Somebody's Heart Is Burning

by Tanya Shaffer

Three rounds in, the Ghanaian volunteers became convinced that Virgin Billy was cheating. Instead of cutting off the sound randomly, they said, he intentionally left certain people stranded. In the last two rounds, the odd men out were both Ghanaian volunteers with whom Billy had recently quarreled. The Ghanaian volunteers would only allow Billy to continue operating the radio if he turned his back while we circled the chairs. That way he couldn’t intentionally influence the outcome.

  A dozen rounds later, it was down to four people: two Ghanaian men, the Australian called Okoto, and Santana. The music began, and they started circling. The men stuck rigidly to the rules, their steps stiff and regular. Santana played by her own rules. She hovered over each chair as long as possible, swiveling her enormous bottom above it as though stirring a cauldron, her body in sync with the twinkling, bubbly highlife music that forced its way through the thick foam of the radio’s static. Then, just as a rival approached, she’d sashay to the next chair and begin the whole process again.

  The music stopped. Okoto was left stranded. He exited gracefully, without fuss.

  Virgin Billy scooped up a chair and set it aside.

  The music began again. The two men watched each other like lions. They ignored Santana to the extent that it was possible to ignore such an ebullient presence, their eyes flickering unwillingly toward her from time to time. The two chairs were placed far apart, and the men stayed close on each other’s tails. They practically ran between the safety zones. Santana played this round as though she’d lost interest. Flaunting her indifference like a cunning lover, she sauntered between the chairs with a bored expression on her face: all the time in the world.

  The music cut out. The two men dove for the same chair, their chests colliding in the air above it. While they struggled for dominion, Santana moved laconically toward the empty chair and slid into it.

  The play-offs. Two contenders remained: Santana and the skinny young man we called Castro. Though a woman, Santana could no longer be ignored.

  Santana and Castro circled the lone outpost. Santana performed her sensual shimmy above it until Castro gave her a light shove, forcing her to circle behind. He then remained beside the chair, swaying from foot to foot, until Santana bumped him with her prodigious hip.

  Music. No music.

  Castro was squarely above the chair. With a smug grin on his face, he slowly bent his knees and began to lower his rangy frame into it. At the last possible instant, just before his bony bottom made contact with the wood, Santana whipped the chair out from under him. Castro crashed to the floor, his legs stretched out before him, a stunned look on his face. Santana brought the chair down beside her with a loud thwack. She straddled it, her arms raised high in the victory sign, magnificent as a queen in her outrageous satin, laughing like a woman with nothing to lose.

  6

  Telegram

  The power is out in Accra, and except for a sliver moon and a few kerosene lamps illuminating the odd food seller, the streets are very dark. I am walking back to the hostel from the Wato Bar, when a group of young Ghanaian men comes toward me. They are laughing and shouting, deep in conversation. As we pass each other, one of them sees me and nods, grinning.

  “Hello, obroni,” he says.

  “Hello, obibini,” I respond, returning his salutation “white person” with the Twi term for “black person.” He laughs appreciatively and repeats it to his friends.

  Later, lying on a lower bunk beneath a snoring German volunteer, I realize that this is the first time in my life that I’ve passed a group of young black men on a dark, deserted street without feeling afraid. In the U.S., if we’d spoken at all, our exchange would’ve been acutely charged, both with my fear and their inevitable awareness of it.

  I rushed out of the hostel barefoot to meet the new American volunteer, anxious for news of home. I was back in Accra, hanging out for a few weeks between projects. I’d been the only American on the two camps I participated in, and I was eager to connect with another.

  She stood on the gravel path with a letter in her hand, gazing with an abstracted expression in the direction of Dr. Nkrumah’s mausoleum and, if you veered right, the ocean. She was a light-skinned black woman in her early twenties, small and delicate-boned, wearing wire-rimmed glasses, a white UC Berkeley T-shirt, and artfully faded jeans. Her hair was pulled tight in a thousand tiny cornrows decorated with red, green, and gold beads.

  “Hi! I’m Tanya,” I said, extending my hand.

  “Nadhiri.” Without meeting my eyes, she offered a cool, limp shake.

  “Are you from Berkeley?” I asked.

  She turned her head in my direction. Her eyes slid slowly from my buzzed hair and sunburned face down the voluminous faded T-shirt and dusty olive drab skirt, finally coming to rest on my bare feet, the negative image of sandals bright white against the tan.

  “No.” She turned deliberately back toward the path, as though expecting someone.

  I stiffened, but continued in a cheerful tone, “Oh, I just thought, because of the T-shirt . . .”

  “I go to school there,” she said curtly.

  “Oh cool! I live in the Bay Area!”

  “Which part?” she asked, after a drawn-out pause.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Which part of the Bay Area are you from?” she overarticulated. Her voice was high-pitched and nasal. It sounded brittle and unsupported, weightless as a dry leaf.

  “Oh. Richmond.”

  Without bothering to glance in my direction this time, she said, “Richmond’s not the Bay Area.”

  I laughed incredulously, “It’s right on the Bay.”

  “The people I know there don’t consider it the Bay Area.”

  “Huh. Well, I don’t know. I just live there. Most of the time I’m over in San Francisco.”

  She snorted, “Well, if you’re not involved in your community.”

  “I’ve gotta meet someone.” I took the path toward the ocean quickly, tripping over a piece of exposed pipe, stubbing my toe. I blinked a few times to clear my eyes of impending tears, and kept walking, feeling a familiar tightness. After four months in Ghana, it surged through my body like a telegram from home.

  A couple of weeks before Nadhiri arrived, I’d decided to splurge on a phone call to Michael. I was feeling sick and lonely, and I craved the goofy intimacy of our conversations, the sense of being known. Calling at around 10 P.M. his time, I’d found no one at home. I tried again at eleven, then at midnight, one, two, and three. Again the next morning. Finally, I left an icy message, something to the effect that finding him gone all night was a surprise not unlike finding a knife twisting in the base of one’s spine. Ten days later I received an outraged letter, asking what the hell I thought I was doing, guilt-tripping him? I was the one who’d set the terms! He’d begged for monogamy, but no, I’d insisted we be free, because I wasn’t sure I wanted to come back to him. I had one hell of a nerve. One fucking hell of a nerve.

  I cried all day and then responded with as conciliatory a tone as I could muster. Yes, of course, he was right, I’d given him a raw deal. I had no right whatsoever to expect anything of him. But welcome to the world of feelings, I couldn’t help adding. They aren’t logical. They don’t always play by the rules. Your saying that I have no right to be hurt is like my saying that you have no right to be angry. Words.

  I put the letter in the mailbox. For the last week I’d had my eye on a new Ghanaian volunteer called MC Brown. I decided to pursue his acquaintance.

  In the hot white beams of rented floodlights, you could see steam rising off the grass. Tinny highlife music zinged and crackled through the air, a gentle, mocking xylophone underscoring the cranked-up guitars. I was at the center of a pulsing crowd, dancing with MC Brown. We were toying with each other, savoring the thrill of possibility. As we danced, I admired the compact curves of his body in Levi’s knockoffs (the label said “Leevy’s”) and African print shirt. Inches apart, without touching, we enacted a cagey sensual drama of
coiling fingertips and jolting hips. I breathed deeply, taking in the sweet, acrid mix of sweat, cocoa butter, mosquito repellent, and cut grass. My bare feet kneaded the earth; my arms and legs were slick.

  We were on the expansive lawns of Legon University, one of the few places in the Accra area that you could easily confuse with the U.S. Among the manicured lawns, neatly trimmed shrubs, rows of palm trees, and geometrically shaped buildings, you might think you were on a college campus in Florida, say, or Southern California.

  Today we were celebrating the birthday of Marcus Garvey, best known as the founder of the Back-to-Africa Movement. Born in Jamaica in 1887, Marcus Garvey came to the U.S. at the age of twenty-eight and established the largest mass movement in African American history. At the height of his popularity, membership in his organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, numbered over a million. He believed that Africa was the spiritual home for all people of African descent, and that blacks would never achieve equality in countries where the majority of people were white. He encouraged blacks from all over the world to emigrate to Africa, with the goal of reclaiming it from European domination and establishing an independent, united Black Nation. I was one of a handful of whites attending the party, our faces spots of pink neon among the hundreds of Africans gathered for the event.

  “She’s gone, but I’m still dancing,” the singer wailed, following up with an extended riff in Twi. MC Brown was singing along, his mouth next to my ear, husky and off-key. I moved a fraction of an inch closer, condensing the force field between us. He turned his head, his lips hovered near mine—

  The music cut out. Static. The microphone squeaked. I looked at the stage and was surprised to see six people dressed in full African regalia, with draping layers of kente and other precious cloth. There was something incongruous about them, even beyond the formal dress. Perhaps it was the way the women stood side by side with the men, their stance at once righteous and timid. Dreadlocks emerged from beneath one of the men’s circular hats—a style I’d only seen in Ghana on a couple of Rastas selling beads at the beach—and two of the women wore glasses. I knew immediately that they were Americans.

  A small, thin young woman stepped forward and began fiddling with the microphone. Behind her, the others raised their fists in the freedom salute. She wore round, John Lennon glasses, and her skin was golden in tone. She was wrapped in a rich indigo cloth. As the squeal of the microphone died down, I removed my hands from my ears.

  “My brothers and sisters. I am speaking to you today on behalf of the African American exchange students of Legon University, who helped to organize this event.” She spoke in careful, measured phrases, as though reciting a prepared text. With a jolt, I recognized Nadhiri’s reedy voice. Is she a student? I wondered. I thought she was a volunteer.

  “Marcus Garvey was not Martin Luther King,” she continued nervously. “Marcus Garvey was not Malcolm X. Marcus Garvey was a man who believed in places of black people, by black people, and for black people, throughout his entire life.”

  A murmur of confusion. Heavy shouts of “Order! Allow!”

  “We came to Ghana as African Americans to discover our heritage and to get to know our African brothers and sisters. It has been a moving reunion. However, in coming here tonight to celebrate the vision of our brother, the late Marcus Garvey, we are disturbed to see a violation of his principles taking place.”

  A louder buzz this time, punctuated by angry discourse in a multiplicity of languages. I was beginning to recognize the sound of the different Ghanaian tongues, and now I caught snatches of Fanti, Ewe, and Ga. Again the cries of, “Allow! Allow!” Slowly the commotion died down. I glanced sideways at Brown, who stared intently at the stage, fists clenched, jaw set in a rigid line.

  “Marcus Garvey was a black nationalist and a black separatist. That doesn’t mean he hated white people, only that he felt that blacks and whites should lead separate lives, in separate places. Therefore, in the interest of respecting the memory of the deceased, we ask that those present who are not of Black African descent please leave the premises. Thank you.”

  Nadhiri replaced the microphone in the stand, where it screeched in resistance. She joined the others in a line, and they once again raised their fists.

  Chaos. All around, fierce arguments erupted—arms gesticulated wildly, voices strained to be heard. Brown shouted at the stage in Twi. Beside me, two men leaned into each other, engaged in passionate conference.

  “They were never Ashanti,” I heard one man say, and the other nodded.

  “They are weak!”

  Onstage, the band had gathered around the group of Americans. The men strained toward each other, near blows. Nadhiri placed her hand on the shoulder of one of the American men in a calming gesture. My stomach alive, I began to make my way through to the edge of the crowd. A hand circled my wrist. It was Brown’s.

  “No,” he said. “You must stay. They must not insult you like this. I will beat them.”

  The crowd pressed in. I fought for air among the ripe bodies, the rising heat.

  “Sweetie, I have to get out.”

  “You have not to be scared,” he shouted in my ear. “The students, they are not angry with you. They are angry with these lazy, these no-good people who insult our guests.”

  Headrush. Turning in the tightening crowd, searching for an opening, I put my hands in front of me like a blind woman, pushing. The crowd thinned, and I emerged at the side of the stage beside a palm tree. A breeze picked out my sweaty body like a breath of heaven. I leaned back against the scaly bark. The microphone squealed again.

  “My brothahs! My sistahs! Order! Order!” From where I stood, I saw the partial profile of a slight, bookish-looking young man in a blue oxford shirt and dark, pressed pants. He removed the microphone from its stand. The African American students and the band members paused in their argument and turned slightly toward him.

  “Brothahs and sistahs, I am president of students at Legon University here, and I am deeply saddened by what I have just heard. I beg of our white brothahs and sistahs present that you have not taken offense.”

  Shouts of “Here! Here!” from the crowd.

  “I beg you, it is not our custom in Ghana here to tell our guests that they are not welcome. I beg you, you are welcome. Then, if there are those people at this party who must ask other people to leave, I must ask those people that they themselves might leave.”

  Cheering. Scattered applause.

  “Now, as this is a party, and the band has not yet finished playing, perhaps we may once again dance.”

  Loud cheering. The young man moved away from the microphone. There was a moment of silence, the African Americans and the band members face-to-face. Then, slowly, the drummer sat down on his stool and pulled a djembe between his knees; the marimba player picked up his mallets. A signal passed between the Americans. They turned as a unit and walked down the steps at the side of the stage. As Nadhiri passed me, our eyes met and held. She saw that I was afraid. And I saw that she was crying. As she turned her head sharply away, her face darkened, and I saw there the same thing I felt rising in my own chest. Hot, leaden, inescapable shame.

  “They have brought the troubles on themselves,” Brown said to me the next day, sitting on the wooden steps outside the volunteer hostel. “They are lazy, I know this for a fact. They could be rich, living in America, but instead they take drugs, and steal, and shoot people with guns.”

  “That isn’t true at all! Millions of black Americans are working themselves to the bone every day.” I scratched around an enormous bite on my leg. Insects didn’t usually go for me, which was fortunate, because I didn’t much care for repellent. Last night, however, an itinerant mosquito had found its way inside my net and covered my ankles in angry red spots.

  “I have read it,” Brown insisted. “They are criminals, they are all in jail.”

  “Not all, a small percentage—”

  “I have read. Time magazine. All the
black males are in prison.”

  “Oh Brown,” I sighed. His attitude was not uncommon. I’d encountered a surprising amount of prejudice among Africans against black Americans, gleaned mostly, I supposed, from the news media and the blockbuster movies that made their way here. African Americans visiting Ghana rarely got the kind of special treatment whites got. A black Peace Corps volunteer I met at a bar in Accra told me that when she arrived in her village for the first time, the villagers looked at her with dismay.

  “They thought they’d been shortchanged,” she said, shaking her head ruefully. “One lady wanted to know if their village had lost some kind of lottery. She said her cousin’s village had gotten a white one!”

  She told the story lightly, over a beer, but I sensed the heart-break behind it. She’d come here, like so many black Americans, expecting to find home. To be treated as a second-class citizen in her ancestral homeland produced a desolation I could scarcely imagine.

  How strange, I thought, not for the first time, that Ghanaians had such affection for white people, given their recent history of colonization. But then, perhaps the very nearness of that experience provided the explanation. The effects of colonial education were so fresh that the majority of Ghanaians still esteemed their former colonizers rather than resenting them. The absence of a significant white population also helped. There was no European aristocracy in residence, lording its wealth over the local people. Almost all the obroni to be found in Ghana were aid workers, students, or volunteers.

  I sighed again, trying to collect my thoughts.

  “It’s true there are a disproportionate number of black men in American jails,” I told Brown, “but the reasons for that are very complicated. Generations of economic oppression, racism, the police, the courts . . .” I scratched the bite fiercely, drawing blood.

  “But look how they behave,” he said. “They are rude.”