Esi Edugyan - The Second Life of Samuel Tyne

They spent the hour adjusting to each other’s company. Almost as soon as the Porters were seated, a fusty, smouldering smell bled from their clothes, an intimate scent, which hung about them palpably. Samuel helped Maud lay out the casual tea they used for all their sudden company, but when they’d finished, the tabletop so frothy with doilies it would have made a spinster flinch, they realized that the Porters’ poverty might lead them to think the Tynes were showing off. No one spoke as Samuel began to serve, but Akosua gave Maud a sulky look that made her ashamed. An uneasy mood filled the room, a leaden silence that fended off Saul Porter’s attempts to pelt it with witticisms. Only when the twins entered in their pyjamas, holding alternate volumes of War and Peace , did real animosity surface in the conversation.

Akosua regarded the twins with a smug look on her face. “Are these the two who have done you trouble?” she said, her pleasure obvious. She beckoned to Yvette, who took a bewildered step backwards and glanced inquisitively at her sister. Akosua scoffed. “No discipline,” she said, pretending to address herself, though her voice could have filled a theatre. “Bra-ha . I’m Auntie Akosua.”

When the twins didn’t respond, she laughed bitterly. “They do not understand the simplest order, or it is stubbornness? Bra-ha.” In a voice less interrogative than whiny, she questioned them in Twi. At their silence, she made a disgusted face. “Eh, even the littlest ones know it. Are you not Akan?”

Samuel was furious. But no sooner did he open his mouth than Akosua began to recite every known cliché in all the Ghanaian tongues she was fluent in. When the twins looked perplexed, she sucked her teeth and shook her head, though she couldn’t keep the smugness from her face.

That gesture enraged Samuel. Frowning, he laughed, a laugh that called attention to its falseness. Sensing a breach of the etiquette the Tynes used in company to stop gossip from leaving their home, Maud motioned to the twins to refill the water carafe. It was an impolitic move, for as soon as they placed their books on the table, Akosua leaned across her husband to see what they were reading.

“Eh, they think they are big big? They think they are whites or what?”

Samuel looked in exasperation at Saul Porter. Throughout all Samuel’s years of study in Gold Coast, he had been a symbol to the confused population of their country’s ills. The British-imposed school system and its misguided graduates were killing the tradition of a country that had already lost so much. Yet, the students who never returned from abroad were even worse, because they left the country bereft of leaders. And so the educated could not win. Samuel was so sick of his guilt, so sick of the social stigmas that had crossed the ocean with him and the way they could be twisted to dismiss the brilliance of his daughters, that he violated the Tyne’s etiquette with a satisfying outburst of sense.

“Since when,” he said, “has literacy altered the colour of one’s skin?”

This roused Porter, and he looked at Samuel as though urging him to go on.

But what was there to expound on? Samuel had said all he meant to say. But having pierced the fog that had dulled Porter until now, he felt encouraged to keep speaking.

“Should a Ghanaian not be happy to see another Ghanaian educating himself? You say only big big man should concern himself with these things. But does this attitude not contribute to uneducation and poverty in our country? The state of things in the world is such that you must immerse yourself or perish. Even now I do not say it is the British system, but an inherited set of ideas, of customs we must somehow integrate better with our own traditions. Perhaps if I lived back home, at this time now, now that we have seen independence, I should never say these things. But I have always thought that a black can, and should, define himself beyond being black. Black, white, Chinese, Arabian — life is much more than that. Egyptian, Senegalese, French — never, never, never accept the limits another wants to give you.”

“If you don’t love another’s limits, why love their education?” said Porter, whose authority drew everyone’s attention. “Reading’s made all the difference, at least for my part. It was not being able to read that kept the vote from us in Oklahoma, sent us north in the first place. We always been the bottom of the pecking order. No respect. Not once, in all those books you reading, are we presented as decent, intelligent men. We ain’t even men. Minstrels, animals, but never upright men. And I’d know, I read all those things once I learned to — self-educated. Won’t read them again. We’re the absolute last in this world with nothing to be done of it but keep on living. I’m a black man, wouldn’t want to be nothing else, and it makes me cry to see one who does.”

Samuel winced, and his face became anxious. “You misunderstand me.”

Porter shrugged. “I speak from my life. My family came up when I was eleven, twelve maybe, and we were healthy, moneyed, what have you. And this country, claiming it’s all for human rights, claiming it’s superior to the States and accepts everyone, didn’t treat us no better than a common dog.” Porter grimaced and coughed, reaching for the water that after sitting five minutes had attracted lint to its surface. When he’d emptied the glass he coughed against his fist.

“They came down with posters — what else? Called it ‘Last Best West,’ said they needed settlers for ranching, dairying, grain, fruit farming, that sort of thing. Now, we weren’t ever ranchers, but my folks thought, what the hell, why not try at least, because we ain’t getting nowhere here. Thirty years the Civil War had ended, over thirty years, and things weren’t any easier. Good for nothing but barbers and bootblacks — if your luck was buttered, you became a porter. So you can imagine. My father, Harlan, was born in Georgia, and he went west after the war, living all round Kansas and Utah, Oklahoma, but he was always at blows with some one. One night he came home — I was helping get his supper — and he says to me, he says, ‘Son, it’s only a matter of time before I kill someone or get killed myself.’ He was usually so irrational that when he talked sense it really made my bones cold. A week later, at his Masons’ meeting, he talked to Jeff Snick, who said he’s getting a group together to head north. Week after that we locked our front door for good. My mother always said it was the only decision Daddy ever took his time with. And he decided in a week, so you can imagine just how rational a man he was.”

Porter went on to describe their mulish journey. Assailed by fatigue and boredom, the group of two hundred were quite dispirited when their train pulled into Edmonton. Young Saul had tired of his casual game of cards with Oscar Bishop, whom Cece (whose people had educated her) had dubbed “Othello” because he was jealous of everyone. Saul lay down to listen to yet another of Uncle Mack’s stories of his days as a libertine youth in Utah (all of which he made up on request). Just as Uncle Mack was set to bound without his pants from the bed of a lady whose hunter husband had suddenly returned, the train belched to a halt. Nervous, but emboldened, the group stepped from the carriages and met the local amateur media. A prepubescent reporter for the Journal , smiling with fear, pestered them with the question everyone wanted answered. From Emerson to Winnipeg to this city, from the most refined genius to the city’s worst wretch, people wanted to know how these pilgrims had come through the rigorous border check unscathed. And it was true; they’d come with riches and livestock and glorious health, so it had been impossible to detain them, though the authorities tried. Always one for pranks, Uncle Mack began to groan and sway in the middle of his explanation to the reporter, who save the chance of race and geography was young enough to be his son, and declared that he was so tired he could feel himself turning yellow. The young man’s eyes widened. A slow wave of laughter went through the crowd.