Esi Edugyan - The Second Life of Samuel Tyne

She spoke admonishingly. “He never said you are Ghanaian.” As though scolded by someone absent, she invited them grudgingly inside.

From what Maud could see, the house looked much the same as her own, except, where the Tyne house looked colossal from outside but felt cloistered within, the Porter house deceived with its armadilline smallness. Inside, its rooms were huge.

Mrs. Porter led them to a kitchen, where a table of ill-clad children chewed stalks of raw sugar cane. They were as surprised at their guests as Maud and Eudora were with their hosts, and eyeing the strangers they lingered in corners, sat on counters, one even busied herself at the stove. Strangely, the kitchen was a precise mirror of Mrs. Porter’s dignified poverty, so that even in a line-up of poor housewives she would have stood out as its owner. The floor had been overlaid with wall-to-wall carpeting that shamelessly displayed its stains. Over the deep freezer hung a print of the Last Supper, Jesus and his black disciples robed in kente cloaks. It stood out amid the squalor, and Maud appreciated that in God’s haste to make neighbours of Tynes and Porters, He’d settled neither beside outright heathens.

The children seemed to multiply before Maud’s eyes, though reason told her she’d counted them twice. All had inherited their mother’s large, wet eyes and her strained look of poverty, which gave them an air of distraction, of stifled desires.

“My God,” Eudora muttered to Maud. “It’s the middle-aged Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe.”

The smallest children, their shyness agonizing, fled past the women in the doorway without excusing themselves. Unfazed by their bad manners, Mrs. Porter even seemed proud of their audacity. She nodded her guests to the table.

Hesitating, Maud and Eudora sat in the abandoned seats. And it seemed that no matter how far away they backed from the table they felt winded. Maud tried to smile. With the heat, the rancid scent of cooking oil and incense turned oppressive.

“I grew up just outside Accra,” Maud said. “Which part of Gold Coast were you from?”

“Eih , what is this Gold Coast business? ‘Which part of Gold Coast?’ she asks. Ahein …” Mrs. Porter sucked her teeth. “Did we not see independence? Must we still go by that name? Are we not ourselves? Sth . And what do you mean by ‘were’? I am from Winneba. I am from Ghana. I am not from Gold Coast . You sign the paper and like that forget your heritage, isn’t it?”

Maud flinched. Eudora raised an eyebrow.

“Now you are angry, eh? The farther you travel, the softer your skin gets.” Mrs. Porter gave Maud a contemptuous smile. “What is it you want to drink?”

Maud wasn’t angry; on the contrary. She’d saved her children from this life by a hair. Eudora spoke with obvious restraint. “Whatever you have is fine.”

Mrs. Porter nodded sharply to the child at the stove, who stopped stirring a tin pot to grab mugs from the cupboard.

“Your husband has my ladder,” said Mrs. Porter. “Does he intend to be buried with it?”

Maud smirked, as if to condescend. “My husband tried to return that ladder a number of days ago,” she enunciated. “Apparently, no one was home.”

Mrs. Porter looked at Maud as though she’d spoken Greek. “He was schooled abroad, isn’t it? Some fancy-pants school in England?”

Unable to repress her pride, Maud nodded. The frightened girl placed two steaming mugs in front of the company. Much younger looking from a distance, she seemed to age with every nearing step. Her eyes were sunken.

Mrs. Porter lowered her voice. “A man who goes to the gods for fire and keeps it for himself gets burned alive.” She raised her voice. “He should have been more indebted to the country that raised him and taken his knowledge back.”

Mrs. Porter had touched on the very guilt that had troubled Samuel’s early married years. His sister Ajoa had badgered him in a series of whiny letters, stating that only thirty per cent of Ghana was literate, that the dearth of teachers was killing the country, that Ghana had exported its finest non-renewable resource — its sharpest students. Five thousand students that year were educated abroad, and the few who returned no longer shared a common culture with the people. It was a paradox: the necessary modern education was killing off traditional tribal life. Samuel had been torn over whether to return. But he’d been abroad so long, and had such fondness and gratitude for Jacob, who’d settled in nearby Aster, that the choice had made itself. Though some days Maud knew he still wondered about it.

“Sam Tyne has done extremely well for himself,” said Eudora, “and for his family, which is more than some have the right to pass judgment on. His success is model , and if we had more like him, we’d be better off.”

Mrs. Porter’s face seemed to say, Is that so? She and Eudora had taken an honest dislike to each other. The more Maud considered it, the more sense it made: the classic case of a philosophy colliding with itself. Both Eudora and Mrs. Porter seemed women of limitless strength, both believed in the necessity of children and keeping a good home. Both were crusaders of a kind; Eudora within the National Association for the Advancement of Women, and Mrs. Porter within her home. Yet each saw in the other an enemy, as if their common cause was somehow muddied by the competition. Simply put, each thought herself better than the other.

Mrs. Porter hadn’t finished. “Anyone who thinks himself above grieving has something wrong with him. Moving to a new country does not exempt you from a proper burial and the forty days’ libation. Your uncle was a good, good man, deserving of his final rest. Do you think you are not bringing punishment upon yourselves? Do you think we sleep in comfort knowing he has not received his proper rest?”

“Has Samuel been here?” said Maud. How else would this woman know which sensitive spots to hit? Maud looked at Eudora, who was frowning at a silent child sucking a piece of sugar cane.

Mrs. Porter sucked her teeth, shaking her head. She studied Maud dubiously. She began to speak, then thought the better of it, and simply said, “Ahein.” Glancing at Eudora, she turned her ironic smile on Maud again.

Maud’s face grew hot. She understood the judgment: not only did she fail to keep up traditions whose neglect would bring certain ruin, but she kept company with a white woman, which Mrs. Porter seemed to view as immoral. Maud sat in blistering silence, trying to find the right words to berate this woman.

Eudora found them first. “Not only have you shown utter disrespect for the Tynes’ loss, but you’ve done just about everything in the book to make enemies of your families. It’s not whether Jacob got his due that should worry you, the grudge the dead have, all that. It’s the grudge the living have you should be worried about. The mess you’ve made of it with the people who share your space.”

Maud looked at Eudora in surprise. She’d underestimated her, and gratefully squeezed her hand under the table.

Mrs. Porter stood from the table and raised her voice. “Who are you to enter my doors and speak to me this way? You, especially, always playing the big woman, always—”

The sound of someone entering cut her short. Porter stood in the doorway, wearing a straight-cut suit too small for his thick, pugilist’s body. Propped atop his head like an abandoned birdcage was a sagging Panama hat, and he clutched a box of stuffed doves, candles and cheap electrical gear under his arm. The shoes at the door and the rising argument had betrayed the company, and yet he proved himself a man of class by appearing pleasantly surprised. His dark face was thrown into relief by his luminous white beard. His eyes shined like wet stones. An engagement in them, a look of intelligence, like that of the twins, led Maud to think him educated.