Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

And she did. In the literal sense could “feel others’ pain.” A proper empath, a thing he hadn’t believed existed when they met. His questions were endless. Where in her body did she feel it? How did she know it was his pain, not hers? (In her chest, on the left, a purely physical sensation, of foreign origin, now familiar, proper empathy.) That face.

“Darling,” she said.

“It’s a lie,” he repeated. But quietly. And was glad now to find his hands free. He grabbed his head, spinning, his gloves to his forehead, a futile attempt, keep the brain in one piece. “She’s never been ill for a day in her life. How? What are they saying?” He went to her side.

She handed him the letter, touching his free hand with hers. It was that cheap air mail paper no one uses anymore, flimsy pastel-blue sheets that, folded up, became envelopes.

All caps, slanting upward.

Unsteady black pen.

The letter didn’t say that his mother was ill. It said she was dying and would be dead in a month. It was two weeks old yesterday. He dropped it to the table. His hands began to tremble (other parts of him, too). Fola jumped up and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. For the first time since he bought it, he loved this beige coat. Its thickness put some distance between her chest and his trembling, his wife and his weakness, his quivering limbs. (And his cameraman in position across the room by the window couldn’t shoot the crumbling hero for his dull protective coat.)

“We’ll go to Ghana,” she said.

“With what money?” he mumbled. “We don’t have the money.”

“We’ll ask for it—”

“ No .” And carried on, desperate, “They’re overreacting… it’s an infection, not cancer… she’s not even fifty. She’ll be better by New Year… I’ll have the money by New Year…”

“We’ll ask for it, Kweku. We have to.”

They did.

• • •

Rather she did: that day spent the last of her cash on a ticket to Lagos to visit a louse, younger half-brother Femi, whose prostitute mother had taken her dead lover’s money and run.

Then Ghana, and the smell of Ghana, a contradiction, a cracked clay pot: the smell of dryness, wetness, both, the damp of earth and dry of dust. The airport. Bodies pushing, pulling, shouting, begging, touching, breathing. He’d forgotten the bodies. The proximity of bodies. In America the bodies were distant. The warmth of it. Pushing through the jostling throng, warm bodies, clutching Fola’s arm while Fola clutched the baby, leading his squadron on to the taxi rank. “Your purse!” he called over his shoulder. “Be careful! This is Ghana.”

“It is ?!”

But when he looked she was laughing. “My friend, I’m from Lagos. Never mind your small Ghana.” She winked. “I’m okay. We’re okay.”

And then home.

• • •

They rode into the village in a ramshackle taxi, a red and yellow jalopy expelling black smoke, bumping awkwardly up the dark red dirt road, no one speaking, even Olu sitting silently, as if in his baby-heart he knew. This wasn’t how he’d envisioned the triumphant return, political hysteria on the radio sans John Williams strings, but this driver was the only one working the rank who both accepted his price and knew the way to his town.

• • •

An hour outside of the city: the ocean.

Unannounced, without fanfare.

Just suddenly there .

From town they’d braved the then-unpaved road to the junction, where they’d turned up the dry empty hill to Kokrobité. The hill brought them down to the coast, blocked from view by the mounds of grass lining the left of the road. Then, abruptly, a clearing: cowed grass lying low before sand, sea, sky, endless. The dramatic reveal. The thing that was there all along, less surprising than startling, the scope, how it changed things. The air.

It was seven in the morning, he could tell without checking, by the men seated tugging in nets from the night: at least ten of them, eleven, in a vertical line along the end of a rope that stretched far out to sea. Heave-ho . Forward, backward, a perfected synchronization, hauling, all, with one movement like rowers on sand in once-bright colored T-shirts (much like the T-shirts sold at Goodwill), all the palm trees leaning with them. Fronds fluttering in the breeze.

He must have made some sound as he stared out the window because Fola laid a hand very lightly on his. As she did. Never taking, never “holding” his hand, just lightly laying hers on top. A choice. To hold or be held. He held her hand absently, not turning from the window. Unable to, glued there, transfixed by the view, with the first few tears forming now, loosely, like cumulus, clouding his eyes, too unripe yet to fall. The effect was to soften the edges, a filter, the beach sparkling gray in celestially blurred light, like a scene from those soaps all the nurses loved watching: irresistibly gripping if you only knew the plot. (And he did. Basic storyline. Dancing, sap, grandmas.) He stared like the nurses, through unfalling tears.

Why had he hated this view? Of this beach, of the backs of these fishermen, glistening brown, of the long wooden boats, evangelical names in bright tricolor paint on their splintering sides, Black Star Jesus, Jah Reign, Christ the Fisher of Men , in the red, yellow, green of the national flag and the national spirit of open-source ethos, this mixing of Anglican, Rastafarian, Ghanaian? What was there to hate in this? There was only openness. As far as he could see. A cheerful openness. An innocence. An innocent beach on the road to Kokrobité at seven A.M., November 1975, little country lurching, cheerful, unaware, to revolution. Little taxi lurching, blasting revolution, to grief.

• • •

And then her.

Not a bridge, her fulfillment the brick.

No jubilation, no drumming, no goats, and no fish.

• • •

Fola stayed waiting with his half-sisters Shormeh and Naa, their eyes filed with old hate and new grief. A crowd had gathered excitedly as they’d alighted the taxi and lingered now watching as he entered the hut. No one needed details (irresistibly gripping). His cameraman, among, didn’t follow him in.

He ducked as he entered, forgetting his height. Or its size, this small shanty, his childhood home. He carried his son, half asleep, six months old then, the American-born boy-child, to her.

The one bed.

She was lying on her back with her arms at her side, with the mats on the floor, the same mats he remembered. Dark, and so cool with the dome overhead. It was a well-structured hut, however minimal. Rounded clay walls with the massive thatch roof sixteen feet at its peak, a triangular dome. His father had built it. An artist, they told him, a Fante, a wanderer, a “genius like him.” (He’d been jailed after punching a drunk English sergeant who’d hassled his wife, jailed, then publicly flogged. There by the tree in the middle of the “compound,” this cluster of huts. Stripped to shorts at midday. “He left,” said the villagers simply. Thereafter. Just packed up his things, walked away, as he’d come. Others, now dead, claim he walked into the ocean in a sparkling white bubu , to his waist, then his head, without stopping. Further, forward, under, into the ocean. Like Jesus. With weights. Under moon. Into black.)

His brother looked surprised as he entered but said nothing. “Leave me,” he said to his brother. His brother left.

• • •

She could have been sleeping from the way she was lying there. He’d heard families say this and chuckled before. “We thought she was napping,” of beloved old Grandma, rushed putrefied to hospital days after death. Idiots, he’d think. Now he understood the confusion. She looked like she was sleeping. But was making no noise. Wasn’t dreaming of the places that she’d never been to.