The Boy Who
Stitched the Sky.

Baba Adéwálé is already awake when Tunde finds him in the courtyard. The Egúngún is laid out across two stools like a sleeping animal — a wooden frame, the cloth grandfather wore last year, and seventeen new strips Mama dyed indigo at the river. 'The cloth remembers,' Baba says. 'But cloth is patient. You must remind it whose body it is.'

• PANEL: Rooster crosses an empty courtyard at dawn.
• PANEL: A folded mass of indigo and red cloth on a low stool.
• PANEL: Tunde, hesitating in the doorway.
• PANEL: Baba's hand, lifting the wooden mask out of a basket.

Eighty-one cowries, Baba says. Always odd. Tunde threads them through the hem until his fingers cramp. His older sister Adunni laughs at him — 'you sew like a chicken pecks' — and then sits down beside him and helps. As the shells click against each other Tunde realises he is making a sound the ancestor will make when he walks.

• PANEL: Close — Tunde's hands, indigo-stained, threading a cowrie.
• PANEL: Adunni laughing, palm-wine cup in hand.
• PANEL: Wide — the family on the verandah, working together.
• PANEL: Sun moving across the wall as hours pass.

The bàtá drums start at moonrise. When the masquerade enters the square it is not Baba inside the cloth — Baba is right next to Tunde, holding his shoulder, watching with everyone else. The Egúngún spins until the strips Tunde sewed lift like wings, and the cowries Tunde threaded begin to sing. 'Do you see him?' Baba whispers. Tunde sees his grandfather, whom he has never met, dancing in the firelight. 'Yes,' he says. 'I see him.'

• PANEL: Bàtá drummers, fingers blurred.
• PANEL: The Egúngún erupts into the square, cloth spinning.
• PANEL: The crowd — wide eyes, open mouths, hands raised.
• PANEL: Tunde, lit from below by torchlight, finally smiling.