They call me disobedient as if it’s a crime. They stick the phrase to my name the way children stamp stickers on a schoolbook: “as stubborn as a goat,” they say, and cheer when someone else laughs. But who gets to name the world? Certainly not the ones who only consider my head when they see an occasion coming, “bring the isi-ewu!” and whose mouths water at the thought of my intestines bobbing in a pot of pepper soup.

They see me in two narrow acts: sacrifice or supper. They don’t see the whole story. They don’t hear the small things I hold inside.

I belong to Nneka. You know the kind of woman with two hands busy, a needle forever bent in thought over wax-printed cloth, laughter like scissors snipping at the air. Her sewing stall sits at the corner where Market Road meets the dusty stretch that remembers the rains.

People come to her for fittings and for the way she tells their stories back to them in pleats and seams. I am not just her goat. I am her excuse to tell a little joke to the boys at the keke stand.

This morning, before the harmattan had fully cleared its throat and the smoke from suya stalls still clung to the eaves, men came to the yard. They had the market lurch in their eyes and the quick math of meat. Mr. Okoro, our landlord, came with a list that smelled of privilege. His son’s wedding is next week; the guest list is long, and the expectations longer.

“Nneka,” he said, tipping his cap, “let me buy your goat. Fair price, fair price. You will not refuse a good price.”

Nneka laughed at first. The laugh that keeps a debt at bay. She pulled me closer, right under my chin, and I felt the scratch-scratch of her thumb. “No,” she said. “Not today.”

They treated her refusal like a disrespect to gravity. “She’s being stubborn,” said one of them, and the word settled on me like dust.

They don’t see the ledger lines Nneka keeps in her head: rent, thread, school fees for her brother’s child, a promise she made in the hospital years ago when Emeka left the way men sometimes do quietly, with too little explanation. They don’t see how I remind her of small rebellions: saving the yam money instead of selling it, keeping one extra egg for a rainy day. I would be trouble in a pot, yes, but I am also a pause.

They tried half a dozen tricks. They bent my rope toward the gate with mango-sweet promises. They put pepper soup at a distance, its steam an offering, but I sniffed the air and refused. In their jokes, they called me “agidigbo” and “agwara” and laughed when I shook my head the way a stubborn thing might be expected to. I chewed on a scrap of cassava peel, unbothered.

“Look at how she pets it,” Mr. Okoro said finally, his voice low with the irritation of someone who always gets his way. “She’s keeping it for something else. Maybe she hopes to blackmail us.”

Rumors find the little cracks first. By midday, the market had turned me into a story: the stubborn goat of Nneka’s corner. A woman at the yam stall used me as a proverb. The children chased me and then stopped when I stared back with eyes like two small moons that did not blink.

What they did not expect was that I had a memory sharper than their knives.

Not long ago, in a night when the rain pelted the town like a sermon, I had been tied for the market too. The rope had bitten my leg, and the men had sung of how good my meat would be. The market is a place that teaches fear. I learned my lesson there: that being led can be a one-way road.

But that caution is not cowardice; it is a map.

When Mr. Okoro returned the next day with a paper that smelled like his son’s wedding invitation: thin and official, he came not alone. Two men, quiet as the underside of a drum, followed him. Nneka was at her stand, selling a blouse she’d hemmed through the night. I had been grazing, pretending to eat the same tuft of grass three different times, when I heard the metallic whispers:

“Eviction,” one said. “She is two months behind. We will remove her stall.”

The ground tilted. I heard the rustle like a warning drumbeat. Nneka’s ledger lines flashed in my head: rent, thread, school fees. If they took the stall, they would take the room where she pressed collars, the old iron that still remembered the shape of her palm, the roll of fabric she kept for her dreams. The wedding meat had been a pretense; the paper was the knife.

I did the only animal things I could. I bleated, long and loud. I jumped a little, towards the gate where the keke boys lounged. I ran, not away, but to where the market’s heart peated and pulsed, and I banged my head against the metal of the generator until its rhythm changed.

People looked up. The children came, then the women, then the men who loved drama more than truth.

When a goat bleats at a market, ears prick like listeners. It is not just sound; it is a summons. Nneka’s cry followed: “They are taking my stall!” Her voice cut through the market like a new pattern on fabric. The keke boys left their gossip and came rushing. A woman who had once bought a dress from Nneka shoved the paperwork from Mr. Okoro’s hand into the dirt.

“You will not chase her away for a wedding!” she shouted. “Which work is bigger? Your son’s food or a mother’s livelihood?”

Stacks of opinion fell on either side like folded clothes. Mr. Okoro’s men tried to reason with the crowd, but the crowd had already sewn itself into a chorus of remembrances: the weddings Nneka had hemmed free of charge, the sweater she had mended for the pastor’s child, the sewing lessons she had given to the widow down the road. The ledger lines in people’s minds became wider than a single eviction notice.

By sunset, the paperwork had been reclaimed into Mr. Okoro’s briefcase, pockets full of grudges. Nneka stood with her iron, soot in the corner of her eye where she’d wiped tears away earlier. I felt her fingers under my chin again, firm and grateful. “You stubborn thing,” she said, whispering like she had a secret. She pulled a wrapper from her basket and tied it around my neck like a little flag.

“Stubborn,” they said. But that night, as harmattan rubbed the town raw and the pepper soup in the pot simmered more slowly than usual, the word tasted different. They were not laughing now. The same mouths that would later call for isi-ewu when Mr. Okoro finally threw the feast had learned something about what it meant to refuse.

I am stubborn because I have learned the geometry of going and staying. I am stubborn because sometimes survival is not about the quick heat of a pot but the slow warmth of a community. They chew my name and spit out the pieces, but I keep my place in the story: a shoulder to lean on, a belly that could have fed many but chose instead to guard one.

When the wedding came, the plates were full and the speeches were long. Mr. Okoro’s son ate and smiled. So did many others. They nodded about tradition and gratitude and the ways of things. Near the end of the night, someone raised a glass and, with the whole room listening, toasted to Nneka’s luck.

I watched from my little corner, chewing a scrap of cassava with the slow dignity of a thing that knows it is more than its taste. People will always have their bowls and their proverbs. Let them keep the sayings. I keep the story.

And when someone points at me and says, “Goat this, goat that,” Nneka squeezes my ear and says, “Not for sale.” That is the truth that holds us, less a stubbornness, more a refusal to let the small good be taken.