Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

Kehinde finds a stick, begins drawing in earth, an old habit. “Reminds me of our first house.” A face. “They used to sell drugs there. The son of our landlord. Right there out our window, me and Olu’s room—”

“Wait. You and Olu shared a room?”

He notes that this is what shocks her. “Until you were born, yes.”

“Of course,” Sadie says. With a hint of aggression.

“Why of course?” He has heard it.

“Until I was born. It’s what all of you say. Like you all lived this whole other lifetime before that, like I was an afterthought. Like I messed it all up.”

“Sadie—”

“Don’t say it. Don’t say I’m being sensitive. Don’t say that it’s just that I’m younger or whatever. I’m different from the rest of you, an idiot can see that, shit, strangers do see it, it’s not in my head. I know what I’m feeling,” she whispers, insistent, to which Kehinde replies with a smile, “So do I.” She hears that he’s smiling and, thinking he’s mocking, says, “Thank you for laughing—”

“I know what you feel.” He does laugh now, quietly, to remember the feeling so plainly, to see his own face in her words, that small face, a girl’s face, as had troubled him deeply for ages, the teasing for being so pretty. “I used to feel the same about our family. That I was different. That I didn’t belong—”

“Didn’t belong ? You had Taiwo.” She whispers this passionately, with no trace of sympathy, overcome by the possessiveness one feels for one’s suffering, the aggressive insistence on the suffering’s uniqueness, in nature and depth and endurance over time.

“I did. I had Taiwo,” he says, and considers it. “Back then. I had Taiwo. But she was the girl. I was the one who shared the bedroom with Olu. I was supposed to be the doctor, the boy, the other son. That was the dream, Sai and Sons, family business. Except for… I hated them.”

“Who?”

“Math and science.” He laughs again, retracing a line in his drawing, then murmurs the rest, less to her than himself: “See, I know they didn’t mean to, but I hated how they looked at me, like I was the break in the chain, Dad and Olu, like I was a stranger, which maybe I was to them, maybe I was to myself, I don’t know. I just wonder, you know. Being here, seeing Olu, I ask myself, what if it was him in the car? Instead of me, that night with Dad. Would this whole thing be different? If it happened like that, with the good son, you know?”

Sadie doesn’t. “What car? If it was Olu in what car?”

“I’m just rambling,” Kehinde says, tracing over the face.

“No, tell me. What car?” she persists.

Kehinde falters. “I…”

“No one tells me anything,” she mumbles. “Never mind.”

He can feel that heavy silence taking form now around him, the familiar film of silence that shields, locks him in — but his sister would appear to be in it here with him, beside him, locked also, her breath, and her heart. He hears her thin breathing, the sound before crying. He feels her aloneness, a space in his throat. A space, opened up. Through which trickles, unbidden, as thin and uncertain, the sound of his voice. Which tells her, very simply, how he went to meet their father, how he walked into the lobby, saw the guards and Dr. Yuki, how they drove home in the Volvo, parked and sat there in the driveway, how he signed his art class painting with a pen that he still has. He pulls this from his pocket and hands it to Sadie.

“What does it say?” She can’t see in the dark.

“I think Mom engraved it. It’s Yoruba. Keep it.”

“Really?”

“Sure.”

“Thank you. And for telling me that.” She thumbs the pen carefully. “I would have been happy. That it happened with you and not anyone else. I bet he was happy.”

“You think so?”

“I know so.”

“ E se, ” he says, though it hurts him to do. The music of the language makes him think of Nigeria. His sister. He stands. “We should get back inside.”

“Really?”

“Mosquitoes.”

“But our family ’s inside,” she says, laughing.

“I know it.” He kisses her head.

Fola and Benson come out of the house now, Amina behind them with Tupperware containers. “You’re really too kind,” he is saying.

“Please. Take it. It’s just some egusi and joloff for later.”

“I have a small staff—”

“But your cook is Ashanti. He can’t make egusi , at least not like mine.” They are smiling, glancing downward, when Fola, feeling butterflies (lower left, bafflement), squints at the garden. There by the tree she can make out the beach chair, a figure beside it, tall. “K, is that you?”

v

Taiwo comes in and finds Olu there reading, the other bed empty. “Do you mind if we switch?”

Olu looks up from his book, sees she’s crying. “Are you…?” he begins, but it’s clear that she’s not. He stands, slightly awkward, unsure what to do with his body, embrace her? He takes a step forward. Taiwo steps backward, a kneejerk reaction that doesn’t offend him.

“The rooms. Can we switch?”

Unnerved by the crying, he leaves without question. She closes the door and he goes down the hall.

vi

This bedroom is larger, a queen bed, small window, the smell of Ling’s lotion, faint sound from the garden. He thinks to go join them, hears Fola, “Where’s Olu?” his brother, “Nice to meet you,” but doesn’t go out. It doesn’t make sense to distrust this man Benson, to duck him. He’ll be back again, tomorrow it sounds like: was talk of a drive in his car to the village, preparations, picking coffins, greeting family, logistics — which are similar, thinks Olu, to the logistics of a hospital, these logistics of a funeral, clinical, procedural, managerial, what to do with the body the general question, a series of actions sucked dry of emotion — but strange to him, still, to be bothering with the answers, to be carrying out the actions when the body is dead. He doesn’t fear Benson will tell them, not really, but why he can’t tell them himself he doesn’t know.

He shouldn’t have waited. He should have just told them, or her, told his mother at least at the time, senior year, when he’d gotten that ticket to Ghana, the same airline ticket that came every spring. To the College. Wrong address: they all had a box at the New Haven post office for personal use, but the Temple Street address of Timothy Dwight College was all that his father could find from Accra. These, the last days before mass use of e-mail. Every year on his birthday, the twenty-sixth of May, came an envelope for Fola (which he’d send back unopened), a letter for him, and a ticket to Ghana. Thin hard-copy ticket in fading red ink with the three carbon copies of tickets of old, dated 26 May every year for four years until 26 May 1997, when he went.

He’s never really asked himself why, or why then, why he skipped graduation, didn’t want to attend. He’d always been frightened that Kweku would surprise them, showing up in New Haven unannounced and uninvited on a day that he knew that they’d all be together, but it was obvious that his father wasn’t thinking of this. Or wasn’t thinking. Not a stranger to American education, he would have known that graduations happened every four years, and that sometime in springtime in 1997 there would be two commencements (twins from high school, his from college); nevertheless sent the letters and ticket as always, same desperate entreaty that Olu come for his birthday, that he stay for a week, that he hear Kweku out, with no mention at all of the conflict of dates.

It was just a coincidence that the two graduations happened to fall on one day and his birthday at that, but he sat with the tickets — Milton commencement, Yale commencement, Ghana Airways — and wept for the first time in years. That his father had forgotten that his children were graduating, three of the four, somehow drove the point home: that he wasn’t a part of their lives any longer, their schedules, their rhythms, their world; he’d dropped out. It wasn’t that Olu hadn’t ever considered this (he had, once a day, since the Volvo drove off), but despair was dulled first by the sheer numbing shock, which in time became denial, which in time became hope.