Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

“Is this where you live?” she says, peering behind him, then at him.

He shakes his head. “…,” then, “come in.”

• • •

Later, indoors, another congress of three blowing, all, on the tea he’d been brewing from leaves (and on other things, hot things, to cool down the anguish, as one soothes a baby, shhhhh ) — Sadie explains. “I wanted to call you,” she says to him, sheepish, “but I didn’t have a number. I only had this.” She holds up the card that he made for her birthday, on the one side a drawing in simple pastels, brown and violet and orange, her face vaguely, close up, the other his writing, happy birthday, baby s , which he’d sent to her wrapped in glycine via FedEx, having scribbled on the label the required return address. “So I made up that story about the paper, I mean, kind of, we did have to write one instead of an exam, and the professor said if we needed extra time after Friday, we could leave it with the doorman at her building in New York, but I mean, clearly, I lied,” with a quick glance at Taiwo, “because I didn’t think you’d come if I told you the truth,” with a quick glance at Kehinde, “and you’re, like, in hiding and no one can call you…” and more in this vein, not a word of which Kehinde can hear for the silence his mind sometimes lays on his tongue and his ears. Like a mother, protective, covering the ears of her infant as something too loud makes a sound in its space, or its eyes in the sunlight. Two soft hands of silence that rest on his mouth and his ears. “… Are you mad?” Sadie is frowning, at him, then at Taiwo. “What’s wrong with him?”

“Nothing,” says Taiwo, sipping tea.

“I’m not mad at you,” he says in his head.

“Why aren’t you talking?”

“I don’t know why,” he says in his head.

“He doesn’t know.” Taiwo nods to Sadie and gestures. “Keep going.”

“We haven’t even gotten to the bad part.” Sadie sighs. She looks at him pityingly. She looks like their father. The tilting-up eyes set in valleys of bone. He has always rather envied her this, and his brother, that they bear such a resemblance to the people they come from, Olu a darker-skinned Fola, classically Yoruba, Sadie a lighter-skinned Kweku, classically Ga. “Aboriginal intransigent” he calls this kind of feature set, the marker of a people with a sticky set of genes or else the product of a process of refinement and reinforcement over century upon century of mass reproduction. Ethiopian eyes, Native American cheekbones, the black hair/blue eyes of the Welsh, Nordic skin: it’s a record of something, he thinks, a visual record of the history of a People, capital P , in the world. That he can find, and finds familiar, the same squarish lip shape, the high-riding brow bone and regal hooked nose on his mother and brother as carved out of ivory by sixteenth century artisans on ritual masks, that the face keeps repeating, the one face, over and over, across ages and oceans and lovers and wars, like a printmaker’s matrix, a good one, worth reusing — is wondrous to Kehinde. He envies them this. His siblings and their parents belong to a People, bear the stamp of belonging.

He and Taiwo do not. Their features are a record, yes, but not of a People, the art history of Peoplehood, constant and strong, but the shorter, very messy, lesser history of people, small p , two at least, who one day happened to make love. As children they’d decided they were aliens, or adopted, notwithstanding the funny photo of their mother in the hall (Fola massively pregnant with a smiling Mr. Chalé and the pink twinned tomato she’d grown in his yard). It wasn’t until later, at thirteen, in Lagos, just arrived at Uncle Femi’s, ushered into the lounge, that they’d see, from the threshold, standing frozen with wonder, the face that theirs came from, there, white, on the wall.

• • •

The woman behind them, Auntie Niké, pushed them forward, her ruby red talons digging into their skin. “What is it?” she asked — rather, spat: hostile t sounds, a thick Lagosian accent, matching accent-piece scowl. She’d been pushing and pulling since they got to the airport, both stunned into silence she assumed to be awe, pulling their suitcases, “This way, darrings,” pushing them into the Mercedes, “don’t touch the leather with your fingers, ehn , they’re oily,” as they drove.

Lagos, through the window, was not as he’d pictured, not luscious, the tropics, bright yellow and green. It was gray, urban-gray, the sky smoggy and muted and clogged with tall buildings, a dirty Hong Kong. The highway from the airport was packed with huge lorries and rusting okadas and shiny Mercedes, all honking, one long steady whine of annoyance, the whole city singing the same nasal dirge. The palm trees looked weary. The harbor was gray, the same shade as the sky, full of barges and yachts. As they’d crossed the bridge, leaving the island of Ikeja for the mainland, Lagos Island, he glimpsed a large sign: THIS IS LAGOS. Not Welcome to Lagos, Lagos Welcomes You , but simply THIS IS LAGOS.

“This is Lagos,” Niké spat.

He found her grotesque, this never-heard-of Auntie Niké with her skin chemically bleached to a wan grayish-beige and a tawny-brown wig falling slick to her shoulders, red lipstick and blush bloodying cheekbones and lips. But the black eyes betrayed her — exposing some sorrow, collected and stagnant, rank puddles of grief — when she touched his cheek, pulling, “A pretty boy, ar’t you?” and he wasn’t afraid of her, not then, not yet.

They’d pulled into the gates of their uncle’s apartment, which from the outside didn’t look like much, four or five floors. It was not until they entered the foyer, then the elevator, that they understood the scale of things. The building was his. The whole building, four stories, belonged to the uncle who was waiting in the penthouse, they were told, going up. She pushed them off the elevator, “Leave your luggage for the houseboy,” with the uncontainable joy of a child on Christmas morning, “To the left, ehn , he’s waiting,” down the double-width hallway to doors standing open to opera, full blast.

Indeed, he was. Waiting. This heard-of Uncle Femi who had come, late in the action, out of nowhere, months before: winning solution to the problem of Where the Twins Should Go to High School, what with their father having hoofed it and the prep school fees too high. Alternatives included the very tony public high school that their mother chanced to visit on an unfortunate afternoon, pulling her car into the lot just as a bus of Metco students was off-loading fighting freshmen screaming swears and throwing blows. The most odious of options was to ask (her word, “beg”) that Olu’s high school, Milton Academy, review their eligibility for financial aid, despite the complicating facts that they had paid the full tuition for the three years he had been there and that no one had, say, died. Then out of thin air appeared an uncle in Nigeria with whom they might live, attending international school and avoiding potential indoctrination into a “pathologically criminalized culture” while their mother found her sea legs as a working single parent.

Fola, who had never once mentioned a brother, nor any other family, nor any of her past, had sat them down simply, him and Taiwo, in the kitchen. “I can’t manage at the moment,” she had started, then stopped. She shook her head, closed her eyes, covered her mouth, as if willing the hurt to stay put in her throat. He could feel her tears rising, a tide, up the middle, but stared at her, frozen, unable to speak. He wanted to say, “He’ll come back, Mom. Don’t worry.” He wanted to say, “Dr. Yuki threw him out in his scrubs.” But had promised in the Volvo, if you could maybe not mention—, don’t worry, I won’t, so said nothing at all.