Drum Call | Seun Lari-Williams

They say we return because we are cruel. 

That we dance between worlds to taste sorrow again and again. 

That we are nothing but wind in the womb, fire in the cradle.

But not this time.

This time, I came to stay—at least until she learned. Until she saw through the man who called himself a master of doors but can’t even find the keyhole, much less turn the lock.

I had left her five times before, in seasons she named after hope: Joko, Bamidele, Durotimi, Bamitale. I watched each name wither on her tongue. But the sixth time, I paused.
Because I had seen her future—and it was worse than all my deaths.

It was him. That bastard with his charcoal eyes and ash-dusted feet. Her juju man.

Oh, he was a spectacle, that one. A peacock strutting in borrowed plumes. They came from miles around, their faces etched with worry and hope in equal measure, to sit at the dusty hem of his embroidered robes. Women clutching wilting herbs and meagre coins, their voices hushed with pleas for barren wombs to quicken or wayward husbands to return. Men with furrowed brows seeking blessings for their harvests or protection from unseen enemies. Children, their eyes wide with a mixture of fear and fascination, clinging to their mothers’ wrappers.

His compound buzzed like a disturbed hive. Goats were tied to crooked fences, their bleating a constant undertone to the murmur of supplications. Clay pots bubbled with concoctions whose pungent smells drifted through the hot air. Cowrie shells, polished smooth by countless fumbling fingers, lay scattered on woven mats, waiting to be “read” by his knowing gaze.

He held court under the shade of a sprawling mango tree, his voice banging with pronouncements that mixed ancient (twisted) wisdom with blatant fabrication. He’d wave a gnarled stick, its tip adorned with feathers that looked suspiciously like they’d come from a common bush fowl. He’d chant incantations in a language that sounded vaguely familiar yet was ultimately meaningless gibberish. And the people? They swallowed it up like akpu. They nodded like lizards, they gasped, they wept.

His reputation had grown like a stubborn weed. Success stories—a baby born after years of trying, a lost trinket miraculously found—were whispered and embellished as they traveled from village to village. Failures were attributed to the stubbornness of spirits or the lack of faith in the supplicant. He was a master of deflection, a weaver of convincing narratives that always landed him on solid ground, and lined his pockets with the desperate offerings of the hopeful and the fearful.

My mother was just one of many in that endless queue, her face a mask of yearning as she waited her turn, clutching her lean gifts. And I, a silent observer just behind her, seethed. How could they not see? How could they be so easily swayed by this charlatan’s theatrics? But then I remembered my own past departures, the raw grief in her eyes, and understood the depth of her need to believe, even in the face of blatant falsehood.

He said I was stubborn. A spirit that refused to obey. He declared me a wild one while fumbling with cowries he didn’t know how to read. He called on tongues he didn’t speak. And still, she believed him.

My mother, oh, my mother—she looked at him the way dry earth looks at clouds after famine has squeezed it hard. She brought him yam, soap, cloth, coins wrapped in old scarves. Each time he asked for more, she gave. When he told her to bury a turtle’s egg beside my mat, she did it in tears, whispering, begging, “Stay. Please stay.”

And I did. That time, I stayed…until the drum call.

She wrapped my ankles in thread and chalk. She fed me bitter herbs until my tongue forgot sweetness. Each morning, she pressed her ear to my chest as if listening for a sign—for proof that I hadn’t slipped away. 

My father had been a practical man—his yam mounds stood in perfect rows, his prayers brief as a harvest knife. He died before I drew my first breath, leaving her with nothing but the kind of grief that hollows out a woman’s bones. So no, I could not let this ash-footed fraud peel the last flesh from her spirit. Not when she had already buried half herself in my father’s grave.

The rubbish man now came to our house every week with a new chant and a higher price. I watched him grow younger, fattened by her hope.

One day, I tested him, hoping my mother would notice something.

I etched symbols in the sand outside our hut—ones only spirit-folk know. He stepped on them without pause.

Another time, I feigned illness and whispered a question in the tongue of the in-between. A true juju man, a Babaláwo would’ve known what I asked. He only blinked and said I must have eaten something spoiled.

I stayed to save her from him. To teach her to save herself from these evil men.

Years passed. My legs grew strong. I laughed. I teased. I loved. My mother aged gently, like someone wearing a shawl she’d chosen. She began to tell me stories—not of charms or spirits—but of stubborn yam seedlings, the stars, and how rivers carry memory. She started to laugh too.

Still, the man came. I loathed him. I wanted to shout that he knew nothing. That I knew his words before he spoke them. That I could undo his chants in my sleep.

I tested him some more, so she could see him for he was.

Nothing.

And then, one day, I noticed something. 

It wasn’t sudden. It was just a softening around her eyes when he spoke. A sigh too quiet to name. A glance she’d toss me, wry and warm, while he rambled on about binding spirits. That was when I began to wonder: had she known all along, or did she just come to realise it?

I mimicked a spirit elder’s lament I’d once overheard in the spaces-between. I spoke of a forgotten wellspring. She paused while stirring the evening stew. Her hand froze. Her eyes clouded. Then, she simply sang a song she’d sung many times: “I, too, have left footprints in the dust of other worlds”, the meaning of the words dawning on me for the first time.

Another time, when our man called a rare blue feather I’d found a powerful charm. My mother plucked it from my hair and said, “A pretty thing, but your laughter is the best shield.”

Yet, understanding came slowly to me. Like dawn that one doesn’t notice until the sky has already turned.

She wasn’t fooled.
She had always known he was a fraud.
Maybe she carried a whisper of the other world in her too—a thin echo that helped her see through him. That’d have been rare, but it wasn’t unheard of.

I still wasn’t sure.

But if she knew… then why?

Why the offerings? The prayers whispered into empty air? Why let the charade enrich the very man I’d stayed to guard her from?

When she lay dying, my old woman, I sat beside her.

Her hand, still strong despite time, cupped my cheek.
“My stubborn fire, my wind-borne joy,” she murmured. “It was never about him. I knew you loved me. I knew this time it was different. But as long as I needed him… you stayed. He was never a priest, just the rope I tied you to earth with.”

After she died, I waited to be pulled—back to the between. But no hand came.

No drumbeat called me home.

Only silence.

And an understanding that she’d since broken the drum.