CHAPTER EIGHT
Okonkwo did not taste any food for two days after the death of Ikemefuna. He drank
palm-wine from morning till night, and his eyes were red and fierce like the eyes of a rat
when it was caught by the tail and dashed against the floor. He called his son, Nwoye, to
sit with him in his obi. But the boy was afraid of him and slipped out of the hut as soon
as he noticed him dozing.
He did not sleep at night. He tried not to think about Ikemefuna,-but the more he
tried the more he thought about him. Once he got up from bed and walked about his
compound. But he was so weak that his legs could hardly carry him. He felt like a
drunken giant walking with the limbs of a mosquito. Now and then a cold shiver
descended on his head and spread down his body.
On the third day he asked his second wife, Ekwefi, to roast plantains for him.
She prepared it the way he liked--with slices of oil-bean and fish.
"You have not eaten for two days," said his daughter Ezinma when she brought
the food to him. "So you must finish this." She sat down and stretched her legs in front
of her. Okonkwo ate the food absent-mindedly. 'She should have been a boy,' he thought
as he looked at his ten-year-old daughter. He passed her a piece of fish.
"Go and bring me some cold water," he said. Ezinma rushed out of the hut,
chewing the fish, and soon returned with a bowl of cool water from the earthen pot in
her mother's hut.
Okonkwo took the bowl from her and gulped the water down. He ate a few more
pieces of plaintain and pushed the dish aside.
"Bring me my bag," he asked, and Ezinma brought his goatskin bag from the far
end of the hut. He searched in it for his snuff-bottle. It was a deep bag and took almost
the whole length of his arm. It contained other things apar t from his snuff-bottle. There
was a drinking horn in it, and also a drinking gourd, and they knocked against each