Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

• • •

The leaves on their street were ablaze in the sunset. He pulled into the driveway and turned off the car. He knew, though didn’t think it, that he couldn’t face Fola now (knowing, not knowledge), that he couldn’t brook the sight. To see Fola’s face on Kehinde’s for that instant was sufficient. To see his failure on Fola’s seemed too much to bear.

The light above the garage came on. All the lights in the house were on. Neither he nor Kehinde stirred nor spoke to acknowledge not moving. They sat as men do: side by side, facing forward, both silent and patient, waiting for something to say. “Do you want to see my painting?” Kehinde asked after a while. Kweku turned to him, embarrassed. He hadn’t thought to ask.

“Thank you, I would, please.”

Kehinde nodded. “One second.” He unzipped his portfolio and pulled out the piece.

• • •

Even in bad light it was breathtakingly beautiful. Not that Kweku began to know how to judge a piece of art. But it didn’t take an expert to see the achievement, the intelligence of the image, the simplicity of the forms. A boy and a woman, from the back, holding hands. Kweku pointed to the woman. “Who’s that?” Though he knew.

“That’s Mom,” Kehinde answered.

“And that must be you.”

“No, that’s—”

“Olu?”

“Um, no.”

“But it’s a boy, right?”

“It’s you.”

“Me?!” Kweku laughed. A sudden sound in the quiet.

“…” Stalling.

Still laughing. “But why am I so small ?”

“Because Mom says she always has to be the bigger person.”

Kweku laughed so hard now he started to cry. “Genius.”

A small smile, fifteen seconds and not longer. “You like it?”

“I love it. Pure genius.” He caught his breath. “She does say that, doesn’t she?”

“With ‘don’t I’ at the end of it. I always have to be the bigger person, don’t I ?”

Kweku laughed harder, tears streaming down his cheeks. “Right.”

Kehinde giggled bashfully and glanced at the house. “It was supposed to be for Mom. But you can have it if you want it.”

“I would love that. She won’t mind?”

“Mom? No. She has loads.”

“Right.” It was he who didn’t know that they had birthed a little Basquiat, not she. She was the parent. He was the provider. He stopped laughing. “I’d l-l-love it.” His voice breaking (other parts of him also). “How do I… take it?”

“I roll it. Like this.”

“Wait. Don’t you have to sign it first?”

“Only famous artists sign their paintings.”

“Only foolish artists wait until they’re famous. Do you have a pen?”

Kehinde was smiling too widely to speak. He reached for his backpack. Kweku stopped him.

“Use this.” He plucked the silver pen from his unused scrubs pocket (a graduation gift from Fola, for prescriptions, engraved). Kehinde took the pen and turned it over in his fingers.

“It’s so nice. Where’d you get it?”

“From your mother. Of course.”

Kehinde nodded, smiling. Another glance at the house. He laid the painting on the dashboard to consider where to mark. Kweku considered Kehinde with some wonder at the change in him: how at ease he became as his hand touched the paper, how his shoulders relaxed, breath released, standing down. He was the same with a body on a table, silver knife in lieu of silver pen. How had he missed it?

So often he’d confided in Fola at night that he just didn’t “get” this slim good-looking boy; unlike Olu who reminded him so much of himself, Kehinde was a veritable black hole. Fola always said something vague in reply about the inscrutable nature of the second-born twin or recited again with great jingoistic pride the Yoruba myth of ibeji.

The myth:

ibeji (twins) are two halves of one spirit, a spirit too massive to fit in one body, and liminal beings, half human, half deity, to be honored, even worshipped accordingly. The second twin specifically — the changeling and the trickster, less fascinated by the affairs of the world than the first — comes to earth with great reluctance and remains with greater effort, homesick for the spiritual realms. On the eve of their birth into physical bodies, this skeptical second twin says to the first, “Go out and see if the world is good. If it’s good, stay there. If it’s not, come back.” The first twin Taiyewo (from the Yoruba to aiye wo , “to see and taste the world,” shortened Taiye or Taiwo ) obediently leaves the womb on his reconnaissance mission and likes the world enough to remain. Kehinde (from the Yoruba kehin de , “to arrive next”), on noting that his other half hasn’t returned, sets out at his leisure to join his Taiyewo, deigning to assume human form. The Yoruba thus consider Kehinde the elder: born second, but wiser, so “older.”

And so it was.

Kehinde wasn’t lesser, less outgoing, less social, “in the shadow” of Taiwo, a shadow himself. He was something else. From somewhere else. Otherworldly like Ekua. An empath like Fola. And for whatever it was worth, Kweku saw now with awe, like his father (and his father before him).

• • •

Kehinde signed neatly in the lower right corner. Kweku touched his shoulder. “Why, thank you, Mr. Sai.”

“You’re welcome, Dr. Sai.” Kehinde’s smile quickly faded. The word doctor hung between them like an odor in the car. Dogs began a canon of cacophonous barking. Kehinde looked out at the house a little longer. The light went off in Taiwo’s room. Then on, then off. Like a signal. Then on. Kehinde turned back to Kweku, turning back into a black hole. “Your pen.”

“Yours.”

“But it’s—”

“Keep it.”

“Are you sure?” Turning it over.

“I’d be honored for you to have it.”

“Thank you, Dad.” Another odor.

Kweku reached over and touched Kehinde’s face, rubbing gently with one finger the space between his brows as he often did with Fola, trying to rub away her frown, though it never really worked and didn’t now. “It must be time for dinner.” Though it wasn’t. Thirty minutes yet. “Your mother will want to hear all about class. You go ahead.”

“You’re not coming?”

“Just a second.”

Kehinde nodded, not smiling. “Your painting,” he said.

He rolled it up neatly and handed it to Kweku. The cameraman filmed: The Intelligent Parent Falls Dumb. Kweku gripped the painting as one does when one means I’ll treasure this always but can’t find the words. The words that he found were, “If you could maybe not mention—”

“Don’t worry. I promise. I won’t.”

And then silence.

“Okay,” said Kweku.

“Okay,” said Kehinde. He waited for a moment then got out of the car.

“I love you,” said Kweku, but the door closed on “I.”

Kehinde didn’t hear and went inside.

• • •

He waited one moment, then backed down the driveway. He didn’t stop driving until Baltimore, seven hours, straight, I-95 stretching out like dark ocean. Flat. Driving without seeing, under moon, into black. He checked into a hotel near Hopkins Hospital, one he remembered. When he called home at last she was sobbing, but clear. “Kehinde won’t tell me what happened, says he promised. You’re scaring me. What happened? Where are you? What’s wrong?”

He said very simply that he was sorry and he was leaving. That if she sold the house at value, she’d have enough to start again. That it was quite possible that he had never actually deserved her, not really. That he’d wiped them out trying to beat the odds.

“Beat the odds. What does that mean? Are you in danger? Have you been gambling? Are you in physical danger? Where are you?”