A murky economic sector in New York City thrived, largely, below the eye and ear of the authorities! That murky economic sector, The Livery-Driving Industry , groomed many of its stake-holders into becoming industry professionals for the larger American Economy. Abbe was a typical (African) livery driver in that murky sector, where he spent many years perfecting the livery business. However, he failed to make New York City, Home, largely because he fell in love with the serenity of his father’s African village environment and the stunning simplicity of the primitive village life; he experienced pure love of extended family in that simplicity. To continue to enjoy his larger-than-life social status in that village, he needed New York City for the money, the all-powerful American dollar! Abbe found the money - enough to establish a small-scale business, and build a couple of small houses in his birth country, in Africa. He earned every dollar the very hard way, driving a Livery Cab at night - in New York City’s dangerous nights.
The strong pull of that nature-ameliorated serenity of Ihite-Eze environment caught Abbe off-guard, off his feet, and dangerously off his mind. He gave in, totally, to that lure, oblivious of the contextual danger that was embedded in unfathomably deep mysteries that awaited him in his ancestral home-land - in that simplicity . The mysteries surrounding the nature of village witches, and other invisible but deadly powers, from which Abbe could not wriggle himself free, rerouted and controlled his life, his destiny, even as far away as New York City, making it impossible for him to have a life. A strong, cultural force - the pull that had its origin, its control mechanism, in his Ihite-Eze village - was too strong for American social culture to neutralize. Abbe was caught, and hung precariously, in the middle of those opposing forces; he was tied, hands, feet, and mind.
Ironically, America gave him a permanent Home, but it was not Home for Abbe; it was a permanent Home for his deceased body - his remains! Those mysterious and deadly African witches made sure it was so! Invisible and mysterious powers dumped Abbe’s remains - his dead body - under Jersey City’s soil, but Abbe’s ghost rose (up), from the Garden State’s Hades, and took a revenge-seeking flight to Ihite-Eze clan! Ihite-Eze had an effective, tradition-tested, ghosts-expelling ritualism, but their complex ghost formula was not customized to expel ghosts that originated from a foreign land. Ihite-Eze witches and wizards, including Abbe’s mother in-law, who had no power over ghosts, tasted the bitter wine of revenge - the targeted or bull’s eye revenge of Abbe’s ghost! When it was all done, the steel-plaited center of Hadeona’s life - Abbe’s celebrated widow - pulled wide apart; the edges could no longer hold! Abbe: Mass Burial in New York City is a magnificent work of literary fiction, interlaced and enlivened with African village mysteries in the context of anecdotal practice of livery driving. Those anecdotes were nipped off the precarious and wriggling life paths of New York City’s African immigrant livery-driving community. The narrative is plotted within a phenomenal imaginative portrayal of an aspect of Africa’s dark culture that was least talked about, hardly researched, and never understood - the mysteries surrounding witches, wizards, and Africa’s traditional medicine men. Abbe: Mass Burial in New York City was carefully crafted to twinge your emotion and make you cringe at times; it was designed to, highly, entertain you as it unraveled that unbelievable influence that African witch mysteries had on the human mind.
