Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

She sets down the camera. It goes up in smoke.

“I love you,” he says.

“I know, I know, I know.”

“It hurts,” he says.

His mother says, “Rest.”

Fola says, “Yes.”

So he lies in the grass. “Love grass” it’s called, of all things. Bloody man.

• • •

He does not think what he thought he would think. That he never said bye or that it goes by so fast or that he should have chased Olu down the stairs when he came or seen Sadie grow up or not driven away. He thinks that he was wrong. About the whole thing being forgettable. Not that he won’t be forgotten — he will, has been already — but about the details being unremarkable. What it amounts to in the balance. There is one detail worth remembering.

That he found her in the end.

Folasadé Savage on the run from a war. Kweku Sai fleeing a peace that could kill. Two boats lost at sea, washed to shore in Pennsylvania (“Pencil-wherever”) of all places, freezing to death, alive, in love. Orphans, escapees, at large in world history, both hailing from countries last great in the eighteenth century — but prideful (braver, hopeful) and brimful and broke — so very desperately seeking home and adventure, finding both. Finding both in each other, being both to each other, the nights that they’d toast with warm Schweppes in cheap flutes or make love in the bathtub in moonlight or laugh until weeping: that he found what he hadn’t dared seek. When it would have been enough to have found his way out, to have started where he started and to have ended up farther, a father and a doctor, whatever else he’s become. To have dared to become. To escape would have sufficed. To be “free,” if one wants swelling strings, to be “human.” Beyond being “citizen,” beyond being “poor.” It was all he was after in the end, a human story, a way to be Kweku beyond being poor. To have somehow unhooked his little story from the larger ones, the stories of Country and of Poverty and of War that had swallowed up the stories of the people around him and spat them up faceless, nameless Villagers, cogs; to have fled, thus unhooked, on the small SS Sai for the vastness and smallness of life free of want: the petty triumphs and defeats of the Self (profession, family) versus those of the State (grinding work, civil war)— yes, this would have been quite enough , Kweku thinks. Born in dust, dead in grass. Progress. Distant shore reached.

That still farther, past “free,” there lay “loved,” in her laughter, lay “home” in her touch, in the soft of her Afro? He almost can’t fathom it. Had never dared dream of it, believing such endings unavailable to him, or to them, who walked shoeless, who smiled in their deaths and who sang in their dreams and who didn’t much matter. That he found her and loved her and made their love flesh four times over — it matters, if only to him. A point to the story. That girl-child met boy-child. And loved him.

Even if he lost her.

So he starts to rise up, to go kiss her in the fountain, not to behold or to be held by but to hold her. Or tries. He makes it as far as a sort of a push-up position before his valves lose the plot.

• • •

And so to death.

He lies here facedown with a smile on his face. Now the butterfly alights, finished drinking. A spectacular contrast, the turquoise against pink. But unconcerned with this, with beauty, with contrast, with loss. It flitters around the garden, coming to hover by his foot. Fluttering its wings against his soles as if to soothe them. Open, shut. The dog smells new death and barks, startling the butterfly. It flaps its wings once, flies away.

Silence.

Fola wakes breathless that Sunday at sunrise, hot, dreaming of drowning, a roaring like waves. Dark. Curtains drawn, humid, the wet bed an ocean: half sleeping still, eyes closed, she sits up, cries out. But her “Kweku!” is silent, two bubbles in water that now, her lips parted, run in down her throat, where they find, being water, more water within her, her belly, below that, her thighs, dripping wet — the once-white satin nightdress soaked, wet from the inside, and outside, a second skin, now brown with sweat — and, becoming a tide, turn, return up the middle, thighs, belly, heart, higher, then burst through her chest.

The sob is so loud that it rouses her fully. She opens her eyes and the water pours out. She is sobbing uncontrollably when the tide subsides abruptly, leaving no trace whatsoever of the dream as it does (much as waves erase sand-script, washing in without warning, wiping the writings of children and of lovers away). Only fear remains vaguely, come unhooked from its storyline, left on damp sand like a thin sparkling foam. And the roaring: sharp racket in dull humid darkness, the A/C as noisy as one that still works.

Sparkling fear-foam, and roaring.

She sits up, disoriented, unable to see for the drawn mustard drapes so just sitting there, baffled, unclear what’s just happened, or why she was crying, or why she’s just stopped. With the usual questions: what time is it? where is she? In Ghana , something answers, the bulbul outside, so-called “pepper birds” bemusedly joining the racket in ode to oblivion to things that don’t work. So not nighttime, then: pepper birds, the morning in Ghana, the place that she’s moved to, or fled to.

Again.

Without fanfare or forethought, as flocks move, or soldiers, on instinct, without luggage, setting off at first light:

found the letter on a Monday, in the morning, in Boston, sorting mail at the counter (coffee, WBUR, “a member station supported by listeners like her”), bills for school fees, utilities. One dropped to the floor. Rather, floated to: pastel blue, flimsy, a feather, slipping silently from the catalogs of Monday’s thick mail. A proper letter. And lay there. In the white light of winter, that cheap “air mail” paper no one uses anymore.

She opened it. Read it. Twice. Set it on the countertop. Left for the flower shop, leaving it there. Came home in the dark to the emptiness, retrieved it. Read again that Sena Wosornu, surrogate father, was dead. Was dead and had left her, “Miss” Folasadé Savage, a three-bedroom house in West Airport, Accra. Stood, stunned, in her coat in the kitchen and silence, soft silver-black darkness, tiles iced by the moon. Monday evening. Left Friday. JFK to Kotoka. Nonstop. Without fanfare. Just packed up and left.

• • •

Now she squints at the darkness and makes out the bedroom, unfamiliar entirely after only six weeks. Unfamiliar shapes, shadows, and the space here beside her, unfamiliar entirely after sixteen years, still.

She touches her nightdress, alarmed at the wetness. She peels the drenched satin away from her skin. She touches her stomach as she does when this happens, when fear hovers shyly, not showing its face yet, when something is wrong but she doesn’t know what or with which of the offspring that sprang from this spot. And the stomach answers always (the “womb” maybe, more, but the word sounds absurd to her, womb , always has. A womb . Something cavernous, mysterious, a basement. A word with a shadow, a draft. Rhymes with tomb ). She touches her stomach in the four different places, the quadrants of her torso between waist and chest: first the upper right (Olu) beneath her right breast, then the lower right (Taiwo) where she has the small scar, then the lower left (Kehinde) adjacent to Taiwo, then the upper left (Sadie), the baby, her heart. Stopping briefly at each to observe the sensation, the movement or stillness beneath the one palm. Sensing:

Olu — all quiet. The sadness as usual, as soft and persistent as the sound of a fan. Taiwo — the tension. Light tugging sensation. But no sense of danger, no cause for alarm. Kehinde — the absence, the echoing absence made bearable by the certainty that if , she would know (as she knew when it happened, as she knew the very instant, cutting pastel-blue hydrangea at the counter in the shop, suddenly feeling a sort of seizure, lower left, crying, “Kehinde!” with the knife slipping sideways and slicing her hand. Dripping blood on the counter, on the stems and the blossoms, on the phone as she dialed, already knowing which it was; getting voicemail, “This is Keh—” call waiting, clicking over, frantic sobbing, “Mom, it’s Taiwo. Something happened.” “I know.” She knew as did Taiwo the very instant that it happened, as the blade made its way through the skin, the first wrist. So that now, a year later — more, nearly two years later — having neither seen nor heard from him, she knows. That she’d know). Last, Sadie — fluttering, butterflies, a new thing this restlessness, this looking for something, not finding it.