Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

Misunderstanding the Greek phile , the connotation of “love.” And misunderstanding her father, who would abandon his children and who hated his feet, as she discovered that night.

• • •

Rather, morning.

Four A.M., the house frozen in silence, Taiwo staring at the ceiling, her hands on her ribs. Suffering “middle insomnia,” as yet undiagnosed. She got up and went to the kitchen.

• • •

Generally, when she couldn’t sleep, she’d sneak in to Kehinde through the little trap door at the back of her closet. There she’d stand silently at the foot of his bed looking down at his face, watercolored by moon, and marvel how serious he looked fast asleep; he could only look serious, only frowned, when he slept. Awake, he looked like Kehinde. Like her, but with a secret, his gold-brown eyes hiding a smile from his lips. She’d smile at his frown until he, without waking, smiled back at her, eyes closed, a smile in his sleep. Just the one. A small smile, fifteen seconds and not longer, his eyelids still restive with Technicolor dreams. Then she’d blow him a kiss and return through the closet to her bed, where she always fell promptly asleep.

Instead, she went down the back stairs to the kitchen, one of several secret passageways lacing that house. This was the Colonial she hated, in Brookline, which the man had bought proudly after Sadie was born (and though Mom had wanted a townhouse, South End, pregentrification; better value for money, she’d said, and was right). It was perfectly lovely. Red brick with black shutters, white trim, gable roof, ample yard in the back. But comparing it to the massive Tudor mansions of their neighbors, Taiwo found the house lacking. Anemic somehow. (She’d laugh to herself that first evening in Lagos, in the car passing streets that made Brookline look broke.)

She went into the kitchen and opened a cupboard.

Then opened another.

Then reopened the first.

Olu had just started at Milton Academy and was insistent upon eating what prep school kids ate. The cupboards were now stocked with mysteriously named products like Mi-Del Organic Lemon Snaps. She closed the cupboard. Opened the fridge.

There was a remnant Capri Sun behind the Apple & Eve apple juice. She stabbed in the straw, drank the juice in one sip. Then threw out the carton and glanced out the window, clamping her hand against her mouth to stop the scream.

There, gazing back at her, alarming in moonlight, was the statue of the mother with the hand-carved stone twins. It looked like a child between the silhouetted fir trees, a four-foot-tall alien-child, glowing pale gray. She hated that thing. They all hated that thing. Even Mom sort of secretly hated that thing. She’d unwrapped it on Christmas, said, “I love it, Kweku! Thank you,” and stood it after dinner by itself in the snow.

Taiwo laughed softly, her heart pounding loudly. She decided she should check all the locks on the doors. Just in case some little alien-child was roaming around Brookline trolling for lemon snaps. The back door was locked. She tiptoed through the dining room, which no one ever dined in, to the cold, empty foyer to check the front door. She almost didn’t notice the figure huddled in the sitting room, which no one ever sat in (except important, slippered guests), to the left, off the foyer through the grand Moorish arch with the two sets of couches and red Turkmen rug.

Almost.

She was slipping through the darkness to the doorway when she turned her head a half-inch to the left and there he was.

• • •

Slumped on the couch, his feet propped on a footrest, his head tipped down, leaden, his lips hanging slack. He was still in blue scrubs, lightly spattered with red, as if he’d left the OR and gone straight to the car. His white coat was pooled on the floor where he’d dropped it. Both slippers had slipped from his feet to the rug. The moon from the window behind him fell brightly on the bottle of liquor still clutched in his palm.

She froze in the foyer. Her heart resumed pounding. She glanced at the stairs, trying to think, walk or run? She knew she’d get in trouble if he woke up and saw her, not for sneaking, for not sleeping, but for seeing him like this. Collapsed on the couch with his mouth hanging open, his coat on the floor, his head slumped to his chest. She’d never seen her father so— loose . Without tension. He was always so rigid, so upright, strung taut. Now he looked like a marionette abandoned by its manipulator, puddled in a jumble of wood, limbs and string. She knew he’d be furious to know he’d been seen so. She knew she should tiptoe-sprint back up the stairs.

But couldn’t. Or didn’t want to. She wanted to disturb him. She wanted to revive him, make him wake up, sit up. So, she went and stood in front of him as if he were Kehinde, at the edge of the footstool in front of his feet, then recoiled, hand to mouth again to keep herself from crying out with shock at all the bruises on the bottom of his feet.

• • •

How she’d never seen them was beyond her, is beyond her now, to think she’d only ever seen the one side of his feet, the smooth. The soles, by sharp contrast, were chafed, calloused, raw, the skin black in some places, puffed up at the toes. It was as if he’d quite literally crossed burning sands barefoot (in fact, had gone shoeless for most of his youth). Taiwo pursed her lips shut to mute her revulsion, but what she felt next had no shape and no sound:

an odd emptiness, weightlessness, as if she were floating, as if for a moment she’d ceased to exist: some new odd sort of sadness, part grief, part compassion, a helium sadness, too airless to bear. In the future, in adulthood, when she feels this same airlessness, when she feels her very being rushing out of her like breath, she’ll long to touch and be touched, to make contact (and will, with an assortment of consequences). This longing, like most things, was innocent at birth, taking root in her hands and her fluttering heart: the urge to touch, to kiss his feet, to kiss-and-make-them better. Put her father back together. But she didn’t know how. She didn’t have the answer. She didn’t know this father. She knelt. Began to cry.

She was frightened for reasons she couldn’t explain, by a sense beyond reason but clear all the same: that something was about to go horribly wrong if it hadn’t already, that something had changed. Most of this was her inexplicably keen intuition (along with middle insomnia, undiagnosed at age twelve). But it came without thought, a feeling completely without narrative. An opening up.

Something had opened somewhere.

The fact of her father here slumped in the moonlight meant something was possible that she hadn’t perceived: that he was vulnerable. And that if he was — their solid wooden father — then that she was, they all were, and worse, might not know. He had hidden the soles of his feet her whole life, for twelve years; he could hide (anyone could hide) anything else. And finally, that he’d tried, that he had a thing to hide, meant her father felt shame. Which was unbearable somehow.

She rested her head on the stool by his feet. Whispered, “Daddy,” touched him lightly. He continued to snore. “Wake up,” she persisted. “Wake up .” But he didn’t. She noticed the slippers by her knees on the rug.

As gently as possible and as silently as she could, she slipped one of the slippers onto one of his feet. It dangled like a shoe on a shoe tree. Then the other. At the very least the bruises were hidden from view.

“No,” he said, barely.

Taiwo leapt up in panic, taking a single bound back from the window and moon into the depth of the dark where, concealed by the shadow, she closed her eyes, waiting for yelling. It didn’t come. He made another noise, a wet, fast-asleep noise, murmured “no” again, softly, then silence. Then snoring. She opened her eyes and stepped forward, still fearful. His head was now upright. He was talking in his sleep.