Somebody's Heart Is Burning (7 page)

“Saltpond Junction. I tell him Yao is sick. He says it is the best. From England.”

“Minessi,” I took her hand. “I want to take Yao to see a doctor. There’s a hospital in Saltpond, right?”

She shrugged and looked at the ground.

“I’ll pay for it, okay? Whatever he needs. But let’s get him there as soon as we can. Can you go today?”

“I must tell my husband.”

I’d forgotten she had a husband. Where was he all day? I didn’t remember ever seeing him. There were so many more women than men in Afranguah that I’d scarcely registered it. Most of the young men had migrated to the cities, looking for work, while the women stayed in the village, farming and caring for the children and a few elderly parents. While the women carried water, pounded
fufu
, nursed babies, and bent over the millet stalks in the fields outside of town, the few remaining men (with the exception of Amoah, the schoolteacher) spent their days hanging around the bar, drinking
apeteshi—
or so it appeared to me. I was struck now, not for the first time, by how little I knew about the people I considered friends.

When I stepped outside Billy Akwah Graham’s house the next morning, Minessi was waiting for me. She was wrapped from head to toe in beautiful printed cloth. The cloth was bright orange and stiff, as though just purchased for a festival. Yao was strapped to her back, asleep. I leaned close and kissed his soft cheek, listening to the low uneven motor of his breath.

The walk from Afranguah to Saltpond Junction, where we could catch a
tro-tro
to the midsized town of Saltpond, took about forty-five minutes. The heat of the day hadn’t settled in yet, and I enjoyed the cool silence as we headed down the dirt path through the luxurious greenery. I asked Minessi where she’d learned English, but she didn’t seem to understand the question, answering only “yes.” I asked her if she wanted more children.

“No!” she said firmly. “Finished. Four children. Enough.”

“Four children? I thought you had only Yao!” I looked at her closely, wondering how old she was. Her queenly bearing made her seem older, but looking at her dewy, unlined face I guessed that she was in her early twenties.

“Three girls!” she laughed. “They stay with my sistah. Cape Coast.”

“What are they doing there?”

“School. Her husband, he is guide. At the monument.”

The “monument” in Cape Coast was a fort, built in the sixteenth century, that was later used as a base for the slave trade. Tourists came from all over the world to bear witness to that grim piece of history, following the guides through the waist-high dungeons where African men, women, and children once lay shackled in darkness, waiting to be shipped overseas. All that foreign income probably provided Cape Coast with better-equipped schools than those in Afranguah, which had neither paper nor pencils nor books.

“You must miss your girls a lot,” I said.

“I will go to them. I want to learn.” She touched her hair and gestured: twisting, braiding, arranging; her long, tapered fingers moving nimbly through the air.

“You want to be a hairdresser!” I cried, absurdly delighted by this small confidence. For all the laughter we’d shared, Minessi had a kind of detachment, an underlying reserve that I’d never been able to penetrate.

She nodded. “Then I go to live in Cape Coast, too.”

At Saltpond Junction we waited for two hours while the
tro-tro
accumulated passengers. While I wandered around outside with Yao in my arms, Minessi preferred to sit in the sweltering vehicle, holding our places. She leaned her head against a window, gazing out.

None of the windows opened, which made the ride to Saltpond a kind of low-grade torture that gathered intensity as the trip progressed. I kept my head down and breathed deeply, trying to ignore the sensation that I was a cauliflower trapped in a steamer. It was past noon by the time we arrived, and the whole town was wilting in the midday sun. We walked to the hospital, the sultry air dragging at our limbs. Yao, strapped to Minessi’s back, groaned in his sleep like an achy old man.

The hospital was a modern cement building with bare, scrubbed hallways. A few people waited in the entryway. It was nothing like the hospital in Accra, with its outdoor courtyard crowded with patients from morning till night. Perhaps the people in this region, accustomed to traditional methods of healing, were suspicious of these Western-style doctors and their unfamiliar medicine.

A nurse sat at the reception desk. She discussed Yao’s condition with Minessi in Fanti for a while, then wrote “cough” on the sheet of paper in front of her.

“His breathing, too, listen to it,” I chimed in. Minessi glanced at me uneasily. The nurse added a few notes to her paper, then told me I should go into the doctor’s office with Minessi and Yao to explain the situation to the doctor. I added that Yao already had the cough when I left a month ago. The nurse looked at Minessi in surprise.

“Bohsom?”
she said sharply, which meant month. Minessi nodded slightly, looking caught out.

The cost of the visit was 200 cedis: astoundingly low by my standards, but what that sum meant to Minessi, I couldn’t say. Much of the village business was conducted by barter, and cash was extremely scarce.

The doctor was a young Ghanaian man in a white button-down shirt and wire-rimmed glasses, with a silver cross around his neck. Probably a recent university graduate doing his mandatory public service. He sat behind a broad desk, wearing a stethoscope, and spoke curtly to Minessi. She replied respectfully, her eyes dropped.

“Bohsom eko,”
she murmured softly. One month.

The doctor brought his hand down on the desk in an impatient gesture, barking a response. I was dismayed to see the proud Minessi cowering now, her elegant posture literally shrinking under this man’s rebuke. She unwrapped Yao and set him, naked, on the desk.

“She feeds the baby mashed
kenke.
No milk,” the doctor told me in English. “Do you know what is kenke?”

I nodded stiffly. Minessi avoided my eyes. I was stunned that he spoke like that in front of her. Did he think she didn’t understand? If she was feeding Yao
kenke
, it must’ve been all she could afford. But wasn’t she also breast-feeding? I realized I didn’t know; I couldn’t remember ever having seen her feed him. For a heart-stopping moment I wondered whether she was guilty of negligence. My mind flitted to her other children, her daughters: why weren’t they with her? I quickly pushed away the disloyal thought. She was wonderful with Yao, so gentle and patient. If she’d stopped breast-feeding, there had to be a reason. And cow’s milk, which could only be found in tins, was certainly out of her range.

The doctor ordered Minessi to remove a small pouch that hung on a frayed red ribbon around Yao’s neck.

“I too have my superstition.” He winked at me. “I won’t touch the baby while this is on.”

Placing the stethoscope against Yao’s tiny chest, the doctor looked up and shook his head at me again.

“They feed the babies mashed
kenke
and then wonder why they grow pale and have no energy,” his voice rang with disgust. “I tell them and tell them but they won’t listen.”

He smiled at me ingratiatingly. In my periphery I saw Minessi adjusting her orange cloth, looking sideways at the bare walls of the room. When the doctor turned his attention back to Yao, I tried to catch her eye.

After the examination, the doctor again spoke sharply to Minessi in Fanti. She nodded, expressionless, head down.

He turned to me. “The baby has pneumonia. It is lucky that he is alive. He will have to sleep two or three days here in hospital,” he continued in a comradely tone. “One hundred cedis a day to stay here. Not so much, eh? But she is afraid to bring him. Instead she will visit the witch doctor. Then she will sit in her house until the baby dies. They can never find money for the hospital, but they will always find money for the funeral.”

Minessi was silent as we walked down the sterile hallway.

“That doctor was a jerk, wasn’t he?” I said finally, but she just stared straight ahead.

In the pediatric section, which seemed to consist of a room with eight cots—six empty and two occupied—they gave me a prescription to fill. We walked into town to find a pharmacy.

Twenty-five hundred cedis for ampicillin. Twenty-one hundred for paracetamol. Minessi looked on with an incredulous expression, shaking her head slightly as I fished out the money for the medications. On the way back to the hospital, she repeatedly removed the medicines from their paper bag and looked at them.

“Are you all right, Minessi?” I asked, but she didn’t respond.

Back at the hospital, she sat down on a cot with Yao. In a flat voice, she asked me to tell her husband to come tonight with clothes for her and the baby, and some water.

I began to leave, but she stopped me. “Chop money,” she said, her face turned away. I gave her 1,500 cedis for food and told her to send word with her husband if she needed more. She took the money without comment and didn’t look at me as I walked to the door.

Yao and Minessi stayed in the hospital a week. When they returned, Yao’s eyes were clear and bright. His breath flowed unimpeded, a strong sweet column of air.

“I’m so glad he’s better,” I said to Minessi as she pounded
fufu
in a corner of the yard. She had been distant toward me since her return from the hospital. My feelings toward her had changed, too. I had an agenda now: to keep Yao healthy. Where I once thought Minessi an ally, I now feared she might be an obstacle. I kept my tone cheery, trying to neutralize the tension by ignoring it.

“Isn’t it a relief that Yao is back? Maybe we could go together and buy some milk for him. I could set up some kind of a milk fund.”

She continued to pound silently, the muscles in her back working.

“Sistah Korkor!” called Amoah, from across the yard. “You people know so much! Here we thought the boy is fine. He smiles, he looks around, this is a healthy boy. And now we find that the boy was so sick. We know nothing!”

I sensed, more than saw, a bristling from Minessi. The pounding sped up.

“Oh no,” I said. “Minessi knows a lot more than I do. She just couldn’t—she didn’t—”

“No!” Amoah laughed. “She is a foolish African woman. Not smart, like you. Is it not true, Minessi?”

Minessi stopped pounding; her pestle hung midair. “Yes,” she said suddenly, loudly. “Before Sistah Korkor and her friend the doctor we know nothing. We do not know Yao is sick, we do not know Yao is well. We know nothing; we can do nothing. We must say thank you to Sistah Korkor.” She turned to me, her jaw taut. The veins stood out in her neck and arms.

“Thank you, Sistah,” she said, her voice low and shaking. “Thank you for the life of Yao.”

She turned her back. The thud of her pestle filled the air like a mournful drum, a rhythmic counterpoint to the other women pounding out their dinners in nearby huts.

5

Musical Chairs

In Apam, every time I step outside the door I attract a following. Foreign visitors are rare here, and people shout
“obroni”
at me—white person—from morning till night. Mothers bring their youngsters close, point
a finger right in my face, and pronounce the word slowly so that the children can learn. Yesterday a group of children trooped after me through the
streets, exuberantly chanting, “
Obroni
/ How are you? / I am fine /
Thank you!” Toddlers start to cry when they see me, and their mothers
seem to find nothing funnier than to drag them toward me, saying in
Fanti, “Take him to your country.” Even Santana and her family refer to
me as “the white lady.” I overhear them saying to each other, “The white
lady is up; the white lady is hungry; the white lady is taking a bath.”

Saturday nights at the Afranguah camp, we took turns sharing party games from our countries. On our first Game Night, an English volunteer introduced “telephone,” in which a whispered message is passed around the circle. First time around, when the last link in our forty-five person chain was asked to relay the message he’d received, he said quizzically, “Fun-dee?”

“How did you hear fun-dee?” shouted Ayatollah, who’d originated the message. “I said, ‘The small girl is pounding fufu.’ ”

“I said to him ‘fund me,’ ” said Gorbachev, the penultimate player. “I thought Ayatollah asks us to pay his fees at university.”

Everyone laughed at that.

“Let us trace this,” said Virgin Billy, the baby-faced home secretary. Though not officially on staff, Billy was in charge when the camp leader was otherwise occupied, and he took his position seriously.

“This can be scientific,” he said enthusiastically, “to find how the words underwent mutation, from ‘the small girl is pounding
fufu
’ to ‘fund me.’ Ballistic, what is it that you passed to Gorbachev?”

“I also heard ‘fund me.’ ”

“And Okoto, what have you passed to Ballistic?”

Okoto, a lumbering Australian, worked as a marine biologist back home and had therefore been named after the Twi word for crab. He was about to respond, when a large Ghanaian woman seated in the middle of the chain could no longer contain her mirth.

“I said, ‘Fuck me!’ ” she crowed. “I did not request you to pay my school fees.”

The crowd erupted. All the Ghanaian men shouted at once.

“Santana, you have ruined the whole game!”

“You make us ashamed with this language!”

“How is it that you, one person, should spoil it for all the rest?”

Grace Appialeh Odoom, a.k.a. Santana, radiant in a maroon satin dress, surveyed the uproar with delight. Tipping back in her chair, she shouted with laughter.

“Sistah Korkor, this is no good,” Virgin Billy told me at the end of the evening. We were cleaning up the dining room, scooting the chairs and tables into place. “Santana should be expelled from the camp.”

“Expel her for having a little fun?” I asked. The camp consisted of thirty Ghanaians and fifteen foreigners. Of the thirty Ghanaians on the project, only two were women.

“She has shamed us. It is not natural to talk this way. To be this way.”

“Oh Billy, come on.”

“The Europeans will get the wrong impression of Ghana women!”

“I think the Europeans are used to women acting all kinds of ways,” I said.

He pursed his lips primly. “In Ghana we are not.”

Santana took up space. She talked out of order at meetings, served herself more food than was allotted, and mocked the male volunteers mercilessly on the construction site. She called them weak and challenged them to competitions of strength. They declined to participate, declaring it beneath them to compete with a woman. Santana’s body was round and firm, her voice deep and gravelly. Her clothes, too, were constantly surprising. She worked all day in a shapeless nightgown or housedress, her hair a frizzy cloud, but in the evening she pulled out the stops. Her wardrobe contained a seemingly limitless parade of dresses that looked like they belonged at a high school prom—puffy-sleeved, ruffly satins in purples and reds and emerald greens. She had African clothes as well, and occasionally showed up at dinner wrapped head to toe in illustrious cotton batiks and prints, her hair oiled and pressed to her head or wrapped in a tower of cloth. The more flamboyant her outfit, the more delight she seemed to take in wearing it.

A week and a half into the camp, I came down with dysentery. For several days, while the other volunteers toiled at the construction site, I lay prostrate on top of my sleeping bag on the cement floor of a classroom in the village school—out of session for the summer—that provided our housing. By the third day, I felt well enough to read and write and was beginning to enjoy the quiet hours. I was perched on the front steps with my notebook when Santana returned from the site for an early lunch.

“
Eh!
Sistah Korkor!” she shouted.

“Sistah Santana.” I smiled; I didn’t think she knew my name.

“Three days now, you don’t work. They say you are sick, but to me you don’t look so sick.” She put her hand on my cheek. “You are not hot.”

“I don’t have a fever,” I said.

“Then you must work! Other people, they work harder because you lie in bed.”

“I’m having stomach problems,” I told her.

Santana laughed. “So is Sistah Mansah, from England. So is Brothah Okoto, from Australia. So am I. Why do you think your stomach is more important than my stomach?”

“I don’t!” I said, bridling. “I just think it’d be hard for me to work if I had to run to Chicago every fifteen minutes!”

“Chicago” was our nickname for the camp toilet, a clean-swept room with a chrome-covered hole in the floor.

“It is true that you could not work while you were visiting Chicago, but when you returned from Chicago you could work for fifteen minutes before visiting Chicago again. And so, throughout the day, it is entirely possible that you could work many hours.”

I glared at her.

“You think it is something very special when a small insect is living inside you,” she continued. “If an African man went to the hospital for a test, he would find thirty or forty different insects living inside him.”

“Fine,” I said resentfully, “I’ll come back to work tomorrow.”

“Eh heh!” said Santana, giving me an I’ll-believe-it-when-I-see-
it
look. “The association is not buying your food so that you may have a rest vacation.” She disappeared into the room.

I returned to work the next day, cursing Santana every time I had to drop my shovel and dash to Chicago.

The camp leader requested a fee of 200 cedis each to cover transportation for a weekend excursion to the nearby village of Enyana Abassa to witness a new chief’s inauguration ceremony. Many of the African volunteers couldn’t afford the fee, so Virgin Billy made an announcement requesting foreigners to sponsor them. Santana was standing next to me with her hand raised, indicating that she needed sponsorship.

“I’ll sponsor you,” I said.

“You, lazy girl?” She raised an eyebrow.

“If you shut up about that.”

“Eh heh! I am not very good at ‘shut up.’ ”

“Great, then there’s potential for growth.”

She laughed a deep, scratchy belly laugh, and took my hand. “You will be my sistah tomorrow. So you do not go missing. This place will be so crowded.”

“You’re going to look out for me?”

She smiled. “Will you trust me?”

In Enyana Abassa, we were crunched all day long in a joyous welter of bodies. I strained to get a glimpse of the new chief, who was carried through town on a bier. Men walked beside the bier, beating with hooked sticks on the taut, fur-covered heads of enormous wooden drums. The young chief was swaddled head to toe in exquisite layers of
kente
, the traditional handwoven Ghanaian cloth, its rich blue, red, and gold dazzling in the midday sun. On his head was a colorful hat, shaped like an upside-down canoe. Beneath the hat, his face was round and unlined, its expression oddly impassive, as though his mind were somewhere far away. Beads of sweat glistened on his broad forehead. An adolescent girl sat in front of him, also wrapped in
kente
, with a stern expression on her face.

“Why do they look so gloomy?” I asked Santana.

“They must not smile during the festival.”

“Why?”

She shrugged, looking bored. “It is the rule.”

A long line of women with painted faces stood waiting, with gifts for the chief balanced on their heads. Their offerings included tall pyramids of oranges, yams, and tomatoes; towering piles of folded cloth; and hand-carved wooden stools. One woman carried a large wooden table upside down on her head, while another toted three antique sewing machines, one on top of the other. I went crazy with my camera, trying to record these astounding feats of balance. In a dusty central square, rifles were fired into the air, and a man in a bird suit danced.

When I asked Santana the meaning of the dance, she just shrugged again.