“Take this worthless thing. Throw it inside the dustbin. A female child is nothing!” Uchenna said to the mid nurse after his wife gave birth to a bouncing baby girl.

PART 3

The next morning, true to her word, Mama Uchenna took Ngozi and baby Chioma to her own house, a modest but solid home on the other side of town. Then she sent word to a neighbor to bring the three older girls.

When the children arrived, they ran to their mother and clung to her, and Ngozi held all three of them and wept with relief. They told her, in frightened whispers, that their father had come home drunk and raging, that he had thrown things, that they had hidden under the bed until morning.

Mama Uchenna’s jaw tightened as she listened.

In the weeks that followed, something began to heal in that modest house on the other side of town. For the first time in seven years, Ngozi woke each morning without the knot of fear in her stomach. There was no drunken husband to brace against, no footsteps on the path to listen for, no smell of alcohol that turned the whole house tense. The children, who had learned to make themselves small and silent, slowly began to grow loud again. They laughed in the mornings. They played in the yard without flinching at every sound. The eldest, who had carried a watchfulness far beyond her years, began to relax into being a child again.

Ngozi watched her daughters bloom in the safety of their grandmother’s home, and she understood, with a grief that was also a kind of liberation, how much fear they had all been living in. She had told herself, for years, that she was enduring Uchenna’s cruelty for the children’s sake, that a home with a father, however terrible, was better than none at all. She saw now how wrong she had been. The children were not better for having endured him. They were only just beginning to recover from him.

But she was not a woman to act on anger alone. She was old, and she had seen much, and she knew that her son’s cruelty was not only his own fault. It had grown, fed by something. And over the following weeks, as Ngozi and the children settled into the safety of her home, Mama Uchenna began, quietly, to find out what.

It was the village gossip, the women at the market, who gave her the first thread.

“Mama Uchenna,” one of them said carefully one afternoon, “your son has been spending a great deal of time with that woman Adaeze. The one who tells fortunes. The one who sells charms.”

Mama Uchenna went still. “What charms?”

The woman lowered her voice. “She has been telling him that his wife is cursed. That Ngozi’s family put a curse on her womb so she can only bear daughters. She has been taking his money for years, promising to break the curse, promising him a son. And the more she takes, the more she tells him his wife is the problem.”

The old woman felt cold all over. So that was it. That was where the obsession had been fed, where the resentment had been sharpened into hatred. A con woman, exploiting her son’s desperate pride, draining his money and poisoning his mind, turning a foolish man’s disappointment into a household of terror.

“And there is more,” the market woman said, even more quietly. “People say Adaeze has been telling him that if he takes a second wife, a younger one, she will give him a son. That the curse only affects Ngozi. He has been talking about marrying again. About sending Ngozi away for good.”

That evening, Mama Uchenna sat alone for a long time, thinking. She loved her son, foolish and cruel as he had become. But she loved her grandchildren more, and she loved justice more than that. She made another decision.

She would not simply hide Ngozi and the children away. She would break the lie at its source. She would expose Adaeze for the fraud she was, and she would force her son to see, in front of the whole community, what his pride had made him.

It took her three weeks to arrange it. She spoke to the village elders, respected men and women who had known her late husband and held the family in regard. She spoke to the matron at the hospital, who confirmed in writing that there was no medical reason Ngozi could not bear a son, that the sex of a child is determined by the father, not the mother, a fact that science had long established and that the con woman Adaeze had deliberately hidden from a man too proud and too ignorant to question her.

And she gathered evidence of Adaeze’s fraud, finding three other families the fortune-teller had bled dry with the same lies about curses and charms and promises that never came true.

When she had everything, Mama Uchenna called a gathering at the family compound. She invited the elders. She invited the neighbors. And she sent a message to her son: Come home. There is a matter of the family’s honor to be settled.

Uchenna came, expecting perhaps that his mother had finally arranged the second wife he wanted, or that Ngozi had come crawling back to beg forgiveness. He swaggered into the compound, and his face changed when he saw the elders seated in a circle, his mother at the center, Ngozi and the four children to one side, and standing nervously near the edge, the fortune-teller Adaeze, who had been summoned without being told why.