Black Gold of the Sun (7 page)

The exoticism of suburbia – My racist friends – Watching the black-and-white minstrels – Jerry Rawlings's coup – The vanishings – Kodwo as Reed Richards – At the Ghana High Commission

It is 1976 and the famously hot summer of that year is at its zenith. In the London suburb of Queensbury a hose-pipe ban leaves gardens parched and golden. A music-box rendition of ‘Greensleeves' is heard at four o'clock each
afternoon to mark the arrival of the Mr Whippy van with its promise of Mivvys, Fabs and 99 Cones. And at number 176 Beverly Drive the Eshuns are planning a party.

The Jubilee Line has recently opened and if you run your finger north on a tube map, past the vale of blighted names that is Kilburn, Willesden and Neasden, you will come eventually to Queensbury, where my family has lived for the past year.

We arrived after a prolonged tour of northwest London. There was the cramped flat in Willesden where we first decamped from the Ghana Airways plane and sat in a daze watching television as Franz Beckenbauer scored for West Germany against Holland in the 1974 World Cup final. From Willesden we moved to a shrunken terraced house in Wembley that proved unpopular with my siblings and me as soon as we stepped inside and learned all three of us had to share a room. As I lay listening to them breathe at night I would think of how you could run and run through the scrubland behind our house in Legon, the long grass whipping at your face, without ever bumping into another human being. When you stopped you heard the beetles scratching through the undergrowth. Greenbottles buzzed in your ear. Butterflies wove erratic patterns among the wild flowers.

Even by yourself, you were never alone in Ghana. It was different in London. The houses of Wembley were made of red brick, and they were forced together in narrow streets. There were lots of people around, wheeling babies in pushchairs and hefting bags of food home from the
shops. But for all the activity, I couldn't get over how quiet it seemed. In Ghana, a child tripping over or any other minor incident would draw a crowd of onlookers offering contradictory advice vastly out of proportion to the incident itself.
They
, not the child nursing a grazed knee, were the true centre of the drama. Without them, London seemed empty of life.

After Wembley we moved to the house in Queensbury where we now lived. Crazy paving was the dominant feature of the driveways here. Each Sunday, Ford Cortinas and Vauxhall Cavaliers were washed and polished with religious devotion. Our house had pebble-dashed walls and a conservatory at the back with Velux windows. An apple tree and a pear tree stood within an expanse of back garden. At exactly 6.15 each evening a police constable strolled past the front gate. We waved at him and he raised a hand to the brim of his helmet in return. Harold Trescothick, the old man who lived alone next door, would sometimes invite me in to share a bag of chips and leaf through his collection of stamps from Tallinn, Lima, Newfoundland and lots of other cities with which I was less than familiar. Moving to Queensbury was like waking up to find yourself in the pages of a Ladybird book with its watercolour illustrations of life in Britain. Here was somewhere truly exotic.

It was the summer holidays and in the back garden Esi sat with her back to the apple tree unfolding the three-page image of Elizabeth Taylor's arrival in Rome as Cleopatra
from the
Encyclopaedia of Epic Films
. Beside her, Kodwo was describing Shelob's lair in
The Return of the King
, with close attention to the grimmer details of how the giant spider ingested its prey. Taller, smarter and two years older than me, Kodwo was the family's presiding genius. At ten, he had long, tapering fingers and an imperious manner that left me feeling like a melted candle beside him. Instead of joining their conversation I practised handstands on the dried-out lawn.

Balanced upside-down, my mind turned to a school trip the previous month to the Museum of London. My class had gone to see an exhibition on the Great Fire of London. For days beforehand, I lay awake picturing the scenes of spectacular destruction it promised. Yet as we crossed the overpass leading into the museum I stood frozen in place while the class streamed past me.

Silently, as it appeared from behind the glass of the overpass, I saw my father's midnight-blue Volvo estate pass by underneath. Through the windscreen I had a clear view of the curve of his forehead. The sun glinted from his glasses. Mr Johnson, his chauffeur, sat beside him in a grey suit, his hands wrapped in brown leather gloves working the wheel. My father leaned towards him and mouthed an instruction. Clouds rippled on the car's metal skin. It swept beneath the bridge towards St Paul's.

When he asked me about the school trip that evening I didn't tell my dad about the overpass. Spotting him had felt like gazing down into the secret workings of the adult
world. I didn't want anything to damage that impression, not even his consciousness of it.

Every morning Mr Johnson collected my father for work in the Volvo, the car drawing up in front of the house powerful as a dray horse. Fixed to its grille was a diplomatic plate, meaning that, as sovereign Ghanaian territory, the Volvo could speed through red lights, park on double yellow lines or race down the corridors of Buckingham Palace with total impunity, or at worst the risk of a mild international incident.

After he came home in the evening, my father would shave standing at the bathroom mirror, then come downstairs, the natural force of him, his solemnity, the volume of his breathing, filling the living room. When I was very young I used to climb over him while he watched television, as if he were a mountain range. I'd haul myself up the rock face of his legs, then sprawl on the plateau of his stomach, its churnings seismic in their mystery below me.

In those days I could imagine my father only from the outside. What I've learned since of his vulnerability and his sadness have tempered that impression. But nothing can erase the memory of looking up at him as a child to find him staring back, as if he were peering down through the clouds.

On the Saturday of the party, my dad slid open the patio doors and dragged the wooden speaker boxes of his quadraphonic stereo on to the lawn. From the attic he hauled down the boxes of Chivas Regal and Johnny Walker Black
Label that he'd buy duty-free on the return leg of a diplomatic mission. In the kitchen, chicken legs spattered in the frying pan. My mother set a huge saucepan of jollof rice on the cooker to simmer. Loaves of kenkey wrapped in banana leaves sat in a pile, stinking of entropy.

As the doorbell chimed and the guests began arriving I watched two worlds coalesce. The adults came dressed in Kente cloth robes flung over bare shoulders. On their feet they wore
mpagoa
, leather sandals in emerald and gold. The women had jewelled fingers and elaborately constructed headscarves. They had grown up in the same sprawling households back in Ghana and called each other brother and sister. There were Mr Campbell Rhodes, a friend of my father's, an enormous man always dressed in a tight-fitting sky-blue safari suit that seemed in danger of imminent rupture; Auntie Christina from Cricklewood, a martyr to her teeth ever since an unscrupulous dentist had whipped out her entire upper set during a routine check-up; my mother's sister Panyin, who had a twin called Kakra, their names in Fante meaning ‘Older' and ‘Younger'. There were diplomats, pastors, the wife of a former vice president, the daughter of a popular highlife singer, the boss of a thriving goat-meat concern and innumerable others whose names have blurred now, but were revealed that night to be fabulous dancers, dazzling storytellers or evil drunks.

Beneath the apple tree at the end of the garden, Esi, Kodwo and I were gathered with their sons and daughters. From Nottingham, our cousins Charles, Albert and
Betsey, the boys in matching blue suits made by their mother; Penelope and Eurydice, the heavenly sisters from Twickenham upon whom I maintained a silent and wholly unrequited crush; Ezra and Ezekiel, who lived in Luton and wore about them a morbid air that surely came from bearing names hewn from the dark matter of the Old Testament. From Brooklyn came my teenage cousin Marcus, sent to London for the summer by my mother's sister in New York, after he'd taken to running with a wild crowd in Flatbush. Marcus wore a gold chain round his neck and spoke in a confidential drawl that forced us all to cluster round him.

‘Back home, I got a gun, yo. But I let one of my boys carry it so I don't get caught with a piece.'

‘Wowww,' we all said.

‘Shit is crazy hectic out there sometimes, yo. Dude gotta pack
something
,' said Marcus. ‘Yo, y'all know how it is, right?'

We nodded vigorously, although I doubt any of us had any idea about how ‘it' was.

However tenuously we were related, us kids formed a family for that night. From the end of the garden we watched as our parents danced to the Mighty Sparrow. Our mothers waved handkerchiefs above their heads and twirled in circles, their steps precise within tight skirts. Fathers did the shimmy and the side-to-side slide, summoning the dance steps of their youth with varying degrees of success. As we watched, my dad patted the air with his hands for quiet. The grown-ups formed a semicircle round him.

He raised an open bottle of gin and recited a remembrance in Fante to family, forebears and Ghana. The adults bowed their heads. Gin splashed on the grass. At the back of the garden Kodwo rolled his eyes and gave a theatrical yawn. The pouring of a libation occurred at every family gathering. It was always greeted with derision by the younger generation.

‘Why can't they just let the music play?' said Kodwo, trying to swing from the lowest branch of the apple tree.

How much of that scorn was envy, I wonder now? Our parents had their rituals and dance steps. They knew where they were from. By contrast all that connected us was distance from Ghana. Born in Britain, it seemed to us that we were the adults. We bore the pressure of growing up in a strange country while our parents played on the grass like children.

Some of my best friends were racists.

At Queensbury Junior School there were no African children apart from the Eshuns. So far I'd failed to turn up with a bone through my nose, but collective wisdom among the members of Class 3B held Africa to be a place of mud huts and cannibals. This from the same kids who conducted earnest debates on the best way to light farts and flick bogeys.

To Greg O'Rourke, the aggressively freckled Jamie
Brown, Benny Mitchell with his lazy eye and the rest of 3B, England was an amalgam of Arthurian lore and Dunkirk spirit, predicated on the dominance of the white race over wogs, Pakis and Yids. In the playground they spread their arms wide like Spitfires, ack-acking at the Hun while they chorused the theme tune to
The Dam Busters
. It was their innocence that appalled me most. These were chubby-legged boys who burped like frogs over lunch. What did they know about giant snails or ants that could kill a tortoise? What did they know about Burma Camp?

And if they didn't know, how could I begin to tell them? When my mind drifted off in the playground, I pictured beggars with rickets and kids my age with the swollen bellies that came from drinking contaminated water. I remembered General Acheampong's face on television, gleaming with sweat. So I said nothing. And they drew their own conclusions about me.

I seemed to elicit a fascination in them. They patted my hair for springiness and pulled the coils straight to test its tensile strength. In the sunshine of an outdoor swimming lesson the water shone iridescent on my skin. Sage words were exchanged on its seal-like consistency, and fingers pinched at my arms to see if I carried an extra layer of fat. Only my eyes and teeth would be visible in the dark they insisted, reaching for the light switch to test their theories.

Eyes moist with compassion, Mrs O'Rourke bent towards me outside the school gates. ‘And what tribe are you from, dear?'

‘I live on Beverly Drive, Mrs O'Rourke.'

‘Yes, dear, but where are you
really
from?'

I couldn't blame them. My friends grew up on Tarzan movies and TV series about white heroes in the bush such as
Daktari
and
Cowboy in Africa
. Everywhere they looked black people stood dumb and bestial. All they had to do was open the
Beano
to find the piccaninny girl in
Lord Snooty
with her big, white eyes and knotted hair. In
Doctor Doolittle
, the ‘mud-coloured' Prince Bumpo offered half his kingdom to the good doctor in exchange for being turned white. A jungle tribe worshipped wooden statues of Tintin and Snowy in
Tintin in the Congo
.

The closer you looked, the worse it got. At peak time on Saturday nights, BBC One would broadcast the
Black & White Minstrel Show
. It wasn't a programme my family made an effort to watch. Sometimes I'd catch it while alone in the living room, though, and I'd sit mesmerized as the minstrels smacked their lips and plucked their banjos. It took me a while to realize the show was set in a skewed version of the antebellum South. Eyes rolling like marbles it seemed they couldn't have been happier than when they leaned their heads together for a close harmony rendition of ‘Ol' Man River'.

As the cameras drew tighter I saw their faces glistening with greasepaint under the studio lights. Pink tongues flickered in white-rimmed mouths. Beneath the mask of black imbecility another consciousness stirred. What did the world look like through the eyes of a Black and White
Minstrel? At its peak the programme drew 16 million viewers. When it was cancelled in 1978, there were letters of protest to the BBC and revivals that toured for years after on the regional stage. George Mitchell, the show's creator, always insisted it was harmless entertainment. But remembering what I glimpsed in the faces of his minstrels I'm not so sure. Behind the make-up, their eyes flashed with an awareness of their real mission. This, I believe, was to occlude the difference between the fantasy and reality of black people. The minstrels weren't truly pretending to be black. Their job was to reflect how a white audience wanted to see blacks: as supine, childlike and cretinous. The same way we were presented, with less sophistication, in
Tintin
,
Tarzan
and
Lord Snooty
.