It's not like anybody gave me a choice: "Sickled" by Jane Kalu (O.Henry Anthology 2025)

I once knew a co-worker who shared a gene with his wife that meant they had a one in four chance of passing along a very debilitating condition to their children. They found this out when their second daughter got it. That daughter died young, but the couple, believing in God's goodness, continued having children. They had one more without the disease and then finally one more who had it again. My co-worker poured all the love he had into that child, making huge alterations to their lives to try to make life less painful for their child with the disease while also keeping life semi-normal for their others. Nobody could say he neglected his duties as a father of a special needs kid, but people could (and I was aware of some who did) fault him for having a child with a one-in-four chance of getting the disease in the first place. I haven't heard from him in a while, since I abandoned Facebook about four years ago. His daughter would now be older than the age their first sick child was when she died, so I wonder if she is still with us. 

Do parents have a right to have children when they know there is a chance they'll pass on a painful condition to their child? If not, how great a chance must there be before they should refrain from having kids? Is one in four enough of a chance, as it is any time both parents are recessive carriers? How bad must the disease be for it to mean the parents should not have children, and how would you even measure that?

These are the questions I wanted the narrator of "Sickled" by Jane Kalu to interrogate. The ingredients are there. We have parents who knew they were both recessive carriers of sickle cell, who were told by a church that they shouldn't get married, so they went to a different, more extreme church, one that believed fervent prayer can fix anything, and got married there. They had one daughter without sickle cell anemia and then one with it. The story mostly takes place in the months soon after the daughter with the disease, Ije, finds out about her parents' choice. 

Instead of delving into the philosophical issues the story brings up, "Sickled" is more interested in how those months affected the psyche of the narrator, Ije's older sister Adamma. Adamma is narrating the story from sometime years after it happened, which was in Nigeria in 1994, not long after the military coup of General Sani Abacha. Adamma's family refers to Ije's worst outbreaks of sickle cell-related sickness as "crises," but the family itself is in a crisis. Mother has lost her government job because of the coup, and father seems unable to do anything besides go to church and pray for divine intervention rather than do something himself to improve his family's life directly. 

Ekwensu, an Igbo deity who represents chaos. Or, if it's easier, just translate it as "the devil." That seems to be how Adamma's family uses it when they compare Abacha to it.

Gap between narrator at time of narration and time of events of story

Having an older narrator look back on events from when they were much younger is a very time-tested technique to story telling. It has the advantage of allowing two different narrators, the one that the narrator once was and the one that the narrator now is with the benefit of hindsight and years of wisdom. "Sickled" makes use of this, invoking the "I know now" formula on more than one occasion. 

There is some confusion, though, between Adamma before and Adamma after, and to me, at least, it makes it so I'm not really sure what kind of psychological journey the narrator has been through and what kind of growth it's caused. When we first get a look into the younger Adamma's interior landscape, it seems like her attitude is distinct from that of her devout parents when it comes to the care of Ije: "I was the one who listened to what the doctor said, give her paracetamol when the fever starts, and put a cold cloth on her head...During those hospital visits, my father was often preoccupied with praying the crisis away, and my mother, well, she followed his lead." 

That seems to be the older Adamma thinking back on herself as the younger version, and while it doesn't necessarily paint the younger version as an outright skeptic about her parents' faith, it does show her to be more pragmatic, wanting to focus on concrete steps to take to help Ije rather than praying and hoping God will heal her. There seems to be a distinction here not between the older Adamma and her parents' faith, but the younger Adamma. It seems like even when she was sixteen, Adamma had a least a strong suspicion her parents didn't have the right approach to life. 

Again, when looking back, Adamma summarizes that "Our father, instead of getting a job, took on more duties in church, insisting that we needed God's intervention. He remained adamantly unemployed, despite my mother's failed attempts at finding work..." This sounds like we are getting the attitudes of the younger Adamma, and that the younger Adamma is cynical about her father's devout prayers when he could have helped his family situation by just getting a job. If this were the older narrator looking back, we would expect to get a hint, like "Looking back on it now," which the narrator does inject in other parts of the narrative. Absent some clue, we assume that the clues about attitudes are those of the younger version of Adamma, and early on, we have these two clues that she is somewhat skeptical about her father's religious approach. We also see her viewing her parents as a unified front representing this approach.

There is more evidence in the first half of the story that the younger Adamma is not part of the unified front her parents present. She has pieced together the story of her parents having children against medical advice sooner than Ije has, by listening to the whispers of nurses about "how irresponsible our parents were." 

But then there are contradictions

The younger Adamma isn't always opposed to her parents beliefs, though. "I, on the other hand, did not disagree with our mother. I believed that there was a reason God allowed her illness," the narrator claims, clearly speaking here of her younger self. It's possible that younger Adamma's reasons for believing God gave Ije this disease are different from those of her parents. They believe God allowed it so they could pray and allow God to show his greatness by healing her. Adamma, continually worn out by worry about her sister, thinks more that if nothing else, the disease keeps Ije's wild spirit in check. So perhaps this one passage isn't enough to show that Adamma sides with her parents.

In two other passages, though, Adamma seems far more in line with her parents' philosophy. When Ije asks if her suffering is her fault, Adamma "wanted to tell her that it was. That if only she followed the rules, that could keep her from having a crisis."  Later, when recalling her New Year's resolution from early 1994, Adamma says, "Hers was to do whatever she wanted, sickness or not; mine was to bring her closer to God. I believed in the undefeatable power of God. I believed in miracles. I believed that God could heal her if only she believed." This just doesn't sound like the version of her that was introduced at the beginning of the story, the one focused more on practical steps to take than on prayer. 

I think the story itself has some technical mistakes in it. It has tried to take advantage of the ability to have two versions of the narrator--an older, wiser one and a younger, naive one--but failed to make the distinction clear in parts. Yes, it's possible to be too pedantic about what a story "should" do or about accepted craft, and yes, other world traditions might part from Western standards, but to me, the lack of clarity about which version of Adamma is thinking what, or possibly the simple mistake of having two different versions of a character running into each other, makes it hard for me to see what the narrator's journey has been. Even if I ascribe the snarkier thoughts to the older narrator and the more pious ones to the younger, I'm still left without a clear link of how we got from one to the other. When Ije has a crisis near the end of the story brought on by pregnancy, she (the older version, probably) seems to suddenly understand her father: "It must have all been from fear. The desperate need to exert his power over the disease, his insistence on keeping himself detached from our world in order to remain resident in one that relieved him of the consequences of his actions. It was all fear. All of it." 

From whence cometh this understanding of her father? We see the mother in vulnerable situations that allow us to view her as a complex character of her own, but we never see this for the father. He's a pretty dull, stock character throughout, droning on about faith over fear. There's no moment when the narrator is given sight that would allow her understanding that he acted out of fear. If the older version of her is trying to forgive her father in some way, I fail to see where the step in her development came. 

This is also true of how the narrator sees the relationship between her parents. Earlier in the story, she is resigned to her mother "going along" with the father. Later, she is frustrated, wanting to know "how could she let him humiliate her" and wishing her mother would do something to defy him. This desire for defiance shows, in the first place, that again, the younger Adamma wasn't really on board with the faith of the family (in contradiction of some passages), and also it demonstrates a desire for the mother to defy the father that violates her wish that people would "follow the rules." 

You could say that this is all brilliant narration, because people are psychologically complicated and contradictory, but when a narrative is going to show contradiction, it ought to have a level of separation between the narrative and the narrator. We ought to be able to see that we have a contradictory character, unless we have some kind of obvious narrative experiment going on. This story doesn't seem to accomplish the needed distinction between complex narrator/character and clear (even if it takes some work to make it clear) narration. It allows conflation of the thoughts of the earlier Adamma as a character and the later as a narrator, and even when the voices are clear, the development from one to the other isn't.  

Epicurus

The best part of this story is the unexpected introduction of Epicurean philosophy into it. We often think of Epicurus as having espoused raw hedonism, although that wasn't really his point. Ije, at one point, seems to think that's what Epicurean philosophy is, because she has open a book about Epicurus and she quotes "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die," which is actually from the Bible (Ecclesiastes), not Epicurus. (Which makes it ironic that Adamma tells her sister to read the Bible rather than Epicurus.) Ije's introduction to Epicurus is third hand: she is getting it from Bube, the boy next door who gets her pregnant, who got it from his philosopher parents, who presumably read the original. So it's certainly possible Ije has a bastardized version of Epicurus, one that more or less reflects her own predilections. 

However, when we hear Bube's exposition of Epicurus, he doesn't seem to have it that wrong. He says that "Death was not the main event, living was. If you live your life constantly afraid of dying, you have allowed death to win twice." That's maybe not a complete bastardization of Epicurus when he wrote: "Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not." 

Epicurus is an apt philosophy for Ije, who has limited control over her disease. Bube encourages her to find small pleasures where she can in order to minimize her suffering. It seems like Bube's philosophy he inherited from his parents is a sensible alternative to the radical faith Adamma has inherited from hers. For a moment, it appears that the story is making a clever reinterpretation of Epicurus in a setting that Epicurus himself would never have imagined. 

Only when the real crisis comes, and Bube learns that he has impregnated Ije, putting her in the hospital, he runs. That sure seems like an indictment of the philosophy he espoused. (Ad hominem attacks are allowed in fiction.) 

Two versions of philosophy have been discarded, one denying the present in favor of eternity (extreme Christian faith) and one denying eternity in favor of the present (whatever version of Epicureanism Bube has passed on). So what are Ije and Adamma left with? 

The mother ends her life. Her alternative she takes is despair. Ije, who has been fascinated throughout the story with an owl in the backyard, an owl the rest of her family saw as a harbinger of demonic forces, perhaps sees a different alternative. The last time Ije and Adamma see the owl, it has two eggs it is nesting upon. Adamma's reaction to the eggs is to exclaim, "Poor Daddy!" because this means the owl he has tried to pray away is about to lead to even more owls. The rejection of daddy's world view allows the girls to find their one moment of unity, holding hands just before they go in to find their mother dead. That moment represents the brief moment of life we have before death takes us. That's the moment we all live in. Perhaps the girls haven't rejected Epicurus, but their misunderstanding of Epicurus, and what they've done at the end is independently arrive at a conclusion more akin to that of the original. 

The shot still lands even if it's not a knockout

I didn't find this story to have quite the power punch it might have had. I wish it had spent more time focusing on the issue Adamma raises when she dreams of what it would have been like to live in a family with fewer problems: "It's not like anybody gave me a choice." With its irresponsible parents clinging to faith, the story could have asked a lot more direct questions about the meaning of life in a world where we all kind of get dealt a hand going in that we wouldn't have chosen for ourselves. It didn't, which left me a little disappointed. I was also struggling to enter into the narrator's mind because I couldn't trace what her journey actually was. But just because the story wasn't a knockout doesn't meant it had no impact. It was still an inventive blending of ideas and worlds into something worth thinking about.