For eleven years Sister Nkechi sold agege bread outside our church, and nobody knew she could not read the Bible she carried every Sunday.
She kept it in her basket, wrapped in the same nylon as the loaves, its cover soft and swollen from handling. During service she held it open on her lap and moved her lips. I sat behind her as a child and thought she was the most devout woman in Lagos.
I learned the truth the year I turned nineteen, when she asked me — shyly, at her bread table, glancing around first — to read her one verse. The pastor said it this morning, she said. I want to carry it in my head this week. My eyes cannot catch the small letters. It was not her eyes. I understood that the way you understand a thing you are not meant to say aloud.
So I read it to her. And the next week another. It became our arrangement: she would save me the softest loaf, still warm, and I would give her a verse to carry. She repeated each one until it lived in her, then went off to sell bread with scripture warm in her mouth like the loaves in her basket.
She is old now. Her hands shake too much to make change, so her granddaughter runs the table. But she still comes to church, and she still cannot read, and it does not matter at all — because eleven years of borrowed verses are stored inside her, hundreds of them, and she pours them out over anyone who is grieving at her table.
Last Sunday she blessed me with words I once read to her when I was nineteen and did not yet know I would need them.
She could not read them. But she had kept every one.