Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

She doesn’t know. Maybe. So much she never asked him. So much she never told him. The aching for example. “Enough,” she would say, which he took to mean “stop,” and he would: floating gently to the surface, coming up, thinking she was exhausted when in fact it was the opposite: she feared his exhaustion. She was aching for more. More, always more of it, more of him, all: having opened, having been opened, wanting only to be filled: but never saying it, just holding him, lying, in silence, he sleeping beside her, he fulfilled, she unfilled. Why didn’t she tell him? And other things also. Why she never said yes when he asked her to come to those parties in Cambridge with colleagues in khakis and cheese cubes on toothpicks and immigrant maids and the requisite child trotted out after drinks to rend “Für Elise” proficiently before trotting to bed. Yes, they were boring. But the more it was heartbreaking, to watch him seek approval from far lesser men in his own fresh-pressed khakis, small eyes wide with hope that he, too, might soon be so at home in the world. Why didn’t she tell him? “You don’t have to impress them,” she might have said, “your excellence speaks for itself.” Instead of “the dishes” or “Sadie has a recital” or “Olu needs help with his science fair booth.” Instead of the silence, protective, destructive, like mites on a daylily nibbling away undetected for decades. And the biggest thing. The precedent. How she got to Pennsylvania.

How she packed up and left.

• • •

How: she had lain in that bedroom, in Lagos, unable to move or to think or to breathe with her head under covers, her hands on her ribcage, her chest emptied out, until nightfall. The housegirl returned as she did every Sunday and let herself in through the door at the back. She’d prepared the whole dinner and laid out the table before she thought strange that the house was so quiet. “Master!” she called, up the stairs, down the corridor. “Master, are you home? Miss Folasadé? Ah- ah .” Only then had Fola left his bed covered in sweat to ride, trembling, to the second-floor kitchen. “I’m here.”

The housegirl Mariama grabbed her forehead when she saw her. “A fever, you have a fever, where’s your father?” she cried.

Fola shrugged, groggy. “He went to Kaduna.”

“No!” cried Mariama, slumping promptly to the floor.

How: they’d just sat there, neither speaking nor eating, at a dining table set for two, built for fourteen. The Nwaneris from their portrait watched them sitting, black John seated, too, white Maud beside him standing, hand on husband’s epaulette. The food was set out, Fola’s favorite, egusi , but neither of them touched it; after an hour it was cold. After two her father’s partner at the law firm, Sena Wosornu, leaned frantically on the doorbell. Fola looked at Mariama. The housegirl was trembling, rocking, clutching her elbows and shaking her head, noiselessly mouthing some prayer. Fola took the shaking of the head to mean “don’t get the door” and stayed seated. Mariama lost her nerve. She stumbled to the entry, from which Fola heard whispers, then loud sudden sobbing, then Sena’s high voice. “The baby will hear you,” he scolded. The baby. What her father always called her, even then, and his friends.

Later that evening Sena came to her bedroom. He knocked on the door, came to sit on her bed. She was lying on her back with her feet on the wall on a poster of Lennon, her head hanging off.

“Fola,” he said. “I have something to tell you.”

She didn’t lift her head up. “I know, I know, I know.” Sena was upside down, bending to face her.

“Your father—”

“Don’t say it,” she said, and sat up.

He said she should pack. They would leave in the morning. His parents lived in Ghana. She’d be safer with them. If anything ever happens, take the baby to Ghana. Don’t leave her in Nigeria , her father had said. She packed a gold aso-oke , a birthday gift, records, his thick kente blanket and bell-bottom jeans. She didn’t pack photos or dresses or teddy bears. The details came later. They left before dawn.

How: at this airport, much smaller, as crowded, they landed, midsummer, July 1966, all the colors so different from Lagos, more yellows, the smell like the smell of a broken clay pot. A man with an Afro gone gray came to greet them, all bushy white beard, laughing eyes, wings of wrinkles. “You must be Fola!” He shook her hand. She shook her head. She didn’t know who she must be anymore. “People call me ‘Reverend.’ Reverend Mawuli Wosornu. Sena’s father,” he said, though he looked far too young.

The house was on a tree-lined street, wide with white houses for friends of the British, the odd Lebanese. They took her to a bedroom painted pink, a funny shade of pink she’d find decades later while shopping for mulch. (Home Depot. She was passing through the paint aisle when she saw it, from a distance, just the color swatch, familiar at once. She read the name. Innocence . Laughed out loud, bought it. Four gallons for the nursery for the child who follows twins.) She stood in the doorway and looked at the bedroom. Reverend Wosornu, behind her, “And this is your room.” She walked in and sat on the narrow twin bed, the stiff mattress; she stared at the candy pink walls. She looked at the man in the doorway. Said, “Thank you,” then lay down and slept, without eating, three days. On the fourth day the wife Vera Wosornu came to see her. Mrs. Wosornu looked older, looked old (fifty-four). A fat woman, haggard, no light in her pupils. She wore a black wig that slipped back, showing grays. “It’s time to get up,” she said. “Come eat your breakfast.” When Fola rolled over the woman was gone.

Breakfast was cocoa bread, pawpaw, eggs, coffee. Mrs. Wosornu ate noisily. Thick, buttered lips. Reverend Wosornu sipped his coffee, listening attentively to the radio. Pogroms in Nigeria ongoing . He switched this off. “Sir Charles Arden Clarke is a friend of the parish. Do you know who that is?”

Fola shook her head no.

“Eat,” said Mrs. Wosornu.

“Former governor of Gold Coast. And the founder of the Gold Coast International School.”

“It’s Ghana International School now,” snapped Mrs. Wosornu. “Eat,” she snapped at Fola.

Fola picked up her fork. The woman’s commands were so tactlessly forceful; it was almost a relief to be told what to do. She put a piece of pawpaw in her mouth but couldn’t chew it. She moved it around until it dissolved on her tongue.

“They’ve agreed to accept you,” said Reverend Wosornu, excited. “In ten years they’ve built quite a fine little school.”

“You’ll take your GCEs, then go to college in America.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Call me Mother.”

“Yes, Mother,” Fola said. The word sounded strange to her. Empty.

“That’s better.”

“Me, I’m just ‘Reverend.’ Not Father, not yet.”

“Speaking of fathers, yours was kind to our Sena.”

“ Vera ,” sighed the reverend, but his wife forged ahead.

“He can’t have any children, our Sena. Such a pity. Only son. And you know what the villagers say.” Fola didn’t know what the villagers said. The proverb was recited with mouth full of egg, “‘The woman who has one child only, has no child.’”

The reverend kept smiling. “Infant mortality,” he explained.

How: she finished high school, seldom speaking, barely eating. When the war came next summer, she didn’t much care. She skimmed the local papers, saw the pictures, heard the rumors (slaughtered civilians, starving children, German mercenaries, Welsh) but this “Nigeria” they spoke of was nowhere she knew of, not home, not a place she could see , so not real. She lost too much weight and excelled in her studies, having done it all in Lagos with her erstwhile private tutor. Her classmates took to calling her “Biafran,” but jealously. They envied her hair, glowing marks, tragic glamour. She allowed herself to be fondled by one out of boredom. He lived up the road in East Cantonments. Yaw. He was actually quite handsome, an athlete, later soldier, but modest in ambition (how: Kweku was her first). She sat her exams and came first in the year. She cut off her hair, tired of brushing. A scholarship was arranged by more friends of the parish at Lincoln University, where Nkrumah had gone. She’d wanted to go to Kings College as her father had, but didn’t object.