Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

The staff comes forward as the car doors open. Everyone alights and stands looking at the house (except Kehinde who — much to the annoyance of Taiwo and the disturbance of Olu — stands looking at Ling). There is the usual combination of disorder and determination that occasions the arrival of a group at a residence: half of the bodies moving busily, lugging suitcases, half of the bodies looking awkward, out of place, trying to help, to be of use but not to get in the way of the bodies who know where to go, what to do. With the lightly frantic energy of awkward introductions, with no one quite knowing what to say or to whom, smiling at no one, shifting positions, making lax observations. Where’s the bathroom? Longing suddenly to be on one’s own.

Fola holds shoulders, steers bodies down hallways. “This is the room where you two boys will sleep.” She pushes in Olu and Kehinde and continues, “The girls in here,” pushing in Taiwo and Ling. “The baby—” she stops herself. “Sadie’s with me. I’d suggest a good nap now. We’ll eat at half six.” Any questions? No questions. “Good. Welcome to Ghana.” She takes Sadie to her bedroom, and leaves them to sleep.

ii

Sadie stares up at the wood-paneled ceiling, alone in this room down the hall from the rest.

“The bloody A/C died this morning—” said Fola, then bent as if nauseous and didn’t go on.

“Mom, are you sick?” Sadie asked, stepping forward, but Fola stood straight, waved a hand, shook her head. “Comes and goes. Going” was her cryptic nonanswer. She turned on the fan, left the room, closed the door.

Sadie stares up at the blades in the shadow, like bats on the ceiling, too hot all the same. Through the thin bedroom walls she can hear other voices but can’t extract words from the soft throbbing din. Olu, maybe Kehinde. A phone in the hallway. The pretty girl, Amelia or something like that. “Please, Madame. Telephone.” The rustling of footsteps, then Fola’s voice, gravelly, the words indistinct. Someone’s laughter. Her mother’s, she realizes after a moment. But higher than normal, a burst of it, false.

She rolls to her side, where she glimpses a photo in light slipping in from the stiff wooden blinds. Just barely she makes out the faces, the location, and suddenly remembers: why Greenpoint seemed familiar: this strange-looking warehouse on Oak Street in Newton, the famed home of Paulette’s Ballet Studio. Winter. Her family stands bundled in coats close together on the sidewalk outside, the recital just over. The Man from the Story holds her up on his shoulders; she is still in her costume, red lips, pink tulle tutu, her four-year-old potbelly pushing unabashedly against the pink skin of the leotard, laughing. Taiwo and Kehinde wear matching red earmuffs, neither looking at the camera, Fola looking at her. Olu looks dwarfed by a massive brown coat. A stranger, another parent, must have taken the picture.

She wonders why Fola has this, of all photos, here framed on the nightstand, the frame the wrong size so the photo slips sideways, the shot out of focus, some Christmas performance of no real consequence. She abandoned ballet sophomore year, first semester, despite great potential and greater “commitment.” Had seen it: could lift her big toe to her forehead, demanded a split of her muscular legs, had defied her flat arches to bend into pointe shoes, could do all the steps in her sleep, no mistakes, but had stood at the bar in a line that September and noticed the palette, the pinks and the whites, light brown hair, light brown wood, clean-straight lines in the sunlight, and noticed herself, neither long, straight, nor light, and had seen in an instant what was meant by commitment: she was great at ballet but was no ballerina. (Philae had suggested that she take up Team Management to meet her requirement for after-school sports, and indeed she had found a perverse kind of pleasure in watching her light-brown-haired classmates in skirts — yellow mouth-guards bared, snarling, browned legs churning earth, drawing blood from bare shins with their field hockey sticks, later ice hockey, lacrosse sticks, so bafflingly violent, “Blood makes the grass grow!”—while she ticked off stats.)

She rolls the other way but feels the photo-faces watching her. She turns the photo over so it’s lying facedown. The position has promise. Unseen and unseeing. She rolls to her stomach and lies there facedown. At first she finds comfort: the intensified silence, the absolute darkness befitting the occasion. She isn’t quite sure what she’s meant to be feeling, but this here would seem the appropriate pose, sort of prostrate with grief (that won’t come) for her father and guilt at the thing with her mother, what’s left. If she embarrassed them all with that scene at the airport, she unburdened a bit of the anguish at least. Maybe they’ll talk a bit more a bit later. Probably not. It is not Fola’s thing, “talking out.” More likely they’ll act as if the thing never happened, not least as there’s now this more solid despair that her siblings won’t mention, not once at the airport, not once in the car, as if it’s not really true, as if they’re all here in Ghana — where no one has been except Olu, someone mentioned, when he was just born — just by chance, here for Christmas, a family vacation, and not for their father, unmentioned and gone.

The comfort becomes panic, with her face in the pillow, unable to breathe for the cloth and the heat, and now, rolling back over, she finds that she’s crying for nothing more epic than feeling left out. There they are, the lot of them, somewhere else, talking, their voices drowned out by the overhead fan while she’s here on her own, the one not like the others, feeling inferior as she always does whenever they’re home. With one of them (two max, the twins for example), she can generally rise above it but not with all three, so much older and taller, inexplicably taller , and surer, more spectacular, more shiny than she.

Her siblings are shiny. Olu, Taiwo, and Kehinde. They shine into rooms with their confident strides, their impressive achievements, and she with her beauty; they glow with their talent, their stuffed bag of tricks. There is Olu’s calm brilliance, his mastery of science, his deep steady voice sure with knowledge of facts. There is Taiwo’s dark genius, her hoarse luring whisper aglow with long words and the odd phrase in French; all her life she has had it, since Sadie can remember, this thick air of mystery, of effortless grace, as have only those women whose beauty is given, not open to interpretation by beholder, a fact. There is Kehinde’s pure talent, the gift of the image, that quiet assurance with which he looks out as if all of the world were overlaid with some pattern indescribably beautiful and meaningful, a grid, and if only you could see it as clearly as he could, then you too would take to blank easel with brush just as simply as one watches movies, the news, without commitment, simply seeing and understanding the seen. And there’s she. Baby Sadie. A good decade tardy, arriving in winter, a cheerful mistake, with her grab bag of competencies — photographic memory, battement développé, making lanyards — but lacking entirely in gifts.

Fola is convinced that the thing is there latent; for years now she’s said, “Just you wait. It will out.” Nothing has outed. She has done all her homework and studied with diligence so done well in school, not like Olu or Taiwo, more so eighty-fifth percentile; has made it to Yale (off the wait list but still); has settled in comfortably to a life of B-pluses and management positions on teams and class councils; has basked in the attention refracted by Philae of tow-headed frat boys endeared by her braids — but has yet to unearth any particular gift that might place her in league with her siblings at last.