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“Sobbing softly, she carefully placed the motionless baby [Young Idahosa] on the heap and hurried back to the house, her black skin making her almost invisible in the darkness. But while so, the faint sound of sniffing drifted from the doorway, but soon only the occasional croaking of frogs broke the silence.
Two or three hours had passed, when sudden flashes of lightning streaked across the blackness, and gave a rainbow in the distance. Heaps of water poured from the sky, pouring mercilessly on the iron roof of the Idahosa family compound.
Drumming of the rain, low faint in the beginning, the cries became more shrilled in an instant. The woman’s dark form again darted from the doorway straight for the heap not frequently illuminated by the lightning, scooping up the small figure soaked from the rain.
The woman clod it to her breasts. Sobbing over and over.
“Benson, my baby, you are alive again! Oh, thank the gods! You are alive!” The baby stopped crying as the woman loosened the cloth wrapped around her waists, leaned forward and placed the baby on her back, then tied a cloth around the both of them to hold the baby snuggled against her.”
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An excerpt from Benson Idahosa’s biography “Fire in His Bones” written by Ruthane Garlock in 1980, on how Idahosa was raised from the dead as a baby.
Fun Fact: This biography’s original edition is out of print, and is very expensive and hard to even buy from online, Amazon sells it in the hundreds. There is an audiobook of the biography made by someone on youtube, and that is where this excerpt was taken from.
The picture on the right shows a young Idahosa. I couldn’t find any childhood photos of him.
Credit: therevivalhistorian
