Highlife

The letter from Lagos came on a Tuesday in August, 1938, in the rainy season, and Elias's father read it aloud at the table under the hurricane lamp while the rain came down on the iron roof like gravel thrown by the handful.

"Dear Brother," he read. "I have spoken to Mr Ogunleye at the shipping agency on the Marina, who is a member of my church and owes me a kindness over some printing, and there is a place for a junior clerk, beginning the first of September, at two pounds ten shillings a month, rising. The young one may lodge with us in Ebute Metta. Morenike says he must bring his own mat. Your brother in Christ, Folarin."

He folded the letter, and laid it beside his plate, and looked across the table at Elias.

Elias had known it was coming. Everybody had known. Elias was seventeen, and had finished at the Grammar School with a good report and a better handwriting, and in Abeokuta, for a young person with a good report and a better handwriting, there was the Church, or the Native Authority office, or the railway, or teaching, or Lagos. And Elias's father, who was a catechist and a schoolmaster and the most respected man on their street, had decided some time ago that it would be Lagos.

"Two pounds ten," said Elias's mother, from the end of the table, where she sat with her hands still faintly blue at the fingertips from the indigo vats in the yard. She had been an adire dyer all her life, as her mother had been, and her hands were never quite clean of it, and Elias had never in his life seen her hands without that faint blue shadow in the creases of the knuckles, like a map of a river. "Rising."

"Rising," said Elias's father firmly. "It is a respectable position. Mr Ogunleye is a respectable man. The agency handles cargo for three steamship lines. In five years, with diligence, there could be a place as a senior clerk. In ten, perhaps, something more." He looked at Elias over his spectacles. "It is a door, Elias. Not every young person in Abeokuta is offered a door."

Elias said, "Yes, Baba," because there was nothing else to say, and looked down at the plate of eba and egusi, and thought about the guitar.

It was under Elias's bed, wrapped in an old wrapper of his mother's, behind a box of schoolbooks. It was not a good guitar. It had been made by a carpenter in Ibadan for a palm-wine player who had died, and it had come to Elias two years ago, by a long road, for three shillings and a promise, from old Gbenga, who played at the palm-wine shed at the bottom of the hill behind the market every evening, and had played there, people said, since before the British came, and who had taught Elias everything Elias knew, three evenings a week, for two years, in secret.

Elias's father did not know about the guitar. Elias's father did not approve of palm-wine music. It was music for drunkards and idlers, he said, played in sheds by men who had nothing better to do, and it led to drinking, and to worse, and a catechist's child had no business being anywhere near it.

So Elias had learned in secret, at the shed. Old Gbenga played with his eyes shut, very softly, a rocking, rolling, two-finger music that went round and round like water going round a stone, and sang in a cracked high voice about women and money and death and the price of kerosene, and every now and then, without opening his eyes, he would stop and reach out and move one of Elias's fingers on the strings a quarter of an inch, and grunt, and go on.

"You have ears," he had said once, at the very beginning, the first time he heard Elias pick out one of his songs on the guitar. "Ears are the only thing nobody can teach. The rest is only work."

And last week, when Elias had told him about Lagos, he had been quiet for a long time, and then said: "Lagos. Good. In Lagos there is music you have not heard yet. New music. From the Gold Coast, from the ships, from the gramophones. Music that has not got a name yet." He had played a few notes, softly, with his eyes shut. "Go and hear it. Then come back and tell me what it sounds like."

Now, at the table, Elias's father picked up the letter again and read it through a second time, as if it might have changed.

"You leave on Saturday," he said. "The morning train. Your mother will pack your box." He paused. "You will take your Bible, and your good shirt, and your school report, and your mat. You will not need anything else."