Ghana Must Go (19 page)

Part III

GO

1.

Mr. Lamptey sleeps balanced at the edge of the ocean, a foot from the foam line, legs crossed and eyes closed, palms on kneecaps, back upright, the stray waiting, patient, its eyes on the water, its chin on its paws. The ocean moves, lazily, forward and backward, advancing to a point near the paws and then not, a few inches, no more, of net movement, indecisive, redrawing its borders then rolling them back. Does the water not wish to come further, in conquest, own more beachfront property? Subdue more damp sand? Apparently not. Forward, backward, net change a few inches, while bored with this, watching, the clouds start to yawn.

In trickles light, weakly, drab, without color, its single distinction not being the darkness. A star, blinking slowly, vivacious by contrast, alerts the dog, waiting, that this is the dawn. The dog leaps up, legs out in
adho mukha svanasana
, then licks its wake up to the sleeping man’s soles.

•   •   •

The garden is empty of all but its shadows. He hears but can’t see for the eyes going off. The issue is the cataracts, he knows, without minding. The surgeon minds terribly and offers to help. (A friend, an operation, no cost to Mr. Lamptey. The surgeon is foolish, if determined and kind. An unusual combination, determination and kindness. An unusual individual, the surgeon.)

The birds.

They are clustered in the fountain, all but covering the statue. They coo very softly and flutter their wings. Ten of them, twenty, or thirty. A conference. He enters the garden and hears first, then sees.

“Good morning,” he says to the birds, bows politely. They coo very softly and flutter their wings. “Really?” he says, with some shock, and great sorrow.

The dog whimpers sadly and sits by his feet.

A light flickers on in the house-with-a-hole-in. A shape through the window, slow moving and round. The woman, young, plumpish, her face like a cushion with buttons for features, as pleasant and soft. He likes her, this woman. There is nothing not to like in her. Usually he likes to have something to dislike, finds the likable dull, but he’s not the right age for it, too old for effort, too young for ennui. At ninety he’ll dislike her. He’ll mock her bad English and semiautonomous buttocks that move one at a time; he’ll say that the country will never move forward so long as the common man moves in this way. Without line. Unambitious thighs and shoulders rolling over, all round edges, like amoeba, like an early form of life. Like the ocean. He watches her move through the shadow and feels for her something as soft as her shape.

She walks to the kitchen where she turns another light on. She stands for a moment, a cloud at the glass. She comes to the door to the sunroom and pauses, then opens the door and comes out with a drink, Milk and Milo. She is crying, he can see by the moonlight, the breasts trembling lightly against the sateen, but she doesn’t seem to notice all the birds in the fountain nor the man by the mango, bare feet, saffron cloth. She goes back inside, turning each of the lights off, the kitchen, the bedroom, a shadow of light.

He rolls out his mat by the base of the mango and sits.
Padma asana
.

Five after four.

ii

They fly into Ghana, Taiwo’s head on Kehinde’s shoulder, Kehinde’s head on Taiwo’s head, before they wake and detach. Olu sits upright, his arms on the armrests, his leg bouncing lightly, Ling’s hand on his thigh. Sadie, behind them, with no one beside her, her head on the window, legs tucked on her seat, gazes listlessly out at the clouds, also listless, the sunrise a flatline, bright red in the black.

iii

Fola hauls her catch in, from garden to kitchen, still dark: couldn’t sleep, went to snip this and that, spongy earth, damp with dawn, dripping blossoms and dirt, sets the boughs on the countertop, wipes off her hands. She fills four small vases with just enough water, stands six boughs in each and sets two in each room. On each nightstand, just so. And is turning to go when it hits her:
There aren’t enough rooms anymore
.

There are just these two small ones apart from the master, a shortage she hadn’t perceived until now, always thinking (rather dreaming) if they all came to visit, the girls would take the queen bed, the boys the two twins. Now that there’s Ling, there’s the question of etiquette. She knows that they’re grown, frankly couldn’t care less, would quite like that they seek some small respite from sorrow in dancing together to breath after hours, but he’s always so
scrupulous
, Olu, so proper, saying grace before eating, Sunday service and that (not that
she
is a heathen, good friend of hers Jesus, but one that she speaks to as such, as a friend, a wise, good-natured friend with an air of detachment, not Olu’s stern Jesus with long face and hair) and she doesn’t want to make him feel awkward, self-conscious, not least as he’s never brought Ling to the house. Olu would do better in the bedroom with Kehinde, less blushing and bumbling at bedtime, less suffering, but that leaves the question of where to put Ling as she can’t very well put a guest on the couch. To put her with Taiwo would border on callous as Taiwo tends not to treat other girls well (not that
she
fares much better with the gender, in general: they all seem to find her aloof or too proud, insufficiently histrionic while she tires of their tragedies, cosmetic, romantic, long faces, long hair), and she wishes for Ling to feel part of the family, whatever “the family” in their case might mean. Better in the bedroom with the queen bed with Sadie—a lover of girls skinny, pretty, like Ling; of things girlish, shared soap and told secrets—but Taiwo, left bedless, would think she was being left out. And mightn’t then Sadie feel awkward, self-conscious, to share the one bed with a woman like that, when she’s taken to acting like Olu, puritanical, and hasn’t done the stating of the obvious yet? Not that she minds in the least whom they love—
where
they love for that matter, be it guest bed or couch—just as long as they’re happy or not too unhappy, in the condition she delivered them, etc., no worse. If the baby likes girls or this one girl, this Philae (who seems to be cheerful and clueless enough not to break a heart badly), then so be it, bully, but what does it mean for the rooming? she asks. Can the baby double up with a woman in comfort? Or might she take this as a comment on what Fola knows. Rather, what Fola thinks. Perhaps she
doesn’t
know Sadie, not really, and not the baby, mustn’t call her daughter “baby.” She is twenty years old, as she said, as of—

“Yesterday.” She breathes this aloud, with a twinge, upper left.

Yesterday was her birthday.

She forgot Sadie’s birthday.

She covers her mouth, shakes her head. Of all days. She laughs for not knowing what else she can do, leaves the room, and goes back to the kitchen.

Never mind. Sadie can share the big bed in her bedroom; let Olu get over his issues with sex. She starts to call Amina, then remembers,
too early
. She takes down the flour for a cake.

iv

“Why did your mother move to Ghana?” Ling asks him. “I thought she was Nigerian.”

Olu thought she was asleep. He smiles at her, shifting positions. “Something different.”

Behind them, Sadie, listening, sotto voce, “Because of me.”

Taiwo, in the aisle seat, peers out the window. “You haven’t been back,” Kehinde says, looking, too.

“Did I say that aloud?” she asks quickly, snapping backward. He hasn’t meant to bother her. He shakes his head no. “I do that now,” she mumbles, frowning, rubbing her forehead.

“I can hear what you’re thinking,” he says in his head.

“No, you can’t read my thoughts,” she adds, leaning back over to pull down the window shade, closing her eyes.

v

A plane overhead.

2.

Fola stops at MaxMart to pick up the candles. The cashier smiles blandly. “Yes, ma. Right this way.” She looks at the candles and laughs. “No, not this kind. The small ones, for a birthday cake.”

“This is all we have.”

She drives to the airport, unnerved by the silence. She turns on the radio. It appears not to work. Then blasting through static comes Joshua’s gospel, off-key and forlorn, like a shrill cry for help. She switches the station. Evangelical Mormons. She switches again. BBC, all bad news. She turns off the radio and peers at the traffic. The usual crush on the new Spintex Road. She rolls down the window and peers at the junction where a policeman appears to be making things worse, shouting, “
Bra, bra, bra
, stop,” with conflicting gesticulations, the newly installed stoplight not working (no power). She rolls up the window and hums, without thinking of it, “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” two bars of it, stops.
Where did that come from?
she thinks, frowning, honking. That hymn, which he always used to sing before work, perfect pitch, though if ever she mentioned it, his singing voice, he’d shake his head, laughing, “Just sound waves,” and stop.

•   •   •

Arrivals is teeming with Christmas returnees deplaning in coats with freight tons of checked luggage. She pushes her way to the front of those waiting, not roughly, but firmly, in the Nigerian tradition. And stands. She is early, she knows, thirty minutes, but couldn’t brook waiting alone in the house with the cake on the countertop sitting there, done, with the look of one waiting for something as well. Better here: closeness, the throng, humans being, aunties wailing as prodigals appear half-asleep, pushing forth from the crowd to grab, hug, sob, and welcome, the tearful theatrics of old women’s happiness. Better here, sweating, surrounded by talking, the low steady throbbing of heartbeats in wait, hundreds, all of them waiting in collective anticipation of some beloved somebody’s coming back home. Bodies. Familiar. She never told him
how
familiar, she is thinking, thoughts drifting as thoughts will in heat as one waits standing still with still time all around one, a space into which enters Past, seeing room. Some motion, slight movement, away from the moment, and off one goes, drifting, from this day to that:

to the airport, same airport:

“Be careful, this is Ghana!”

“My friend, I’m from Lagos.”

And I’ve been here before.

Why didn’t she tell him? It wasn’t a secret. He knew that she’d fled at the start of the war, that she’d somehow left Lagos to finish her studies and showed up at Lincoln in bell-bottom denim, but he never asked
how
, how she got
to Pennsylvania, as if her life had begun where their shared life began, and she never proffered answers at night in the dark after he had gone diving and held to her, wet. Then, it seemed normal to lie there beside him alive in the present and dead to the past with the man in her bed, in her heart, in her body but not in her memory and she not in his. It was almost as if they had taken some oath—not just they, their whole circle at Lincoln those years, clever grandsons of servants, bright fugitive immigrants—an oath to uphold their shared right to stay silent (so
not
to stay the prior selves, the broken, battered, embarrassed selves who lived in stories and died in silence). An oath between sufferers.
But also between lovers?

She doesn’t know. Maybe. So much she never asked him. So much she never told him. The aching for example. “Enough,” she would say, which he took to mean “stop,” and he would: floating gently to the surface, coming up, thinking
she
was exhausted when in fact it was the opposite: she feared his exhaustion. She was aching for more. More, always more of it, more of him, all: having opened, having been opened, wanting only to be filled: but never saying it, just holding him, lying, in silence, he sleeping beside her, he fulfilled, she unfilled.
Why didn’t she tell him?
And other things also. Why she never said yes when he asked her to come to those parties in Cambridge with colleagues in khakis and cheese cubes on toothpicks and immigrant maids and the requisite child trotted out after drinks to rend “Für Elise” proficiently before trotting to bed. Yes, they were boring. But the more it was heartbreaking, to watch him seek approval from far lesser men in his own fresh-pressed khakis, small eyes wide with hope that he, too, might soon be so at home in the world.
Why didn’t she tell him?
“You don’t have to impress them,” she might have said, “your excellence speaks for itself.” Instead of “the dishes” or “Sadie has a recital” or “Olu needs help with his science fair booth.” Instead of the silence, protective, destructive, like mites on a daylily nibbling away undetected for decades. And the biggest thing. The precedent. How she got to Pennsylvania.

How she packed up and left.

•   •   •

How: she had lain in that bedroom, in Lagos, unable to move or to think or to breathe with her head under covers, her hands on her ribcage, her chest emptied out, until nightfall. The housegirl returned as she did every Sunday and let herself in through the door at the back. She’d prepared the whole dinner and laid out the table before she thought strange that the house was so quiet. “Master!” she called, up the stairs, down the corridor. “Master, are you home? Miss Folasadé? Ah-
ah
.” Only then had Fola left his bed covered in sweat to ride, trembling, to the second-floor kitchen. “I’m here.”

The housegirl Mariama grabbed her forehead when she saw her. “A fever, you have a fever, where’s your father?” she cried.

Fola shrugged, groggy. “He went to Kaduna.”

“No!” cried Mariama, slumping promptly to the floor.

How: they’d just sat there, neither speaking nor eating, at a dining table set for two, built for fourteen. The Nwaneris from their portrait watched them sitting, black John seated, too, white Maud beside him standing, hand on husband’s epaulette. The food was set out, Fola’s favorite,
egusi
, but neither of them touched it; after an hour it was cold. After two her father’s partner at the law firm, Sena Wosornu, leaned frantically on the doorbell. Fola looked at Mariama. The housegirl was trembling, rocking, clutching her elbows and shaking her head, noiselessly mouthing some prayer. Fola took the shaking of the head to mean “don’t get the door” and stayed seated. Mariama lost her nerve. She stumbled to the entry, from which Fola heard whispers, then loud sudden sobbing, then Sena’s high voice. “The baby will hear you,” he scolded.
The baby.
What her father always called her, even then, and his friends.

Later that evening Sena came to her bedroom. He knocked on the door, came to sit on her bed. She was lying on her back with her feet on the wall on a poster of Lennon, her head hanging off.

“Fola,” he said. “I have something to tell you.”

She didn’t lift her head up. “I know, I know, I know.” Sena was upside down, bending to face her.

“Your father—”

“Don’t say it,” she said, and sat up.

He said she should pack. They would leave in the morning. His parents lived in Ghana. She’d be safer with them.
If anything ever happens, take the baby to Ghana. Don’t leave her in Nigeria
, her father had said. She packed a gold
aso-oke
, a birthday gift, records, his thick kente blanket and bell-bottom jeans. She didn’t pack photos or dresses or teddy bears. The details came later. They left before dawn.

How: at this airport, much smaller, as crowded, they landed, midsummer, July 1966, all the colors so different from Lagos, more yellows, the smell like the smell of a broken clay pot. A man with an Afro gone gray came to greet them, all bushy white beard, laughing eyes, wings of wrinkles. “You must be Fola!” He shook her hand. She shook her head. She didn’t know who she must be anymore. “People call me ‘Reverend.’ Reverend Mawuli Wosornu. Sena’s father,” he said, though he looked far too young.

The house was on a tree-lined street, wide with white houses for friends of the British, the odd Lebanese. They took her to a bedroom painted pink, a funny shade of pink she’d find decades later while shopping for mulch. (Home Depot. She was passing through the paint aisle when she saw it, from a distance, just the color swatch, familiar at once. She read the name.
Innocence
. Laughed out loud, bought it. Four gallons for the nursery for the child who follows twins.) She stood in the doorway and looked at the bedroom. Reverend Wosornu, behind her, “And this is your room.” She walked in and sat on the narrow twin bed, the stiff mattress; she stared at the candy pink walls. She looked at the man in the doorway. Said, “Thank you,” then lay down and slept, without eating, three days. On the fourth day the wife Vera Wosornu came to see her. Mrs. Wosornu looked older, looked
old
(fifty-four). A fat woman, haggard, no light in her pupils. She wore a black wig that slipped back, showing grays. “It’s time to get up,” she said. “Come eat your breakfast.” When Fola rolled over the woman was gone.

Breakfast was cocoa bread, pawpaw, eggs, coffee. Mrs. Wosornu ate noisily. Thick, buttered lips. Reverend Wosornu sipped his coffee, listening attentively to the radio.
Pogroms in Nigeria ongoing
. He switched this off. “Sir Charles Arden Clarke is a friend of the parish. Do you know who that is?”

Fola shook her head no.

“Eat,” said Mrs. Wosornu.

“Former governor of Gold Coast. And the founder of the Gold Coast International School.”

“It’s
Ghana
International School now,” snapped Mrs. Wosornu. “Eat,” she snapped at Fola.

Fola picked up her fork. The woman’s commands were so tactlessly forceful; it was almost a relief to be told what to do. She put a piece of pawpaw in her mouth but couldn’t chew it. She moved it around until it dissolved on her tongue.

“They’ve agreed to accept you,” said Reverend Wosornu, excited. “In ten years they’ve built quite a fine little school.”

“You’ll take your GCEs, then go to college in America.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Call me Mother.”

“Yes, Mother,” Fola said. The word sounded strange to her. Empty.

“That’s better.”

“Me, I’m just ‘Reverend.’ Not Father, not yet.”

“Speaking of fathers, yours was kind to our Sena.”

“
Vera
,” sighed the reverend, but his wife forged ahead.

“He can’t have any children, our Sena. Such a pity. Only son. And you know what the villagers say.” Fola didn’t know what the villagers said. The proverb was recited with mouth full of egg, “‘The woman who has one child only, has no child.’”

The reverend kept smiling. “Infant mortality,” he explained.

How: she finished high school, seldom speaking, barely eating. When the war came next summer, she didn’t much care. She skimmed the local papers, saw the pictures, heard the rumors (slaughtered civilians, starving children, German mercenaries, Welsh) but this “Nigeria” they spoke of was nowhere she knew of, not home, not a place she could
see
, so not real. She lost too much weight and excelled in her studies, having done it all in Lagos with her erstwhile private tutor. Her classmates took to calling her “Biafran,” but jealously. They envied her hair, glowing marks, tragic glamour. She allowed herself to be fondled by one out of boredom. He lived up the road in East Cantonments. Yaw. He was actually quite handsome, an athlete, later soldier, but modest in ambition (how: Kweku was her first). She sat her exams and came first in the year. She cut off her hair, tired of brushing. A scholarship was arranged by more friends of the parish at Lincoln University, where Nkrumah had gone. She’d wanted to go to Kings College as her father had, but didn’t object.

To the airport again.

How: she crossed the tarmac to the aircraft with the smell of dripping evening in her nostrils thick with soon-arriving rain. She didn’t turn to smile or wave or look back at the terminal at the reverend, whom she’d rather liked, or Vera, whom she’d hated. So almost didn’t see him coming running in his three-piece suit. The passenger behind her had to tap her on the shoulder. “Miss?”

And there was chubby Sena, jacket flapping out behind him like a broken magic mantle. “Fola, stop!” Fola stopped. He was wheezing when he reached her. “Thank goodness I caught you. How are you?”

She shrugged.

“I’ve been meaning to come. The firm is still operating, if you can believe it, in Lagos.”

She shrugged.

“But I should have come sooner, I know.” He hugged her now, pressing an object against her. An envelope. “He left this. Don’t open it yet. I was afraid that my mother would steal it so I waited.” He hugged until she had it, then he backed away. “
Go
.”

How: when she got there she opened the envelope. United States dollars in crisp bounded stacks. Enough to start over, to remain in America, enough not to have to watch fat women eat or take handouts or need them or ever go hungry or go back to that airport in Ghana again.

•   •   •

A passenger behind her is tapping her shoulder. “Miss?”

She turns, startled. The passenger points.

And there they are, all of them, watching her, waiting, here, back at this airport in Ghana again.

ii

“She doesn’t look happy to see us,” says Sadie.

“I’m sure she’s still shocked,” Kehinde tells her. “Don’t worry.” But pulls down his sweatshirt sleeves, covering his wrists with them, worried that Fola has noticed the scars.

“You remember my mother,” Olu murmurs to Ling, thinking how much this airport has changed since he came.

Ling whispers, awestruck, “She’s
beautiful
, Jesus.”

Taiwo feels inexplicably angry.

•   •   •

All of them slow to a stop and stand staring.
Someone should do something
, everyone thinks. Kehinde steps forward to hug her but Fola, thrown, cradles his face, rather thwarting the hug. “A beard,” she says, laughing.

“Don’t cry,” he says gently.

“Oh, am I?” Still laughing, she wipes off her cheeks.

The others come forward now, forming a huddle, and taking their turns with their hugs and hellos. “Ling,” breathes out Fola. “I’m
so
glad you made it,” while Sadie waits, watching them, trying not to scowl.