Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

She was dead, in the village, the only place she’d ever go.

His heart broke in one place. The first break. He didn’t feel it. Olu giggled, soft, the only sound in the room. Kweku looked at Olu, suddenly remembering that he was holding him. Olu looked, awestruck, at the butterfly on her toe.

Black and blue (swordtail), just coming to rest, an almost neon shade of turquoise, black markings, white dots. It fluttered around his mother’s foot, a lazy lap, then lifted off, flapping blithely toward the triangular dome and out the little window. Gone.

“This is your grandmother.” Changed the tense. “ Was .” Olu looked at Kweku, not recognizing the voice. And he at his mother. “I told you,” he mustered. “I told you I’d return—” but couldn’t manage the rest.

So he sat on the floor, on a raffia mat. In the heat and the smell of it, the stench of new death. He rubbed Olu’s back until the child fell asleep (fifteen minutes, not more, such a well-behaved boy). Then stayed in semidarkness, who knows for how long, maybe hours, with the sunlight changing, shifting, on the wall.

He didn’t think what he thought he’d think. That he shouldn’t have left. Without saying good-bye. That the last time he saw her — when they’d had that horrid argument about whether he should accept the full scholarship or not, when she’d said that he was needed here , not “Pencil-wherever”—he shouldn’t have said what he said.

That she was “jealous.”

Of course she was jealous. She was thirty-eight years old. She had never left Ghana. Her youngest daughter was dead. Her genius-husband had absconded with the tide in the moonlight (or abandoned her, more likely, unable to face her for shame). Now here was her son — her genius-son, sixteen, shoeless — trying to abscond with American missionaries to the president’s alma mater (motto: “if the son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.” Indeed. And if the son shall win a scholarship?). In her mother-heart she knew.

That he would not “go and come,” that there was nothing to come back to, that he would learn — as she had wanted, a gifted youngster herself, plucked from school at age seven to fetch firewood and water — and leave. As she wanted.

It didn’t need to be said.

• • •

Those thoughts came later. (And for many years after, when he’d try to unsmell the damp stench of new death.) What he thought as he sat was: how different the quiet. It had never been this quiet in this hut, growing up. And that he might have rather liked it if he only could have sat in it, like this, alone and quiet. And that she must have felt the same. This is why she’d made them all wake up so early and leave the hut, all of them, five A.M., out! not for “idle hands” or “early birds,” or whatever else the mission had Ghanaian mothers hawking to their pikin in those days. It was so she could lie on her back on her mattress in silence and solitude, arms at her side. Just looking at the reeds arching in toward the center high above her. Clever structure: on your back it felt huge. Clever lover: hoping, praying, that he’d one day make the widow “wife”—the one with the little black transistor radio that she carried with her everywhere she went like a pet — had designed his mud hut so a girl on his bed would look up and feel distance, expansiveness, height. She’d sent them away so she could: feel some distance. Some quiet. Just lie there. Five, ten minutes max. Soon they’d be back from the well and their washing, six children (then five), two boys, four skinny girls. Soon the whole hut would be full of their motion, then so full of moisture, they’d all go outside.

Now, five A.M., she could lie, still, in silence, the waves nearby making what wasn’t quite noise. Perhaps admiring the genius of her runaway husband? At peace for a moment with the cards she’d been dealt? A woman, born in Gold Coast, in 1941, with the whole world at war with itself. But not here. Here at the edge of the world, the frayed edges. Here frozen in time pounding yam into paste. Fetching firewood and water. Watching boats push off, wistful. Above all things wanting to go .

• • •

Finally, Fola, from outside the hut.

“Darling,” very gently. “Are you in there?”

He wasn’t. He was nowhere, he was missing, he was outside of himself. “I’m here.”

“Is the baby…?”

“The baby’s asleep.”

But he knew what she meant: that it was wrong in some way to have new life so long in the presence of death. He lifted up the baby and handed him out to his mother, leaning in, her head tipped to the side.

“Just another minute.” As if he were in a bathroom.

He stayed until midnight, the tears too unripe.

His second wife Ama is asleep in that bedroom as he loves her most: dreaming, a bridge made of flesh. So he won’t get his slippers. He’ll go make the coffee. It can’t be past four A.M. — what woke him up? — now he doesn’t remember — what day is it? Sunday. Kofi’s day off. No more banging of nails. Just the silence and stillness. Aloneness and quiet. He thinks, I rather like it, this odd sense of pause. Of the morning suspended between darkness and daybreak, and him suspended with it, adrift in the gray. Too late to resume sleeping, too early to get going. On pause for the moment. The coffee, he thinks.

And is turning to go in to decamp to the kitchen when he sees the thing, barely, from the corner of his eye. There is no way of knowing what would have happened to him otherwise, had he not seen, remembered, and thought of her face. Had he continued out of the sunroom through the door into the Dining Wing, through the dining room, to the kitchen, to make mocha and toast. Most likely he’d have noticed the constriction in the chest and the shortness of breath and known instantly: go . Would have tracked down the heparin in the medicine closet — unrushed, hyperfocused — then tracked down a phone. Would have called his friend Benson, another Ghanaian from Hopkins who now runs a high-end private hospital in Accra (and who just yesterday rang and left a very strange voicemail, something about having seen Fola here in Ghana; couldn’t be). Would have gotten hold of Benson, agreed to meet him at the hospital. Would have found his sneakers waiting by the door for his run. Would have tried to think back, as he laced up his laces, to the first of the chest pangs ( too beautiful sometimes ). Would have glanced at the clock. Thirty minutes. Easy peasy. Would have driven to the hospital, leaving Ama who can’t drive. And so forth.

Would have noticed.

And so known.

And so gone.

But he sees the thing, barely, bright turquoise and black.

• • •

Just coming to rest on a blossom, bright pink. When it comes to him suddenly: the name, by her face.

“Bougainvillaea,” he hears her saying.

“It sounds like a disease. The patient presented with bougainvillaea.”

“You be quiet.” She sucked her teeth.

But when he looked she was laughing. At the sink, hands in blooms, small, magnificent, magenta. “Absolutely beautiful,” he said.

“Yes. Aren’t they?”

“No. You are.”

She laughed again, blushing. “You be quiet,” but quietly. A smile taking shape. The sun from the window behind her a backlight. He thought to go hold her. Beheld her instead.

• • •

Why did I ever leave you? he thinks without warning, and the pang sends him reeling off the ledge to the grass. Once again his bare soles — which for years have known nothing but slipper leather, sock cotton, shower stall — object. The coldness, the wetness, the sharpness of grass blades. He takes these in, trying to unthink it, to breathe. But the words don’t relent, nor the shortness of breath. Just the why did I ever leave you , a song on repeat (with the bridge yet inaudible in the distance, too soon ) as he buckles now, gasping, brought low by the pain. “I don’t know,” he says aloud and to no one, but he’s lying. He closes his eyes; in the dark sees her face. Her brows knit together. Her mouth folded over. The voice of a woman. I know, I know, I know .