by Taiye Selasi
She doesn’t fall.
When they speak of it later they’ll say that a girl came to Sadie and pulled her up off of their bench, gave a little demonstration of the base two-step footwork, which Sadie repeated a few times herself, that the drummers, encouraged, started drumming a little faster, that Sadie kept pace, to the delight of the crowd, and that before they all knew it, she was dancing in the clearing as if she’d been born doing traditional Ga dance. No one will know what it is in this moment that overwhelms Sadie, not even Sadie herself, as the insistent lead dancer catches hold of her elbow and repeats, tugging gently, “Please sees-tah, please come.” She pulls Sadie forward, away from the benches. “Like so,” she says, demonstrating the footwork: one, two. There are tears in Sadie’s eyes that will fall if she doesn’t, so she stares at the ground, at the girl’s small bare feet. One two, one two, one two, one two. A surrogate heartbeat. Calmer and surer. She takes a few steps. Hears the onlookers cheering. Goes red with embarrassment. Too late to sit down. She stares at the ground, at her feet, willing movement. The feet obey, shockingly, and move, left to right. The girl cries, “Ehn-hehn!” with great pride in her pupil. Sadie glances up as she moves. “Yeah? Like this?” More movement. More cheering. Transporting, the drumbeat. Tension in the stomach. Which moves to the thighs. Then the knees, then the calves, then the shins, then the feet. Too embarrassed to stop, she keeps moving. Starts dancing. Slowly at first, with her eyes on the ground, on the feet of the girl, which she follows with ease—then a spark, something clicking, a logic inside her, a stranger inside her that knows what to do, knows this music, these movements, this footwork, this rhythm, the body relaxing, eyes trained on the feet, she is moving, not looking, afraid to stop moving, afraid to look up at the small cheering crowd, she is moving, she is sweating, she is crying (I am dancing, she thinks, disbelieving, unable to stop), stomach taut, thighs on fire, lids slack, hips in circles, shoulder up shoulder down, around, foot out foot in, she is outside her body or in it, inside it, unaware of the exterior, unaware of the skin, unaware of the eyes, unaware of the onlookers, aware of the pounding, aware of the drum.
Crack!
The drum stops. Sadie stops. Sweating, breathless. The small gathered crowd ceases clapping and stares. An instant of silence, then Olu: “Go, Sadie!” with all of the might of his baritone voice. The children resume clapping and cheering in Ga, the chubby dancer, “My sees-tah!” Pictures taken with phones. Fola leaps up from the bench to embrace her as if she has just run a footrace and won. “My God,” she is laughing, clutching Sadie by the forehead. “My daughter’s a dancer, ehn?” Kissing her braids. Sadie, overcome by belated self-consciousness now that she’s stopped and can feel the warm eyes, lets her mother embrace her, her heart pounding wildly for, among other things, joy.
v
But to see Sadie now in her moment of triumph, enfolded by Fola as she was at the airport (all smiles-through-the-tears, face to breast, and the rest of it), Taiwo feels something rather startlingly like rage. She’s been trying all morning to stick to the script, looking somber, sounding interested, dabbing sweat without complaining, an attempt at being civil that the rest take for sulking, accustomed as they are to her silence, her brooding. This is her preassigned part in the play, as it’s Olu’s to administrate or Kehinde’s to peacekeep or Sadie’s to cry at the drop of a hat or their mother’s to turn a blind eye: Taiwo sulks. They expect it, await it, would miss it if she stopped it. No one worries or asks her what’s wrong, did something happen? That’s just Taiwo, they’ll say with their eyes to each other when they think she can’t see, eyebrows raised, shoulders shrugged.
Such that she, too, believes that she’s always been like this, was a “difficult infant” and will always be difficult—and that, she thinks suddenly, watching Fola and Sadie, if only I were easier, then I’d be hugged, too. Her mother doesn’t hug her, it occurs to her, jarringly. Doesn’t rush to her side at the first sign of need, reserves this privilege for Sadie, who is sweeter and weepy and cute like a doll, like a thing that you hold. So it was yesterday at the dining room table when Fola just stared as she’d started to cry. Had it been Sadie, Taiwo knows, Fola would have embraced her, as now, instead of watching as her daughter walked away.
Rage, out of nowhere. She stares at her mother and feels this rage surging, both startling and embarrassing, that it should come now, with the rest of them laughing, putting grief aside momentarily to celebrate Sadie, small Sadie, sweet Sadie, clean Sadie, pure Sadie, as cute as a baby they can’t help but hug. Out of nowhere, overwhelming, a rage beyond reason. Her body begins trembling, then moving, without bidding: first quivering, then burning, then standing, then walking: without thinking, without speaking, she is walking away. The others don’t notice her go, taking pictures, the children still chattering, older women uninterested. Only Kehinde stands worriedly. “Where you going?” he murmurs. She answers, “To the bathroom,” and he doesn’t pursue.
She hasn’t the foggiest idea where she’s going. Just strides out the entrance to the compound, along the wall, sees the driver by the car, goes the other direction, away from the town, down the dark red dirt road. Rage bids her onward, a visceral seething that quickens her pace and inhibits her thinking so all she can see is her mother hugging Sadie and all she can think is the thought but not me. Rage and self-pity and shame at self-pity. A fire in the legs. Faster, onward, consumed—until, reaching the edge of the village, nearly jogging, she looks up and sees that she’s reached a small clearing. Absent clustered structures obstructing the ocean, the sand beckons, open, like an answer.
• • •
The beach is almost empty, the sun near its height, just the four little boys playing soccer without shoes who smile pleasantly at Taiwo as she appears between palm trees but don’t stop their passing or chitchat in Ga. She pulls off her flip-flops and walks down the sand, which is hard, whitish-gray, piping hot at this hour; feels the rage start to cool with the new, damper air, with the salt taste and sea breeze and sound of the waves; and keeps walking, away from the boys, from their laughter, not thinking, still heaving, now dripping with sweat.
A half mile ahead stands a colonial structure, what looks to have once been some grand beachfront house, complete with terraces and pillars, now abandoned to the sunshine. A few miles beyond another village begins. Somewhere in her mind is the idea of escaping, of making her way to the end of this beach, but the building distracts, looming darkly before her, the sand turning brown in its shadow ahead. It reminds her of that house that she hated, the sullenness, the ghosts of other families, strangers, long-dead Europeans, here plopped on a beach with the boats and the palm trees and few thatch-roofed huts someone’s built in the shade. She stops to consider it: out of place in this picture, as they always felt, an African family in Brookline; as she always felt late at night in her bedroom, the ghosts more at home there than she was. And laughs.
The visual is laughable: this house on a beach in a village in Ghana, some white family home, with its paint stripped away and its eye sockets empty, but here, still assertive, imposing itself. She laughs at the thought of her father, in childhood, a child on this beach looking up at this house, thinking one day he’d have one as big, as assertive, thinking one day he’d conquer some land of his own. Which he did, she thinks, laughing—those acres in Brookline on which stood that equally joyless old home, i.e., “home” as conceived by the same pink-faced British who would have erected this thing on this beach, hulking, rock, a declaration—but without the immovability, the faint air of dominance, the confidence or the permanence. He conquered new land and he founded a house, but his shame was too great and his conquest was sold. Or sold back, very likely, to a sweet pink-faced family, the descendants of Pilgrims, more familiar with dominance. Retrieved from the new boy, returned to the natives, to Cabots or Gardeners, reclaimed from the Sais. Poor little boy, who had walked on this beach, who had dreamed of grand homes and new homelands, she t
hinks, with his feet cracking open, his soles turning black, never guessing his error (she’d have told him if he’d asked): that he’d never find a home, or a home that would last. That one never feels home who feels shame, never will. She laughs at the thought of that boy on this beach, and laughs harder at the thought of the house that he bought, and laughs hardest at the thought of herself in that house, twelve years old, still a girl, still believing in home.
The usual thing happens:
she laughs until she’s crying with laughter, then crying without it, just crying. Then sitting. Where she is. Drops her bag, just stops walking, has nowhere to go, is a stranger here also. Had she any more energy she’d likely go anyway, start running, waiting (hoping) for some person (man) to follow her—but can’t, is too tired, in her legs, in her body; something seeping out the center, some last stronghold giving in, within. So sits. In the sun, on the sand, sweating, crying. As one sits on beaches. But without the lover’s cardigan.
She fumbles in the bag for her American Spirits, lights one, smokes it quickly; small, jittery motions. She clutches her knees to her chest, to feel closeness, overcome by a grief she can hardly make sense of. The last time she felt this was midnight in Boston, her father slumped over on the couch in his scrubs: that the world was too open, wide open, an ocean, their ship sinking slowly, weighed down by the shame. What she hadn’t known then was that it would be Fola to cut off the ropes, set the lifeboats adrift. Or that it could be Fola. Not a father but a mother. What she hadn’t known then is that mothers betray.
So then.
The thought that she hasn’t been thinking.
Stepping at last into light after years at the edge of awareness, a shadow of consciousness, peeking then hiding when her mind turned its way. Dr. Hass has it wrong, as she’s long since suspected: it isn’t the father. Or not him alone. It was Fola who sent them to Femi that summer like two fatted calves to the altar. Not he. How has she missed this? The source of her anger. The rage without name: that she sent them away, that she shipped them to Lagos when she should have known better, when she must have known somehow what would happen, who he was, her own brother, her own family. For the cost of tuition. The thought in the open. That mothers betray. And what happens to daughters whose mothers betray them? They don’t become huggable like Sadie, Taiwo thinks. They don’t become giggly, adorable like Ling. They grow shells. Become hardened. They stop being girls. Though they look like girls and act like girls and flirt like girls and kiss like girls—really, they’re generals, commandos at war, riding out at first light to preempt further strikes. With an army behind them, their talents their horsemen, their brilliance and beauty and anything else they may have at their disposal dispatched into battle to capture the castle, to bring back the Honor. Of course it doesn’t work. For they burn down the village in search of the safety they lost, every time, Taiwo knows. They end lonely. Desired and admired and alone in their tents, where they weep through the night. In the morning they ride, and the boys see them coming. And think: my, what brilliant and beautiful girls. Hearts broken, blood spilled. Riding on, seeking vengeance. This a most curious twist in the plot: that the vengeance they seek is the love of another, a mother-like lover who will not betray. At the thought she laughs harder. To think of her lover, his scarf and his sweatpants, his motherly smile. And his wife and his children. Prepackaged betrayal. A foregone conclusion. “Marissa, thank you.” And . . . scene.
She stares at the water, eyes blurry for seeing things clearly, unsure what to do or think next. (If she hears it the first time, her name doesn’t register.) She lights another cigarette. She smokes this one slowly. The sun beating down on her shoulders and back is a comfort of sorts, a reminder of skin, a reminder of pain in a different dimension, outside of her body, outside of this grief. She lies on her back in the sand, which is damper than she realized sitting upright, a welcome surprise. She stretches her toes in the direction of the waves, but the tide doesn’t wash in this high at this hour. And is lying there, smoking, her locks full of sand, when she hears it again.
Someone calling her name.
• • •
“Taiwo,” and again from a distance, insistent. “Tai-wo!”
She props herself up.
Sees her mother.
Fola, as if conjured, calling, “Darling!” Coming toward her. The little boys pointing, informants, behind her. Fola, out of nowhere, storming frantically toward her, white linen pants billowing, gesturing. (All but the torches.) “Kehinde said you went to the bathroom, but I looked there. The driver said he saw you walking here toward the beach. What happened, my darling?” she’s saying, coming closer. “Did you get hurt? Can you stand?” She reaches Taiwo, and kneels.
Perhaps it is the proximity that overwhelms Taiwo, having Fola so close after all of these years? Something. She snaps, leaping up, startling Fola, who stands, reeling backward. “DID I GET HURT?!” Taiwo screams. Almost as if a thread that’s been dangling gets pulled on, or catches on something, the whole thing unraveling. She is laughing and crying and screaming, “What happened? Mom, what did you think was going to happen to us?” And then, because Fola looks utterly baffled, Taiwo sneers, “I’ll tell you what happened, sure, fine.” Though she promised she wouldn’t and hasn’t for years, though she never once imagined the moment like this (empty beach in the daytime, young boys standing, staring), she tells, without pausing, how it happened, how it started:
• • •
how they shared the second bedroom, the one given Kehinde, with the creaky twin beds because hers was too big and too cold with the air conditioner, which she couldn’t turn off (it was too high to reach), whereas his didn’t work. That first night she came to his door in her nightdress. “Can I sleep here, Kehinde?” Her brother said yes.
At first she took the one bed and Kehinde the other, but his room was too hot not to sleep by the window, so after a week they just shared, head to foot, like sardines in a can, sheets thrown off to the breeze. After two, she stopped sneaking to her room before sunrise, afraid that Uncle Femi would discover and scold them; they’d seen him only twice since they’d arrived in Nigeria, at the elaborate Sunday lunches he threw for his friends. The rest of the time he was virtually absent, locked away at the top of the four-floor apartment, accessible only by an elevator that required a code, which the twins didn’t have, so an invisible world. They could hear their uncle’s guests always coming and going, riding up, riding down, music playing, all hours, the raucous parties on Saturdays, women laughing, glasses smashing, muffled shouting, Niké complaining—but they never went up.
They lived on the second floor like two (wealthy) orphans in the care of Uncle Femi’s large all-male staff. The houseboys would wake them and set out their uniforms. The cooks served their meals. The drivers took them to school. They’d spend the whole day there, returning for dinner. They ate by themselves, did their work, went to bed. Sardines in a can, by the window for breeze, telling stories about Boston, most involving the snow, as if by remembering the cold they might actually feel it, and lessen the pressure of the humidity somehow. Auntie Niké would appear in the evenings after dinner to reiterate the rules about the use of the elevator, to see that they hadn’t dropped dead in the daytime, to complain about Femi, then ride back upstairs. They didn’t make friends at the American International School, where their peers thought them arrogant on account of their looks. So mostly stuck to each other, eating, sleeping, doing schoolwork, watching television, playing cassette tapes, swimming, riding in cars.
When they spoke to her, Fola, on the phone at the weekends (the one call allotted them, five minutes each), they said they were “happy” so she wouldn’t be worried. They weren’t sad in the beginning. They were simply alone. They knew there was something not right in the apartment—different people always coming in and out at all hours, speaking Yoruba and Arabic and English and pidgin; on weekends they could see them, from the bedroom,
by the pool; they saw the girls prancing in leopard-print dresses and heavy fur jackets and stilettos and wigs, and the fat men beside them, and young men in batches, all slender and handsome with dark, hungry eyes—but they didn’t ask questions. It didn’t seem worth it. They did what they were told to and kept to themselves. Three months, then six, and then nine in this fashion. With the summer arriving suddenly with cool, drier air, then the end of the school year, a change in the program, an emptiness appearing in the middle of their days.
How things changed:
that one morning. Auntie Niké, without warning. Appearing in the kitchen as they sat down to eat. It was the first time they’d seen her in the morning, out of costume, without face paint or wig, a silk scarf on her head. Taiwo happened to glance up from her Weetabix and saw her, and choked on her milk with dismay at the sight.
The woman looked like a ghost. With her beige-grayish skin and her small vacant eyes, a white sheet in her hand. A ghost laughing. “Surprised to see me, ehn? You think we don’t live here? You think you can do as you please in this house?” She was laughing very softly as she liked to, when angry, and jabbing her finger like the tongue of a snake. They’d observed this performance on a number of occasions when Niké stood berating the houseboys outside: the measured opening (soft laughter or whispered derision), one finger thrust forward on salient points, the slow build to full volume, with rhetorical questions (“you think we don’t live here?”), the use of “my friend,” then the climax, the screaming, the invocation of the Bible, the melodramatic finale, Shakespearean in tone. Always ranting about honor and justice and such, before beating the houseboys, a violent to-do. To Taiwo’s mind, Nigerians seemed to like being angry, to derive pleasure from conflict, some physical thrill; she would watch them in the marketplace, at school, the way they carried on, their eyes alive with pleasure as they screamed and tore their hair. It was hard to take seriously. She was listening to Auntie Niké but absently, carefully mashing down her Weetabix in milk. It was only when the woman started shouting, “It’s disgusting!” that she looked up from the cereal.
