Ope oku. E wo mariwo ope. --- The palm is not dead. Watch its branches sway - Yoruba folk wedding song –King Sunny Ade (Nigerian musician)

Memories of my mother are bitter sweet. I was the last child she had for my father. She was nine months pregnant with me when she finally left an abusive husband with the help of her mother who had had one opportunity too many to observe my father's brutal temper. I often asked her why she waited so long to leave a man who beat her and cheated on her mercilessly. She replied that she had to try to make the marriage work, that she had his children; that divorced women were thought to be prostitutes and that outside of the beatings and cheating my father was really not a bad man. She often tried to make me understand her reasoning for remaining with a man who frequently tried to grind her humanity to dust; I could not understand that then. Now, I do. I now understand the possibly fatal connection between the abuser and the abused. I now better understand the depressing weight of the opinion of others in a culture that values the lives of children of one gender over another.

As a young child, constantly watching and hearing my mother's pain as she struggled with trying to raise five children from a bad marriage with little help, I learned to be quiet and somewhat withdrawn in public. I did most of my talking at home. I did a lot of it. I was an expressive child caught in the web of adult lives. I also became a good observer of people and the complexities of their lives. Looking back, I was luckier than many other children caught in similar situations. My mother had chosen to live alone with her children although she entered into a new relationship with my stepfather. As she often said, SHE had chosen never to live under the roof of another man. As with most women in her circumstances at that time, my mother was never legally married to my stepfather. My maternal grandfather had for his own reasons rejected my step-father as a worthy suitor for his first child even though my grandmother saw my step-father who was eleven years older than my mother as a practical choice for her divorced daughter.

Enough people thought that my mother should have counted herself lucky to have the attention of any man given the fact that she had five children from a previous marriage. In reality she was in fact a good catch; a generous and well educated woman for her time who was bringing with her the benefits of excellent business connections from a significantly affluent father as well as her own personal landed property.She had three children from her union with my stepfather who already had another wife and who took on several other wives in his lifetime. Despite the fact that my mother had bowed to the mores of a culture that marked a woman by herself as unworthy, she never could accept that she was deemed unworthy and fought very hard to maintain her independence and to prove her worth

My mother was an introvert in a country that valued and still values extroverts. She was not averse to celebrations but shunned social events that she thought would be unduly boisterous. She enjoyed the quieter things in life. She was a bibliophile. I do not believe that there was a room in her house that did not contain some sort of reading material with pages worn from recurring use. I met Amos Tutuola on the pages of books from her collection. I learned to appreciate my Aunty Ebun's husband, Uncle J. P. Clarke better through my mother's collection of his books. I willed myself to read his Ozidi Saga because I found a copy that my mother had read before me. My mother's library was diverse. She collected different genres of literature; autobiographies, biographies, comedies, poetry, science fiction etc.I inherited my first collection of books by African authors from my mother. She delighted in the written word.

My mother loved nature. She taught me how to appreciate nature as we shared weather worn pieces of wood (drift wood) she discovered at the beach or while she was out on a walk as well as the picturesque sky splattered with color as day changed. I treasure memories of the little fish that swam around me while my hands were cupped ready to catch a pet to take home as I waded in the Yemule River in Ijebu-Ode. I remember being woken up in the early hours to observe a flower about to bloom. I grew up surrounded by chickens, cats, turkeys, dogs, pigeons and even a foundling antelope on the Lagos mainland! If it were not for limited space and time, I am certain that she would have extended her collection of pets, foundlings and other of nature's creatures because she truly delighted in them. As she got older her collection of animals became fewer but included other items like nests abandoned by its owners for the grand children.

Much as she loved to read, she had some rather diverse interests. She found the science of the human body as well as the science of construction very engaging. She seized upon numerous teachable moments to name the different bones in a chicken while she cut the bird we were soon to cook as part of a meal up. No animal headed to our cooking pots were exempt from this type of analysis as long as my mother could find the time. If you appeared interested, she would relate those bones to corresponding bones in your body. She'd jokingly tell the scientific names for various muscles in the body hoping that it would catch our interest. She loved architectural drawings and details.

She was just as quick to notice the flaw in a building that looked perfectly fine to the untrained eye as she was to notice a person in need of medical attention. She would discuss structural parts of a house and the measure of land as one would an interesting article from a newspaper. Perhaps that was the nature of the whispering conversations she and her father held before day break outside her house prior to his directing her to oversee some of his construction projects. My grandfather treated my mother more like a man than a woman with children who needed to be readied for school and she often responded as if she was the son he expected her to be. Along with books, biology, architecture and construction, my mother loved to sing. She enjoyed musicals. She sang songs from musicals such as "Annie Get Your Gun" so frequently that I sometimes felt that I was born in her era.I knew my mother loved the music and the slow elegant dances of her grandmother's era, but it was not until later in life that I discovered that she loved apala, the music of Haruna Isola.

It is the face that one turns to the world that one is best remembered by. How and why then do some of us choose to wear such severe masks even though it does not match our inner workings? Life and how we deal with it draws our frown or smile lines. My mother with her outward mask deeply scarred by frowns intended to hold people at bay was essentially a gentle natured woman. She taught us numerous songs and rhymes as children. She abhorred cruelty and did not tolerate cruelty to animals. One particular poem that stands out in my mind is one about ants.

Mase pa kokoro won ni Do not kill ants such as these

Yi ese re si apa kon Turn your foot away from them

Kokoro ti iwo ko le da Ants, that you cannot create

Olorun lo le da.Only God alone can

As with most other African Christians, she ensured our religious instruction through regular church attendance and unending admonition at home. As an old world disciplinarian, she did not tolerate the use of vulgar or harsh words from members of her household or anyone who passed through her portals. She often reprimanded me when I said I hated something. She said hate was too strong a word even if it referred to food I did not wish to eat. She said it reminded her of all the arguing and bickering she had heard in the past and wanted to forget. Religion, Christian ethics and her children were her main stay. In her bid to protect us, she fell into the hands of a lecherous church leader, who was well practiced at manipulating unsuspecting and trusting persons through religion for financial gain. He successfully blinded my typically perceptive mother and managed to extort significantly large sums of money from her over the course of many years.

She chose not to let the hypocrisy, malice and corruption that lay within the church and some Christian circles deter her from church membership. Even after being denied permission to baptize one of her own children at one Anglican Church in Ibadan because she had divorced, she continued to hold membership in the Anglican Church. She protested the extortion of money from parishioners and the shabby treatment of less fortunate church members until the time of her death. She found serving the church by supporting its youngest children and engaging in beautification projects that involved planting flowers particularly rewarding.

She watched television with us when the electric company, then the Electricity Corporation of Nigeria (E.C.N.), allowed or when she had a moment of respite from trying to make ends meet.  She left us hot meals when she had to be at the Bookworm or when she had to attend to other business. I remember sealed Tupperware bowls of eba wrapped in tons of towels to keep the warmth in. For a short while my stepfather featured in the some of the activities that nurtured us such as accompanying our family to the beach. In due course he became a memory; a person who emphatically made it clear that he would provide only for his own children. In my mind, he was more of a guest in the house than a parent. He operated from a different mindset than my mother did.  Any relationship between two adults approached from such different perspectives was doomed to fail.

My mother was frugal and practical. She had to be. She bought most things including our fruits, snacks and medicine in large quantities. Between guests and our selves, things rarely, if ever, went to waste. She maintained a good relationship with Dr. Usim Odim, our family doctor who was a rotund genial gentleman with an infectious laugh even when he held a needle ready to inject you. No sneeze, cough or rubbing of the eyes went unnoticed. Between Dr. Odim’s medical care and mega doses of my mother’s vitamins, Sunday anti-malaria medicine, Antiper and penicillin shots, most of us remained in excellent health. The cupboard in the hallway outside her bathroom was the in-house drug store from which she dispensed medicine to her family and neighbors who sought her help.

We had some particularly trying times, some of them I failed to notice or have since buried in the recesses of my memory in a hard to reach place; that place that I no longer attempt to pry open. Despite the realities of the hardship involved in having a sizeable family that was headed by a female with limited personal financial resources, my mother was clear on her priorities. She maintained a stable home and kept us in some of the best schools. She did not allow us to forget for a singular moment how important a career and financial independence were. Perhaps our school years could have been less of a financial strain on the family had my mother sought the assistance of her father or enrolled us at his school in Ijebu-Ode. Life did not write that experience into her story. Pride and inflexibility on the part of both my grandfather father and his first child excluded that experience from our lives. None the less, we were never short on care, food and those things that supported our education and well-being and I do not regret the path on which I obtained my education for one moment.

Contradictory as it may sound, I do not recall truly ever needing money as an individual growing up because I always felt that everything I needed was in the house within my reach. The primary focus in the household had never been money; it was self improvement and excellence. Perhaps I had learned about contentment as well as she had taught it. My mother was determined to be a good mother who raised good children. My father’s bid to discredit her as being a bad mother since she divorced him only served to further motivate her to be the best mother that she could be. For some all is fair in love and war; for others only a battle to death will suffice. Battle scars run deeper for some than others.

My mother had a keen sense of humor that was more cerebral than casually funny. You had to be on your toes and thinking to realize that she was indeed joking because she was not always smiling when she told them.  Her jokes confounded slow thinking people and left unsuspecting people pondering the words that came from such a stern faced disciplinarian. In a largely ostentatious society she would tell people to be careful not to dirty the clothes she was wearing because she had yet to finish paying for them. The reaction of the innocent victims of my mother’s humor, ranged from shock to pity for this “lady of grand standing” who had announced her own indebtedness. Those who knew better had a good laugh at the consternation she caused by such an announcements.

I do not know that she ever truly appreciated the effect that her sort of humor had on certain people. Her humor was a taste to be acquired much like acquiring a taste for bitternut or pickles. First you pucker your lips and then you smile. She jokingly referred to the first batches of water in sealed plastic bags on the Nigerian market as “Pure Gutter”. This was her jab at producers of the water which had a gel like residue lining the inside of the bags at that time and was marketed as “Pure Water”. Her mental equals tremendously appreciated her jokes that were sometimes laced with witty cynicism and engaged her in verbal jabs that they kept coming back to with skill reserved for players at an academic  tournament. Those who did not either categorized her jokes as the professions of a cantankerous woman or regarded them as the peculiarity that results from living too closely and too long with English people.

Despite her propensity for off-beat humor she did not appreciate humor that attacked the physical attributes of others and definitely did not appreciate rude or denigrating remarks. She frowned on jokes about tribal marks, attributes that were inherent in a person or that poked fun at a person’s physical disabilities. She was willing to wait years for a joke to unfold. I had defiantly insisted on wearing my hair in a punk rocker looking bun for some passport photos as a teenager. Since I could not be convinced that I might regret the photos as an adult, my mother allowed me to do as I wished but kept several extra copies of the photos which she showed to my college age son, who found them extremely humorous even though I did not value being the object of their fun.

This privately gentle woman who fiercely guarded her independence after experience taught her that emotional relationships with men, though of her culture, could never amount to any good, was my mother. She did not galvanize a movement to liberate women nor did she advocate that women march against their men. However, she consistently worked hard to raise an awareness of what physical, verbal and emotional abuse could do to people and the need to completely reject any form of abuse from anyone, man or woman.  

It is amusing that we do the very opposite of what will help us achieve our goals. A young boy who likes a girl delivers this message by punching her in the arm. The young girl retreats and the message of affection the boy seeks to deliver is lost. A wife seeking to gain closeness with her husband begins rather affectionately but somehow the discourse ends up on a sour note. He becomes defensive and the goal of regaining closeness is lost. Somewhere along the line, communication gets confused and the wires are tangled. Are they tangled forever or can the channels of communication be reopened?

My mother despised conflict and yet she often found herself right in the in the middle of it. She was very much the queen of miscommunication in emotionally charged situations. She adored her father even if she did not always agree with him on certain matters. She acknowledged his genius in the business arena but disagreed passionately with his management style as regards his family. She described his style as “divide and rule’ and often said that he pitched his children and wives against each other as a way to maintain absolute control of the family. My mother, who discouraged choosing favorites, adored her sister, my Aunt Desola, whose birth she witnessed.  I do not know that she ever told Aunty Desola how special she was to her although she told and retold the event so many times that I felt that this aunt was to be treated with extra care so as no to incur my mother’s  wrath.

In anger, my mother spoke her mind too clearly on specifics and this often obscured the larger message. Her anger at injustice dealt to anyone became her anger toward all the injustice she had ever been dealt. This sometimes spiraled into an explosive and unbridled volcano that sometimes spewed hurtful and destructive far reaching words; words that were best forgotten. She had the ability to make a vandal look like an angel because of her inability to manipulate words and attitudes as was required in the culture in which she lived when she perceived injustice to herself or to others. She empathized so deeply with those who were hurt, ailing or mistreated that she saw herself as one with them. Consequently she frequently took on the cause of the underdog relentlessly. Unfortunately, she did not always ensure that the underdog was being entirely truthful.

Her unwavering sense of fairness and justice too often caused her to kill a fly with a sledge hammer.  Times without number, she threw all of her being into the defense of the underdog and the defenseless with little concern for whom the adversaries were. My mother would not have been a successful diplomat. She was a warrior who often did not calculate risk or ensure that she had the appropriate weapons when angered. This was indeed a great flaw.

In an ideal world where people were sensitive and caring my mother would have been queen. She was compassionate, generous and especially hard working. She spoke directly. She was honest. She sought justice and fairness. She was passionate about the higher values and eager to help others. Caught in her quiet and given adequate time to express herself, she was eloquent and her attitude was much more flexible. In quiet conversations she was able to remove that mask that served as a wall between a world she perceived as cruel and her self.

Inside of this woman of many great attributes lay a frightened child. Many conversations with my mother about her life revealed a frightened, abandoned child. She missed her mother whom she felt she had lost not just once but twice. She had lost her mother as a young woman due to discord between her parents. She had arrived home from school to find her mother gone and another one of her father’s wives occupying the room which used to be her mother’s. Her mother had been banished by the family patriarch. This was not an uncommon practice among men in those days. But for her losing a mother in such circumstances must have been an awful blow. She lost my grandmother a second time when her mother died on the second of September in1989. This time the loss was permanent. She missed some of her siblings terribly even though the challenges of being born into a wealthy polygamous home had dragged them all into an abyss of confusion.

My mother who was born Olayide Adebimpe Odutola on June the fifteenth of 1924 into a polygamous family headed by an upward mobile entrepreneur father was the first child in the household although her mother was not the first wife. She was born into controversy because her birth did not follow the expected order. Considering that a first wife expects to birth the first child and that polygamy is not a tree that bears fruits of peace and harmony, my mother’s life was always complex. My grandmother bore both the first and the second children in the household. She was especially close to her paternal grandmother whom she often described as her sole protector in her growing years. She expressed her indebtedness to her grandmother for shielding her from beatings that could have ended in her death at the hands of her father. Had all the physical scars from that period in her life healed completely, perhaps the memories of that bitter period would not have been so well preserved such as to rob her of the pleasure of the company of some of her siblings.

Being sent to school in England by her father was my mother’s great escape from the complexities of her affluent childhood. She lived with her father’s friends that comprised a family complete with a father, one mother and their children. She greatly admired the simplicity and serenity of this sort of life. Pa Winter’s family was not as celebrated as hers but she felt truly at home for the first time. This model of family was forever my mother’s ideal. She completed her professional training and returned to Nigeria as a full fledged nurse and a married woman.

She had married my father, a debonair Nigerian man six years her senior who already had one child from a romance in his youth. That marriage was unsuccessful partly because my mother sought to replicate the family she had so much admired in England - A family where one woman was deemed enough for one caring man.  My father on the other hand was in reality all he knew a Nigerian man to be. He was one of 44 children and his mother was one of 22 wives. Just as my maternal grandfather had done, my paternal grandfather as was fashionable with elite men of their day had ensured that all his children received western education in as much as they sought it. My father’s education in Dublin had not influenced his inner perception of women.

Upon returning to Nigeria where there was ample support for my father’s polygamic views, it did not take long for him to begin to express the traditional views he held on women and their role. My mother pursued a divorce from her husband much against the advice of many friends and family members. This was a daring move for a female straight shooter who naively expected the truth and God alone to be adequate defense in an arena where men typically won. Divorces were rare in Nigerian society. Women typically waited patiently for men to dismiss them or to relegate them to the background from where they escaped under the guise of going to help raise their grandchildren in due time. Nigerian divorces were rarely, if ever amicable. Furthermore when a woman sought separation from a man it was considered a major attack on his masculinity; this was something worth killing for. Male children were and are still considered superior in many circumstances. Wives were not supposed to and typically did not leave their husbands even at the cost of their lives. My mother defied custom and she paid the price through isolation and financial deprivation.

Taking the advice of her mother, my mother duly committed herself to a second man, my stepfather who was an only child. The jewels of that union were three children. My mother had established what she saw as her security at the beginning of the union. She had vouched never to live under another man’s roof.  Rather she and her children lived in a house that she had secured. She found the union to be another empty promise unsuited to her ideals and so chose instead to devote herself entirely to her children.

The problems of a single man with a hundred children are quickly resolved by friends and family in a culture where it is an exception for a man to raise children and women are of no consequence. A divorced woman with eight children is considered a fool; one who should have known better than to leave a husband of any kind.  It did not matter that five children belonged to one man who had refused to provide for them as a weapon against their mother or who at every opportunity tried to prevent their mother from earning a living. One could also not fault a man who chose to support only his three children although he willingly chose a relationship with a woman who already had children from a previous marriage. My mother chose all her children over having a husband. Thus my sense of family was firmly established.

For a long time I did not feel that we really lacked anything. We had siblings for companionship. We were well fed. We went to school and we spent Christmas vacation within the gates of my maternal grandfather’s estate surrounded by a host of my mother’s relatives and our grandfather’s guests that included his town’s people who often came to pay their respects. We children played in the shadow of the adults. Adults, including servants hustled and bustled and plotted. Those adult voices were sometimes louder than they knew. The loudness was not just in volume but in fierceness.

When my mother’s paternal grandmother died my mother wept for what seemed like an eternity. She had lost her best friend and the woman she saw as her only true ally and protector in the battleground she knew as home. My mother’s grief was unbearable as I watched her prepare to return to her hometown with eight children for this last rite amidst trying to cope with the one more in a series of robberies at our house and my stepfather’s latest dalliance connected with a close neighbor with whom my mother had become friendly. In ignorance and kindness my mother had welcomed the neighbor into our home and had nursed a persistent infection on daughter’s legs. It seemed as if sorrow dug a trough deeper and faster than her faith could fill with joys.

Sometime after the death of my maternal great-grandmother the Christmas holiday trips to that bustling community of relatives in the country came to an abrupt stop.  I never quite knew what precipitated this change but I suppose it was related to conflict that never seemed to be in short supply in a rather large and diverse family. I often wondered how the gate and walls that surrounded my grandfather’s family managed to capture so much hostility within it at that point in time. The real battle seemed to be within the walls.  Walls intended to protect the dwellers from the dangers on the outside had somehow locked hostility and rivalry within.  I do not claim to understand the dynamics of the greater family that I knew. I was only a young observer then.

My mother drew her strength from religion and lost a lot to religion. Religion finds those in adversity much as those in adversity seek religion. My mother knew much adversity and therefore relied heavily on her faith. It was not an easy feat to be the first child of the giant industrialist her father had become while she suffered the humiliation of two failed relationships and the scorn of those who could have helped but chose not to because they said they could not imagine why any one of her birth would need help given her father’s significant status in Nigerian society. I observed much of the events of that time period as I observed all the others, quietly and unobtrusively. Though her losses mounted, her children were growing up and became more and more her support.

In a country such as Nigeria, where at this point in history, poverty amongst the masses increases at such an astronomic rate in light of a highly corrupt and lightly responsive government, my mother lived a truly altruistic life. She was sometimes unbelievably unassuming and did not act in a manner conducive to self preservation. It was confounding that she continuously gave to people that she perceived as needier than she was even when it caused her significant discomfort. This part of her personality was often a source of great bewilderment to those who had worked hard to give her things it appeared she needed. The only car my step-father had bought for my mother at an earlier stage in their relationship was a source of such consternation.A younger neighbor, Mr. Ibrahim, whose family my mother had adopted as part of hers, had asked to borrow her brand new car. With little hesitation and perceiving the neighbor's need as greater than hers, my mother had loaned him the car.

Much to her dismay and every one else's, the neighbor turned out to be an unscrupulous fellow. He had vanished along with the car. The car which was by then in great disrepair, was found after an extensive search was launched for Mr. Ibrahim. The situation, as it typically did at that time, ended with an apology. Naturally, the situation incurred the wrath of my step-father. I do not recall what happened to the car after that. My mother in her guileless unselfishness found herself in these situations many more times than I care to remember. She wished to believe the best of a good number of people but more often than not, she found them wanting. She believed that whatever good she did, she did for God.I find it difficult to imagine that she did not privately regret some of these circumstances.

My mother's "career" seemed to have been centered on her children. Before the children it was centered on my father's well-being. He had been the collector and distributor of most of her income. My stepfather on the other hand was never the center of her universe. He was a man meant to serve the role that becoming a doctor served for my father- maintaining the status quo. Although she had learned to love him, my stepfather, without being fully cognizant of what this position entailed, believed somehow that he could be the "more acceptable" man to society; the man who had bettered the one that came before; the winner. He wasn't and he couldn't be. My mother and stepfather were two ships on a parallel path in opposite directions. Perhaps he had sought to chart a course of his own, but his appetites, habits and custom had guided him directly into the waters that would easily drown a man such as he was. He was unaware that he had walked away before the journey began. My mother on the other hand had agreed to follow custom but was not amenable to the terms of the agreement.

The idea that education and a career were invaluable was part and parcel of my mother. She had been raised on that premise and held firmly onto that belief. She stressed being the best one could be at anything one chose. Wealth was not everything. One could not buy a good name or dignity. My mother had a formal career. It was one that she loved and one that suited her somewhat easily embarrassed, empathetic and compassionate nature well. She was a nurse by profession. She had arrived in England at the end of World War II and was a certified nurse and mid-wife in the early years of the Korean War.Her arrival in England was at the end of one war and her departure was at the early part of another. Her own life experiences, her experience with rationing in England and personally administering pain killing narcotics to disabled men whose bodies had been ravaged by war had made her even more empathetic to those in pain.

Her nursing badge proffered to her by Whips Cross Hospital was a source of great pride for her. She carefully saved all her letters, telegrams, results from examinations, certificates and mementos related to her arrival at that place as a nurse and mid-wife. Her records show that she was indeed an excellent scholar. She treasured memories of her school days and the experiences with students and colleagues whose lives she had touched over the years. She derived particular pleasure from those special students and colleagues who remembered her after many years. Some called her "sister" as in nursing sister, others called her Aunty Layide. Aunty Olugbo Bailey who fondly called my mother, "my sister" was particularly close to my mother during her child rearing years.

My mother loved her people. She loved Ijebu Land and took great pride in being a Yoruba woman from Ijebu-Ode. She was born in Ago-Iwoye in a house that her maternal grand-mother's had built. Her father was then an itinerant court clerk and Nigeria was a British colony.My mother was equally literate in Yoruba and English. Her penmanship was bold clear and definitively the formal script of her era. The Ijebu language was her first language and it flowed freely from her lips. It was the dominant language my mother spoke to her children and her kin. English which she spoke and understood quite well was a third tongue; trailing behind Ijebu and mainstream Yoruba. She could and did speak other Yoruba dialects when need arose, but she essentially spoke Ijebu.My mother was an exacting woman with regards to learning and completing tasks. She was as particular about the correct pronunciation of /th/ as she was about cleanliness. If you were going to speak a language you had to speak it well. In order to speak it well, you had to understand it well.

She did her best to ensure our fluency in the Yoruba language, but the Lagos society in which we lived supported her best only in our acquisition of the English language. Those of us who chose to had to make a concerted effort to keep our mastery of spoken Yoruba language alive and well. My mother was not to be outdone in her defense of her home town. She did not take kindly to jokes that reflected poorly on her people or her family. She was proud of the fact that Ijebu culture had not been over run by African slave trade or the colonization of Nigeria. Criticism of her family or people was reserved solely for people within that particular membership. As with many people of her time, she appreciated people of other cultures but struggled with the idea of her own children choosing spouses outside of indigenous Yoruba groups.

My mother was very sure of whom she was. She did not equivocate when it came to her beliefs, her expectations and her goals even when they seemed totally impossible and unachievable.She willingly made the sacrifice she needed to attain many of her goals no matter how much she was inconvenienced. She valued a good name and refused to engage in acts that would have her name associated with unbecoming conduct. She believed in honor; this included honoring ones obligations. She loved family even though she painfully expressed and acknowledged that hers was fragmented. She often spoke of her relatives who lived beyond the walls of her father's estate. She wanted her children to know that she had relatives beyond those who were wealthy and celebrated people. She wanted us to understand where and from whom she came and that although she had not always agreed with some of the commonly held beliefs of her people, she still was a part of them and had not abandoned them.

During the latter part of her life she took a trip to her maternal grand-mother's house in Ago-Iwoye, to revisit the room in which she was born. She traced her steps to the parsonage where she had lived a part of her earliest years with Reverend and Mrs. Beckley, a missionary and his wife. She credited them for her love of nature and her interest in the names of various plants and animals because it was while perched on the shoulders of Reverend Beckley on bicycle trips through the woods that many plants and animals were first pointed out to her. Her final trip to Ago-Iwoye proved to be a history lesson about her childhood for those of us who accompanied her. Although I knew that she had lived with various people during the course of growing up, as was the educational training practice of her time, I had not given much thought to the collective of people who contributed in various ways to the person my mother was. People she lived with included an aunt of hers, Mrs. Jadesimi and the Winter family.

The eye indeed does not see itself. My mother was an authoritative individual; a consequence of her birth and background. Although she perceived herself as closer to the masses, they were suspicious of her motives and often perceived her only as a product of her wealthy upper class background; an aristocrat hiding among lowly people to preserve her wealth. That which might have been perceived as humility in some circles was seen as a shrewd act of deception by many. My mother's speech patterns, attitude, expectations, values and overall demeanor did not reflect or coincide with that of the masses with whom she sought to identify. She held ideals reflective of her societal class and her educational background.

She truly believed that she could effect change in an emerging and often turbulent society.She failed to recognize the power of other people's perception of her person on her life. She was not an ostentatious person and did not promote herself by declaring the power of her status by birth. She frequently described herself as the daughter of a court clerk; a position her father had left behind very early in his life. She rarely admitted that she indeed was the first born of the business mogul that her father had then become. My mother yearned for simplicity. She did not perceive herself as just another woman in the sea of women. She emulated her role models who were strong willed hardy pioneering people; her father, both her maternal and paternal grandmothers and her grand uncle. She strove to have equal rights with men at a time when it was contrary to the mores of the society within which she lived. She perceived herself as the equal of any man and lived her life as such.

Although my mother was imposing in presence, she was essentially an introverted, guileless, nurturing idealist who staunchly believed in teaching by example in a world full of pain and injustice. She did not believe in titles beyond academic ones and consequently shunned membership in many secular organizations lest she be trapped in group think; unable to express her own opinions freely when her ideas differed from that of the group. She moved freely between many groups especially in her church but avoided situations that involved titles. She did not like to draw attention to herself. She was shy but appreciated being valued. Her idea of a good time ranged from a caucus with her children, including the many children she had adopted through the years, to enjoying solitude while reading a good book. She served her fellow human beings as faithfully and as completely as she could.

Her generosity was remarkable and at times to her own detriment. When she had, she shared what she had. When she did not have enough to share, she tried to find a solution to the other person's problem. Despite her inability to employ diplomacy in some circumstances that required it, she was a leader and a friend to a multitude of people in many stations in life. Her impatience with injustice made her an advocate for the weak, the downtrodden and anyone whose voice was being drowned out in a loud world. My mother loved and lived life passionately. She was a relentless problem solver. Her faith was her mainstay and children were both her greatest joy and greatest mystery. She was imperfect and so human, yet she was a woman of great conviction who stood solidly behind what she believed. She died believing that neither wealth nor clothes made a man; personal integrity was paramount.