"You remember Ugbala?" Nne-nne asked, her face crinkling in a teasing smile.  Both of us burst out laughing, and then I began shaking my head.

Yes, I remembered Ugbala.  I remembered Ugbala as the tall woman with the rough voice and the hoarse laugh, the beauty gap in her upper front teeth, and blue nki tatoos on both her arms.  Ugbala had the ability to transform herself into a fiery-eyed monster by pushing out her lips and folding her upper eyelids inside out.  Tell any child in our village that Ugbala was coming, and he could be made to eat food or swallow medicine that no one could otherwise get past his clenched teeth.  I remembered Ugbala for the thorough physical inspection she gave me whenever she came to visit my grandmother, peering inside my mouth and ears, examining my hair for lice and ringworm, and squeezing my belly to see if any organs were enlarged or painful.  Then came the part that, even at twenty-one, I remembered with a shudder.  Ugbala turned me upside down, and holding me in place between her knees, she pulled apart the lobes of my buttocks and peered into my rectum for worms, all the while making comments about how carelessly I wiped myself and jokingly threatening that if I did anything in her face while she was looking, she would poke a stick into my belly all the way to my mouth!

Yes, I remembered Ugbala.  I remembered her rolling her eyes or opening them wide with mock surprise or making faces at everyone's genitals, calling them nicknames that described their size, shape, and the direction of their pointing.  I remember that older children found her an unbearable tease but dared not show it, for if you frowned or acted offended because of the liberties she took with you, she was apt to say, "Look at him now, daring to be haughty with me.  If only I had known he was going to act haughty with me, I could have made a little mistake when I was circumcising him and gone chook! with my aguba.  And cut off the whole thing!" Then she would wink and chuckle.

Physically, Ugbala was a tower of a woman, a rare combination of grace and strength.  Men said of her that she had a personality originally intended for a man, but which somehow had found its way into a woman.  Regardless of what anyone said, Ugbala was very much a woman.  In fact, all aspects of womanhood were exaggerated in her – in her heavy breasts; her long, black hair; her laughing, teasing eyes, which invited flirtation or easy familiarity; and in her tendency to tell bawdy jokes, which sometimes gave false hopes of seduction to men who had no chance of bedding her in a thousand reincarnations.  When she smiled, her wide-open face opened even wider; her teeth with a beauty gap in the middle of the upper row flashed, and her head wagged fat plaits of hair, which were pulled down beside her ears like grooved horns.  Those plaits and her warm rust complexion gave her the look of a Mami-Wota doll.

Remembering Ugbala from the age I now was, I saw her as the proverbial okpolu, a specimen marked by its uniqueness and singularity and produced by Nature to illustrate the ultimate possibilities of which a species is capable.  She was the solitary orji or apu tree whose roots seem to reach down to the very center of the Earth and whose trunk erupts out of the ground and vaults straight upward to meet the sky, attaining a height so great that men could only tilt back their heads to stare and wonder about what went on among its elevated branches.  For such a tree, as for Ugbala, Nature usually clears a wide perimeter free of the ordinary.