Ghana Must Go

by Taiye Selasi

  This is why (he believes) he loves Ama.

  Because she said, “Thank you, I would, please,” and the same thing again when he asked her to marry him (she always says yes) and is loyal and simple and supple and young. Because her thoughts don’t explode over breakfast. He believes he loves Ama because of the symmetry between them, between his capacity for provision and her prerequisites for joy. Because he finds all symmetry elegant and this symmetry quiet: an elegant kind of quiet, here and there, around the house. He believes he loves Ama—although he once thought he didn’t, thought he cared for and was grateful for but didn’t “really love” her, and in the beginning he didn’t, before he recognized her genius—because he knows something, now, about women. He has come to understand his basic relationship to women, the very crux of it, the need to be finally sufficient. To know he’s enough, once and for all, now and forever.

  This is why (he believes) he loves Ama.

  • • •

  He is wrong.

  In fact, it is because as she sleeps at night, with a thin film of sweat above her ripe plum-brown lip and her breath sounding sweetly and loudly beside him, she looks so uncannily like Taiwo. Like Taiwo when she wasn’t yet five years old and when he was a resident, postcall, staggering home, too tired to sleep, too sleepy to stand, too worked up to sit—and so pacing.

  He’d pace to and fro about the narrow apartment (the best he could afford on his resident’s pay, the dim, skinnier half of a two-family duplex on Huntington Ave where the ghetto began, beneath the overpass that separates Boston from Brookline, the wealth from the want) in his scrubs, in the dark. Down the hallway, through the kitchen, to the first room, the boys’, with its rickety wooden bunk bed, Kehinde’s drawings on the walls. To the little windowed closet, from which he’d watch some minor drug trade. To the bathroom, where he’d wash his face.

  Press a towel to it.

  Hold.

  But finally to the front room and to Taiwo on the pullout couch, with no bedroom of her own as he so wanted her to have, his first daughter, a complete mystery despite the resemblance to the brother. A girl-child. A new thing. More precious somehow.

  With a thin film of sweat above her lip care of the “project heat.”

  Which he’d wipe away, thinking it’s the least I can do.

  For a girl with no bedroom and conch-shell-pink lips.

  Where he’d fall asleep upright, sitting next to her.

  • • •

  In fact, he loves Ama because, asleep, she looks like Taiwo when his daughter wasn’t five and slept sweating on the couch, and because when she snores she sounds just like his mother, when he wasn’t five and slept sweating on the floor. In that same thatch-roofed hut where his sister would die, on a mat beside his siblings’ by the one wooden bed, where their mother snored sweetly and loudly, dreaming wildly, as her son listened carefully to the places she went (to the operas and jazz riffs and snare drums and war chants, to the fifties as they sounded in faraway lands, beyond the beach), dreaming aloud of on-the-radio-places that he’d never seen and that she’d never see. And this sight and this sound, these two senses—of his daughter, (a), a modern thing entirely and a product of there, North America, snow, cow products, thoughts of the future, of his mother, (b), an ancient thing, a product of here, hut, heat, raffia, West Africa, the perpetual past—wouldn’t otherwise touch but for Ama.

  A bridge.

  Loyal and simple and supple young Ama who came from Kokrobité still stinking of salt (and of palm oil, Pink Oil, evaporated Carnation) to sleep by his side in suburban Accra. Ama, whose sweat and whose snores when she’s sleeping close miles of sorrow and ocean and sky, whose soft body is a bridge on which he walks between worlds.

  The very bridge he’d been looking for, for thirty-one years.

  • • •

  He thought when he left that he knew how to build one: by returning home triumphant with a degree and a son, laying the American-born baby before the Ghana-bound grandma like a wreath at a shrine, “See, I told you I’d return.” And with a boy-child on top of it, a luckier-Moses. A father and a doctor. As promised. A success. He imagined this moment every day in Pennsylvania, how his cameraman would film it, panning up to her face. Cue strings. Tears in mother’s eyes. Wonder, joy, amazement. The awe of the siblings. The jubilation. Cue drums. Then the dancing and feasting, fish grilled, a goat slaughtered, red sparks from the fire leaping for joy in the sky, a black sky thick with star, the ocean roaring contentedly. The reunion a bridge, her fulfillment the brick.

  This is how he planned it.

  But this isn’t how it happened.

  By the time he returned she was gone.

  10.

  Heartbreaking winter, 1975.

  A one-bedroom hovel.

  A wife of one year.

  Who was sitting at a table in the “kitchen,” i.e., a corner where a stove and sink were shoved against a wall with a tub. He entered in an overcoat. He hated this particular overcoat. A bulk of dull beige from the Goodwill downtown. She’d insisted that he buy it and now demanded that he wear it. It was the warmest thing he owned, but it made him look poor.

  He came into the apartment, looking poor. She looked gorgeous. She always looked gorgeous, even angry, to him. She wore bell-bottom jeans and a wraparound sweater, both care of the Goodwill, a scarf in her hair.

  No, not a scarf, he saw, looking more closely. A gold-flecked asooke, the Nigerian cloth. Nigerians were far more artful than Ghanaians with their head wraps. “More flamboyant, more ostentatious,” they Ghanaians liked to chide. But at that moment he saw otherwise: more insistent upon beauty. At all times, in all things, insistent upon flair. Even here, in this hovel, wearing secondhand clothing, at a table by a tub, she insisted on flair. Had found this gold cloth, no doubt expensive, from her father, to sort of wind around her Afro puff, true to her name. “Wealth confers my crown.” Folasadé. She looked gorgeous.

  He came into the apartment and froze at the door.

  Her hands were folded neatly on the red plastic tablecloth, the kind that you buy for a picnic, then bin. They’d snuck it home, embarrassed, from his orientation barbecue. She thought it cheered things up a bit. Flowers, too. Of course. Everything looked as it always looked. The bed was made. The baby was sleeping. And breathing, he checked quickly.

  Because something was wrong.

  He stopped at the door knowing something was wrong.

  • • •

  He didn’t see the letter lying flat on the table. Only Fola as she turned her head, neck taut with fear. She didn’t speak. He didn’t move. His cameraman slipped in the window. In this scene: a Young Man receives Horrible News. He set down his bag now. To free both his hands up. For whatever he might have do with them, given whatever she had to say.

  She said, “Your mother is ill, love.” She held up the letter. “Your cousin got our address from the college and wrote.”

  These were too many words to make sense of at once. Mother. Ill. Cousin. Address. College. And wrote. Which of his cousins even knew how to write? This mean, specious question somehow washed to shore first. “My cousins are illiterates! They know nothing!” he bellowed, not knowing why he was shouting, or at Fola. “It’s a lie!”

  She just watched him, with that expression, with her brows knit together and her mouth folded over, an upside-down smile. Only yesterday he’d noticed that she made this face with Olu, too, whenever he was wailing to communicate complaint. The brows knit together, the head slightly sideways. “Okunrin mi,” she’d say. My son. “I know, I know, I know. It hurts.”

  And she did. In the literal sense could “feel others’ pain.” A proper empath, a thing he hadn’t believed existed when they met. His questions were endless. Where in her body did she feel it? How did she know it was his pain, not hers? (In her chest, on the left, a purely physical sensation, of foreign orig
in, now familiar, proper empathy.) That face.

  “Darling,” she said.

  “It’s a lie,” he repeated. But quietly. And was glad now to find his hands free. He grabbed his head, spinning, his gloves to his forehead, a futile attempt, keep the brain in one piece. “She’s never been ill for a day in her life. How? What are they saying?” He went to her side.

  She handed him the letter, touching his free hand with hers. It was that cheap air mail paper no one uses anymore, flimsy pastel-blue sheets that, folded up, became envelopes.

  All caps, slanting upward.

  Unsteady black pen.

  The letter didn’t say that his mother was ill. It said she was dying and would be dead in a month. It was two weeks old yesterday. He dropped it to the table. His hands began to tremble (other parts of him, too). Fola jumped up and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. For the first time since he bought it, he loved this beige coat. Its thickness put some distance between her chest and his trembling, his wife and his weakness, his quivering limbs. (And his cameraman in position across the room by the window couldn’t shoot the crumbling hero for his dull protective coat.)

  “We’ll go to Ghana,” she said.

  “With what money?” he mumbled. “We don’t have the money.”

  “We’ll ask for it—”

  “No.” And carried on, desperate, “They’re overreacting . . . it’s an infection, not cancer . . . she’s not even fifty. She’ll be better by New Year . . . I’ll have the money by New Year . . .”

  “We’ll ask for it, Kweku. We have to.”

  They did.

  • • •

  Rather she did: that day spent the last of her cash on a ticket to Lagos to visit a louse, younger half-brother Femi, whose prostitute mother had taken her dead lover’s money and run.

  Then Ghana, and the smell of Ghana, a contradiction, a cracked clay pot: the smell of dryness, wetness, both, the damp of earth and dry of dust. The airport. Bodies pushing, pulling, shouting, begging, touching, breathing. He’d forgotten the bodies. The proximity of bodies. In America the bodies were distant. The warmth of it. Pushing through the jostling throng, warm bodies, clutching Fola’s arm while Fola clutched the baby, leading his squadron on to the taxi rank. “Your purse!” he called over his shoulder. “Be careful! This is Ghana.”

  “It is?!”

  But when he looked she was laughing. “My friend, I’m from Lagos. Never mind your small Ghana.” She winked. “I’m okay. We’re okay.”

  And then home.

  • • •

  They rode into the village in a ramshackle taxi, a red and yellow jalopy expelling black smoke, bumping awkwardly up the dark red dirt road, no one speaking, even Olu sitting silently, as if in his baby-heart he knew. This wasn’t how he’d envisioned the triumphant return, political hysteria on the radio sans John Williams strings, but this driver was the only one working the rank who both accepted his price and knew the way to his town.

  • • •

  An hour outside of the city: the ocean.

  Unannounced, without fanfare.

  Just suddenly there.

  From town they’d braved the then-unpaved road to the junction, where they’d turned up the dry empty hill to Kokrobité. The hill brought them down to the coast, blocked from view by the mounds of grass lining the left of the road. Then, abruptly, a clearing: cowed grass lying low before sand, sea, sky, endless. The dramatic reveal. The thing that was there all along, less surprising than startling, the scope, how it changed things. The air.

  It was seven in the morning, he could tell without checking, by the men seated tugging in nets from the night: at least ten of them, eleven, in a vertical line along the end of a rope that stretched far out to sea. Heave-ho. Forward, backward, a perfected synchronization, hauling, all, with one movement like rowers on sand in once-bright colored T-shirts (much like the T-shirts sold at Goodwill), all the palm trees leaning with them. Fronds fluttering in the breeze.

  He must have made some sound as he stared out the window because Fola laid a hand very lightly on his. As she did. Never taking, never “holding” his hand, just lightly laying hers on top. A choice. To hold or be held. He held her hand absently, not turning from the window. Unable to, glued there, transfixed by the view, with the first few tears forming now, loosely, like cumulus, clouding his eyes, too unripe yet to fall. The effect was to soften the edges, a filter, the beach sparkling gray in celestially blurred light, like a scene from those soaps all the nurses loved watching: irresistibly gripping if you only knew the plot. (And he did. Basic storyline. Dancing, sap, grandmas.) He stared like the nurses, through unfalling tears.

  Why had he hated this view? Of this beach, of the backs of these fishermen, glistening brown, of the long wooden boats, evangelical names in bright tricolor paint on their splintering sides, Black Star Jesus, Jah Reign, Christ the Fisher of Men, in the red, yellow, green of the national flag and the national spirit of open-source ethos, this mixing of Anglican, Rastafarian, Ghanaian? What was there to hate in this? There was only openness. As far as he could see. A cheerful openness. An innocence. An innocent beach on the road to Kokrobité at seven A.M., November 1975, little country lurching, cheerful, unaware, to revolution. Little taxi lurching, blasting revolution, to grief.

  • • •

  And then her.

  Not a bridge, her fulfillment the brick.

  No jubilation, no drumming, no goats, and no fish.

  • • •

  Fola stayed waiting with his half-sisters Shormeh and Naa, their eyes filed with old hate and new grief. A crowd had gathered excitedly as they’d alighted the taxi and lingered now watching as he entered the hut. No one needed details (irresistibly gripping). His cameraman, among, didn’t follow him in.

  He ducked as he entered, forgetting his height. Or its size, this small shanty, his childhood home. He carried his son, half asleep, six months old then, the American-born boy-child, to her.

  The one bed.

  She was lying on her back with her arms at her side, with the mats on the floor, the same mats he remembered. Dark, and so cool with the dome overhead. It was a well-structured hut, however minimal. Rounded clay walls with the massive thatch roof sixteen feet at its peak, a triangular dome. His father had built it. An artist, they told him, a Fante, a wanderer, a “genius like him.” (He’d been jailed after punching a drunk English sergeant who’d hassled his wife, jailed, then publicly flogged. There by the tree in the middle of the “compound,” this cluster of huts. Stripped to shorts at midday. “He left,” said the villagers simply. Thereafter. Just packed up his things, walked away, as he’d come. Others, now dead, claim he walked into the ocean in a sparkling white bubu, to his waist, then his head, without stopping. Further, forward, under, into the ocean. Like Jesus. With weights. Under moon. Into black.)

  His brother looked surprised as he entered but said nothing. “Leave me,” he said to his brother. His brother left.

  • • •

  She could have been sleeping from the way she was lying there. He’d heard families say this and chuckled before. “We thought she was napping,” of beloved old Grandma, rushed putrefied to hospital days after death. Idiots, he’d think. Now he understood the confusion. She looked like she was sleeping. But was making no noise. Wasn’t dreaming of the places that she’d never been to.

  She was dead, in the village, the only place she’d ever go.

  His heart broke in one place. The first break. He didn’t feel it. Olu giggled, soft, the only sound in the room. Kweku looked at Olu, suddenly remembering that he was holding him. Olu looked, awestruck, at the butterfly on her toe.

  Black and blue (swordtail), just coming to rest, an almost neon shade of turquoise, black markings, white dots. It fluttered around his mother’s foot, a lazy lap, then lifted off, flapping blithely toward the triangular dome and out the
little window. Gone.

  “This is your grandmother.” Changed the tense. “Was.” Olu looked at Kweku, not recognizing the voice. And he at his mother. “I told you,” he mustered. “I told you I’d return—” but couldn’t manage the rest.

  So he sat on the floor, on a raffia mat. In the heat and the smell of it, the stench of new death. He rubbed Olu’s back until the child fell asleep (fifteen minutes, not more, such a well-behaved boy). Then stayed in semidarkness, who knows for how long, maybe hours, with the sunlight changing, shifting, on the wall.

  He didn’t think what he thought he’d think. That he shouldn’t have left. Without saying good-bye. That the last time he saw her—when they’d had that horrid argument about whether he should accept the full scholarship or not, when she’d said that he was needed here, not “Pencil-wherever”—he shouldn’t have said what he said.

  That she was “jealous.”

  Of course she was jealous. She was thirty-eight years old. She had never left Ghana. Her youngest daughter was dead. Her genius-husband had absconded with the tide in the moonlight (or abandoned her, more likely, unable to face her for shame). Now here was her son—her genius-son, sixteen, shoeless—trying to abscond with American missionaries to the president’s alma mater (motto: “if the son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.” Indeed. And if the son shall win a scholarship?). In her mother-heart she knew.

  That he would not “go and come,” that there was nothing to come back to, that he would learn—as she had wanted, a gifted youngster herself, plucked from school at age seven to fetch firewood and water—and leave. As she wanted.

  It didn’t need to be said.

  • • •

  Those thoughts came later. (And for many years after, when he’d try to unsmell the damp stench of new death.) What he thought as he sat was: how different the quiet. It had never been this quiet in this hut, growing up. And that he might have rather liked it if he only could have sat in it, like this, alone and quiet. And that she must have felt the same. This is why she’d made them all wake up so early and leave the hut, all of them, five A.M., out!, not for “idle hands” or “early birds,” or whatever else the mission had Ghanaian mothers hawking to their pikin in those days. It was so she could lie on her back on her mattress in silence and solitude, arms at her side. Just looking at the reeds arching in toward the center high above her. Clever structure: on your back it felt huge. Clever lover: hoping, praying, that he’d one day make the widow “wife”—the one with the little black transistor radio that she carried with her everywhere she went like a pet—had designed his mud hut so a girl on his bed would look up and feel distance, expansiveness, height. She’d sent them away so she could: feel some distance. Some quiet. Just lie there. Five, ten minutes max. Soon they’d be back from the well and their washing, six children (then five), two boys, four skinny girls. Soon the whole hut would be full of their motion, then so full of moisture, they’d all go outside.