The Coal Pot

In his mama's kitchen there was one coal pot, one big pot on top of it, one wooden spoon, and eight children who all believed they were in charge.

They were not. Mama was in charge. She ran that kitchen in Ajegunle the way a general runs a war: smoke for cover, pepper for artillery, the wooden spoon for discipline. Chuks was the fourth child and the biggest, and while his brothers were outside chasing a football made of plastic bags and string, he was at her elbow, watching.

"Why are you always here?" she asked him once, when he was seven.

"I am supervising."

She hit him lightly on the head with the spoon, then put the spoon in his hand. "If you are going to stand there, stir."

So he stirred. He learned to tell by the smell when onions had gone from raw to sweet. He learned that you do not wash the rice in the pot you cook it in, that you do not answer back to palm oil, and that the bottom of the jollof, the tomato-red party rice every Lagos cook is judged by, the crisp, smoky layer that sticks to the pot, belongs to whoever did the washing up. He learned that a pot of stew, done properly, can stretch to feed eight children, a husband, two neighbors and a visiting aunt who had said she was not hungry.

"A man who cooks never goes hungry," his mama told him.

She didn't say anything about running. Chuks never asked. It seemed like the kind of question that would lead to running.

His parents went back east to the village when his father retired, to the land and the relatives. Chuks stayed in Lagos. He was nineteen and very large and owned one good shirt, a set of knives wrapped in a towel, and his mama's recipe for pepper soup, which he had not written down because it was not the kind of thing you write down.

June 12 Street

He came to June 12 Street because of a rumor that Mama Shola's restaurant at No. 1 needed someone to wash pots. The old mess hall is still there at the back, called the Parade Room; out front, the sign now says Mama Shola Hot Stuff Restaurant & Grill.

The rumor was true. The restaurant fed the soldiers and police from the training camp next door, which meant that by two o'clock every afternoon the back of the kitchen looked like a battlefield, and the head cook, Mama Bisola, stood in the middle of it like the only survivor.

Mama Bisola was not his mama. She made this very clear on the first day. She was a short, broad woman with forearms like yams and a voice that could stop a platoon. She looked at Chuks, at the size of him, and said, "You eat a lot."

"Yes, Ma."

"Good. A cook who does not eat cannot be trusted."

He washed pots for her for two years. Then he chopped onions for her. Then, one day when her nephew failed to show up, he made the stew, and she tasted it in silence, and said, "Salt." Just that.

He was crushed for a week before one of the soldiers explained that "salt" was the highest compliment Mama Bisola had ever paid anyone. It meant she could only find one thing wrong.

Not long after that, he set up a coal pot of his own on the street outside No. 1. Mama Bisola allowed it on two conditions: he must never sell to her soldiers at lunchtime, and he must never, ever make jollof within sight of her kitchen window.

He broke the second rule within a month. She has not forgiven him. She has also, on three occasions that he knows about, sent a boy across the street to buy a plate of it.

These days the pot stands across the road from Iloro House, and everybody on the Abraham Adesyan Estate knows it and the big man in the apron behind it.

Some people pay him. Some people pay him later. Some people pay him in stories, or advice, or a promise to fix his phone. Dozie from Room 6 at Iloro House pays him in investment opportunities, the latest of which is a currency called BreakCoin that Chuks has been told will make them both very rich by December, of a year not yet specified. Chuks keeps a tally of all of it in his head, and every few months he quietly forgets most of it.

"Food is medicine," he tells people, ladling stew onto rice. He says it to the nurse at the clinic at No. 5, who never has time to eat lunch and finds a covered bowl on her desk anyway. He said it to Funke, the medical student upstairs, the first week she moved in, and she laughed and said, "I am going to put that on my exam paper and see what they give me."

Every afternoon he walks to the Afternoon Store, the little kiosk on the street, for pepper and onions and, when the power has stayed on, a bottle of cold water. "I'm off to the store for pepper and onions," he announces to whoever is sitting near the pot. "If I come back with suya, you didn't see anything."

Suya is spiced beef grilled on sticks, and it is the one food in Lagos that Chuks will buy from someone else. A man must have one weakness, or people will not trust him.

He went to buy one onion, once. The woman at the stall talked him into a whole bag. He still says, with reverence, "That's skill."

The tin

At night, after the last plate, after he has scrubbed the pot and banked the coals, Chuks takes a biscuit tin out from under his bed and counts what is in it.

It is not a lot. It grows slowly, the way stew reduces: you have to stand over it, and you cannot rush it, and the moment you look away it burns. Inside the tin, with the money, there is a piece of paper folded into quarters. On the paper, in his careful capital letters, is a plan.

A buka. That is what Lagos calls a small, plain restaurant, a room with a counter and benches and pots, where working people eat real food at a fair price. Nothing fancy. Five benches. A ceiling fan. A sign over the door. He has changed the name on the sign eleven times. The current one is MAMA'S SPOON, which he feels is respectful and a little bit threatening, which is exactly how he remembers her.

The landlord of a room near the Ajegunle market wants two years' rent up front, which is how Lagos landlords prefer to be loved. Add the cookers, the benches, the fan, the paint, the license, the sign. Chuks has done the sums so many times he can do them in his sleep, and sometimes does. The answer is always roughly two million naira. The tin, tonight, holds ₦163,500.

"Good things take time," he tells the tin.

The tin, as usual, says nothing.

The afternoon it all started to change, he was coming back from the store with the pepper and onions and, yes, a small packet of suya, when he saw a man sitting on the veranda bench at Iloro House.

Thin. Bruised. One bag.

Chuks stopped in the middle of the street. Something about the man's shoulders, the tilt of his head, reached into a part of his memory closed for twenty years.

He knew that boy. He had once chased that boy down a muddy street in Ajegunle for stealing the last piece of fried plantain out of his hand.

It was AJ.