Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

To which the contractors responded as politely as possible that he was free to leave their offices and never return. After the seventh such encounter Kweku tucked his little blueprint (the then-thirteen-year-old napkin) in the pocket at his heart and walked in no particular hurry out of the office, down the staircase, out the entrance, onto High Street.

Into brilliant glinting sun.

• • •

The humidity welcomed him back, open arms. He stood still for some moments, obliging the hug. Then hired a taxi to take him to Jamestown — the oldest part of Accra and the smelliest by far, a fetid seaside slum of corrugated tin-and-cardboard shanties in the shadow of the country’s former Presidential Palace — where, braving the stink (re-dried sweat, rotting fish), he inquired in rusty Ga about a carpenter.

“A carpenter?” someone said, and hissed to someone else.

“A carpenter…” murmured someone else, and pointed down the alley.

“Carpenter?” The pointed-to someone laughed loudly, then shouted out, “The carpenter!”

An old woman appeared.

“The old man,” she said, sucking what teeth she had left. A wave of quiet yeses rose and washed across the slum. “ Yes . The old man who sleeps by the ocean.” “ Yes . The old man who sleeps in the tree.” The woman sucked her teeth again, impatient with the addenda. “The old man,” she said. “Get the small boy.”

A girl appeared.

She’d been standing behind the woman, who was of such considerable width that she’d obscured the girl entirely, knobby braids and knees and all. Now she sprinted off obediently before Kweku could ask the obvious, e.g., if an “old man” was the answer or why he slept in a tree or what a “small boy” had to do with it. He supposed he’d find out. He leaned against the cab, wiped his face, crossed his feet. It was too hot to wait in the car sans A/C. The driver sat contentedly eating freshly smoked fish, the pride of Jamestown, blasting Joy FM Radio, “Death for Life.” Reggie Rockstone, all the rage in Accra.

• • •

Not sixty seconds later the girl sprinted back, holding what looked to be her brother by the brittle-thin wrist. The boy was smiling brightly, possessed of that brand of indomitable cheerfulness Kweku had only seen in children living in poverty near the equator: an instinct to laugh at the world as they found it, to find things to laugh at, to know where to look. Excitement at nothing and at everything, inextinguishable. Inexplicable under the circumstances.

Amusement with the circumstances.

He’d seen it in the village, in his siblings, or in one: his youngest sister, dead at eleven of treatable TB. As a younger man himself, he’d mistaken it for silliness, the blitheness of the youngest, a kind of blindness to things. To be that happy, that often, in that village, in the fifties, one would’ve had to have been blind or dumb, he’d thought, but he was wrong. His sister saw as much as he, he’d come to see the night she died, when the one village doctor (a maker of coffins) had done all he could before dinner. His mother had gone to the fetish priest with a white baby goat (a fair trade: kid for kid), leaving the four elder siblings in their usual clump outside the hut, the two youngest inside it. Ekua his sister had lain coughing on her side on a raffia mat in a tangle of limbs, as jutting-out thin as a pyre of twigs, and laughing. “What are you doing?”

He was kneeling beside her and touching her neck, wondering how all this blood could just up and run dry, in mere moments, as predicted, just halt its hot flow. It seemed worse than implausible. A cruel joke, a lie. “You’re not going to die,” he’d said, feeling her pulse, with his fingers, his chest, throbbing ache in his lungs. Ekua was his ally, just thirteen months younger, born on Wednesday like him, with the same restless mind. And a glint in her eye and a gap in her teeth (as he’d find between Fola’s five years up ahead). “You are not going to die.” With conviction now, believing, in the spectacular mystery of the pumping of blood above the failure-prone prayers of the villagers outside or the slaughtering of goats or the prognoses of hacks. He’d touched her face, whispering, “You’re not going to die.”

She’d whispered back, smiling, eyes glinting, “I am.”

And had, with a smile on her hollowed-out face, with her hand in her brother’s, his hand on her neck, wide eyes laughing, growing wider and colder as he’d stared at them, seeing that she’d seen through them. Laughing at death. (Later in America he’d see them again, in the emergency room mostly, where eleven-year-olds die: the calm eyes of a child who has lived and died destitute and knows it, both accepting and defying the fact. Not with formal education, his preferred mode of defiance. Not with blindness, as he’d imagined of his sister until then. But with precisely the same heedlessness the world had shown her, and him, all dirt-poor children. The same disregard.) Her eyes were still laughing. Disregarding of everything: tuberculosis, destitution, hack doctors, early death. Looking back at a world that considered her irrelevant with a look that said she considered the world irrelevant, too. She’d seen everything he had — all the indignities of their poverty; the seeming unimportance of their being to and in the wider world; the maddening smallness of an existence that didn’t extend past a beach they could walk the whole length of in half of a day — without seeing herself undignified, unimportant, or small.

• • •

That brand of cheerfulness.

It broke Kweku’s heart.

This was the third of his heartbreaks, the cleanest, though he couldn’t have possibly known it was that. The girl approached gripping the wrist of her brother who smiled with his eyes, a small gap in his teeth. Not quite clear why she held him as if he would bolt when he seemed so delighted, so willing, to come. But like this. Kweku saw them and thought of his sister, her wide laughing eyes. Felt a knot in his chest. But not sadness, as the victim of a third-degree burn, a very small one, will feel nothing of the infection beneath. The same reason: severe nerve damage. Loss of sensation. The eschar cemented black over that part of his past.

He could see them all, the images — village doctor, elder siblings, braying kid, setting sun — playing mute in his head, but they were like scenes from a movie with a long-dead child star shot in grainy black and white before his cameraman was born. They inspired no emotion. Or no emotion he could identify. Just the sudden bout of wheezing he attributed to the heat. Not to hurt. He never “hurt” when remembering his childhood, which was rarely, even then, at forty-nine, having returned. He was circling in closer — toward the center, toward the starting point, same points — by then, Jamestown, an hour from home. But didn’t feel it. Was in his mind still moving “forward,” getting “farther,” his whole life a straight line stretching out from the start.

So if ever the odd memory returned to him, caught up to him, billowing forward from behind him like tumbleweed in wind, he would feel only distance, the uncoverable distance, deeply comforting distance, and with it a calm. A calm understanding of how loss worked in the world, of what happened to whom, in what quantities. Never hurt. He didn’t add it all up — loss of sister, later mother, absent father, scourge of colonialism, birth into poverty and all that — and lament that he’d had a sad life, an unfair one, shake his fists at the heavens, asking why. Never rage. He very simply considered it, where he came from, what he’d come through, who he was, and concluded that it was forgettable, all. He had no need for remembering, as if the details were remarkable, as if anyone would forget it all happened if he did. It would happen to someone else, a million and one someone elses: the same senseless losses, the same tearless hurts. This was one perk of growing up poor in the tropics.