and the container had an expiration date, and the people who’d built the container had never once considered that what grew inside it might be worth more than whatever they were growing it for.

Then Bisi called across the courtyard: “Ogechi, come here, I need your opinion on something,” and the something was whether Fatimah’s hair should be twisted left or right, and I went.

Mrs. Adaeze’s Tomatoes

Mrs. Adaeze had been in the block longer than anyone else. She was old enough that the kids called her grandmother and she answered to it, and she grew tomatoes in plastic buckets with a seriousness that suggested the tomatoes owed her something.

She talked about a place she’d lived before. Not every day. Not to everyone. But sometimes, when the evening was long and she’d found someone willing to sit, she’d describe a harbor. Hills behind it. A market that spread for kilometers. She never named the place. She described it from within the memory, circling, adding detail each time.

“The fish stalls were closest to the water,” she told me once. “You could hear the fishermen arguing about prices before you could see them. And behind the fish was the fabric, bolts of it, more colors than you’d think existed, piled on tables under tin roofs, and the women who sold them could hold a conversation, make change, and fold an ankara in the same breath.”

“When did you leave?” I asked.

“When I came here,” she said, which was not an answer. She went back to her tomatoes, pinching off a yellow leaf.

Night

At night the block was different. The courtyard emptied and the buildings filled and the light in the windows made a pattern that was never the same twice — who was reading, who was arguing softly, who was watching the one channel the district provided, who was sitting in the dark.

I lay on my bed and listened to the sounds. My mother washing dishes. The family upstairs walking — their footsteps so familiar I could tell who was moving: the father heavy and even, the mother quick, the baby a scatter of small impacts like rain on cardboard.

Outside, the perimeter wall. Beyond it, the facility whose purpose we’d settled into not asking about.

From somewhere in the building, the smell of onions in palm oil — someone starting something that would take hours and would feed everyone who stopped by. You cooked what you had and you shared what you cooked.

Quarterly Assembly

Four times a year the District Liaison came to the Youth Development Facility and spoke to us in the auditorium — folding chairs, a podium, a banner that read YOUR DEVELOPMENT IS OUR PRIORITY in letters so large they must have been designed by someone who believed size was sincerity.

The Liaison was a woman named Dr. Holt. She wore gray and she smiled and she used words like outcomes and benchmarks and transition readiness. She never said what the outcomes were. She never said what we were transitioning toward.

We sat in the folding chairs. Some of us took notes because we’d been told to. Some of us whispered about other things — who had said what to whom, whether the courtyard pump was going to be fixed this week, whether Bisi was going to charge Fatimah for her next set of twists or whether love had changed the economy.

After the assembly we filed out and the block absorbed us the way it always did, warm and noisy and indifferent to whatever the Liaison had said.

February

The notice came on a Tuesday. Cold enough for a jacket, bright enough to squint. Posted at the Wellness Center and the Youth Development Facility and on the courtyard bulletin board, printed on district letterhead in the district’s language.

Cohort Year would begin Transfer Preparation on March first.

Transfer Preparation was four weeks. After Transfer Preparation, Cohort would be Placed.

The notice did not say where. It said personal belongings should be limited to one standard bag per individual, and that any questions should be directed to the District Liaison during posted office hours.

Everyone read the notice. Then Bisi said, “Fatimah, come sit, I want to try something with your hair before it gets too cold,” and Fatimah sat, and Bisi’s fingers moved through the sections with the same quick certainty they always had, and Yusuf opened his notebook and started drawing, and I stood in the courtyard in the February light and watched my block being itself for twenty-seven more days.

Ogechi, Again

On the final Transfer form, the one I signed on the morning of March first with a pen the District Liaison provided, it said Ogech Nwanko.

I didn’t correct it.

I walked through the perimeter gate into the transit line’s morning noise, my one standard bag on my shoulder, the courtyard behind me, the blank space ahead.