A short story by Zoë Gadegbeku, in response to How We Wear Our Faith: Christian Symbols in Nigeria, a series of newly commissioned photographs by the Nigerian photographer Adetutu Adediran.
Santa Clara knew this would be her last day alive. She heard it in the bells ringing, clear as new honey, to mark the end of the mid-morning Mass. Es-tu prête? This is the end for you. Do you hear? She barely noticed them anymore, having long grown accustomed to hearing them speak, but never directly to her, never calling her by name. That the voice of the bells recognised her was more surprising than the announcement (or was it a warning?) of her imminent death.
She was immediately resigned to the revelation; the thread of a life would unravel into nothing, one way or another. There were, of course, her children, both grown and creating lives for themselves in which they had little need for her. She had not been longing for death, nor was she trying to accelerate her journey towards it. Neither did she particularly long for an afterlife where she could reunite with all the dear ones who had passed on, even if she thought of them fondly as she moved about her days and nights alone. Rather, she supposed it was good to know what was coming her way, though it did feel inconvenient to have confirmation of the fact of one’s demise without knowing the when and how. She could only assume that it would be soon since the bells felt the need to tell her.
•••
The earliest she could ever make it to Our Mother of Sorrows parish was for the 11 o’clock Mass, especially if she wanted enough time to make herself a proper breakfast, cornmeal porridge or fried fish and baguette; to take down her rollers and spray her hair until the bathroom threatened suffocation, just to avoid frizz; to stroll rather than march down the path that led from the outskirts of town, past the peeling sign that read, ‘Vous quittez Cari…! À bient…t!’ past the weeping willows and the lake and the evergreen mangroves, the water gently waving if you stood still long enough to notice, down the brick alleys in the outer neighbourhoods and further on, into the centre of the town of Sorrows, right up to the blaze of flame trees and the pink-walled compound behind it where the church stood.
She took the hour walk instead of the short, more direct ride in any of the sept-place station wagons that left every fifteen minutes, carrying people on the island between towns, because the time she spent in Sorrows from infancy to the end of her teens was one of the few things Santa Clara was sentimental about in her life. She was as precious with these Sunday mornings as she was with her memories of Sorrows because she had been forced to leave when she wasn’t ready, as a young mother in a family that could no longer afford the rents rising like monsoon tides and was forced to accept that moving inland meant a better chance at a decent life.
It was in Sorrows that she first realised she could hear differently than other people. She was eight, not quite old enough to take a tap-tap on her own to school, but with her mother rising with the sun to go to work, there was no other choice. On one otherwise regular morning, she heard, in other passengers’ pockets, rosaries, prayer beads, and gris-gris clicking feverish prayers to Erzulie in her different manifestations, depending on the prayer-bearer’s need: Erzulie Dantor for the woman sinking into silence right after her husband’s hurting hands; Erzulie Freda for the lonely and those trying to spin a sweet life out of coarse thread and not enough coins; Erzulie Je Wouj for the vengeful, the betrayed, the wrongfully evicted, the falsely accused of crimes they had never even considered; La Sirène for those yearning to become mothers. It took Santa Clara some time to understand that what she could hear was not morning chatter among strangers and neighbours alike along the route from the suburbs of Sorrows to the centre district.
One person had a pocket full of small bones and pebbles that cried out to Christ. Another flipped through the pages of a brand new book, its gold letters on a red cover announcing, ‘Catechism of the Catholic Church’, and in the pages flipping, Santa Clara heard, ‘Please, Lord, show me your power. Please Lord, hear my cry’. Someone wore a pair of earrings adorned with the image of Black Madonna, and every time the bus fell into a pothole, the earrings clinked, ‘I feel so alone. Show me I am not. Show your selves to me. I’m begging you’. The cross charms on a woman’s anklet chimed together and Santa Clara heard, ‘Just not today. I can’t take it today’. A peacock feather in someone’s pocket whispered the same thing that another’s evil eye ring knocked against the window, ‘Evil eye, look far from me. Evil intentions, stay far from me’.
There were spells to pull ancestors, recent and long departed, back from the realm beyond life; petitions to the Holy Mothers: Mary, Erzulie, Santa Barbara and others whose names are so revered they should never be uttered out loud; frantic calls for intervention to Allah, the All-Merciful; effusive thanks to Yesu and to Yahweh; an orchestra of pleas and promises spilling out of the van and into the world speeding past its windows. Santa Clara sat in confused terror, but not deep enough to make her forget her maman’s warnings to keep her pink and cream uniform and pink-lace-edged socks clean, and, ‘Remember, when you see the flame trees, it’s time to get off! Fais attention! Hear?’
Through her first two periods of English lessons, Santa Clara bit her nails down to their beds, to the tune of the teacher’s lilting and listing sideways through the story for that day, her coastal accent heavier and more Frenchified than they were used to inland. Santa Clara heard Sister Honorée explain that the story was about a family travelling through some place called the ‘American West’, and she caught the tail of sentences as they turned the corner and were immediately lost to her attention for good, words like ‘pioneer’, ‘frontier’, ‘savage’, and ‘civilise’. She couldn’t hear much else over the sound of her desk mate tapping the cross on his rosary against his front teeth. ‘Tap. If they stop fighting…Tap. I will stop being naughty. Tap. At least just for this week. Tap. And it’s my birthday on Saturday. Tap. Please’.
At twenty past nine, one of the older girls, who was the envy of the younger students because she was at the age where she left pinafores behind for skirts and blouses, came out and stood in the centre of the schoolyard to ring the bell for break. Santa Clara couldn’t run fast enough for tripping, over her satchel, her own feet, and the wooden bar that connected the seat to the desk, with Sister Honorée’s reminder not to leave without being dismissed floating behind her head and away, ‘Attention, les enfants! I didn’t say we were done here! Why so eager to leave? Mamzelle Santa Clara!’
Santa Clara skipped over the scattered blocks in the schoolyard where the giant flame trees’ roots had started to break through the concrete to reclaim their space, up the two short stairs and through the short hallway of the principal’s office building, out to the front of Our Mother of Sorrows, and up several more steep stairs into the church itself that was always much cooler than it was outside, be it monsoon or dry season. Something about the quiet that lived inside the church made Santa Clara want to tip toe, to talk low, to linger in the incense cloud for a second longer, and she was tempted to slow walk until she heard in the hiss of the sacred smoke, ‘Child, you do not want to know what we have heard and seen in this place’. She hurried to the back right corner of the church where the confessional booth stood.
She wasn’t the type of child who felt guilty or anxious enough to treat confession like the sombre act she had been taught it was, at least not usually. She made a game out of making up ‘sins’ to confess, a little rude, a little silly, all for her own amusement – what was sin to a fearless eight-year-old who hadn’t yet learned shame, nor would she ever? – like ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been one week since my confession. I took an extra piece of lamb from the pot that my mother was saving for her lover’, or, ‘It has been two days since my last confession. I lied and said my neighbour’s wig was pretty, but it looks like a cat caught in the rain’.
On this day when her world came alive with other people’s secrets, she approached the pink velvet curtain with a new appreciation for Father Pierre-Paul’s still and steady presence, the absence of judgment in his replies that never differed regardless of the level of absurdity in Santa Clara’s confessions. He was probably the only adult she trusted to listen without dismissing her, without telling her to ‘go outside and find something better to do’.
‘Bless me, Father. What does it mean if I can hear people speaking to me but no one’s there?’
Benita and Rita, altar girls at Our Lady Queen of Apostles Catholic Church. Photograph by Adetutu Adediran.
If there was ever a time for Father Pierre-Paul to throw away the script that ended with him assigning her a penance and listening to her as she prayed for forgiveness, it was this morning. Whether it was by divine grace or just boredom with the usual procession of guilt-burdened parishioners, he replied, ‘Child, what do the voices say?’
Santa Clara did her best to explain how it felt to look around at a silent tap-tap full of passengers or a room full of her classmates all trying to follow Sister Honorée’s reading and to hear, at the same time, anguished cries that went from whisper to scream, petitions she couldn’t fully understand but knew, at the very least, were not intended for her ears.
She talked until the fear fell away and her surroundings with it; she could no longer see the pink curtain or the wooden panel with heart-shaped cutouts that kept Father Pierre-Paul in shadow. She had almost forgotten that he was there until he said, ‘As a young one, you are closer to the borderline. Whatever comes through from the other side, you can feel and hear more than those who are now too grown and too scared to hear. Just listen. Listen close’.
She couldn’t have known—most people didn’t—that Father Pierre-Paul’s view of life and what lay beyond it came from having a mother who spent most of his childhood travelling all the way to Benin to study Vodou, and a father who was a prolific and renowned Vodouisant, especially for people who needed to heal from ill-intentioned or wrongly performed spells. For the schoolchildren and the parishioners, Father Pierre-Paul only existed as the pale hands and face floating in priestly black robes, topped by closely cropped hair that only revealed the fluffy wool of itself that time the barbers joined other striking workers, around the time the island was fighting to be free from their colonisers in name, in spirit, and in all aspects of waking life.
Father Pierre-Paul’s explanation wasn’t any more comforting than the generic prayers of contrition he would have normally offered Santa Clara, mostly because she didn’t fully understand what the ‘borderline’ was and what it had to do with her. By the time she stepped out of the alcove and beyond the curtains, the bell for the end of break pealed in harmony with the church’s bells suspended in the tower above the church, and in them, Santa Clara heard the echo of Father Pierre-Paul’s mysterious advice, ‘Just listen. Listen close’.
It could be that on this particular morning, as Santa Clara stepped out of the church, she also turned away from whatever frightful knowing lay in choosing the path of listening closely, and turned instead towards a life where she would accept her lot with straight-faced, rigid-backed pragmatism. She choose a forced impassivity over fear lapsing into curiosity which, in turn, could have become a desire to help people solve these problems they were constantly praying about, or at least offer them some comfort in the meantime. Maybe if she acted like she didn’t care, whoever or whatever was whispering to her from the other side of Father Pierre-Paul’s ‘borderline’ would realise they were not wanted and would leave her alone, just like the monsters under her bed or whatever lurked in the dark hallway through the middle of her house couldn’t touch her if she pretended they did not exist.
The next Saturday, Santa Clara went to the salon to get her hair washed and pressed for Sunday Mass. The hairdresser’s Vierge Marie bracelet knocked against the inside of the sink’s bowl as she washed Santa Clara’s hair, and Santa Clara was an unwilling eavesdropper to what was less a stream of prayers and more a conversation, an attempt to reach a bargain, ‘You know I need this. I’ve been working for this for years. Saving every franc. You can’t tell me it’s all gone just like that. Please’.
The hairdresser was the most glamorous person Santa Clara knew, one of those women whose every move felt at once effortless and choreographed. Her rows of bangles and earrings rang together whenever she turned to pick up a tail comb or the jar of pomade, and especially when she laughed. Santa Clara didn’t think she was someone who worried about money the way more grim adults seemed to do all the time, mouths turned down and heavy sighing about how ‘tight’ their pockets felt since the latest news from France had descended on them like a carrion bird.
At Mass the next morning, Santa Clara could pick out the metallic shake and cheer of her mother’s tambourine in the chorus of praise and worship right before the end of the service, a brief moment of ecstasy in what was otherwise a very solemn service. Santa Clara’s mother was spare with words whether she was excited or not, and so, her tambourine spoke no actual sentences that Santa Clara could decipher. Instead, it sounded like an open-mouthed laugh, then a giggle, then a sigh.
Kosisochukwu & Chinecherem pose with a Bible at home. Photograph by Adetutu Adediran.
As Santa Clara grew, all the spiritual keepsakes speaking to her did not fall silent, nor did the overheard prayers dissipate as she hoped they would, though they receded slightly into the background and were not as unbearable as one might think a constant hum of pleas and praise might be. She could have grown into the martyr kind of woman who spent her quiet moments wringing her hands in worry for other people, the everybody’s mother type of woman whose fingertips were wrinkled and roughened from all the work it took to smooth the troubles of other people. But she chose to become indifferent to what she could hear, and eventually, it would be as easy to ignore as the empty sea shell sound everyone carries in their ears, which people are rarely ever quiet enough to notice.
It would become clear to her, much later in life, that there were certain ways of the world that priests, nuns, Vodouisants, imams and soothsayers claimed they could read in between the lines of their holy books, or in beads and tea leaves, or in the ways the bones fell in the dirt. In reality, they had no more of a clue than the adherents and worshippers that looked to them for guidance through the terrible, sublime unknown of being human.
She also learned that most people were worrying about the same things, and those worries followed the tides of the times. When the French government tried to punish the island for daring to demand and seize its own freedom, food shortages followed, and what the gris-gris said was ‘Help’, and what the rosary said was ‘Our children are starving’, and what the prayer beads said was ‘We are grateful for the little that we have and we humbly ask for more’, and what the feather said was ‘We know it is already done’.
When the rains were generous and the soil greedy rich, when the crops burst audaciously alive in every window box and backyard garden and farm, the gris-gris and the rosaries and the prayer beads and the feathers laughed and sang their thanks, before turning to other matters that people with full bellies and full pockets now had time to pray about.
•••
Santa Clara entered her eighteenth year a few months before she met a man who wore, around his wrist, a string of prayer beads twined with a rosary made of cowry shells and green beads that she would later find out glowed in the dark. She had been working at the Sorrows’ Library information desk when he approached her to ask for directions to the town’s city hall. ‘I was told to look for an old stone building with two towers. But actually, I’m lost, oui?’
Santa Clara took one look at the welling of his round eyes, somewhere between gleam and water, and thought begging, thought lonely, thought desperate even, thought she knew what he was praying for, until she heard the clack of the cowries on her desk. What he said out loud: ‘Bon, this is definitely not the place. Can you help, mamzelle?’ What the shells whispered: ‘I am lost in this life without them. Please. If only we had more time. If only. Please’.
It would be easy to think that having access to people’s most intimate pains and desires, without even a light pluck at the strings in Santa Clara’s heart that might sing empathy, without any inclination to comfort or help, would make a monster of her, make her someone with an appetite for other people’s grief, fortifying herself on the secret power of eating prayers for breakfast and pleas for salvation as dessert. In fact, she was mostly bored. But something about this face she could just as easily see as a baby as she could the grown man before her slipped around the wall of her ambivalence and made her answer, ‘It’s time for lunch anyway. I’ll ride with you. Vas y?’
As they drove that day, she learned that his name was Taureau Ountò, that his parents had been musicians so skilled people thought them saints, that he had inherited not a note nor a beat of their gift but made a living tuning pianos and repairing musical instruments in general, that he was on the way to city hall to fill out the necessary papers to make his business official. But the conversation had a painful undercurrent rushing below it, a silent wail that Taureau didn’t know Santa Clara could hear. The blue and white rosary strung around the rearview mirror of his car cried, ‘I’m lost in the world. I’ll do anything to bring them back’.
Santa Clara would later come to witness and understand and hold Taureau’s grief over his parents and the flood that carried them and their home, piano, drums, and all away, a few years before he walked into that library where Santa Clara worked. She couldn’t remember, though, exactly when the rosary’s song turned from mourning to euphoria, just that it probably happened after they saw that a life in Sorrows was costing more than any living they could ever make, and that those beautiful houses with vine-covered roofs and white metal bars curving around their large windows would likely never become their reality. They decided on Caridad, with its streets narrower and missing many a stone, its steady commotion of Sunday after-church parades that often turned into chaos, its tall town homes turned apartments with many families where one used to be, all that they came to love about the town.
On a morning a few years into their marriage, she heard the rosary from the pocket of his work trousers tossed over a chair in their bedroom, ‘Yes, I’m whole. I miss them, but at least, I have her. Not at least. At last. Merci Bon Dieu, la Vierge, les ancêtres. Merci à tous’.
She was a little in awe and a lot flattered that Taureau’s love for her tethered him so strongly to life, especially now that she was intimately familiar with the space in his life left by his parents’ absence and the destruction of the only home he ever knew.
Santa Clara was also regretful, if only momentarily, that she could not reciprocate Taureau’s love in all its depth because of the ambivalence she had learned and tended to since childhood, like a garden of stubborn perennial plants which never withered or died, to steady herself against the heft of people’s private sufferings that she knew she could neither solve nor soothe. And this was why she never told another soul what she could hear, because their knowing about her knowing might make them think she had the power to answer, to help, to intercede, and she was neither prepared for nor interested in that kind of god-like responsibility.
The prayers of her younger child, André, came to her more gently, in the uncertain dark of nights where she heard him, through the wall, tapping the silver cross of his rosary—a confirmation gift—against the metal of his bed frame, ‘Something happy for Christmas? Everything sounds so sad all the time. Please?’
The morning after the first time she heard him, she asked without asking, ‘Tout va bien? If something was the matter, you wouldn’t hide, oui?’
André didn’t look up from his cup of hot chocolate and the pool forming in the saucer where it had overflowed. ‘Non…I mean, yes. I’m fine. Tout va bien’.
Without asking exactly what he had been hearing and why it made his spirit bow low enough to lament this way when he should have been asleep, Santa Clara could only assume he heard things the way she did. It would take years for André himself to understand, and he would never tell Santa Clara, that he only ever heard music or any sounds close to it in a minor key, so that the crows in the school playground, the ice cream man’s bell, and Easter hymns all sounded like dirges to him.
Clementine swept the crumbs from her half-eaten bread roll off the table and rose from her seat next to André, her face closed tight around any feelings she might have had. Santa Clara never heard from Clementine at all, even with the anklet she always wore, its gold crosses tinkling every time she moved, and would always wonder if this daughter of hers never felt compelled to pray thanks or complaints heavenward.
Victoria at Our Lady Queen of Apostles Catholic Church. Photograph by Adetutu Adediran.
Santa Clara began her weekly pilgrimages to Sorrows after Taureau passed quietly one evening, his heart pausing and then coming to a serene stop with little warning, except that he had said he felt more tired than usual after spending his typical day in a workshop full of bruised and dented drums and flutes, their notes all twisted out of shape. She never got Sorrows totally out of her system, but Taureau had not been willing to make that journey with her to hear what he called ‘two hours of an organ so out of tune, it might as well be a broken trumpet’. She would go alone because Clementine had moved to the island’s capital, Magdalène, as soon as she was old enough to leave in pursuit of fortune and a love that was more tender than the aloof mother she found in Santa Clara and the father who loved his wife to distraction and could only give his children the remainder of his affection, sweet as it was. Clementine was probably the only person in the family whose heart was more distant than Santa Clara’s to reach, and she and Santa Clara never talked. André lived in Sorrows, but Santa Clara only heard from him on both their birthdays and on All Soul’s Day when they would all converge at Taureau’s graveside to sweep the tombstone, to lay some lilies down, to leave a little candle on for him.
Now, standing on the steep staircase of the church, she did something she had never done in decades of hearing what was not intended for her. She listened closely, and she spoke back.
‘But was I a neglectful mother? Was I wicked person? Did I do any harm?’
The bells chimed back, But did you care enough? Did you listen? And what did you do with what you heard?
‘What was I supposed to do with what I heard? What kind of god or spirit or ancestors would give me the ability to hear people begging for salvation without the power to actually help them?’
The bells rang, and Santa Clara thought she could hear them growing irritated. And did you ever ask for help if the task felt too grand? Did you ever try?
The prickly heat of unfairness and frustration settled around Santa Clara’s head. ‘So what was I supposed to do? Sacrifice myself for other people? Lose myself in problems God created and refused to solve? Was I wrong for wanting a safe and simple life?’
Again, the bells sang, Do you think those were the only choices you had to make? Total selfishness or total surrender? Safety that required closed eyes and numbness?
For the first time since that day many years ago, when she was a little girl on her way to school in a tap-tap, Santa Clara felt something like doubt, something like fear, a heavy heat wrapping around her neck and up towards her ears. She always thought that if so many people continued to pray the same prayers without receiving any relief, then maybe God or Spirit intended for the universe to spin in a particular direction, regardless of any appeals humanity might make to the contrary. If every hummingbird’s frenzied flight, every war, every storm was preordained, then prayer was useless.
Santa Clara breathed deep and stood tall on the church’s top stair, feeling like she did not want the bells to win. ‘Okay, so when? And will it hurt? Is this punishment for not listening close?’
The bells tolled a final response. Soon, peut-être. And it will hurt, but you won’t remember. Death is no punishment if it was always going to claim you for itself. In the meantime, will you really listen? Can you hear now? And what will you do, now that you can?
Zoë Gadegbeku is a Ghanaian writer. She received a master of fine arts in creative writing from Emerson College, where she worked in communications and taught first-year writing. She has been a fellow at the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her writing has appeared in Saraba Magazine, AFREADA, Blackbird, The Washington Post, Slice Magazine, Longreads, Electric Marronage, and Torch Literary Arts. Her work has also been anthologized in the collections Pan African Spaces: Essays on Black Transnationalism and The Best Small Fictions 2019. She won the 2024 Rebecca Mitchell Tarumoto Short Fiction Prize from the English Department at Virginia Commonwealth University, for her short story “Of Flower and Sorrows.” Her first novel, Blue Futures, Break Open, was published by West Virginia University Press in March 2025.
