Eddie Signwriter

by Adam Schwartzman

  And he’d remember when the turn came for the young hustlers—the gangs who had been roaming the beaches—how they began to chant the old Ga fisherman chants. Not only them, but the ordinary townspeople too. Even those who lived abroad, in Germany and America. The songs leaked out of them all from across the kiosks along the length of the beach.

  And then it ended.

  The squall passed over and the people drifted away silently. There was no acknowledgement of what had happened, or what they had shared. People who’d been touching and shaking and contorting around each other walked away as strangers.

  The air was now dry and clean and cool, and the storm moved inland, heading for the ridge, where it would arrive that night. But now the evening light shone through the braided clouds. The sea was cool, flat as a piece of stretched cloth, and it all felt as if it could last forever—this moment of reprieve—as for the rest of that day it did.

  BIG HENRY

  AFTER NANA OFORIWAA’S DEATH the boy returned to Nii Boi Town, where he stayed for a short time in his mother’s house. There was talk of his finishing his studies elsewhere that came to nothing. Shortly afterwards he moved to the city to live with his uncle.

  His uncle’s name was Festus Ankrah. He had a large property on Castle Street in the centre of town. He ran a fleet of taxis, which he’d funded out of cash saved over five years of wandering across the world—during which he traveled from Ghana to Jordan, through Arabia, to the Far East, and had ended up as a construction worker building cinemas in Manila for Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos.

  His uncle’s taxi fleet had done well. He employed six drivers, and no longer needed to work himself for his livelihood, though the thought of leisure had never occurred to him. Although he’d never married it is well known that he’s fathered two sons since his return to Accra—one in the old colonial slum of Jamestown, one in the new post-Independence slum of Nima.

  His uncle had been living on Castle Street for a little more than eight years when he brought him to the house. Though many people assumed as much, his uncle did not take him in out of duty, nor in observance of any rights to the care of his sister’s sons—his uncle despised tradition. Nor was it out of affection—his uncle knew him even less than he did his own two sons (which was not very well either).

  His uncle brought him to the house out of a sense of kinship, but not one based on family. Rather, his uncle sensed in the boy a younger version of himself. He identified with his nephew’s disgrace—his expulsion from school and return to Accra—which, in his uncle’s eyes made his nephew as much an outsider as his uncle felt himself to be an outsider.

  That, and the opportunity to thwart his sister, mother of his nephew, who—in her self-assurance, her narrow-mindedness, her cultivated respectability—stood for everything his uncle hated most about the world he’d fled when he set out on his travels and had then returned to.

  And so, after the boy had returned from the school, and had spent two months already under the discipline of his mother’s household (doing nothing more than the chores of an eleven-year-old, and otherwise keeping to himself and his only interest, painting), it was his uncle who first suggested what his nephew had been secretly contemplating for a long time, but didn’t dare, in his disaffection, propose.

  “If the child cannot think of anything better than to lose his time through painting,” his uncle said (repeating the words of his sister, who had been complaining for weeks about her son’s disinterest in anything else), “then let him paint and make his living.”

  His mother was opposed from the start to the idea of a child of hers becoming a signwriter, and condemning himself to a life among artisans, hustlers, and small traders. But a week to the day after his uncle first made his suggestion, he arrived by car at his sister’s house, unannounced, to take his nephew away.

  “Mary, I want a word with you,” he said in his soft, firm voice that had the authority of a man used to having his way.

  “Come in,” his sister said, swinging the half-door open. “I thought you’d be back,” and that afternoon the arrangements were made.

  To spare his sister the sight of her child’s descent into the artisan classes, his uncle suggested he stay with him in his large house in Adabraka. And to spare him the prospect of undeserved failure, his uncle offered to get him an apprenticeship to learn the rudiments of the trade, a shed in which to paint when the time came, and the benefits of his contacts with traders and businessmen, who always needed signs and billboards.

  And so he moved from Nii Boi Town into the city and what would be his home for the next three years.

  The house on Castle Road had been built before Independence. It had front and back balconies, thick palm trees grown knobbly as a crocodile’s back in the tall grass in what was left of the garden, a dirt-brown zinc roof, and a driveway parked with taxis in various states of repair, the most dilapidated still on bricks.

  Inside it was a shell of wood and lime-washed walls, kept tidy by a woman employed twice a week. It was entirely bare, but for four rooms at the back inhabited by the boy’s uncle, away from people and the road, and those in the front, where the boy established his quarters.

  Given the whole house on Castle Road from which to select, the boy chose two rooms that opened up onto the front balcony, their entry on the upstairs landing. The original function of the rooms was indiscernible. They were relatively small and connected to each other by arches that had never known doors. In the room furthest from the landing he put a mattress. This became his bedroom. A chair and table turned the landing into his living room, from which he could look down between the railings into the empty entrance hall, where shafts of sunlight—that in the morning carpeted his bedroom—caught the dust as it crept through the holes in the roof.

  He and his uncle got along well. He admired his uncle, who had traveled the world and lived as he pleased. An easy affection developed between them, as between people who are alike. Although they were alone together in the house, their lives revolved only loosely around one another’s. They ate when they were hungry, together when they felt like company. His uncle said that his nephew did not need nurturing—something, in any event, that he could not have provided him. He said that his nephew needed to be left alone, to do as he pleased.

  His uncle wasted no time in fulfilling his side of the deal with his mother. Shortly after his nephew’s arrival at Castle Road, the promised apprenticeship was organized. The signwriter with whom his uncle arranged for his nephew to work had cut his teeth in the trade thirty years before, when competition was fierce and the formal economy ruled. Somewhere his real name must have been recorded, but everyone knew him by his moniker—Big Henry.

  To look at, he was five-foot square of a man, wide almost as he was short, black as a seal, his whole skin sparkling with humidity. He was full of life. His flesh buckled under it. His heart was full as a wardrobe.

  Though there was a suppleness about him too. He was lithe. In his manner, but also in his movements—the way he sprung up the stairs to his studio, agile as a goat, though the heavy stairs shook and the plates rattled in the kitchen below.

  There was a kind of magnetism in that sort of bulk. People weren’t laughing at him. They were sharing in something good about the world that his existence made possible. But also there was something more serious about him, something less about joy. A solidity to his presence, that was more than simply his physical bulk. This man exuded dignity. He was graceful, generous, had the balance of things.

  In his own boyhood Big Henry had painted with love. But many years had passed and now he painted not so much with love as with honesty. He took a casual interest in the beauty of the world, drew simple pleasure from the fact that a surface made of paint could represent known things, and saw as much value in the intention to suggest something beautiful with his art as to succeed in it.

  Though in his time Big Henry had been successful. He had made a name for himself—not only through commissions for the
large European and later Ghanaian firms, but also for the piecework he’d continued to do around the neighbourhood for next to nothing. And it was this that became the mainstay of his business three decades later, when the formal sector had turned to photography, and many younger men, more hungry than himself, and more mobile, were plying his trade.

  Still, the signwriter painted with as much skill and enjoyment as ever. Only now, for the first time in his life, he’d begun to suffer problems with his health. Even into his fifties he’d been able to drink as long and late as any man, then sing as loud the next morning in church as anyone on a full night’s sleep and a proper breakfast. He could still travel fair distances for even small commissions, happy to sleep on a shop floor with his rolled-up trousers as a pillow if an extra day was required.

  But this had now come to an end. He had always been a large man—as full of guts as he was of life, his friends said. Now sixty years of carrying those guts around had made walking painful. He tired easily. Often he was out of breath, especially on hot afternoons.

  Many of those same friends who had shared with him his youth had now retired—returned to their villages or their children’s compounds. But he had married late, a woman much younger than himself, and had two small girls in school. Times were hard for everyone these days, except for the rich perhaps, and he had never been rich. And so when Festus Ankrah approached him on the matter of taking on his nephew as an apprentice, Big Henry was glad of the opportunity to have somebody in the studio to help.

  A day was set. Uncle and nephew arrived at Big Henry’s house. The signwriter was summoned by his wife from his studio on the second floor. He came down the stairs slowly, smiling, talking through his breathlessness, as his wife went off to get water and food for Festus Ankrah and his nephew. The signwriter’s whole body gathered with a small jerk in preparation for each step, then straightened out as he arranged his weight delicately on the pads of his soft feet.

  “Yes, yes, yes, hello,” he was saying as he descended, while Festus Ankrah and the boy stood formally at the door. “Good morning to you.”

  The signwriter invited his visitors to sit. Festus Ankrah hesitated, explaining that he would have to leave, but sat then nonetheless. The boy remained standing.

  “As for myself, I must have some relief,” the signwriter said, lowering himself into a beaten-up old leather chair.

  Then the boy’s uncle and the signwriter talked. The boy stood quietly at his uncle’s side.

  Only when his uncle took his leave—“You will forgive me for not getting up,” the signwriter said to him, shrugging a self-deprecating shrug—did Big Henry address the boy.

  “O-yeees,” Big Henry sighed with gratification, then edged off his shoes and shifted in his seat exaggeratedly, as if shaking off the formality of the last five minutes. The two flat clubs of his feet began spinning slowly, like little fins propelling him lazily through the air.

  It was a gesture of complicity with which he hoped to start his relationship with the boy.

  The boy smiled, an uncertain smile, but did not say anything.

  “Very well,” the old man said, and introduced himself.

  At first the signwriter thought the boy was merely shy. Although he made many attempts to put the boy at ease in those first few days, it seemed to make little difference. The boy was quiet, spoke haltingly, uncertainly, when he had to, and in a mixture of English and Twi, since he was not fluent.

  “Something is wrong with him,” Big Henry’s wife said to her husband.

  “As for me, I think he is only sad,” the signwriter replied.

  “What is it that he has to be sad about?” the woman asked.

  The old man didn’t know.

  Though there was more to it than just sadness. There was mistrust too. Not of him. Of everyone. Or everything. Somewhere along the line, the old man guessed, damage had been done. And in his way of seeing the best in people, he looked on the boy’s silence as something apart from the boy, an affliction; and so the apprenticeship continued, when others might have broken it off after a few weeks.

  In the beginning Big Henry would start the morning with the boy at Amaamo timber market, where he’d give instruction in the selection of wood. As they made their way together through the winding alleys of the market, barrow boys would maneuver through with boards stacked on their heads. The air was filled with the sound of bargaining and shouting and the animal howl of wood being torn by metal, and as they walked, and the signwriter talked, sawdust would fall like snow from the board saws, and gather in piles like river sand at their feet.

  The merchant from whom they bought their boards had his shop at the back of the market. He was a small man with little brown teeth and a scrubby head—an immigrant from Niger in a political suit that was cut from a piece of purple cloth so thin that the collars and lapels hung as loose and flimsily as a shirttail.

  There they would find him standing outside his shed, in a row of identical sheds with tall frontages opening to a passage. All around his merchandise was piled up in stacks, like folded tablecloths, on which the night-shift machinist and porters lay asleep. From a distance the merchant would watch the signwriter and the boy approach, and the boy too would watch the merchant, clearing his ears with the head of a two-inch nail, from which he collected the yellow crust with his teeth and spat into the sand.

  To the doorframe of the wood merchant’s shed a monkey was tied by a rope attached round its waist. It was a pale gray creature with dangling limbs and sky-blue testicles that bounced between its legs like berries. It would take a banana with both hands gently, but it would also bare its teeth and shriek soundlessly at the porters and assistants who harassed it, hopping around the frame of the shack looking for a door in the plank wall where there was none.

  After the lessons of the timber market, the signwriter taught the boy to sand and prime. Later they went through the mixing of colour. The composition of a board. The disciplines of the different fonts, varnishing finishes, and installation.

  The boy followed instructions well. He seemed to take pleasure in his work. The signwriter noticed that having a task to do, with its specific requirements set and understood, gave the boy contentment. Perhaps a lack of structure had been part of his problem, the old man thought. That before there’d been nothing that necessitated the world being one way or another.

  But at the studio there were always things that needed doing. And as time passed Big Henry found the boy a very useful assistant. He treated the boy kindly. The boy’s presence became part of the signwriter’s daily routine. And because the signwriter loved his life—his wife, his girls, his house, his job—the boy became part of his generalized sense of rightness and contentment.

  He began to feel a fondness for the boy, as he noticed in his girls a fondness for anything that was familiar. “Hello sky, hello birds, hello sandy yard,” the younger one, who was six, would say as their mother took them out to school.

  It was something like that for him too—Hello boy.

  The signwriter knew that to try to coax the boy into conversation would only make him withdraw further. But it did not stop him from speaking himself through the long days they spent together. He did not think the boy minded. Having somebody around to whom he could pass on his experience brought out of Big Henry all kinds of reminiscences and half-articulated philosophies.

  He talked of the kindness of strangers, and the coincidences that had brought him into the trade, and why he had stuck with it.

  “Long ago,” he told the boy, “when I was young I started reading books about people that have died.

  “The way they started, what they were performing.

  “And one day in a little magazine I read that the former world boxing champion Cassius Clay, the father was a signwriter—

  “Now I say if the father was a signwriter, a prominent man like that, why can you not also follow in his footsteps.

  “Ahaaaaa?

  “Ah!

  “And s
o what I had to do was to make a small box and put my little paints inside, and then get my brushes and put them into my hair.

  “And moreover the clothes that I wore had to be full of paint so that the people see that you belong to paint.

  “Now when I started I was walking in the street, and somebody would see me and say, ‘O let me call this man.’

  “Then he’d say, ‘Are you a painter or are you an artist?’

  “And I say, ‘I’m an artist.’

  “And then he asks me can I write on his shop for him?

  “Then I have to put my paints down and we talk of price, and if the price is good then I start doing something.”

  It was late one afternoon that the signwriter told the boy this story. The boy had finished for the day, had washed up and had come to the old man in the room above the house where the old man had been continuing with the day’s work. Naked to his waist, the signwriter stood painting at his easel, filling in certificates for the African Bible College for Christian Resurrection.

  The old man’s face was crumpled in concentration. Seams of sweat formed in the creases of his skin. Sweat rolled round the socket of the eye, gathered in the hollow between cheek and ear where the flesh folded inwards like rubber, then back under the pressure of its own weight. His flesh hung from his arms in solid blocks, like hot-water bottles. His forearms were large and thick, growing over the wrists. His chest hair curled like burnt spiders. The meat of his back fell away from the spine like the folds of gathered curtains.

  All around there were planks of wood piled against the walls, some salvaged, some primed and washed, others half completed. There was an old clothes cupboard against the wall, two rusted trunks, tins full of paint—coffee and milk tins, brands just distinguishable beneath the paint drippings—bottles, rags, string, brushes, sandpaper, a lathe held to a nail against the wall.