A Blind Faith

Making a living on the streets of Lagos is not easy. There are so many people coming and going, chasing work, looking for God. Bisi has found God. Her husband, Makinde, hasn't, and isn't looking for him either. But the unexpected can always happen, whether you call it a miracle or not.

Makinde only complained about one thing in his new wife, Bisi. She gave too much in tithes to her church. Ten percent was not enough for Bisi. She had to prove just how religious she was. And each time she visited her church, the Abundant Life Tabernacle, she gave a little extra money for the married women's group, which in Makinde's eyes was just a home for gossips.

Makinde was a mechanic. He worked on a lot, a piece of ground on the corner of a Lagos street. Bisi sold bread and boiled eggs to passengers at a nearby bus station.

When she stopped wearing colorful clothes and started dressing in black, Makinde didn't complain. When she stopped speaking to those of his friends who did not go to church, he didn't say anything.

When he broke his hand, Bisi went without food to make his hand better. He had jumped out of the way of a motorcycle taxi and hit his hand on a rock. For two weeks, Makinde ate his own food, and Bisi's food as well, and his finger got better, but it stayed bent.

Bisi could get too enthusiastic about religious things, Makinde thought. So that afternoon, when she came to his lot with his usual lunch of bread and boiled egg, and she saw the windscreen of an old car that had been sitting there for years, and she fell on her knees, saying it was a vision of the Virgin Mary, Makinde didn't even look up from his sandwich. He had cleaned the windscreen with an oily rag to get rid of some bird droppings, and later in the morning, there had been some light rain.

Bisi ran to the bus station to tell passengers she'd seen a vision. Several of them came back to see. A few, mostly men, walked away laughing about Nigerian women and their love of religion. The rest, women mostly, stayed to stare at the dirty windscreen. They trembled and burst into tears.

“It was a miracle,” they said.

There was a clear figure all right, one small circle over a bigger circle, and beautiful rainbow colors around the small circle. More bus passengers arrived as news of the vision got out. Soon there were enough of them to make Makinde's work impossible, and he drove them away.

All his life he had worked, and he never went to school. First he sold oranges, then at age ten he began working for his father, a mechanic. He put air into tires and mended them. Then he learned about engines. He was not the best mechanic in Lagos, but people knew that when they left their cars with him, things would not go missing.

Some of his customers seemed extraordinary to him. They were rich from oil money and owned Mercedes cars, but when it was time to pay Makinde, they counted every single coin. They gave him the money with soft, fat fingers, while Makinde couldn't even remember the color of his own fingernails. He had black oil under them.

He ate zero-one-zero to save money. Nothing for breakfast, one big lunch meal, nothing for dinner. Here was the real miracle. He was still poor.

“My wife,” he said to Bisi after the visitors left, “I don't care if you choose to throw away your money on your church.”

“Actually, I do.”

“But nothing I say will change your mind.”

“But I won't allow you to do your church business here on my lot and get in the way of my work.”

“Why?”

Bisi asked.

“Your people will frighten my customers away with their crying and shaking.”

“How?”

Bisi asked.

This was the way she argued. She asked enough questions to drive him crazy, hoping that she would win.

“All I'm saying is that it must never happen again,” Makinde answered.

He was known as a patient man because he didn't like talking. Talking was too tiring. Bisi knew he didn't change his mind easily either. He refused to go to church with her.

The next day, Makinde arrived at work, and a group of about twenty people were waiting in his lot: men, women, and children, all dressed in white.

“We have come to see the vision,” an old man said.

“In the name of God,” Makinde said to himself.

It was about 5:30 in the morning. “This news hasn't come to them from Bisi,” thought Makinde. “It's gone from one person to the next.” He had not expected that.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“You can't come and pray on my lot.”

“Unfortunately, that is out of your control,” the old man said.

“Something stronger than you or me has chosen this place.”

“It's probably best not to stand in its way.”

The old man was smiling, but Makinde was afraid anyway.

“Over there,” he said.

He pointed at the old car, once a Peugeot 405. Robbers had taken the seats and steering wheel. The group walked towards the windscreen.

The old man saw the vision first and fell on his knees. The group followed, and then they began to sing. Makinde started beating a piece of metal to drown out the sound. At most, he thought, five groups would visit his lot: three that day and maybe two the next. He'd heard about such visions that appeared on dirty glass, where poor people lived. He could not read, so he did not know what the newspapers in Lagos said about these visions. Reporters said that the visions drew great crowds, or throngs, and that these throngs came together, or flocked. These were past national headlines.

Makinde's guess of five groups of twenty people was too low. Two hundred and fifty people visited his lot in the morning. By afternoon, about five hundred people had been to his lot.

Makinde's guess, five groups of twenty people, was too low. Makinde stopped showing them the windscreen of the Peugeot. A tall, thin woman stayed from her morning visit to act as a guide. She told the story to a reporter: how Makinde and his wife were recently married, how Bisi was religious, and Makinde did not go to church. This vision had still appeared on his lot, and this was a clear sign that God's love was everywhere, for everybody.

Bisi came at lunchtime with Makinde's usual lunch of bread and egg. She saw the crowds and immediately said that she was not responsible.

“It wasn't me.”

“Don't worry.”

“I believe you,” Makinde said.

The situation was out of her control. The guidewoman approached her.

“God's blessings to you, my sister.”

“To you, too,” Bisi said.

“We've been here all morning, without pay, showing the people where to pray for miracles.”

“Yes, yes, and we are getting quite hungry now.”

“So please, can you go back and get some bread and eggs for us to eat?”

The guide said “we,” but she was talking about herself alone. The miracle that she had prayed for was for people to stop saying she was crazy. She knew that her job was to do God's work. Anywhere else in the world, she would be able to stand in the street and tell people about God. Here, she was sent to a hospital, where the doctors laughed at her, and the nurses beat her up.

So, Makinde told Bisi to get her bread and a boiled egg. Bisi left to fetch the food, and the woman returned to the crowd. Then an idea came to Makinde.

“Without pay,” the guide had said.

The people were standing on his lot, getting in the way of his work.

“Why not make them pay?”

“They pay to go to church?”

He added up the numbers. If each visitor paid him one naira, he thought, that would more or less cover the money he was losing because he couldn't work.

He stood in front of his lot and said politely:

“Excuse me, I am Makinde.”

“Yes, the owner of this lot.”

“I have decided I will not get in the way of your praying today.”

“But I am not a rich man, as you can see.”

“And all these crowds are causing problems for my business.”

“Yes, what I am suggesting is that, can you please...”

Talking was exhausting him. Nobody was listening anyway. They were praying, singing, shaking.

Makinde tried shouting.

“My name is Makinde.”

“I am the owner of this lot.”

“And I am telling you now, if you wish to continue to see your vision, I suggest you pay me one naira now each, or else I will take a rag and clean the vision off.”

The lot went quiet. One or two people asked what he was talking about and why he was getting angry. The guide woman was explaining to them when another visitor arrived.

Makinde put out his hand without looking at her face.

“Each one naira to enter, please,” he said.

“Since when?”

It was Bisi. She had returned with the bread and boiled egg for the guide, and so fast.

Makinde earned money that month from the visitors to his lot. It was even in the Sunday newspapers.

“Throngs flock to miracle at mechanic's.”

People came to pray for better health, success at school, new jobs, better jobs, money mostly. There were visitors in wheelchairs, blind visitors, crazy, homeless, heartbroken, childless, lonely visitors. Some people complained about the one naira for entrance. A few refused and walked away. One was a priest.

“How can you do this?”

he asked Makinde.

“Make money out of people's troubles and misery.”

Makinde said he could go in free. Sick children and the homeless also got in free. The priest still refused to walk into his lot.

“Did Jesus ask to be paid for miracles?”

“How do you sleep at night knowing you do this for a living?”

“Quite well, when he wasn't making love to Bisi, who was now talking about having a child and perhaps taking a break from her work.” She became pregnant one night during a storm. Hearing the rain on his roof, Makinde worried about his Virgin Mary, though he had put a cover over the Peugeot's windscreen and put rocks on the edge of the cover to hold it in place. He was not worrying enough. During the night, the wind became strong enough to move one of the rocks, and the rock dropped off the edge of the cover, which fell away from the windscreen, and the rain fell onto the windscreen and washed the vision away.

He arrived at work the next morning, and there were only two people in his lot. One was a homeless man who normally came to look for bits of food. The other was the guidewoman.

“Our vision is no more,” she said.

The ground in his lot had turned to mud. Makinde could only see the clean windscreen of the Peugeot. He was thinking about how to get back to his work.

The guide continued, “It appears the storm last night is the cause.”

“Our work here is done then.”

“We don't expect to have visitors anymore, and as you know, the Lord God gives, and the—” The Lord God was not Makinde's favorite person at that moment. He kicked the Peugeot, which appeared to be smiling at him, and then hit it hard, so hard that his bent little finger was straightened.

He did have one visitor that day: a tax assessor.

“Mr. Makinde,” he began, “I read about you in the papers.”

“It's been very busy here recently, eh?”

“Since you can't call this a church, nor yourself a priest, it means that you have to pay taxes.” Makinde had not paid taxes before. Tax was for people who wore shirts and ties, people who received checks regularly. He thought the tax assessor was someone who had come to trick him out of his money.

“From where are you?”

he asked.

“I'm from the government.”

“Couldn't they give you a clean shirt?”

“This from a man wearing rags?”

“What have you done with your money?”

Makinde felt exhausted, and perhaps the man really was a tax assessor. If so, why didn't he go to the people who had their hands full of the country's oil money and assess them?

“This is my lot,” he said.

“Where are your papers?”

the tax assessor asked.

“What papers?”

“The papers to show that the lot belongs to you.”

Makinde trembled with anger.

“My father left me this lot,” he said.

“My father found this lot.”

“He cleared this lot.”

“He worked on this lot.”

“So it's yours,” the tax assessor said.

“Then you must show me proof that you've paid ground rent since the land has been yours.”

“Don't look so cross.”

“That's a different office's business.”

“But I'll make sure I tell them after I've assessed the tax on your earnings.” Makinde removed his shirt. The money he had earned was hidden under his bed at home. He slept on it. He wasn't going to let this visitor from the land of rich men have it.

“What is this?”

the tax assessor asked, thinking that Makinde was going to hit him.

“Here I am,” Makinde said, undoing his trousers.

“Tax my head, my arms, my broken finger.”

“Tax my legs, see?”

“My foot is injured.”

“Tax that.”

“Here, tax my balls.”

“And when you finish with them...”

He turned his backside to the tax assessor.

“Tax my ass.”

The tax assessor promised he would come back with his helpers.

“You will pay,” he said, “or my men will help themselves to your wife.” A wife who wouldn't even allow Makinde to touch her. She felt sick and was eating dirt now that she was pregnant.

Dirt.

“I can't help it,” she said.

“When I see it, I want to touch it.”

“When I touch it, I want to smell it.”

“When I smell it, I want to eat it.”

Makinde watched as she put dirt into her mouth. He tried to stop her by reminding her of disease. He could not afford to take her to a doctor. He could not go to work because he was afraid of the taxman's helpers. They argued. In the end, she packed a suitcase and said she was going to her mother in the village for a week.

Makinde decided to get advice from Rasaki, a local man known as the King of Downtown. Rasaki's work was playing pools and, for a price, arranging beatings for other people. People said he was friendly with criminals and armed robbers. He smoked and drank a lot of dangerous things, and he called out to girls in the street in Lagos.

“Baby, I've got a big one!”

And they replied, “Yeah, as big as my little finger.”

That sort of king. But he was also known as a person who helped people in trouble with government offices, the police, the taxmen. He knew exactly who to bribe.

Rasaki was smoking a cigarette as Makinde talked. His fingers were as black as his lips, and his teeth were a dirty yellow.

“My friend,” he said.

“What is wrong with your head?”

“You don't say things like that to a tax assessor.”

“It's too late for that advice,” Makinde said quietly.

Rasaki had just woken up. He stared at the calendar on his wall. The girl of the month, Miss February, wearing very little, smiled back at him.

“Why didn't you keep your mouth shut?”

Rasaki said, “You want to offer your wife?”

“My wife,” Makinde said, “She smells of boiled egg most days.”

“Right now she eats dirt.”

“I love her.”

“I would not offer my wife to the president if he wanted her.”

“I thought not.”

“And I'm telling you, these tax men are not normal human beings.”

“They have a lot of hate in their hearts, and they want revenge.”

“It's how they get their jobs in the first place.”

“I suggest, and no need to take my advice, I'm only suggesting, that you pay him the money he asked for.”

“Pay?”

“Yes.”

“Because right now he's feeling terrible.”

“You've made him feel like a small man, and nothing you do will make him feel better.”

“From my experience, he may probably ask you to pay enough to buy the whole lot.”

“How will I ever do that?”

“How much money do you have now?”

“It's here, in my pocket.”

“Put it on my table.”

Makinde did. Rasaki studied the naira notes. He shook his head and smiled.

“You got this by tricking believers?”

“I didn't trick anyone,” Makinde answered.

“They just paid to get in.”

“Call it whatever you want.”

“You were in a game of chance, and you were winning.”

“People believed you, and you tricked them.”

“I'm not blaming you.”

“They were all crazy, so it's their fault.”

“Who knows what Mary looks like?”

“Do you?”

Makinde was getting impatient. Rasaki seemed to know a lot of things, except how to help him out of paying the taxman.

“What can you do for me?” he asked.

“My friend,” Rasaki said.

“Do you play pools?”

Rasaki knew everything about pools. That was how he had survived without a job for years. Playing pools was not dangerous, he said, and only those who played pools long enough knew this. “Give me your money, and I will give you back ten times as much,” he said.

The people who lost were the ones on the outside, like believers looking for miracles in lots.

“How?”

Makinde asked.

“Uh-uh.”

“Will I tell you what has taken me years and years to learn?”

“Why should I give you what has taken me a month to earn?”

“It's up to you.”

“I don't have many choices.”

“The possibilities are endless.”

“You know a lot.”

“Why aren't you a rich man yourself?”

“I choose not to be.”

“Why?”

“Where else will I be a king?”

Makinde had to agree that he did not know one person like Rasaki, who walked around downtown like a king. He wore trousers that were long and wide. “Keep Lagos clean,” that fashion was called. His gray hair was cut high on top. “Girls follow me,” that haircut was called. His girlfriends were prostitutes. He lived in one room, and people knew that his wife had left him because he could not father children, and yet he was extremely sure of himself.

“I came to you because you're a man who knows people,” Makinde said.

“I was hoping for something not so out of the ordinary.”

“A name to give a bribe to, perhaps.”

“Let me think about this.”

At home, Makinde considered the choices. There was his lot, and there was the money that he hadn't earned from working.

Free money.

It seemed to him that Rasaki was right. Who left his lot with a miracle? Who departed with more money in their pockets except him? Those who came in wheelchairs went away in wheelchairs. Those who came blind went away blind. Not one of the visitors to his lot was a Mercedes owner. Those big, godlike people who controlled his country. It didn't matter how long he worked. Life would always suit their plans, their wishes. Never his. Never his.

He thought. He worried. He could not find an answer that pleased him. In the end, he went back to Rasaki with the money. Rasaki promised a return within a week.

How did Makinde hear about his money? He kept going to Rasaki's place, but Rasaki was not there. He asked about him, and people said that he had traveled up north. He waited near the row of rough houses where the king had a room. No Rasaki. The king had completely disappeared downtown.

It wasn't until Bisi returned, full of her mother's delicious vegetables, and no longer wanting to eat dirt, that he heard the news from her. She had heard it from her friend in the married women's group at church, who'd heard it from her husband, who'd heard it from a friend at work. Rasaki had taken money from someone to play pools, lost the money, and the someone would probably not ask for his money back, because the someone was in big trouble with the tax men, and Rasaki knew exactly who to approach to make sure the someone ended up ruined, and the someone was Makinde.

“Is it true?”

Bisi asked him.

“It seems so,” Makinde said.

“In the short time I've been away?”

“Yes.”

“How could you?”

“I had little choice.”

“Well, it makes me sick.”

“Why?”

he asked, the kind of question she would ask. After all, it was not his fault. She saw the vision on the dirty windscreen. She told people, and they came, and they stopped him from doing his work, got his name mentioned in the papers, and made the tax man notice him.

“It was your vision that made this happen,” he said.

“That's not true at all,” she said, and honestly.

“It is you who went wrong when you listened to that terrible man, Rasaki.”

“That money was a blessing.”

“You lost it as soon as you chose the wrong way to make more money from it.”

“What other way was there?”

“Why not take it to church?”

“For what?”

“To give as tithes.”

“God gives great blessings to those who give.”

“My dear wife, when has God ever given me a blessing?”

Bisi had to think. Becoming a father was one blessing, but perhaps Makinde would not want to hear that. She couldn't think of another.

“I give tithes,” she said.

“My prayers are answered.”

“The miracle you prayed for on my lot, was that answered?”

“No.”

“Ah, well.”

“It will be.”

“I know it will.”

“Tell me when that happens.”

“Me, I feel like I've been fighting against something much stronger than me.”

“It ruined my life, and I don't want to fight it anymore.”

She had an answer to their problem, meanwhile. She could get help from the married women's group, who had money put away for emergencies.

“But you have to join my church family.”

Makinde was truly exhausted.

“For God's sake.”

“It's the rule.”

“You want this help or not?”

“I don't think I've got any choice.”

The following Sunday, he went to Abundant Life Tabernacle with Bisi. There, Bisi told him that the miracle she prayed for had happened. He was present in her church.

“I'm so glad you found your way,” she said.