What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky

In this fairy tale, young women create children out of materials they gather. When others see the created baby, they perform a traditional call-and-response song to bring the child to life. For a year, the mother must care for this creature until it becomes a flesh-and-bone child. The material used to form the baby in part determines the character of the person it will become.

Ogechi herself was made from mud, utilitarian and basic, but wants her child to be pretty, lighthearted, and lovable. She tries yarn, which women living in more comfortable circumstances often use, but the yarn baby snags on a nail and unravels. On a bus ride, Ogechi resentfully watches two basket weavers with babies made of woven raffia. The other riders praise the women for their handiwork and sing the traditional song.

She recalls her first attempts at making a baby. She used cotton tufts and then paper, but her mother destroyed both, saying that she needed one made of harder stuff to face a life of work. They fought, and Ogechi ran away.

Ogechi works at a hair salon owned by a businesswoman (“Mama”) who also runs a service that blesses the babies of motherless young women. Ogechi owes Mama for the unraveled yarn baby but doesn’t have money to pay her. Instead, Mama siphons some of Ogechi’s joy. She previously siphoned some of Ogechi’s empathy in payment for past babies, as she requires joy and empathy to conduct blessings. Ogechi has noticed that she herself is less compassionate than she used to be.

One day, a beautiful woman with a porcelain baby comes in looking for Mama. Though envious of the baby, Ogechi knows her mother would deride it as needing too much coddling (Ogechi also envies the porcelain baby that coddling). She decides to collect the hair from the salon to make a baby. When Mama finishes with the woman with the porcelain baby, Ogechi approaches her with a request for a new blessing, not showing her the hair baby. Mama sings the traditional song and siphons more joy from Ogechi.

Ogechi recalls an old tale about a village where the girls made babies from their hair clippings. One day, a storm scattered all the hair. As they collected it, the girls fought over the best strands until their mothers made them each take turns taking one strand at a time. When the babies were the right size, the elder mothers sang them into life. The next morning, all the new mothers were gone or reduced to bones. Ogechi ignores this warning about mixing hair.

When the baby wakes up hungry and crying, Ogechi discovers that it will only settle while suckling the hair on the nape of her neck. She straps it there and goes to work. On the way, she encounters a crowd watching a mother and daughter publicly unwrap the daughter’s new baby. The child is merely made of twigs, scraps, and grass, disappointing many in the crowd but delighting the two mothers. Ogechi is curious about why they would love such an ordinary child.

At the hair salon, the other shop assistants notice the new baby and sing the traditional song of welcome for Ogechi. Ogechi is newly confident, but the child sucking on Ogechi’s neck makes her achy, and when she removes it at the end of the day, the hair is gone. She cuts off some of her hair to feed it and collects more hair at work. The other assistants get suspicious and try to see the baby. When she doesn’t let them, they make extra messes for her to clean. Ogechi takes to hiding her baby among the wigs.

One day, a client of Mama’s comes to repay her debt. Mama orders one of the shop girls to fetch a wig for the woman after she pays. Fearing the discovery of her baby, Ogechi jumps up to do it, but Mama forces her to sit down. The assistant doesn’t return. When the client tires of waiting, Mama tells Ogechi to fetch the wig. She finds the wig on the floor and her baby on the shelf where the wig was. The assistant is gone and never returns.

That night, the baby refuses to eat hair, and its belly is very warm. Then it laughs—the snicker of the shop assistant who vanished. Ogechi’s fear grows as the child nips her fingers despite her not having given it teeth, but she feels that mothers must make sacrifices for their children. She latches it to her neck and returns to work. The other assistant has been crying and accuses Ogechi of knowing what happened to the other assistant, her cousin. Ogechi threatens to do the same to her. When she washes the baby in the sink the next day, the assistant sees the baby and runs out to fetch Mama. Ogechi apologizes, but Mama prefers payment. Not realizing that the hair baby is on Ogechi, she puts her hand on it to siphon joy and falls down, shuddering. Ogechi runs home.

In the middle of the night, Ogechi wakes to find the child standing over her. It pulls her hair back and shoves its fist into her mouth to quiet her. Ogechi grabs a candle and sets the hair baby on fire. Later, she scoops up dirt and adds water and the ashes from the hair baby. She forms a new child made of sorrow and gives it a face like her mother’s. Tomorrow she will gather leaves to protect it.