My mother didn’t stop going to the farm all at once.
It happened gradually—like rain that begins as a mist, too soft to notice, and only when you are drenched do you realize the sky has opened.
One morning, she left her hoe by the door.
The next, she sat outside instead of tying her wrapper for the walk to Nekede.
By the third morning, she didn’t even pretend anymore.
I asked her, “Mama, you’re not working today?”
She didn’t look up. “I’m working,” she said. “Just not there.”
I waited for more, but the rest of the sentence stayed trapped inside her mouth.
I didn’t push her. At sixteen, shame lived in my throat like a stone. I thought I had no right to ask her anything. I thought silence was repentance.
I was wrong. Silence was surrender.
The men returned after a few days—a different car this time, but the same polished smiles, the same cologne that didn’t belong in our neighborhood.
She stepped out of the house before they could knock, as if she had been expecting them. They spoke in low voices. Then she climbed into the back seat without looking back.
I stood at the window, watching the dust rise behind the tires.
She returned before dawn.
I heard her feet scrape the floor before I saw her.
She moved like someone whose bones were borrowed.
I opened my mouth, but no words came.
She didn’t give me the chance anyway.
“Go to sleep,” she murmured.
“But—”
“Go to sleep.”
The tone was final—flat, emptied of life.
A tone that said: Do not open this door. If you open it, neither of us will survive what’s inside.
So I closed it.
And another part of her closed with it.
Money became our new language.
Not a flood—no, not yet. But enough to notice the shift:
rice with seasoning cubes, new sandals for school, medicine for my grandmother that didn’t come in unlabelled bottles from dubious chemists.
Then came the generator.
Then the better mattress.
Then the envelope she handed to my principal with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes.
“You’re doing well now,” my grandmother said, squinting at her.
“What job brings this kind of blessing?”
My mother wiped sweat from her forehead. “God provides,” she said.
Maybe my grandmother believed her.
Maybe she pretended to.
That’s the thing about poverty: sometimes survival demands faith you don’t actually have.
The rumors didn’t begin with noise—they began with laughter.
The boys at school laughed when I walked past.
Not the usual laughter at my softness or my quietness—this was different. Meaner. Sharper.
Obinna, the loudest of them, leaned against a wall and called out,
“Ifechi, your mother is famous o!”
I kept walking.
Fame was not something mothers in Owerri sought.
Not that kind of fame.
I didn’t ask what he meant.
I didn’t have to.
My stomach already knew.
The truth reached me not through cruelty, but through pity.
A boy named Chima approached me after school, his shoulders curled inward, his voice barely more than breath.
“My cousin works at a hotel near Port Harcourt Road,” he whispered. “Sometimes… they film things there.”
My heartbeat stuttered.
I didn’t want him to continue.
I wanted him to be speaking about someone else—anyone else.
“He saw your mother,” he said.
The world did what worlds do when they collapse:
It went silent, then unbearably loud, then silent again.
I didn’t cry.
I didn’t react.
I simply stood there, stunned into stillness, while the ground scraped itself open beneath me.
Chima touched my arm lightly. “I’m sorry. I thought you should know.”
He walked away.
I stood there long after my shadow disappeared into the dusk.
I could have confronted her.
I could have screamed, demanded, begged.
Instead, I ate the food she cooked.
I accepted the new notebooks she bought me.
I looked at the bruises on her skin and pretended they were shadows.
I said nothing.
And each time I said nothing, the distance between us grew until she was on one side of a ravine and I on the other—with no bridge left between us.
What finally broke me wasn’t a tape or a rumor—it was a memory.
One evening, she came home early.
She sat by the lantern, her shoulders trembling though her eyes stayed dry.
Her hands—those hands I once traced like maps—were shaking.
I watched her from my mat, pretending to do homework.
For a moment, she lifted her eyes and looked at me.
Really looked at me.
And in that brief glance, I saw everything:
the sacrifices she never wanted,
the bargains she never chose,
the child she lived for,
and the child she was dying because of.
I looked away first.
Cowardice always looks away first.
I am the son of a porn star.
But she was not born for that life.
She was forged into it—hammered, bent, reshaped by desperation and shame and the weight of my existence.
And I was old enough to know it.
Old enough to understand.
Old enough to speak.
But I chose silence.
And silence, in the end, is the loudest crime of all.
