Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

Fine.

Sadness, tension, absence, angst — but fine , as she birthed them, alive if not well, in the world, fish in water, in the condition she delivered them (breathing and struggling) and this is enough. Perhaps not for others, Fola thinks, other mothers who pray for great fortune and fame for their young, epic romance and joy (better mothers quite likely; small, bright-smiling, hard-driving, minivan-mothers), but for her who would kill, maim, and die for each child but who knows that the willingness to die has its limits.

That death is indifferent.

Not she (though she seems), but her age-old opponent, her enemy, theirs, the common enemy of all mothers — death, harm to the child — which will defeat her, she knows.

But not today.

• • •

The fear recedes. The roaring persists. The rough snuffling slosh of the broken machine. The heat grows assertive, as if feeing ignored. The bedsheet and nightgown go suddenly cold.

She gets out of bed, knocking her knee as she does, quietly cursing the house, its deficient A/C. The night watchman Mr. Ghartey was meant to have fixed it, or meant to have had his electrician-cousin come fix it, or meant to have called the white man who installed it to come fix it — the plan remains largely unclear. “He is coming” is the answer whenever she asks. “I beg, he is coming.” For weeks now, hot air. But the relationship is young, between her and her staff, and she knows to go slow, to tread lightly. She is a woman, first; unmarried, worse; a Nigerian, worst; and fair-skinned. As suspicious persons go in Ghana, she might as well be a known terrorist. The staff, whom she inherited along with the house and its 1970s orange-wool-upholstered wooden furniture, sort of tiptoes around her poorly masking their shock. That she moved here alone. To sell flowers .

Worse: that she arrived on that Saturday, from the airport, in the morning, in the white linen outfit and open-toe shoes and, alighting the cab, said, “How are you?” incomprehensibly, with British a and American r . Worst: that no man alighted the taxi thereafter.

That she shook their hands, seeking their eyes.

That, leaving her suitcases (three? were there more? was this all? a whole life in America?) by the cab, she proceeded directly to the wall to put her face in the crawlers. “Bougainv iiii llea!” Still incomprehensible.

That she greets them in the morning with this same odd “How are you?” and thanks them as bizarrely for doing their jobs. “ Thank you” to the houseboy when he washes her clothing. “ Thank you” to the cook when he sets out her meals. “ Thank you” to the gatekeeper when he opens the gate and again as he closes it.

That she smokes.

That she wears shorts.

That she wanders around the garden in these shorts and a sun hat with cigarettes and clippers, snipping this, snipping that, hauling her catch into the kitchen, where she stands at the counter, not pounding yam, not shelling beans, but arranging flowers . It amuses her, always has, this disregard of Africans for flowers, the indifference of the abundantly blessed (or psychologically battered — the chronic self-loather who can’t accept, even with evidence, that anything native to him, occurring in abundance, in excess, without effort, has value). They watch as research scientists observe a new species, a hybrid, herbivorous, likely harmless, maybe not. Masked, feeding her, washing for her, examining her clothing when they think she’s not looking, whispering, watching her eat. She hasn’t yet told them that she once lived in Ghana, that she speaks and understands all they say in hushed Twi about her flowers, flowered nightdresses, distressing eating habits like pulling out and eating the weeds (lemongrass). She learned this from her father, who spoke the major Nigerian languages plus French, Swahili, Arabic, and snatches of Twi. “Always learn the local language. Never let on to the locals,” he’d say, a cigar at the end of its life on his lips, giving birth to a laugh—

• • •

upper left.

There it is.

The movement she was feeling for.

Left upper quadrant, in the vicinity of Sadie but closer to the heart, not a tugging or a tightening or a throbbing of dread but an echo, an emptiness, an emptying out. A familiar sensation. Not the one she was feeling for, fearful of (auguring harm done the child) but remembered, unmistakable, from four decades prior, a memory she forgot she still has.

• • •

She sits back down absently, abandoning her mission, whatever it was, a word with Mr. Ghartey perhaps, or a smack to the side of the wall-mounted machine, or a fresh set of bedsheets, a postnightmare drink. And thinks: odd, to be returned to the death of her father, which she thinks of so rarely, as one recounts dreams, out of focus, diluted, not the event but the emotion, a sadness that’s faded, dried, curled, lost its color. The event she can see clear as day even now: Lagos, July 1966, the short chain of events:

first the waking up gasping, cold, thirteen years old, all her posters of the Beatles stuck with tacks to the walls, sitting alarmed in the dark with that space in her chest, unfamiliar with the feeling (same odd emptiness as now). Second: making her way from her room down the hall, to her father’s room, forgetting that he’d traveled to the North, gone to see about his in-laws, her “grandparents,” the Nwaneris, whom she’d never actually met and never would. No one said it. Never him, her kind, broad-shouldered, woolly-haired father, who wept for the loss of his bride every night, kneeling down by his bed beneath the portrait above it, Somayina Nwaneri, fair, gold-eyed. A ghost.

Twenty-seven.

Fairy ghostmother.

Had bled out in labor.

A stranger to Fola, no more than a face, so unusually pale that she looked in her portrait as if she’d been born without blood, cut from ice. Still so pretty. Stuff of legend. Local celebrity in Kaduna, Igbo father as famous for his post in the North as for plucking one rose from the grounds of the mission and marrying her, a Scotswoman, auburn-haired Maud. And the rest of it: shame, stillborn son, successive miscarriages, the shaking of heads and the wagging of tongues, see, the Scotswoman can’t bear the Igbo man’s child, then the one white-skinned daughter, the magic mulatto. Little princess of Kaduna. Colonial Administrator’s daughter. Won a bursary to study nursing in London after the war, promptly met and immediately married Kayo Savage, Fola’s father, lawyer, late of the Royal Air Force. Felled in childbirth, etc. No one said it. No one mentioned that they never came to see her, Rt. Hon. John and Maud. Nwaneri, never called nor sent a gift, but she could guess it: that they blamed her for their only daughter’s early death, as she would come to hate them for his.

But not yet.

First: waking at midnight with space in her chest. Second: slipping down the hallway to her father’s bedroom, vacant. Third: ascending to his empty bed, still warm with scent (rum, soap, Russian Leather) and covering her face with his thick kente blanket, then lying, unmoving, eyes open, heart racing. Still as a corpse, swathed in cotton and sweating, with the A/C not on, with her father not there, gone to Kaduna that morning, having heard from some friends that the Igbos in the North were in trouble again.

“ Again ?” she’d sighed, sulking, loudly slurping her breakfast ( gari , sugar water, ice), already knowing he was going by his having prepared this. “A bush girl’s breakfast” as he called it, mocking. Powdered yam in ice water, her favorite. If this grandfather of hers was as rich as they said, with his Cyclone CJ and his split-level ranch, then why must her father go “check on him” always, she’d asked, crunching ice, but she knew. He had to go, always, to appease them, to redeem himself, to beg again forgiveness for the death of Somayina (which was, technically speaking, not his fault but hers, infant Fola’s, the doctor’s at least, or the womb’s).