Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

She sits up, alarmed, trying to steady her breathing, trying not to wake Sadie, but can’t catch her breath. She slips from the bed, rushing quietly to the bathroom, where she doesn’t turn the light on. Just stands, until calm. She turns on the tap, a little trickle of water to splash on her face, dabs her cheeks with a towel. As she lowers this, she glimpses her reflection in the mirror in the moonlight, and stops, leaning forward to look.

At her face.

Rather shocked by the large, chiseled features, somehow foreign after years of not looking in the mirror — merely rubbing rose lipstick across as she leaves in the morning or patting her hair down, top, back. How long has it been since she’s looked at these features, the angular shapes of the mouth and the nose, the fair skin, still unwrinkled, the wide eyes familiar — yet different. She leans in to peer at her eyes.

The shade and the shape are the same as her father’s (and Olu’s), but something has changed over time; they are more like her father’s than she’s previously noticed, or more like her father’s than they previously were. She thinks of him less frequently than she looks in the mirror, so rarely has occasion to remember his face, to compare it to hers, as she does in this moment. His eyes on her face, where her own used to be. His eyes, with their faint sheen of grief and their laugh lines, the soft brown made softer by sorrow, by aching: these are the eyes Fola finds in the mirror. She stares, disbelieving. She touches the glass. Her father’s eyes glisten in the light from the window behind her, aglow with the gathering tears. One slides down her cheek and she touches the droplet, as one lifts a finger to just-starting rain.

She returns to the bed from the bathroom on tiptoe. She slips back the cover and lies on her back. She touches her stomach but doesn’t feel movement. She weeps until dawn without making a sound.

They pile into Benson’s SUV after breakfast, each shut in the silent glass box of his thoughts, seven boxes, locked, soundproof and shatter-resistant; the eighth man, the driver, hums, present, alone. The day has dawned coolish, deceptively clement, sun covered by clouds, a thick coat of pale gray with bright whiteness behind it, a threat or a promise, breeze running its fingers through leaves, not yet noon. In thirty or so minutes the clouds will start parting, the leaves will stop moving, the air will stand still; the sun will stop playing demure and come forward; the day will turn muggy, unbearably hot. The weather in December is like this in Ghana: an in-taken breath held until the world spins, trail of tears to the New Year through sopping humidity, the worst of the heat, then the respite of rain.

ii

An hour outside of the city: the ocean.

Unannounced, unambitious.

Just suddenly there .

They’ve flown up the freshly paved road to the junction, where they turn up a hill lined on both sides by homes. The main road is bustling with noonday commotion, plump women bearing water and goods on their heads, thin children in uniform, dark brown and light orange, trotting briskly down the road to catch a tro-tro to lunch. The men are less visible. A few stand in doorways in loose faded trousers and wifebeater shirts, peering out, partially squinting, partially frowning, undecided, as Benson’s Benz truck rumbles past, stirring dust.

Benson is seated up front with the driver, in straw hat and Ray-Bans, a safari tour guide. Ling, between Fola and Olu, sits tensely. Sadie between Taiwo and Kehinde, behind.

“I remember this road,” murmurs Fola.

“You’ve been here?” Benson turns to face Fola, and Olu shrinks back.

“Only once. And too late.” She touches Olu on the shoulder blade. “You came too, darling.” A twinge, upper right.

• • •

The car crests the hill and descends by the water, the road belted in from the beach by a field. They all turn to stare as one does when he hasn’t seen ocean in months, shocked afresh by the scope. Even Sadie stops pretending to sleep on her brother, sits up, and leans over to stare out the glass.

A halfhearted wall made of mortar and concrete block starts and then stops like a six-year-old’s smile, with huge gaps between bits of it exposing the goats grazing lazily on grass, in no rush, a large herd. To the right of the road the steep hill continues upward, red earth densely greened with tall grass and short trees; to the left a low field, a mile deep, flowering shrubs, knotted crawlers, wild grass thinning out into sand. Then the beach. It is farther than it seems from the car, where one thinks if he wanted he could simply leap out and make a beeline for the water like a toddler, peeling clothes off, kicking shoes off, screaming, joyous, for his freedom as he ran. In fact, it would take more than a little bit of effort to approach through the weeds at this point in the road; better access lies ahead at the edge of the village, where the fishermen have beaten out a trail through the grass.

Still, the water beckons, stretched flat to the horizon, the same moody shade as the clouds overhead, not the prettiest beach in the world but there’s something, a calm getting on with it, calming to behold. Palms stretching forward at forty-five-degree angles appear to be shaking out their hair on the sand over long wooden boats in spectacular colors festooned with black seaweed, white, blue and green nets. Just visible in the distance, three women are walking with babies tucked into their lappas , bare feet, three abreast, with a touch of the patriotic to the lappas , one goldish, one red, one a bright emerald green.

Benson begins speaking to no one in particular, a rambling little speech in a tight, chipper voice. “I came here with Kweku when he first moved to Ghana to treat some young nephew who’d broken his leg, and so happened to meet the local maker of coffins, who was also the local physician, it seemed. Ga people believe that a coffin should be a reflection of the life of the person inside it. So a fisherman’s coffin might be shaped like a fish or a carpenter’s shaped like a hammer, I guess, or a woman who likes shoes, in the shape of a shoe. They can be quite elaborate.”

Fola offers, “Indeed.”

“What’s this town called?” Olu asks. (Benson answers.) “Kokrobité,” repeats Olu. “Sounds Japanese.” Disappointed.

“Reminds me of Jamaica,” Ling murmurs. “Ocho Rios.”

Different palette , thinks Kehinde. Less azure, more red .

“Village,” says Fola. “Less a town than a village.”

“I didn’t know he grew up by the ocean,” Taiwo says.

“That’s why we always had a house near the water. The harbor, the river, in Brookline the pond…” Fola trails off, seeing trees in the distance, the boats beached on sand.

They are silent again.

• • •

The road travels on past the first glimpse of ocean and into the village, where it loses the view — and the paving and straightness, becoming instead a dirt path winding, rock-strewn and rough, through the homes. They’re single-room structures — of wood, brick, or concrete, some mud, with tin roofs, a few thatch, glassless windows, wooden shutters — in clusters, with clotheslines and open-air stoves and bath buckets and trees between clusters. Women bent over these buckets wash clothing and very young children, who wave as they pass. Chickens wander pecking at earth, as do goats, these much dirtier and skinnier than the ones by the beach. The elderly sit watching ancient TVs under shade trees, in a circle beneath the leaf cover. Barbershops mingle with braiding stalls, signboards, BLOOD ON THE CROSS CUT & SHAVE, CROWN OF THORNS BRAIDS, kiosks sell calling cards and top-up cards and aliment, with wares stacked in piles to the roof, blocks of color: yellow (Lipton, Maggi), green (Milo, Wrigley’s), red (oil, tomato paste, corned beef, instant coffee).