Poor Village Girl Was Forced To Marry A Poor Man, Unaware He Is A Crown Prince

 

Part One

Juka’s eyes were focused, determined, and honest as he spoke. “Mama Ujunwa, I have come to seek Ujunwa’s hand in marriage. I may not be rich, but I am hardworking, and I will take care of her.”

For a few seconds there was complete silence in the compound. Even the breeze seemed to pause, waiting for what would happen next. Chickens pecked and lifted their heads as if to listen. Somewhere beyond the mud fence the river muttered to itself, the same way it had murmured since the village was young.

Then, like thunder cracking the sky, Mama Ujunwa exploded into laughter.

“Chim!” She clapped her hands so loudly that a lizard sprinted from the foot of the iroko. “Did I hear well? Did my ears deceive me? A common fisherman wants to marry my daughter? Wonders shall never end in this village.”

Her daughter, Ujunwa, stood behind her, chin raised, bangles chiming as she adjusted her blue wrapper. The late afternoon sun loved her face; it lingered on her cheekbones as though reluctant to leave.

“Look at you, Chuka,” Mama Ujunwa continued, her eyes traveling from Juka’s worn-out slippers to his torn shirt. “What do you have? A broken canoe and an empty pocket? My daughter will marry a prince, not a pauper smelling of fish.”

Ujunwa clicked her tongue. “You have no shame, Chuka. Don’t you know who I am? I cannot stoop so low to marry a wretched man like you.”

The words hit Juka like stones. But he stood still, shoulders squared under a shirt the river had tried its best to claim. He had heard whispers about Ujunwa’s pride, but he had hoped that beneath her bright skin there would be softer things—humility, maybe gratitude. He had been wrong before; he was wrong again.

He took a breath that tasted like dust and smoke and river water. “I understand, Mama,” he said, and bowed his head in a way that was not defeat.

But Mama Ujunwa wasn’t finished. She turned sharply and called out, “Chioma! Chi-o-ma, come here!”

From the corner of the compound a slim girl with a tired face and sad eyes walked forward, broom still in her hand. Her dress was faded, her feet dusty, her hands rough from years of labor. She was beautiful—more beautiful than Ujunwa—but her beauty had learned to hide, the way flowers in harmattan tuck their faces into themselves.

Chioma stopped a few feet away, eyes on the ground, heart beating like a goat caught in the wrong farm. She knew nothing good ever came from her stepmother’s voice shaped like this.

Mama Ujunwa sneered and pointed at her. “Since you are looking for a wife, Chuka, and you think you can enter my house empty-handed and take my daughter, eh? Take Chioma. She is available. She is nobody’s child. You can marry her. After all, one wretched person deserves another.”

Chioma was shocked to the bone. Shame crawled up her skin with long, cold fingers. Juka lifted his eyes and looked at her properly for the first time, and what he saw made his chest tighten. Her beauty was different. It was hidden, gentle, like a flower struggling to grow in the middle of thorns. And beyond her face there was a sadness deep in her eyes that told him a story he already knew: some people learn to speak with silence because words have always cost them too much.

He shifted his gaze back to Mama Ujunwa. “Is she your daughter?”

“She’s my late husband’s child,” Mama Ujunwa said coldly. “Her mother died giving birth to her, and her father followed her shortly after. I’ve been the one carrying her useless load since she was a baby. She has nothing,” she added wickedly. “No family, no money, no beauty compared to my Ujunwa. If you must marry from this house, carry her and go.”

The word nobody fell like a shadow across the yard.

Juka remained silent for a heartbeat, then another, then a long, long one. His eyes went back to Chioma. She didn’t dare look up. Tears welled and threatened, stronger than her eyelids. He felt something move inside him, a tenderness mixed with anger he didn’t know where to place.

“I will marry her,” he said at last, quietly but with a backbone inside the words.

Chioma’s head snapped up. She stared as if he had spoken a foreign language. The broom fell from her hand and scratched across the red earth.

Mama Ujunwa burst into laughter again. “Ah! Chai! It is true what they say—poor people like to gather. Fisherman and house girl. Perfect match.”

Ujunwa hissed, flipped her hair, and walked away without sparing Juka another glance, anklets singing a tiny song to accompany her contempt.

Juka stepped closer to Chioma, lowered his voice so the compound would not hear what was meant for one person. “I will come back in three market days to see your people. Mama Ujunwa, prepare her.”

Before anyone could say another thing, he left. The breeze returned to its ordinary business. Somewhere in a mango tree, a bird remembered its own song.

Chioma stood still, unable to move. The world became a shell of sound: pestle thudding yam in a neighboring compound, a baby’s cry, the soft crunch of dead leaves under a goat’s hooves. Her ears rang and her heart raced. She had never imagined her life would turn out like this. All her life had been a dream of freedom—fleeing Mama’s cruelty and living somewhere nobody knew her name. Now freedom looked like a cage shaped like marriage to a man she didn’t know.

That night, she sat under the mango tree after everyone had gone inside, the moon like a white plate balanced on the thorny branches. She cried silently so the compound would not add her tears to its gossip. She didn’t know that fate had already begun to weave a story far bigger than her tears. A story that would shake the whole of Anoma like wind shakes raffia leaves.

Juka had moved to Anoma six months earlier. He said he had returned to his mother’s people for greener pasture. He settled quickly, took a room near the river, rose before the sun, and returned with a canoe and nets and the kind of damp tiredness that had to become money before it became rest. Luck, if it was a person, looked elsewhere for a few months. His nets came up heavy with water more often than fish. His calloused hands earned him respect in the market, but respect does not buy soup, and people measured him by the number of tilapia and catfish in his basin.

On the agreed day, Juka arrived at the compound with two elders. He wore a clean shirt the color of boiled groundnut and a wrapper tied with a care that meant respect. The elders carried a small keg of palm wine, some tubers of yam, and a token of money for the knocking on the door. Mama Ujunwa welcomed them with smiles that didn’t touch her eyes. She had invited her late husband’s younger brother to sit for form’s sake. They performed the formalities while Mama Ujunwa sprinkled her commentary like pepper—sarcastic, stinging.

Chioma stood quietly behind the kitchen wall, listening as her life was traded like a goat at market. No one asked her what she felt. No one looked at her face when her name was mentioned. It is an old thing in many places: women’s lives being decided in rooms they stand outside of.

The marriage date was fixed for the next market day, just three days away. Mama wasted no time. “You will marry Juka whether you like it or not,” she told Chioma when the guests left. “I don’t want to see your face in this house again. You are nothing but a burden.”

Three days passed in a blur, like a calabash spinning on water. The traditional rites were nothing grand. No drums, no dancing, no village feast—just a few elders, the passing of palm wine, and quiet prayers muttered under the baobab tree. Chioma wore a simple wrapper and a blouse borrowed from a neighbor whose kindness had to hide itself from Mama’s eye. There was no joy in her eyes, no smile on her lips. When Juka came forward and took her hand, she barely looked at him. She felt empty inside, like a person walking into darkness without knowing whether the floor would hold.

As they walked to his small compound by the riverside, the village women whispered and clicked their tongues. “What a pity!” “She will suffer.” “A poor fisherman’s wife? No better than slavery.” “But she is beautiful, ah. Eh, beauty and suffering are cousins.”

Juka remained quiet as they walked, glancing at Chioma from time to time, noticing how withdrawn she was, how she refused to meet his eyes. He led her through a bamboo gate into his yard. The house was mud and thatch, but neat. A mat lay rolled in one corner, a clay pot of drinking water glistened in another, a lantern hung on a nail, wick trimmed to patience.

“This is your home now,” Juka said softly. “I know you didn’t choose this marriage. I know you don’t know me. But I promise I will never hurt you.”

Chioma stood, tears banked in her eyes. The sentence pushed against them: no one has promised me anything good in my life. It didn’t come out. She nodded, once, because yes is sometimes the only safe answer to a kindness you don’t yet trust.

He gave her space. He mended his nets with hands that had learned both finesse and force. He went to the river before dawn and returned at noon with a basin that grew, fish by fish, from hope to enough. He came in smelling like wet rope and river grass. He stopped at the market to buy small things—ground crayfish, a bead, a little mirror, a length of cotton cloth he said would make a fine head tie. He laid those gifts down like apologies and did not wait for thanks.

He never raised his voice. He never beat her. He never forced himself on her. He did the unremarkable things decent men have done forever and were not given praise for because they were the bare minimum, and yet in a life like Chioma’s, they felt like miracles.

One evening when the heat day was sighing and the goats were calling each other home, Chioma was fetching water from the clay pot outside when Juka approached. He stopped where his shadow would not fall on her.

“Chioma,” he said gently.

She turned; her eyes met his for a second then slid away.

“I want you to know something,” he continued. He looked down at his rough hands and smiled like a person who knew his tools. “I didn’t marry you because I pitied you. I didn’t marry you because I wanted a slave. I married you because when I looked into your eyes, I saw a woman worth loving.”

Chioma’s heart did a small too-fast thing. She gripped the gourd and tried to steady it. No one had ever arranged words like that for her. There was always you are a burden or you are lucky I fed you. Never you are worth loving.

“I know you don’t love me yet,” Juka continued, as if he could see the storm and the clearing inside her. “I won’t force you. All I want is a chance to make you happy.”

That night, the mango tree was a different tree. The moon felt like a different lamp. The river’s song found a new key. She lay awake hearing those words again and again like a refrain her life hadn’t had before.

In the following weeks, kindness did what it always does when it is persistent and patient—it planted itself and grew. He taught her to paddle the canoe, laughed when the current turned her paddle the wrong way, cheered when she straightened. He showed her how to mend nets, her small fingers learning to tie strong knots. He tripped on a root, fell into the river with his clothes on, and came up sputtering and looking like a wet goat. She laughed without remembering to swallow it.

She began waiting for him at the water’s edge when he returned, a bowl and a cloth ready. She cooked his favorite meals once she figured out what they were—obin-nkwu one day, okro soup the next. She watched him when he did not see and saw that his strength housed gentleness and that his gentleness held the kind of strength she wanted to lean on.

One night, under a sky so full of stars it looked like someone had spilled salt on a black cloth, she turned toward him on the mat and whispered into the dark, “I love you.”

He smiled in the kind of darkness that holds smiles true. “I love you too, my wife,” he said, and the word wife put down roots inside her.

It was almost three months later, when the rains had done their first violence and the world was green again, that the royal drums spoke outside the calendar.

In Anoma, when those particular drums sounded on a day that was not festival or funeral, everyone knew the sound was carrying a message from the palace. People left mortars mid-pound, ignored stew mid-stir, wiped cassava from their hands, and hurried to the square.

The king’s messenger stood in the center, staff in hand, cloth wrapped just so, voice rolled low and strong. “Attention! Attention, people of Anoma, gather and listen. The palace brings important news. By the order of His Royal Majesty, the king: Crown Prince Obinna will return from the city in two weeks. Upon his return, a grand ceremony will be held at the palace where he will choose a wife from among the maidens of the kingdom.”

The square erupted. Girls screamed and laughed and shoved each other and already began building lives in their heads. Mothers looked at daughters they had been feeding specifically for this day since the girls were born. Aunties told stories about being passed over in their time. Drapers tied measurements. Bead sellers did calculations.

Mama Ujunwa grabbed Ujunwa’s arm so hard that the bangles protested. “You see? Have I been lying since? Have I not always told you that your destiny cannot be hidden? This is the day we have been waiting for.”

Ujunwa tilted her head at an angle that made her look like a painting. “Nobody in this village can match me. The prince will not be blind.”

While the square spun itself into silk and smoke, Juka walked past with nets on his shoulder. He didn’t go into the crowd; he didn’t tell anyone to make way; he didn’t even look up. But his shoulders got a little higher under the nets’ weight, and something in his gait changed a fraction.

Back at home, Chioma peeled cassava and hummed to herself, the kind of song a mouth makes when the heart is light for no reason it can name. “The drums are loud today,” she said when he came in. “The queens of tomorrow are losing their voices already.”

He sat under the mango tree, stared at the sky where the drums could not reach, and smiled with his mouth and not his eyes. He wondered if truth is a thing you throw like a net or put down like a sleeping child. He wondered if Chioma would forgive him. He wondered if the word love could survive an iron crown made of family.

The morning of the ceremony, the village woke up to a different light. Palm fronds decorated the square, colorful cloths turned shade into celebration, clay pots filled with flowers lined the paths. The king sat in state on a throne the sun claimed for itself every market day, and chiefs and elders sat near him with faces carved from rock and small smiles they couldn’t hide.

Women were dressed in wrappers that shone like new water, skin oiled, coral beads waiting on collars to be admired. The men wore their best and stood in groups pretending not to look at the women. Children ran a choreography someone ancient had taught them, hair oiled and eyes bright.

Mama Ujunwa occupied a horizon all by herself. She shooed dust from shadows that didn’t have it, lifted a chin she loved more than truth, and made sure every eye saw that her daughter’s beads were redder, her blouse more expensive, her gele higher, her smile brighter.

“This is your day,” she told Ujunwa. “You will not go back to our house as ordinary girl. You will return as future queen.”

“Who can compete with me?” Ujunwa said without arrogance that attached to anything new and flashy. This was the kind of arrogance that had lived a long life and felt its legs were unassailable.

By the river, the drums were only drums again. Chioma stirred yam and palm oil in a blackened pot and made that humming mouth again. Juka tied and untied his nets and looked toward the village and then back at the yam and then at a point above everything where a man stares when he needs strength that is not food.

At the square, the royal gong sounded. It fell silent. Then the king stood and his voice filled the space the way harmattan fills a field with dust.

“My people,” he said, eyes sweeping the sea of faces that loved him because he remembered their names. “Today is the day my son, Prince Obinna, will choose a wife. But before he does, you must know something. My son returned to this village many moons ago. But he did not come as a prince. He came as a common man, to live among you, to see with his own eyes, to find a woman who will love him, not for his crown, but for his heart.” He paused and grinned. “When he told me this plan I reminded him that I am old and my heart can no longer dance with shock. But children make fathers do strange things.”

A murmur moved through the crowd like wind through tall grass. Confusion and suspicion and a small bright hope collided and made new shapes in people’s mouths.

“Today you will meet the real prince,” the king said, and clapped once.

The crowd parted. The guards stepped aside. And there, walking slowly, head high, eyes calm, dressed in fine regalia the color of river at dusk, came a man everyone thought they knew.

“Chuka!” someone screamed. “The fisherman!” Someone else dropped a bundle. Someone else laughed because their body didn’t know which reaction to choose.

Mama Ujunwa’s mouth fell open like a calabash whose bottom had been troubling it for some time. Ujunwa went pale in a way the sun was offended by.

Juka—Obinna—stood before his father and bowed. The king pulled him into an embrace that made the crowd forgot how to whisper.

“My son,” the king said, his voice suddenly not king but father.

Obinna turned to the crowd, to the elders, to the women, to the children. “My people,” he said, and the phrase felt like it belonged in his mouth. “I am sorry for the misinformation. We will celebrate my return. Eat. Drink. Dance. As for choosing a wife—” He smiled a smile Anoma had never seen under the fisherman’s face. “—I have already chosen. She is worth more to me than gold.”

“Where is she?” the king asked, his eyes already soft because he had seen his son’s eyes soften, and that is how fathers know.

“She is not here,” Obinna said. “She does not know she is married to a prince.”

Mama Ujunwa swayed and then dropped like a tree you need four men to push. They carried her to shade and did the things women who know how to bring people back to themselves do; when her eyes opened, she saw the roof of a world she had built tilt inside her.

By the river, the yam burned a little. Chioma wiped a tear she couldn’t explain and brushed ash off a hot thing with a softness that had finally found a home.

 

Part Two

They came for her in clothes that made people move aside without knowing why. Not with pomp that crushes, but with dignity that steadies. Obinna walked in front of the guards, crown abandoned in the palace, regalia exchanged for a wrapper a fisherman could have worn, and a smile he had earned.

He stopped in front of her and could not help it—he laughed, a small helpless sound, because she stood with a wooden spoon in one hand and a frown for the yam and not for him, and the world had never been this beautiful.

“I forgive you for hiding who you are,” she said before he spoke, because she had already decided to, and sometimes grace outruns offense. “But if you think I will carry this yam to the palace, you are mad.”

He grinned and took the spoon and stirred and burned his thumb and danced a little and she laughed and then cried and then put her forehead against his shoulder and whispered, “Why?” because it was still a question even in joy.

“Because I wanted to be loved for the man under the cloth,” he said, “and because when I first looked at you, I knew the cloth had never touched your eyes.”

They took her to the palace slowly so that the women of the village could adjust their tongues and their pride and make new songs. The old women ululated in the specific note that means we told you kindness is not poverty. Children ran ahead and then back again and then ahead again because it is their work. Men stood with arms folded and nodded to each other like they had known all along.

At the palace gate, Eleanor waited with the quickness of a woman who usually arrives late and hates it and had decided not to be late for this. Richard stood like a tree you don’t trust not to fall but that still offers shade. Edward held his cane in both hands as if it needed him now, not the other way around.

“Welcome,” Eleanor said, and this time the word was not a performance. It was a place.

Chioma knelt and then did not because Eleanor stopped her with a hand under her chin and lifted her face up like a mother does when she wants to see if her child is lying and then believes what she sees.

“I have no other mother,” Chioma whispered before she could stop herself, and Eleanor’s eyes filled because sometimes families are born out of sentences we catch.

The wedding was not like the small thing under the baobab where she had been handed over like a parcel. It was a stretching of joy across a landscape. It was the kolanut breaking with the right proverbs and the right elder and the right humility. It was the palm wine poured and carried and tasted, a circle closed. It was women singing names and children forgetting to be bored. It was dancing until the sun wondered what they were doing. It was head ties high enough to graze the sky and wrappers so beautiful the sky apologized for not trying harder. It was plates of jollof and bowls of okazi and meat that had been promised to this day six months ago. It was ululation so loud the river clapped.

When she knelt with a calabash of palm wine to offer her husband a drink, she held it a heartbeat longer than necessary and looked up at him with a smile that belonged to the woman she had become, not the girl who had been bartered. He took the calabash with both hands like a vow and sipped and then let her drink, and the drums understood and adjusted their rhythm.

People cried because there is a crying that has nothing to do with sadness.

Between the celebration and the next morning, Mama Ujunwa sent a message with someone who had not loved her enough to watch her fall and not lift her. She came in a wrapper that had been ironed a little too hard and a face that had been ironed not enough. Ujunwa stood behind her, less brush, more human.

“I have done wickedly,” Mama said, the admission bitter like herbs swallowed without fufu. “I opened my mouth and closed my heart. Can a stone turn itself into water? It is not easy. But I have brought a stone to a river.”

Chioma did not rush. Forgiveness has to be measured the way salt is. “You are my mother because my father married you and because none of us has a time machine,” she said. “But you will not speak to me like a broom again. You will not touch a child of mine with contempt. If you call any child in this house nobody, you will eat alone for a month.”

Mama started to cry, ugly and humble and good. Ujunwa did what people rarely do in stories like this; she took responsibility for the little she had, which was not yet much, but it was hers. “I am sorry,” she said to Chioma. “I have always been hungry for a mirror. I forgot mirrors are cruel.”

Chioma took their hands and folded them gently around each other because sometimes peace is a practical thing.

In the months that followed, the palace became less about cloth and more about work. Chioma learned how to fold protocol into kindness so neither snapped. She sat with market women on hot afternoons and listened to the small injustices that had shortened their lives: a levy collected twice by men who could not explain why, spoiled produce confiscated by officials who had never planted anything, water barrels empty because someone had connected a pipe to somewhere it did not belong.

“Bring me your ledger,” she said to the chief of market when he protested that things had always been done this way. “Let my eyes gather your numbers on my tongue.” He learned to fear and love that sentence.

She advocated for widows who had been told by brothers-in-law that grief includes surrendering your roof. She brought those men into a cool room with a long table and left with their signatures and their shame. She insisted a portion of the palace’s income go into a fund that fixed wells and bought anti-malarial drugs and paid school fees for children whose mother’s names she knew.

Juka—Obinna—did not become a king yet; his father still breathed and spoke and had strength for a while. But everyone used the word with their mouths and not just their eyes. He attended councils with elders and remembered to listen until his ears hurt. He went to the river in plain clothes sometimes and fished with men who had once called him brother in ignorance and called him brother now in relief. He instituted a fair tax for fisherfolk and a schedule for when the river would have time to heal. He asked the old men what their fathers had taught them about land and then did not do the thing many princes do when they remember school in the city—he did not laugh.

Ethan learned the geography of a childhood that was finally what childhood is supposed to be. He ran in courtyards. He fell and did not learn cruelty from how quickly adults picked him up. He learned to say please in the language of two grandmothers. He slept with a truck under his pillow in a room that had space for more than one dream.

Chris. The name stopped being a wound and became work. He started showing up at the building the Foundation had bought in Anoma, where women and children stayed when something had broken that their hands could not put together. He painted walls. He broke a habit with a quiet no every afternoon when his body’s calendar reminded him it was time to drink. He sat with a boy whose father had never learned how and taught him how to fly a kite and then cried in his car. He did not get his trust back and he did not get his father’s hand that easily. But one day in the palace courtyard, he knelt by Ethan as the boy struggled with a shoe strap and said, “May I?” and fastened it gently, and nobody bled that day.

Time moved forward because it liked this house now.

When the king’s time reached its evening, the palace did the thing it had always done—it put on black and cooked enough soup to feed grief, which eats a lot. Edward Harrington of Anoma, old and suddenly smaller because men always shrink in the end, murmured, “I have done my part,” and then did the thing bodies do when they are tired of standing between breath and air.

They buried him under the tree his father had planted and his father’s father had watered. The land took him like a beloved child and the people wept like a family at a wake where everyone remembers the same story slightly differently. Richard cried openly for the first time in a long time. Eleanor wore white because grief in her place is a celebration of a life well-lived, and she danced the slow dance she and Edward had always done in the kitchen.

Obinna took the ofo, not with swagger but with reluctance that made it sit well in his mouth when he spoke. “I will try to be the kind of man my father thinks I already am,” he said, and the elders nodded because it is the only sentence worth saying on such days.

Chioma stood beside him, not behind him. They ruled the way a river does—sometimes with gentle insistence, sometimes with force that saves lives, always with knowledge that their power comes from people who have bread to eat and ground to stand on. They had three children: two boys who learned not to climb trees when a mother says don’t, and a girl who argued with the sun and sometimes won. She painted her own face before festivals and refused to let anyone else choose her cloth.

The palace became ordinary in the right ways. It did not sparkle at the expense of the dark. There were fewer courtiers and more farmers in the courtyards. The dinner table had more soup and less speech. The king listened. The queen worked. The children argued and were made to say sorry in a tone that sounded like future leaders.

Years later, when people who had not even been born when the drums sounded out of season asked their mothers to tell the story of the day everyone froze and then moved, the women told it differently depending on what they needed the children to learn that day. Some said it was about humility hidden in a hut by the river. Some said it was about eyes that saw beyond wrappers and bangles. Some said it was about fate and how it walks with bare feet and will not be stopped by fences.

And some said—looking at their daughters and sons with a softness no one had given them—“It is about how love becomes law in a house, and how, when it does, even kings are safe.”

They lived long. Not just lived—ruled, laughed, fought and forgave, burned yam sometimes, raised children who didn’t learn contempt, and went to bed most nights grateful for roofs and neighbours and a river that, at last, sang in the key of home.

END!