Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

For a moment she recoils. The velvet bass voice and the smell of black soap and cologne mixed together too strong, too familiar: a wave rises, passes. She clutches the doorframe, then waves her hand, laughing, “I’m fine, really, fine. Please. Thank you , and welcome.” She reaches for the flowers to waylay a second attempt at embrace. “We’re just getting started.”

“I’m not interrupting? In Ghana it’s rude to be early.”

“Thank God. Six is an uncivilized hour for dinner, I know, but with—”

“Jetlag—”

“Exactly.”

“Of course.” He swallows hard, nodding. “And the children?”

“Hardly children.” She laughs. “They’re all here, we’re all here, through the den.” He follows behind her to where they’re all standing, their hands on the table now, eyes on his face. “My darlings, this is Benson. A friend of your f… of the f-family’s,” she stumbles. “From Hopkins.”

“Hello.” He holds up the bottle and smiles at them sadly. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m sorry for your loss.”

They stare at him blankly, the expression before coldly , even Ling, as if he were the cause of this loss, being the first one to mention it here in this pause with the facing of facts on the tips of their tongues. Sensing this, Benson adds softly, to Fola, “You all must be shell-shocked. God knows that I am.”

Fola, with a feeling that she hasn’t had in decades, concern that every stranger think her children well behaved, holds up the flowers. “Aren’t they glorious? Gardenias.” She smiles with such force that they all smile back. She places the arrangement, intended for a mantel, in the middle of the table; it doesn’t quite fit. The decorative fern fronds dangle into the rice pot, the height of the blossoms obscuring the view. When everyone sits — as they do now, instructed — they can’t see the person across, for the vase.

Benson takes the empty seat, smiling at Olu. “I knew you looked familiar,” he says, scooting in. The voice is too bass for the others to hear it, and Olu too dark for his blushing to show, but he shakes his head stiffly, left, right, just once, quickly, and Benson nods once — up, down, up — in reply (having somehow understood to abandon the subject as men sometimes do with the slightest of hints: a quick nod, a quick frown, the dark arts of the eyebrows, poof! subjects are changed without changes in tone). “The last time I saw you two, you were in diapers.” He smiles at the twins, faces blocked by the flowers. “My last year of residency. Now you’re what, thirty?”

“Twenty-nine,” they say in unison, the same husky tone.

“October,” offers Kehinde. “We’ll be thirty next October.”

“And you.” He turns to Sadie, next to Kehinde, less obscured. “ You … were just a glimmer in—”

“My ovary,” says Fola. Preempting. “More precisely.”

“That’s obscene,” Sadie says. This is the part she dreads most: when the stranger starts asking their ages, what each of them does. She senses it coming just as sure as a key change the moment a pop song approaches its bridge and looks ruefully at the man at the head of the table, wondering why he is here but not minding too much. At least with a guest, there’s a guise for the dolor that hovered above them in silence before, doubly massive for being unnamed, unacknowledged, the size of itself and its shadow, a blob. Now they can pin, each, their anguish to Benson, who took the seat no one else wanted to take and who said the thing no else wanted to say and who cut the grim picture in half with his flowers. He is the reason they all sit so upright, speak softly, smile politely, because there’s a Guest , as ensconced in the drama that attends family dinners (even absent a death in the family) as they, but a visitor, an innocent, in need of protection. They must ensure, all, that the Guest is okay. She smiles at him wanly. “Right. I was born later. I’m Sadie.”

Ling contributes her finger bell laugh. “Ovaries aren’t ‘obscene.’”

Turning quickly to Benson, “She’s an ob-gyn. I’m in ortho,” Olu says.

“Two doctors!” exclaims Benson. “So it runs in the family. I didn’t get your first name.” Ling tells him. “Well, Ling. Ghana is wanting for excellent doctors, foremost in obstetrics and maternal and child health. I opened a little hospital in town seven years ago. We still have a wait list for consults.” He laughs. “We could also use surgeons,” with a gesture to Olu, “and knowing your father, I know that you’re good.” He pauses. They all do. To see where he’s going, to see if the Guest is now stuck in the weeds, but he laughs again softly and presses on strongly, “The top of our class at Johns Hopkins, bar none. No one could touch him. And I don’t mean the Africans. No one was better. No one even came close. I remember when he got there I thought, who’s this bumpkin? From this Lincoln University? Never heard of it before. I should have, I know it. God. Kwame Nkrumah. But I’d been in Poland, of all places, for school. Funny times, those. Cold war scholarships for Africans. You could study in Warsaw and not pay a dime. I arrived in East Baltimore with an Eastern Bloc accent. I think they all thought I was deaf for a while.” Another laugh. “But we managed. We banded together. Everybody wanted to be friends with your dad. And Kweku was…” He pauses, smiling, turning to Fola. Seeing her face, he turns back. “He was shy. A geek, if we’re honest. But handsome, so meticulous. All the girls loved him. But he only loved one.”

Fola says, “Really. I don’t think—”

“Keep going,” says Sadie, not loudly. “He only loved one?”

Benson looks at Fola, who tips her head, sighing. He looks back at Sadie, returns the sad smile. “There were four of us. Africans — well, five counting Trevor. Jamaican—”

“Trinidadian,” Fola corrects.

“Ah, right. Trinidadian. Five of us brethren,” says Benson. “Prodigious, but desperately poor. We got stipends with our scholarships but blew them on airfare so no one had much; we shared all that we had. We used to eat dinner together, in rotation, so Monday to Friday a different one cooked. Wednesday was Kweku. He always cooked banku . We hated his banku; it tasted like glue. But we’d all get there early to talk to your mother. Or stare at her. No one could work up the nerve. And we’d look at your father, this shy guy from Ghana, not strapping like Trevor, or tall, not like me, with these shirts buttoned up to the uppermost button like a Ghanaian Lumumba, with glasses — with her.”

A silence has settled on all of them, thickly. They stare at the flowers as if at a hearse. No one quite knows what the other is thinking or whether to speak and reveal the wrong thought.

Finally, Fola. “For goodness sake, Benson.” She laughs with such sadness, they start to laugh, too. “That isn’t what happened—”

“It’s true—”

“No, it isn’t. He also made bacon and eggs. Which were worse.” She stands up to pick out a fern from the rice pot. “The food’s getting cold,” she says. “Eat,” and they do.

Joloff, egusi . They muddle through bravely, evading fraught silence with pleasant requests: pass the wine please, what time is it, do you have enough space there, more wine please, what’s in this, should we open another bottle? When Fola observes that the questions are waning, she stands, disappears, and returns with the cake. “I am not to be forgiven,” she says, “for not writing or calling on time, but I didn’t forget.” She sings the first notes, then the rest join in, smiling, while Sadie sits blushing and chewing her lip. On the last long “to yooou…!” Fola settles the cake on the tabletop, bending over Sadie to do so and pausing, so stationed, to kiss her and say, “You were right,” and that’s that, the thing finished, “talked out.” Taiwo and Kehinde say “The wish!” again in unison, which makes them both frown and which makes Benson laugh. “So they really are twins!” That daft oft-repeated comment, which makes Olu tense. He recovers and chuckles. Sadie laughs, too, suddenly noticing the candle: one big white utility candle dripping thick wax.She starts to ask why, glancing back at her mother, who shrugs, laughing also, then changes her mind. The sturdier the candle , she thinks, leaning forward, the better for bearing such wishes .