Somebody's Heart Is Burning (17 page)

“Why is there so much divorce in your country?” Bengo asked me later. This question had come up so often in Ghana that I’d developed a fairly elaborate response. I delivered my spiel about the individualism inherent in American culture, the way our families and communities didn’t hold couples together the way they did in Ghana. I talked as well about the Hollywoodstyle expectations of love I’d grown up with.

“We don’t get into relationships expecting to have to toil over them,” I told him. “We expect them to come ready-made. When things get too rough, we just persuade ourselves we’ve picked the wrong person and start looking for someone else.”

“Eh!”
said Bengo. “You must be a sociologist! You understand this phenomenon very well.”

I smiled wanly. Ah, irony. I knew the ills of my society like I knew the smell of my own sweat. But at twenty-seven years of age, my longest relationship by far was the one with Michael, and we’d lived together for exactly two years. No matter how I might rail against rugged individualism and overblown romantic expectation, I was a prime example of both.

“What do you think of these interracial couples?” asked Bengo.

“I think people should marry whomever they want,” I said.

“I wholeheartedly agree,” he said. “Whichever woman a man wishes to marry, he should do so.” He paused for a moment, then asked pointedly, “Don’t you think so, Kojo?”

“I think that in marriage, a person should choose among those who understand him best,” said Kojo, staring at him evenly.

“There are still some small-minded villagers who feel that a man must stay within his tribe, that Ashanti must marry Ashanti,” said Bengo.

Bengo and Kojo were both Ashanti, as were a high percentage of Ghana’s political and economic elite. Although I was light-years from understanding Ghana’s complex tribal histories, I saw that the Ashanti as a group garnered both respect and resentment. Long ago, they had sold other tribes into slavery.

“This attitude is small-minded,” Bengo continued. “I myself will marry an intelligent woman. I do not care whether she is Ashanti or not. I do not even care whether she is black! I care only that she is educated and that we can talk to one another as equals.” He looked at me with those laser-bright eyes of his, and I felt my face grow hot. Kojo, too, was watching me with an unpleasant expression on his face.

“What do you think, Sistah Korkor?” Bengo asked.

“Well, it’s complicated,” I said, stammering a little. “As I said, I think people should marry whomever they choose, regardless of race or nationality . . . or gender,” I added. Kojo looked startled. He glanced at Bengo, whose face was blank.

“But I do think cross-cultural marriages can be challenging,” I continued. “If I were to marry a Ghanaian, for example, we would each come to the relationship with certain expectations about what a partnership between a man and a woman means— anything from who is expected to do the cooking and cleaning to how we handle our finances to how we raise a child. My boyfriend in the U.S. is Chicano—his parents are Mexican, but he grew up in the States—and even there, there are challenges. I’m not saying it can’t work, just . . .” I stopped, feeling a pang of emptiness. I’d called Michael my boyfriend. But what should I have called him? My former boyfriend for whom my feelings remained suspended in a state of hellish limbo?

Bengo started to say something, but Kojo interrupted.

“Gender, you say,” he said cautiously. “Is it true that there are those in the United States who believe that two males or two females should be permitted to marry each other?”

“Oh, sure,” I said. “Lots of people. Not the majority yet, but more and more. Certain employers are already providing benefits to partners of the same sex who live together.”

“This is not wise,” Bengo said sternly. “It will cause the breakdown of the social order. It is against nature.” He looked directly at Kojo as he spoke the final sentence.

“Now you sound like the Pope,” I said lightly, looking from one to the other. Their eyes were locked in some kind of stare-down, which Bengo broke to respond to my remark.

“This is not religion; this is science. If men married men and women married women the human race would die out. Charles Darwin has shown that our instinct is to continue the species. If you go against nature, things will not go well for you.” His tone was hard.

“I might argue that all human behavior is natural,” I said. “We are, after all, animals. So anything humans do comes from our own natural urges. We don’t manufacture our desires.” I paused and glanced at Kojo, who appeared to be examining his navy blue bedspread with intent interest. “Isn’t there a movement for gay rights here in Ghana?” I asked.

Bengo shook his head vigorously. “No. There is never a movement. There may be some rumor of a young boy, in school, who has made some experiment with another boy, but he will never boast of it. He will deny it every day.”

Later on, Bengo briefly excused himself and left the room. Kojo and I sat for a couple of minutes in a deepening silence. Suddenly he drew in his breath and spoke, in a soft, furtive tone that was almost a whisper.

“You live in San Francisco?”

“In the area, yes.”

“I have heard . . .” his voice trailed off. He glanced quickly at the door.

“Yes?” I said encouragingly.

“I have heard that there are very many, very many of . . . of those men and women who . . .” he swallowed, closed his eyes, pressed his palms tightly together.

“Yes,” I said, “There are. Very many. A whole community.”

His eyes met mine, then, for a quick moment. “And they can live there, as they are, openly?” His tone was querulous, disbelieving.

“Yes, they can.” I looked at Kojo’s smooth face, struggling to contain my curiosity. “You and Bengo,” I said suddenly, “are you lovers?”

Kojo looked at me in terror. I was immediately sorry I’d asked. I heard Bengo’s step in the hallway.

He shook his head violently. “Please,” he whispered.

I shook my head too, to reassure him, placing a finger to my lips.

We had returned from our campus tour at noon. Now my watch said seven o’clock. Other than Bengo’s brief departure, we hadn’t stirred from our perches in many hours. I was dizzy and exhausted. My stomach was growling so loudly I was sure they could hear it. Kojo, too, appeared drained. Since our conversation he hadn’t spoken a word, and in fact seemed to have sunk into a kind of catatonia, staring blankly into space. Bengo, however, showed no sign of tiring. His eyes gleamed as he pumped me for details about the U.S. He was debating the highs and lows of Richard Nixon’s career when I finally spoke up.

“Bengo—” I interrupted.

“Yes?”

“I’m hungry.”

“What?” Kojo stirred from his lethargy.

“Please . . . I’d like to get something to eat. Is it time for dinner, do you think?”

Bengo started laughing. “Oh, my goodness,” he gasped. “Our guest, we have overlooked. We have forgotten to feed her.”

Kojo looked at him reproachfully.

“This is not funny,” he said. “This is shameful. We must apologize. We were simply so eager for your words that we have forgotten everything else.”

“Oh, no, it’s no big deal. I was just thinking, you know, maybe we could get something . . . before the stands close down.”

“Oh,” said Kojo, “This is terrible. We become so absorbed. We forget entirely what is right.”

He went to a shelf and pulled down a tin of fish from a small stack.

“This we have,” he said. “We have only to buy some
kenke
and pepper sauce to accompany it.”

We walked a couple of blocks to where a lone man stood at a table beneath a streetlight. Once back in the room, Kojo opened the tin of fish while Bengo brought out a small folding table.

“Is this okay?” said Kojo, anxiously. “Will you have enough?”

“Oh sure, plenty,” I said, although I wasn’t sure at all.

There was a momentary silence as we pulled apart our balls of
kenke
and dipped the pieces into the pepper sauce. I ate slowly, trying to stretch out the experience.

“Do you guys normally eat dinner later, or . . . ?”

“We are not so conscious about food,” said Bengo. “Sometimes we will eat twice in a day, and sometimes only once. For myself, I try to conserve funds, for books. I am not so concerned with hunger. I have more important concerns,” he smiled. “Like talking to my new American friend.”

“Of course,” said Kojo. “Why should you be concerned for her stomach? You have no concern for anyone’s appetite but your own.”

Bengo looked at him coldly. Then he gave me an uneasy smile.

“I am sorry for your hunger,” he said

“Oh! Not at all,” I said, embarrassed. I looked quickly from one to the other, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand.

10

The Children of
Afranguah

I’m sitting on a step watching a three-year-old boy play in a muddy
yard. He is a perpetual motion machine: jumping and spinning, shirt
over his head, chubby tummy exposed. He falls to the ground, rolls
around, climbs the steps and jumps off again, stomps his foot in a puddle. He’s been playing on his own for almost an hour now, with no sign
of slowing down. Everything is exciting to him, every action a science
experiment. If he stands on a step and inches backward, how far can he
go before he tumbles off? How small a part of his foot will support him?
How high can he get the puddle to splash?

I can’t help thinking of a three-year-old boy I knew in California, the
son of a friend. The last time I was at their house, he ran through the living room in his cowboy suit brandishing toy guns, then ran out into the
yard and drove his plastic car around a toy filling station, came back in
and colored with his magic markers, changed into his Ninja eye patch and
cape, and then cried that he was bored and needed something to do.

Bengo and Kojo were eager to take me sightseeing, but Katie and I wanted to get on the road. As compelling as my time with the two men had been, I wasn’t sure I had the stamina for another day in their presence. Later, back in the States, I received a letter from Bengo, proposing marriage. He was in graduate school now, he said, and would soon be moving into a government job that would allow him sufficient income to begin a family. He said he’d never forgotten our conversation that day in Kumasi. He longed for a wife he could hold such frank discourse with, on so many topics. Ghanaian women, he complained, thought only of their hair and their clothes. I wrote him back, saying I was honored that he’d thought of me, but I was hesitant to start an involvement at such a distance. I couldn’t see myself making it back to Ghana anytime soon, I told him, and I wasn’t ready to commit based solely on the information we already had. I asked him how Kojo was doing, whether he was in graduate school as well.

Bengo responded graciously to my letter, saying that he’d always known I was practical and wise. Kojo, he said, had married a German girl and moved to Berlin. He had not written to Bengo, but Bengo had heard from a mutual friend that Kojo had abandoned his studies and was selling African beads on the street.

After leaving Kumasi, Katie and I decided to take a detour before returning to Accra. We wanted to spend a week in the village of Afranguah, the site of our first work camp. We missed the children there. There had been other villages, and other children, but these particular kids remained sharply etched in our memories. There was Yao, of course, but also Essi, Abba, Baba, Kwesi, Kwabena, Efuwe, Kukue, Mansah, and countless others. They danced in my mind: their skinny legs and radiant faces, their tiny hands clinging to my fingers, tentatively stroking my inner arm to see what white skin felt like. At once shy and bold, impossibly eager, achingly open, they darted and danced and laughed and sang, parroting English words and teaching me Fanti ones. Katie and I wondered aloud whether they would remember us. They were children, after all, and several months had passed.

The moment we stepped off the
tro-tro
from Saltpond Junction, a swarm of little bodies engulfed us, all of them hugging and cheering and jumping up and down. How had they gathered so quickly? I wondered. It seemed impossible, unless someone from the junction had run ahead to tip them off. The village minister, Billy Akwah Graham, had extended an invitation to the foreign volunteers to stay in his home whenever we chose to visit. Now the children insisted on carrying our luggage to Billy’s house. Our overstuffed backpacks rode above their heads, hoisted by six or eight little arms like chief’s palanquins. As we walked through town, women stood in doorways, shouting their salutations. Ama Akrabba, the village grandmother, ran from her house, beaming a toothless smile, to crush me in her leathery arms. Even the slacker men who hung out streetside, drinking
apeteshi
all day long, called out
“Eh! Obroni!”
grinning and waving.

Billy Akwah Graham had the largest and nicest house in town. Made of cinder blocks and stucco and painted a clean white with blue wooden shutters, it sat on a hill at a slight distance from the other houses. While extended families often shared a single room, Billy’s home actually had extra rooms, entire unoccupied spaces surrounded by walls. He was a Ghanaian anomaly: a financially solvent rural bachelor in his thirties. He shared the house with his adolescent nephew Kofi. When recent college graduates came to Afranguah from Accra or Kumasi to fulfill their national service requirement by teaching in the school, they, too, stayed in Billy Akwah Graham’s guest rooms. Someday they would stay in the teachers’ quarters our association had begun to build, but for now they remained with Billy, sometimes for as long as a year or two.

Billy was a dapper, bird-boned man, always impeccably dressed in Western clothes. Although I had stayed in his house once before, when I returned to the village to visit Yao, I had never developed a sense of ease with him. He’d spent a fair amount of time around our construction site, conversing with the camp leader and the home secretary, but I’d never seen him lift a brick. He moved in the world with the practiced, sunny air of a politician, smiling and shaking hands, spouting vague, optimistic statements.

It was unclear to me whether Billy had a prior arrangement with the association or had simply befriended the camp leader. In either case, it was soon established that he would oversee the completion of our project by the villagers once our group had left, and that he would communicate any additional need for supplies to the office in Accra. It was he, as well, who would administer the sponsorship of children’s school fees, a project which originated with our brigade. Twelve or fourteen of the foreign volunteers, Katie and myself included, had agreed to take on the yearly fees of a school-aged child through the completion of high school. The fees were nominal to us, along the order of forty dollars a year, but enormous to the villagers. Billy chose the families and matched children to volunteers. The yearly checks would be filtered through him, since most of the families had neither bank accounts nor post office boxes, and he would supply the volunteers with updates and photographs of the sponsored children.

When we arrived at Billy’s house, he stepped outside the door, extending his arms in welcome. His nephew, Kofi, stood slightly behind him, smiling shyly. Kofi was fourteen years old and, like his uncle, always perfectly groomed. He had occasionally accompanied Billy on his visits to the construction site, but I’d never heard him speak. He’d simply stood there in his school uniform, watching.

Billy gestured for us to enter the house, shooing the children away. They backed up twenty or thirty yards and remained there, wide-eyed, bearing witness. He shouted for them to be gone, and they backed up a little farther and settled down to play in the dirt. Exasperated, he was about to shout again, but abruptly changed his mind and ushered us inside. The living room was simple and spare—a couch and a low table on a bare cement floor, no decoration of any kind.

“You must stay as long as you like!” said Billy effusively, “one month I hope, maybe two.”

“You’re very kind,” said Katie.

“Yes, thank you,” I added, “but we’ll be here four or five days at the most. We really just wanted to see everybody again. How’s the construction going?”

“Oh . . . very slow,” said Billy. “I try to make these people work, but for no money, they do not want to do anything. I tell them, this is for you, so that your children may be educated. They think that if they wait, the foreigners will return and finish the job.”

I nodded and sighed. Afranguah was one of the few places where I’d felt reasonably confident that the work we began would eventually be finished. I didn’t envy Billy’s role in the process, though. Getting people to donate their labor was a difficult task anywhere in the world, whether it was in their own interest or not.

Kofi showed us to our room. He stood by as we began to unpack, watching our every motion with a shy, eager look.

“Are you in school, Kofi?” Katie asked.

“Yes, in Saltpond. I finish in two years.”

“And what would you like to do then?” I asked.

“I would like to attend University,” he said, “if only I could find the funds.”

“Surely your uncle will help you,” I said.

“It is too great a cost for him. He wishes me to acquire a foreign sponsor,” he said demurely, looking at his hands.

The days went quickly. We spent them with the children, sitting on the steps of Billy’s house when he was out, playing clapping games, braiding hair, trading Fanti and English words. One of our favorite activities was a verb game in which we took turns giving each other orders in Fanti. The children would call out words like “cry,” “laugh,” “dig,” or “dance,” and Katie and I would act them out, prompting wild laughter. Then we’d switch and have twenty criers, dancers, and laughers going at it with gusto in response to our commands.

Every day I dropped in to see Yao. He was crawling now, and he’d acquired a couple of single syllable words, which he shouted upon occasion. It was wonderful to see him healthy, his extraordinary eyes alight with intelligence. Although he didn’t remember me, we soon renewed our friendship, and he would climb straight into my lap when I arrived.

Repairing things with Minessi was not so easy. Although the tensions between us had eased, our relationship lacked the camaraderie of our early days. I tried to initiate a conversation with her about the hospital, asking her if I had done something to make her angry, but she either didn’t understand or didn’t want to engage. I soon abandoned the effort. Because of the strain, my daily visits were much shorter than they had once been.

The other children followed Katie and me around every moment that they were not in school or asleep, which for the littlest ones meant every moment of daylight. Among the company were Minessi’s neighbor Amoah’s three children: Baba, Kwesi, and Essi, and his niece, Mansah. Eight-year-old Baba had a smile that could light a dark cave to its unknown corners. With her laughing eyes and wide, flexible mouth, her entire face reflected an irrepressible joy that was absolutely contagious—you had to smile back. She was quick, too, remembering English words with astonishing precision. She never seemed to forget anything, from songs and phrases to hand gestures and dance steps.

Baba was the primary caretaker of her one-year-old sister Essi and her three-year-old brother Kwesi. Essi rode most of the day in a sling on Baba’s narrow back, while grave-eyed, dimpled Kwesi toddled beside her, hanging onto her arm as though it were a life buoy and the world a lake. Ten-year-old Mansah was more reserved. She was upright and slender as the millet stalks in the fields outside of town, her face long and foxlike, with the kind of elegant bone structure that telegraphs the shape of the adult face to come. She supervised her younger cousins like a cautious mother, the sober counterweight to Baba’s bubbling exuberance.