The Honest Tin at Onitsha Market

The rain stopped just before nine, and the market began to steam. Water ran in the gutters between the stalls. A radio somewhere played old highlife. A wheelbarrow boy shouted, “Ụzọ! Ụzọ!” and pushed through with a load of yams. Chidinma pulled the tarpaulin back from her table and the smell of dried crayfish rose to meet her.

She sells crayfish and ground pepper. She measures them in a small enamel tin, white with a blue rim, chipped at one side. It was her mother's tin. Her mother sold from this same spot for twenty-two years.

Prices had climbed all month. Transport from the coast had doubled. The bag of crayfish she bought on Monday cost more than the bag she sold on Friday. Her nephew, Ikenna, who helps her on Saturdays, watched her count the morning's money. Then he picked up the tin and turned it over.

“Aunty,” he said quietly, “everybody is doing it. You knock the bottom in, small. Nobody can see. The customer pays the same. You survive.” He showed her the stall across the lane. The tin there sat a little high on the table. The bottom had been pushed up from underneath. A finger's width of crayfish, gone from every measure.

Chidinma did not answer at once. She was thinking about rent. She was thinking about her daughter's school fees, due in two weeks. She was thinking that Ikenna was not wrong about the numbers.

A young woman came to the table with a baby tied on her back. She asked for two tins of crayfish and one of pepper. She counted her notes twice, slowly, the way you count when there is nothing extra. Chidinma filled the tin. She let it heap. She tipped it into the nylon bag, and as she did, a sentence came back to her in her mother's voice, the way her mother used to say it in the evenings while she wiped the tin clean: “A false balance is abomination to the LORD: but a just weight is his delight.”

Her mother had not said it like a sermon. She had said it like a recipe. This is how the work is done. The tin is a promise. Every customer who carries your measure home is trusting you with their soup, their children's dinner, their money that was counted twice.

When the young woman had gone, Chidinma handed the tin to Ikenna. “Look at it well,” she said. “This tin has fed this family for thirty years. It has never lied. I will not teach it to lie now.” Ikenna shrugged. He was not convinced, and she did not pretend he was.

The month was hard. She made less than the stall across the lane. She raised her price a little and told her customers why, plainly. Some went elsewhere. But some came back, and a few brought their sisters, because word travels in a market faster than rain. One woman said, “Your tin is full. I know.”

School fees were paid late, with help from a contribution group. Nothing was solved for ever. But every evening Chidinma wipes the tin clean, the way her mother did, and puts it away with nothing to hide.