“It’s . . .” I sighed, abandoning the insatiable itch. “It’s complicated. There’s a lot of anger built up. But this group isn’t representative, either. Most black Americans aren’t separatists.”
“I will beat them,” he said.
I looked at him, and we burst out laughing. I picked up his hand, pressing his calloused yellow palm against mine. “My hero, defending my good name.”
The jovial guard at the gated American Embassy compound refused to believe there were homeless people in the U.S.
“No!” he shouted at me. “No one begs in America. It is not possible.”
“I’m sorry,” I told him, “but it’s more than possible. It’s the truth.”
“I will never believe it.”
“Okay,” I shrugged and moved to enter the building.
“You must marry me and bring me there, and then I will see for myself,” he called after me. I didn’t respond and he tried again, “Why not?”
I turned back to him, grinning. “You want to marry me? I’d make a horrible wife. I barely cook; I hate to clean . . . And when you got to the U.S. and saw all the homeless people, you’d divorce me and head straight back to Ghana.”
“Never! Others will cook and clean; no problem.”
I laughed, shaking my head helplessly. “And what if you didn’t like it there? What if you couldn’t find a job?”
He laughed and laughed, calling out something to the other guard in Twi. They were handsome in their dark blue uniforms, their faces shiny from the heat. “I will have no trouble in America,” he said, wiping his eyes. “Do not worry. My brother is in America. He writes me, he has two cars. He lives in Dallas; he is married with a white lady. His name is Atineku. You have met him?”
“I don’t think so. I’ve never been to Dallas.”
He laughed again. “Good. When do we go?”
My daypack passed inspection, and I entered a low-ceilinged room filled with yellow plastic chairs. The air-conditioning iced my bare arms, and I shivered. At one end of the room, separated by a glass partition, a U.S. official sat behind a counter listening to Ghanaians plead their cases for visitors’ visas to the U.S. Their task was to persuade him that they would return to Ghana once the visa expired. Unless they had a secure, well-paying job in Ghana that could reasonably tempt them back, their chances of getting a visa were slim. This ruled out 98 percent of the population. All the same, the room was full of people, dressed in festival clothes, clutching letters of recommendation from American friends.
The counter for American citizens was on my right as I entered the room, and there was only one person in line: Nadhiri. I hadn’t seen her since the Marcus Garvey event, a week ago.
“Hi,” I said, approaching the counter.
Her face went blank when she saw me. She nodded slightly. I felt an obstinate desire to push the connection, to force her to acknowledge me.
“What are you doing?” I asked her.
She indicated the form she was filling out.
“Registering? That’s smart; I never bothered to do that. I’m adding some pages to my passport.” I flipped it open, displaying the pages filled with stamps. “I’m thinking of going to Mali.”
She finished filling out the form and handed it to the woman behind the desk, thanking her.
“Goodbye,” I said, as she headed for the door.
She didn’t want to answer. She wanted to keep going, but something, some law of politeness drilled into her from an early age, caused her to turn slightly and nod in my direction before she pushed through the heavy glass door.
Over the next few weeks in Accra, I watched for her. Sometimes she hung out on the wooden steps in front of the hostel, chatting with the Ghanaian volunteers. With them she was a different person, laughing, putting her arms around them, slapping their legs. She had learned a bit of Twi, and they laughed at her pronunciation, teasing her. Watching her with them, I felt a nameless longing, an ache so strong I had to turn away.
Without exactly trying to, I discovered her habits. I bumped into her now at least once a day—buying pineapple on the street corner, inspecting printed cloth in the bustling Makola Market, standing in line at the post office, waiting in the crowded car park for a tro-tro to the beach. Each time I saw her, I said hello. Just that: “Hello.”
I’d discovered her weakness. I took perverse glee in watching her fight and lose the inner battle over whether or not to respond. It was a short-lived, joyless rush. I could make her nod at me, but I couldn’t make her see me, or recognize our bond.
And then one day she was gone.
I dawdled around Accra too long and arrived a week late for my next work camp in Kaleo, Upper West Region. MC Brown was there, and I was looking forward to seeing him. I hitched a ride from the regional capital of Wa on a tall truck, bouncing along painfully with metal implements of all sizes grinding against my sides. My legs were somewhere down below, sandwiched between two heavy metal poles with prime potential to roll. I had the uncomfortable sensation that in the event of an accident or even a particularly ill-timed stop, I could be sliced neatly in half.
I tried not to think about that, but instead focused on chatting with Katie, an Englishwoman I’d met in Afranguah who was also catching a ride. When I boarded in Wa, the men on the truck had shouted, “ Obroni, your friend, your friend!” and parted to reveal a slender figure with light, stick-straight brown hair sitting in the bed of the truck.
“Katie!” I’d said in surprise, and the men had roared with glee. Ghanaians are under the impression that all white people know each other, and they take great delight when this idea is confirmed. I’d been on many buses in which the people around me had excitedly called my attention to some hapless obroni riding in the back. They were always extremely disappointed when I claimed not to have met the person before.
The Upper West Region of Ghana was drier than the coastal areas where I’d previously spent time. It was almost October now, too, and the rainy season was drawing to a close. Though still very hot, the air was less muggy here, and therefore more bearable. As we drew closer to the Sahara, the tropical landscape gave way to flat, grassy savanna with scattered clumps of trees. The huts here were round, rather than rectangular like the ones on the coast. They had conical thatched roofs and were often grouped together in extended family compounds surrounded by smooth mud walls.
The most conspicuous trees in this region were the baobabs. Comical and monstrous, a single baobab often stood alone in a field or on the crest of a low hill. No two looked alike. Their enormously thick trunks resembled either a single bark-covered cylinder or multiple cylinders welded together. They could grow up to sixty feet tall and twenty-five feet in diameter, though many were much smaller. Their short branches stuck out from their trunks like deformed arms and radiated off the tops like bad haircuts. Legend had it that the baobab complained so many times to the creator about where it wanted to live, moving gradually all over the African continent, that the creator got fed up with its whining and stuck it in the ground upside down, with its roots in the air.
The men in our truck were boisterously good-natured and soon began teaching us songs. By the time we arrived at the camp, we were belting them out at the top of our lungs. Katie and I waved and shouted as the truck clattered away, its tires spraying us with pebbles and dust.
Katie had been at camp for a week already. She had gone into Wa that day to mail a letter and purchase some supplies. While she went to store her supplies in the kitchen area, the camp leader, a heavyset man from Accra called Facts (“Fats?” “Facts”), told me that the other volunteers were at the construction site and would be back in about an hour. If I would like to set up my bed and wash, he said, I could greet them when they returned. I nodded, eyeing the rain barrel full of greenish water with distrust.
“Be quiet when you go inside,” Facts cautioned me. “Our sistah is recovering from malaria.”
I groaned. Malaria had hit almost all of the volunteers in t
he camp, picking them off one by one like ducks in a shooting gallery. Because of mosquitoes’ aversion to me, I’d so far been spared.
I saw Nadhiri as soon as I entered the tiny unfurnished church where the volunteers stayed. She was curled on a mat in the corner, fast asleep. The sight of her sent a painful jolt of adrenaline through my bloodstream. I felt like a gunslinger in an old Western, grimly anticipating a showdown. Out here, I thought, there’s nowhere to hide.
When Brown returned from the work site, sticky with sweat, I threw my arms around him and kissed him on the cheek.
He returned my hug stiffly and pulled away first.
“How’s camp?” I asked.
“Fine, fine.” He looked at the ground.
“Yeah? What’s going on?”
“Camp is very nice. Excuse me please, I must bathe now. Tonight I cook the dinner.”
I stared in disbelief as he headed into the church and emerged again moments later, carrying a bucket and towel. He gave me a small, perfunctory smile, dunked the bucket into the rain barrel, and disappeared behind the reed screens. He avoided me the rest of the evening, but I noticed him going in and out of the church several times, carrying food and water. Once I peered in and saw him kneeling by Nadhiri’s mat, placing a cloth on her forehead.
“So you and Nadhiri became friends?” I asked him as we piled shovels and picks into a wheelbarrow the next morning.
“She is a very brave girl.”
“That’s great,” I said, forcing a smile. “Because from what you said before, it seemed like you had a lot of ideas about black Americans that . . . well, it seemed like the media had given you a false impression.”
“Yes,” he looked at me for a moment, then looked away. “My ideas have changed.”
A European and American night was declared, in which we were to prepare a typical European or American dish for dinner. Jan from Germany, Katie from England, and I volunteered to cook. After much discussion about the menu, we decided on pancakes. They were simple to make, we reasoned, the ingredients were readily available, and they resembled Ghanaian food enough that we felt confident that people would like them. As the day approached we grew excited. Jan thought he’d seen a stand in town that sold small jars of jam. Could we create syrup by mixing the jam with water and sugar? How about melting down some chocolate bars for a real treat? We planned to mix bananas into the batter and have oranges on the side.
There was a slight ruckus with Facts over the request for extra eggs.
“Usually the campers fund this European night themselves,” he said.
“On my last camp the association funded it,” said Jan.
“Yes, mine too,” said Katie. “I assumed it would be that way this time as well.”
Facts grunted and scowled. He’d been in a surly mood lately.
“Well,” he said at last. “The camp may perhaps provide you with some eggs, but such things as chocolate you must surely purchase yourselves.”
On the day itself, we tried to get a buzz going around the camp.
“Pancakes tonight,” we announced eagerly at the construction site. A couple of local people who were working with us seemed excited about the prospect.
“You must not invite these people to partake of our food,” said Facts. “It is prohibited. Soon we must feed the entire village!”
At dusk I mixed batter beneath a baobab whose enormous trunk was actually four trunks joined together. We’d tried once to encircle it with our arms and found that we needed four people before our hands could touch.
Katie and Jan fried the batter in two iron pans. What emerged were crêpes, really, thin and slightly dense, not the fat cakey pancakes we eat in the U.S. Katie and Jan competed with each other over degrees of thinness. Jan was the professional— he and a friend had hired themselves out in Germany to make pancakes at children’s birthday parties.
I ran to the church to make the announcement: “Pancakes ready! Come get your red-hot pancakes!” then hurried back to stir the chocolate.
No one came. I returned to the church and poked my head in again. Several foreign volunteers lay crashed out on their sleeping bags. Nadhiri huddled in the corner with a group of Ghanaians.
“Come on, everybody!” I shouted. “Pancakes getting cold!”
“I guess I’ll set an example,” said a Danish girl, lazily setting down her book.
Ten minutes later, despite multiple trips by Katie and myself to promote our cause, not a single African had partaken of the food. Several Europeans sat around eating crêpes with chocolate and commenting nostalgically on the ones they’d had in France.
Nadhiri emerged from the church, set up a coal port, and began to heat up some leftover goat stew from the previous night. She didn’t even glance in the direction of the pancakes. Next to the stew she set a pot of rice.
Slowly the Ghanaians emerged from the church and made their way toward the stew.
“Castro!” said Jan eagerly. “Surely you’d like a pancake. Just one pancake?”
Glancing guiltily at Nadhiri, Castro accepted a pancake on his plate. The three of us were giddy with excitement.
“Would you like chocolate? Or jam? An orange?” Katie and I buzzed around him with pots and spoons, offering things. Looking down, he shook his head. He headed for the stew.
“Good idea—a savory pancake!” said Katie. “I’m sure they’ll go quite well with the stew.”
“Except for the bananas,” I murmured.
“Let’s make some batter without banana,” said Jan, “so they can eat them with the stew. Perhaps eating sweet things for dinner doesn’t seem right.”
While the pile of banana pancakes attracted flies, we hastily made up a savory batch, holding off on the sugar and adding a bit of salt. A couple of Ghanaians tasted them, but no one came back for seconds. Soon the savory pancakes too began to pile up.
“Perhaps I could invite some villagers?” I said to Facts, who hovered nearby, frowning. “We don’t want the food to go to waste.”
“The Europeans will eat it,” he said grimly. “If not today, then tomorrow.”
The Ghanaians sat aside, in a group, sharing the rice and goat stew. On my way to the bathroom, I overheard a snippet of conversation.
“See how they treat us?” said Nadhiri. “Like children waiting for a treat. They act like we’ve never seen a pancake before!”
Who’s us? I wondered angrily. You’re a girl from D.C. You have more in common with me than you do with the Ghanaian volunteers.
“Yes,” said MC Brown, sitting at her side. “They come here thinking we live in trees, and they return home with the very same thought.”
After the disastrous dinner had been cleared away, Katie, Jan, and I lay on our backs on wooden benches, gazing up at the astonishing layers of stars and fighting off mosquitoes.
“She’s turned the Ghanaians against us,” I said bitterly. “A true gift, to inspire hatred and distrust.”
“Aren’t you being a bit dramatic?” said Katie. “Perhaps we simply served the wrong food.”
I cast her an arch glance.
“Really,” said Jan. “Maybe they thought it was cheap of us to prepare something without meat. Perhaps they were expecting McDonald’s hamburgers.”
“I’m surprised I haven’t seen a McDonald’s here,” said Katie.
“Oh, I’m sure it’s just a matter of time,” I said sardonically. “American culture is conquering the world.”
“You mean poisoning the world,” said Jan, and we laughed.
From the darkened doorway of the church, a high-pitched voice said, “American culture. I don’t think there is any such animal.”
I looked up in surprise.
“I guess it depends what you mean by culture, Nadhiri,” I said carefully. “Obviously the U.S. is a blend of many cultures. But if you define culture in terms of a common mythology, common symbols—”
“What is an American?” she asked suddenly.
“What do you mean?�
�� asked Katie, after a short silence.
“What do you think of, when you think of the word ‘America’?”
The condescension in her voice irked me, and I answered sharply, “A lot of things. An imperfect experiment. A military-industrial bully. I don’t know! Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and . . . oh, whatever.” I was suddenly tired. “What are you even asking? It’s not one thing. You know that. Culture, counterculture. It’s a dance, an exchange. Just like anywhere.”
“And ‘American’?” she said to the group, ignoring my response. “What is the image in your mind when you think of an American? Do you picture someone like me?”
“I picture a person with a United States passport,” I said. “In case you haven’t noticed, we come in all shapes and sizes.”
“I guess you want us to say we think of a white male,” said Jan.
“The only real Americans,” she said, with the exaggerated patience of a teacher speaking to a particularly slow student, “are the Native Americans, most of whom were massacred.”
Well, no shit, I thought, stung by her tone and the elementary political point. Was this supposed to be news?
“But when they teach us ‘American’ history in school, it’s all about white men.”
Breathe, I told myself. She doesn’t know you. This is your chance to show her you’re not the enemy.
“That’s right,” I said. “It’s disgusting.”
“We were speaking about McDonald’s hamburgers,” interjected Jan. “That’s what we meant by American cul—”
“I don’t recognize any United States,” said Nadhiri, still sounding like a lecturer. “I see only Divided States. I am part of a Black nation that intends to establish its autonomy within the territory that claims that name.”
“Within the U.S.?” I asked incredulously. “How’s that gonna work?”
“We will create two or three Black-only states.”
“Which ones?” I sputtered. “And how do you plan to get the current residents to leave?”
Somebody's Heart Is Burning Page 9
