The next morning they were roasted in clay pots and then spread in the sun until they became dry and brittle. Then all Umuofia turned out in spite of the cold harmattan, and everyone filled his bags and pots with locusts. The locusts settled in the bushes for the night and their wings became wet with dew. Many people went out with baskets trying to catch them, but the elders counseled patience till nightfall. Mighty tree branches broke away under them, and the whole country became the brown-earth color of the vast, hungry swarm. They settled on every tree and on every blade of grass they settled on the roofs and covered the bare ground. For although locusts had not visited Umuofia for many years, everybody knew by instinct that they were very good to eat. Everyone was now about, talking excitedly and praying that the locusts should camp in Umuofia for the night. The locusts had not come for many, many years, and only the old people had seen them before. “Locusts are descending,” was joyfully chanted everywhere, and men, women and children left their work or their play and ran into the open to see the unfamiliar sight. It was a brief resting period between the exacting and arduous planting season and the equally exacting but light-hearted month of harvests. At such times, in each of the countless thatched huts of Umuofia, children sat around their mother’s cooking fire telling stories, or with their father in his obi warming themselves from a log fire, roasting and eating maize. It was then uncertain whether the low rumbling of Amadiora’s thunder came from above or below.
Sometimes it poured down in such thick sheets of water that earth and sky seemed merged in one gray wetness. And so nature was not interfered with in the middle of the rainy season. The personal dynamism required to counter the forces of these extremes of weather would be far too great for the human frame. He could not stop the rain now, just as he would not attempt to start it in the heart of the dry season, without serious danger to his own health. And now the rains had really come, so heavy and persistent that even the village rain-maker no longer claimed to be able to intervene. The women weeded the farm three times at definite periods in the life of the yams, neither early not late. The yams were then staked, first with little sticks and later with tall and big tree branches. As the rains became heavier the women planted maize, melons and beans between yam mounds.
The young tendrils were protected from earth-heat with rings of sisal leaves. For three or four moons it demanded hard work and constant attention from cock-crow till the chickens went back to roost. Yam, the king of crops, was a very exacting king.
One man tied his cloth to a tree branch and hanged himself. That year the harvest was sad, like a funeral, and many farmers wept as they dug up the miserable and rotting yams. The yams put on luxuriant green leaves, but every farmer knew that without sunshine the tubers would not grow. The spell of sunshine which always came in the middle of the wet season did not appear. But it went from day to day without a pause. Trees were uprooted and deep gorges appeared everywhere. For days and nights together it poured down in violent torrents, and washed away the yam heaps. He still had the eight hundred from Nwakibie and the four hundred from his father’s friend. The yams he had sown before the drought were his own, the harvest of the previous. But the drought continued for eight market weeks and the yams were killed… Okonkwo planted what was left of his seed-yams when the rains finally returned. He changed them every day, and prayed that the rain might fall in the night.
But by the end of the day the sisal rings were burned dry and gray. He had tried to protect them from the smoldering earth by making rings of thick sisal leaves around them. In the morning he went back to his farm and saw the withering tendrils. He watched the sky all day for signs of rain clouds and lay awake all night. He had sown four hundred seeds when the rains dried up and the heat returned. Like all good farmers, Okonkwo had began to sow with the first rains. The earth burned like hot coals and roasted all the yams that had been sown. The blazing sun returned, more fierce than it had ever been known, and scorched all the green that had appeared with the rains. The first rains were late, and, when they came, lasted only a brief moment. Nothing happened at its proper time it was either too early or too late. The year that Okonkwo took eight hundred seed-yams from Nwakibie was the worst year in living memory.
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