Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

They were allies still, lovers. There was no cause for anger. She’d never asked nor wanted that he tell or leave his wife. She had no particular interest in being a wife, for rather obvious reasons, and none in being his. But she wanted that he suffer . To know that he’d failed her. She was determined to withdraw so that he’d know that she’d failed; so that all of them, seeing her failure, would puzzle, would ask in hushed tones how this girl, this success —summa cum laude, NYU! PPE, Magdalen College! summer associate, Wachtell! — came to fall on her sword, whereon the answer would come, if not to them who were asking, then to him:

Because he let her.

And not him alone.

There was the other one, the first one, the one they’d deleted, the one who had backed down a sunset-lit drive while she watched from the window obscured by the darkness, having played with the lights to bid Kehinde inside: first off, then on, then off, then on: just sufficiently dark now to see in the car, the man’s face through the windshield, soft, narrow eyes narrower, fighting: then filling with, tears — but resolute.

He would know, too, she thought, sitting there silent as one sits on beaches: with knees to the chest, and the chin on the knees, and the breeze in the hair, and the taste of one’s tears bearing salt from the breeze. She would find him and tell him. He was somewhere in Ghana (according to Olu); she’d go there and wait. She’d be seated on his stoop when he came home from work, in a Volvo as she saw it, the sunset full swing. He’d see her from the driveway and slow to a stop with that look on his face per that scene in such films when a man on the run returns home before dark and the hit man is waiting, at ease, in plain sight, with his boots on the railing, a gun in one boot where the man in the driveway can see it. Like that. He’d stop, kill the engine, and stare from the car with his eyes meeting hers, hers unblinking, his wet, for he’d see in her face that a light had gone out and would know without words that his daughter was dead, that the girl he had left on a street in North America was not the one sitting on this stoop in West Africa, with boots propped on railing and pistol in boots, that she’d died because no one would save her. Indeed. She would drop out of law school and earn waiting tables the thousand-odd dollars to fly to Accra (against prior beliefs about the injustice of such pricing, an insult to immigrants the cost to fly east) so that he, too, would know, and would suffer from knowing, that he’d been too weak to protect her.

Or rather: this is how she planned it.

She should have come sooner.

She laughs, looking out at the streets of Accra. Two years imagining the look on his face, she is here and her father is gone.

v

He is sitting with his face to the window, his back to Taiwo, looking out at the road from the airport, at Accra, somehow different than he expected, not like Mali or Lagos, less glamour, more order. A suburb. With dust. There are the standard things, African things, the hawkers on the roadside, the color of the buildings the same faded beige as the air and the foliage, the bright printed fabrics, the never-finished construction sites (condos, hotels) giving the whole thing the feel of a home being remodeled in perpetuity, midproject, the men gone to lunch, the new paint already chipping and fading in the sunshine as if it never really mattered what color it was, stacked-up concrete blocks soldiers awaiting their orders, steel, sleeping machinery interrupting the green. This is familiar.

What strikes him is the movement, neither lethargic nor frenetic, an in-the-middle kind of pace, none of the ancientness of Mali nor the ambitiousness of Nigeria, just a steady-on movement toward what he can’t tell. There are the same big green highway signs seen the world over, proof positive of “development” as he’s heard the word used, as if developing a country means refashioning it as California: supermarkets, SUVs, palms, smog, and all. Children in T-shirts with rap stars’ huge faces run up to the taxi to peddle their wares: imported apples in columns, PK chewing gum, bananas, daily papers, deconstructed exfoliation sponge, matches. The wares beckon cheerfully in primary colors, imported from China, South Africa, all plastic, all manner of plastic and cellophane and packaging as if the poor love nothing more than kitsch wrapped up like gifts. A man without legs has a boy without shoes wheel him carefully through the traffic in the middle of the road to the cab, where he knocks on the passenger window and holds up a hand missing fingers for coins.

“Go, go, go,” shoos the driver, suddenly agitated. He rolls down his window to shout in coarse Twi.

Kehinde peers down, sees the man, is embarrassed. He rifles through his sweatshirt for five single bills. “Don’t shout at them, please, sir,” he says to the driver. The driver looks back at him, sweating and stunned. Kehinde rolls his window down and holds out the dollars. “Here,” he says. “Take it.” The driver sucks his teeth. The boy without shoes takes just one of the dollars. The man without legs smiles, a smile without teeth. “Take the rest,” Kehinde says, but the boy doesn’t hear, and the taxi starts moving as the stoplight turns green.

“They’re thieves,” says the driver. “They come from Mauritania. They steal from the tourists.”

“We’re not tourists,” Kehinde says.

The driver starts laughing, one golden tooth glinting, as if to say only tourists give beggars U.S. dollars , but quickly recovers and rolls up his window, asking casually, “So where are you from?”

Kehinde looks at Taiwo, who is paying no attention, then back at the driver, not much older than they. He can sense in the man a very particular form of aggression, mounting, familiar from Lagos and London and New York, to do with the fact that they’re both brown-skinned males unequally yoked by the side effects. He’d rather be ferrying some tense blond-haired couple in his taxi than them — brown, well dressed, the same age — whom he takes for American and assumes to be rich, at least richer than he by some cruel twist of fate. “Have you ever been to Africa?” he adds proprietarily.

“Nigeria and Mali.”

“But not Ghana,” he insists.

Kehinde shakes his head, and the driver looks satisfied. Kehinde feels the need to add, “Our father’s from here.” The instant he says it he wishes he hadn’t, for now comes the surge he’s been keeping at bay in the form of a headache, a sudden searing something in the space between his eyebrows so sharp he gasps, “ Was .”

The driver doesn’t hear this. “Where’s ‘here’?” he asks, challenging.

“Ghana,” mumbles Kehinde. It sounds like a lie.

“Oh yeah? Where in Ghana?” The driver is smirking.

“I don’t know where,” says Kehinde, now closing his eyes.

“You don’t know where he’s from, your own father,” says the driver. He sucks his teeth, glancing at Taiwo, still mute. “Why don’t you ask him?”

As it finally hits him, “He died,” Kehinde answers and starts, at the laugh.

He can’t quite imagine what his sister finds funny, but she appears to be laughing, outright, her back turned. “Taiwo,” he whispers, thinking maybe she’s crying, but she turns to him dry-eyed.

“He’s gone.” She shakes her head. She doesn’t stop laughing.

The driver looks incredulous. “Father na’ dead and she laugh for,” he scoffs. But says nothing further, just turns on the radio (inconsolate gospel) and looks straight ahead.

Both the taxi and Mercedes pull into the drive where the house staff stands waiting at attention, in a line. Sadie has been sleeping for the twenty-minute ride and now opening her eyes says, “Where are we?” Olu and Ling side by side in the back, neither moving nor speaking, peer out at the house. Fola peers also with hands on the wheel as if considering whether this is the right place or not. One breath, then she stirs, pulling the key from the ignition and her sunglasses from her forehead. “We’re home, I suppose.”