Ghana Must Go

by Taiye Selasi

  How: at this airport, much smaller, as crowded, they landed, midsummer, July 1966, all the colors so different from Lagos, more yellows, the smell like the smell of a broken clay pot. A man with an Afro gone gray came to greet them, all bushy white beard, laughing eyes, wings of wrinkles. “You must be Fola!” He shook her hand. She shook her head. She didn’t know who she must be anymore. “People call me ‘Reverend.’ Reverend Mawuli Wosornu. Sena’s father,” he said, though he looked far too young.

  The house was on a tree-lined street, wide with white houses for friends of the British, the odd Lebanese. They took her to a bedroom painted pink, a funny shade of pink she’d find decades later while shopping for mulch. (Home Depot. She was passing through the paint aisle when she saw it, from a distance, just the color swatch, familiar at once. She read the name. Innocence. Laughed out loud, bought it. Four gallons for the nursery for the child who follows twins.) She stood in the doorway and looked at the bedroom. Reverend Wosornu, behind her, “And this is your room.” She walked in and sat on the narrow twin bed, the stiff mattress; she stared at the candy pink walls. She looked at the man in the doorway. Said, “Thank you,” then lay down and slept, without eating, three days. On the fourth day the wife Vera Wosornu came to see her. Mrs. Wosornu looked older, looked old (fifty-four). A fat woman, haggard, no light in her pupils. She wore a black wig that slipped back, showing grays. “It’s time to get up,” she said. “Come eat your breakfast.” When Fola rolled over the woman was gone.

  Breakfast was cocoa bread, pawpaw, eggs, coffee. Mrs. Wosornu ate noisily. Thick, buttered lips. Reverend Wosornu sipped his coffee, listening attentively to the radio. Pogroms in Nigeria ongoing. He switched this off. “Sir Charles Arden Clarke is a friend of the parish. Do you know who that is?”

  Fola shook her head no.

  “Eat,” said Mrs. Wosornu.

  “Former governor of Gold Coast. And the founder of the Gold Coast International School.”

  “It’s Ghana International School now,” snapped Mrs. Wosornu. “Eat,” she snapped at Fola.

  Fola picked up her fork. The woman’s commands were so tactlessly forceful; it was almost a relief to be told what to do. She put a piece of pawpaw in her mouth but couldn’t chew it. She moved it around until it dissolved on her tongue.

  “They’ve agreed to accept you,” said Reverend Wosornu, excited. “In ten years they’ve built quite a fine little school.”

  “You’ll take your GCEs, then go to college in America.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Call me Mother.”

  “Yes, Mother,” Fola said. The word sounded strange to her. Empty.

  “That’s better.”

  “Me, I’m just ‘Reverend.’ Not Father, not yet.”

  “Speaking of fathers, yours was kind to our Sena.”

  “Vera,” sighed the reverend, but his wife forged ahead.

  “He can’t have any children, our Sena. Such a pity. Only son. And you know what the villagers say.” Fola didn’t know what the villagers said. The proverb was recited with mouth full of egg, “‘The woman who has one child only, has no child.’”

  The reverend kept smiling. “Infant mortality,” he explained.

  How: she finished high school, seldom speaking, barely eating. When the war came next summer, she didn’t much care. She skimmed the local papers, saw the pictures, heard the rumors (slaughtered civilians, starving children, German mercenaries, Welsh) but this “Nigeria” they spoke of was nowhere she knew of, not home, not a place she could see, so not real. She lost too much weight and excelled in her studies, having done it all in Lagos with her erstwhile private tutor. Her classmates took to calling her “Biafran,” but jealously. They envied her hair, glowing marks, tragic glamour. She allowed herself to be fondled by one out of boredom. He lived up the road in East Cantonments. Yaw. He was actually quite handsome, an athlete, later soldier, but modest in ambition (how: Kweku was her first). She sat her exams and came first in the year. She cut off her hair, tired of brushing. A scholarship was arranged by more friends of the parish at Lincoln University, where Nkrumah had gone. She’d wanted to go to Kings College as her father had, but didn’t object.

  To the airport again.

  How: she crossed the tarmac to the aircraft with the smell of dripping evening in her nostrils thick with soon-arriving rain. She didn’t turn to smile or wave or look back at the terminal at the reverend, whom she’d rather liked, or Vera, whom she’d hated. So almost didn’t see him coming running in his three-piece suit. The passenger behind her had to tap her on the shoulder. “Miss?”

  And there was chubby Sena, jacket flapping out behind him like a broken magic mantle. “Fola, stop!” Fola stopped. He was wheezing when he reached her. “Thank goodness I caught you. How are you?”

  She shrugged.

  “I’ve been meaning to come. The firm is still operating, if you can believe it, in Lagos.”

  She shrugged.

  “But I should have come sooner, I know.” He hugged her now, pressing an object against her. An envelope. “He left this. Don’t open it yet. I was afraid that my mother would steal it so I waited.” He hugged until she had it, then he backed away. “Go.”

  How: when she got there she opened the envelope. United States dollars in crisp bounded stacks. Enough to start over, to remain in America, enough not to have to watch fat women eat or take handouts or need them or ever go hungry or go back to that airport in Ghana again.

  • • •

  A passenger behind her is tapping her shoulder. “Miss?”

  She turns, startled. The passenger points.

  And there they are, all of them, watching her, waiting, here, back at this airport in Ghana again.

  ii

  “She doesn’t look happy to see us,” says Sadie.

  “I’m sure she’s still shocked,” Kehinde tells her. “Don’t worry.” But pulls down his sweatshirt sleeves, covering his wrists with them, worried that Fola has noticed the scars.

  “You remember my mother,” Olu murmurs to Ling, thinking how much this airport has changed since he came.

  Ling whispers, awestruck, “She’s beautiful, Jesus.”

  Taiwo feels inexplicably angry.

  • • •

  All of them slow to a stop and stand staring. Someone should do something, everyone thinks. Kehinde steps forward to hug her but Fola, thrown, cradles his face, rather thwarting the hug. “A beard,” she says, laughing.

  “Don’t cry,” he says gently.

  “Oh, am I?” Still laughing, she wipes off her cheeks.

  The others come forward now, forming a huddle, and taking their turns with their hugs and hellos. “Ling,” breathes out Fola. “I’m so glad you made it,” while Sadie waits, watching them, trying not to scowl.

  • • •

  She knows this moment. This welcoming smile. This weightless expression of genuine warmth such as only exists for like-a-member of the family. Actual members get heavier welcomes. “And Sadie,” says Fola, her two hands extended, her mouth folded over, head tipped to the side. Sadie shuffles forward, suddenly nervous at the audience, intending a calm, very grown-up embrace, a stiff “Mom. Good to see you,” but the smell is overwhelming, and she feels herself crumbling, sobbing desperately instead.

  The smell of her mother—so instantaneously familiar, the smell of baked goods and Dax Indian Hemp, Fola’s twenty-year-old hair product, green with brown speckles like something she uses for gardening, too—and the feel of her mother, so impossibly yielding, the skin on her arms and her hands like a child’s, are a welcome too warm, undiluted, wide open for Sadie to bear it, to feel she deserves it. She buries her face in her mother’s soft shoulder and grips her waist tightly. “I’m sorry,” she slurs.

  • • •

  Fola laughs softly, stroking Sadie’s braids lightly. Olu watches, w
ishing that they’d do this at home. At least without Ling looking awkwardly at her sandals, remnant smile from “you made it” gone stiff with surprise. Fola lifts her chin up to peer over Sadie and gestures that the rest of them join in the hug. Olu looks at Taiwo, who looks inexplicably angry, and worries that she won’t accept Fola’s soft “Come.” By way of good example, he takes a step forward and wraps a long arm around Fola’s tall frame. Kehinde moves also to stand behind Sadie, pressing gently between her shoulder blades, calming her down. Ling touches Olu, too, maintaining some distance, reaching quickly for his elbow, squeezing once, letting go. Taiwo watches, thinking that she wants to go forward, for once in her life to feel part of the thing, however loose and misshapen the form of the huddle to feel somehow inside it. But she can’t.

  iii

  There isn’t enough room in the Mercedes for all of them. Taiwo and Kehinde follow behind in a cab.

  iv

  She is sitting with her face to the window, her back to Kehinde, remembering seeing Lagos for the first time: the grayness, the haze and the chaos, the road from Ikeja, the hawkers with trinkets and live death-row chickens, the way Femi clapped when they reached the apartment, his cocaine-cold lips on her browbone, his laugh, how her brother looked standing there colder and harder than she’d ever before seen him except when he slept—

  when the memory jump-cuts to Barrow Street, November, nude, sitting in the windowsill, blowing out O’s—

  and then onward to the end of it, sunrise, late summer, the wife in Apuglia in search of wet cheese, little inn on the oceanfront ideal for endings, the paper between them, the silence a knell.

  • • •

  It was always the ocean they came to on weekends. He called her his “water girl,” appropriately so: she was happiest the closest she was to the water, the ocean foremost, though the Hudson would do. (A matter of astrology, he says, she’s a water sign. Nonsense, says Taiwo, just doesn’t make sense. The scorpion is terrestrial, but Scorpio a water sign? And Aquarius an air sign? The logic is flawed.) A wind from the water washed over the porch where they sat, and she drew in a breath of the salt.

  “I’ll withdraw,” she exhaled.

  “No. I can’t let you do that.”

  “I don’t want to be a lawyer,” she said, with some bite. She ran her middle finger along the incriminating headline. Allegations of Infidelity Mire Elite Law School Dean. “You didn’t even think I should be a law student.”

  “Two years ago, Taiwo. You’re at the top of your class.”

  “I’m always at the top of my class,” she snapped quickly. “Has it ever occurred to you it’s bullshit, the ‘class’? What is this ‘class’? Just the same group of cowards seeking solace in schoolwork. How smart can we be?”

  Helpless laughter. “You’re relentless.”

  “I’m honest.”

  “No difference. I can’t let you quit.”

  “Well you can’t make me stay.” She stood in demonstration and walked down the porch steps. “Taiwo!” he called, but he didn’t give chase. She walked and then jogged and then ran to the beachfront, and sat looking out at the Atlantic alone. How wonderful it would be to walk in, she was thinking, just follow the path of the sunrise on waves, pinkish-gold, in her flip-flops and lover’s wool cardigan, to walk and keep walking, onward, under, away. Instead she just sat there, an hour, maybe longer, just long enough to hurt him, to ensure he felt pain. She wasn’t particularly angry—at least not with her lover; she’d been angry with her lot now for fifteen odd years—but she wanted him to suffer, and not from disgrace, but from a sense of having failed her. Of having caused her to fail.

  Why did she want this?

  He never deceived her. Neither chased the other, nor clung, nor insisted. They’d simply fallen into it, both, in an instant. Succumbed to the sucking-down feeling, and drowned. Now there were whispers and photos and rumors, a manner of discourse she’d never before known, as if some well-trained robot were spitting out stories involving some facts from her life but not her. This wasn’t his doing. He was clumsy and lovestruck with modest amounts of what one might call power; had been able to entertain her where no one could see them but unable to resist his own need to be seen. Two years of sex in a room in the Village and sweet beachfront inns up and down the East Coast, and he’d started to long for an audience to applaud him, to see his great conquest, to know his great joy. A dinner did them in. There were friends of his wife’s there and friends of his enemies from government days. In less than a month there was scandal in the offing. University president and board were apprised. In the middle of August they repaired to Cape May to negotiate the terms of surrender. End scene.

  They were allies still, lovers. There was no cause for anger. She’d never asked nor wanted that he tell or leave his wife. She had no particular interest in being a wife, for rather obvious reasons, and none in being his. But she wanted that he suffer. To know that he’d failed her. She was determined to withdraw so that he’d know that she’d failed; so that all of them, seeing her failure, would puzzle, would ask in hushed tones how this girl, this success—summa cum laude, NYU! PPE, Magdalen College! summer associate, Wachtell!—came to fall on her sword, whereon the answer would come, if not to them who were asking, then to him:

  Because he let her.

  And not him alone.

  There was the other one, the first one, the one they’d deleted, the one who had backed down a sunset-lit drive while she watched from the window obscured by the darkness, having played with the lights to bid Kehinde inside: first off, then on, then off, then on: just sufficiently dark now to see in the car, the man’s face through the windshield, soft, narrow eyes narrower, fighting: then filling with, tears—but resolute.

  He would know, too, she thought, sitting there silent as one sits on beaches: with knees to the chest, and the chin on the knees, and the breeze in the hair, and the taste of one’s tears bearing salt from the breeze. She would find him and tell him. He was somewhere in Ghana (according to Olu); she’d go there and wait. She’d be seated on his stoop when he came home from work, in a Volvo as she saw it, the sunset full swing. He’d see her from the driveway and slow to a stop with that look on his face per that scene in such films when a man on the run returns home before dark and the hit man is waiting, at ease, in plain sight, with his boots on the railing, a gun in one boot where the man in the driveway can see it. Like that. He’d stop, kill the engine, and stare from the car with his eyes meeting hers, hers unblinking, his wet, for he’d see in her face that a light had gone out and would know without words that his daughter was dead, that the girl he had left on a street in North America was not the one sitting on this stoop in West Africa, with boots propped on railing and pistol in boots, that she’d died because no one would save her. Indeed. She would drop out of law school and earn waiting tables the thousand-odd dollars to fly to Accra (against prior beliefs about the injustice of such pricing, an insult to immigrants the cost to fly east) so that he, too, would know, and would suffer from knowing, that he’d been too weak to protect her.

  Or rather: this is how she planned it.

  She should have come sooner.

  She laughs, looking out at the streets of Accra. Two years imagining the look on his face, she is here and her father is gone.

  v

  He is sitting with his face to the window, his back to Taiwo, looking out at the road from the airport, at Accra, somehow different than he expected, not like Mali or Lagos, less glamour, more order. A suburb. With dust. There are the standard things, African things, the hawkers on the roadside, the color of the buildings the same faded beige as the air and the foliage, the bright printed fabrics, the never-finished construction sites (condos, hotels) giving the whole thing the feel of a home being remodeled in perpetuity, midproject, the men gone to lunch, the new paint already chipping and fading in the sunshine as if it never really mattered what color it wa
s, stacked-up concrete blocks soldiers awaiting their orders, steel, sleeping machinery interrupting the green. This is familiar.

  What strikes him is the movement, neither lethargic nor frenetic, an in-the-middle kind of pace, none of the ancientness of Mali nor the ambitiousness of Nigeria, just a steady-on movement toward what he can’t tell. There are the same big green highway signs seen the world over, proof positive of “development” as he’s heard the word used, as if developing a country means refashioning it as California: supermarkets, SUVs, palms, smog, and all. Children in T-shirts with rap stars’ huge faces run up to the taxi to peddle their wares: imported apples in columns, PK chewing gum, bananas, daily papers, deconstructed exfoliation sponge, matches. The wares beckon cheerfully in primary colors, imported from China, South Africa, all plastic, all manner of plastic and cellophane and packaging as if the poor love nothing more than kitsch wrapped up like gifts. A man without legs has a boy without shoes wheel him carefully through the traffic in the middle of the road to the cab, where he knocks on the passenger window and holds up a hand missing fingers for coins.

  “Go, go, go,” shoos the driver, suddenly agitated. He rolls down his window to shout in coarse Twi.

  Kehinde peers down, sees the man, is embarrassed. He rifles through his sweatshirt for five single bills. “Don’t shout at them, please, sir,” he says to the driver. The driver looks back at him, sweating and stunned. Kehinde rolls his window down and holds out the dollars. “Here,” he says. “Take it.” The driver sucks his teeth. The boy without shoes takes just one of the dollars. The man without legs smiles, a smile without teeth. “Take the rest,” Kehinde says, but the boy doesn’t hear, and the taxi starts moving as the stoplight turns green.