Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

The woman looked like a ghost. With her beige-grayish skin and her small vacant eyes, a white sheet in her hand. A ghost laughing. “Surprised to see me, ehn ? You think we don’t live here? You think you can do as you please in this house?” She was laughing very softly as she liked to, when angry, and jabbing her finger like the tongue of a snake. They’d observed this performance on a number of occasions when Niké stood berating the houseboys outside: the measured opening (soft laughter or whispered derision), one finger thrust forward on salient points, the slow build to full volume, with rhetorical questions (“you think we don’t live here?”), the use of “my friend,” then the climax, the screaming, the invocation of the Bible, the melodramatic finale, Shakespearean in tone. Always ranting about honor and justice and such, before beating the houseboys, a violent to-do. To Taiwo’s mind, Nigerians seemed to like being angry, to derive pleasure from conflict, some physical thrill; she would watch them in the marketplace, at school, the way they carried on, their eyes alive with pleasure as they screamed and tore their hair. It was hard to take seriously. She was listening to Auntie Niké but absently, carefully mashing down her Weetabix in milk. It was only when the woman started shouting, “It’s disgusting!” that she looked up from the cereal.

“It’s disgusting what you’ve done!” In a single dramatic gesture Niké shook out the bedsheet, a white fitted sheet with a small reddish stain. Taiwo and Kehinde both stared in confusion. Niké continued, shouting, “I know what you’ve done! The houseboys have told me that you sleep in one bedroom, and now we can see what you do in there, ehn ?” She pointed at Kehinde, eyes slit. “She’s your sister . Your very own twin. You are a sinner, my friend.”

Kehinde sat blinking with shock. “I–I-I’m sorry?”

A question, not an apology, but Niké raged on, “It’s a sin what you’ve done, ehn ? ‘I’m sorry’ isn’t good enough! You tell me what happened. You tell me right now.”

“We don’t understand, Auntie,” said Taiwo very calmly, though it was beginning now to dawn on her, what had happened with this sheet: not a week ago she’d woken up bleeding, just a little bit; her first period, she knew, from sex ed class last year. She’d informed the youngest houseboy, Babatunde, the nicest, who’d returned hours later with tampons and pads, a huge bag, unceremoniously. Had thus “become a woman.” That was the phrase that their teacher had used. Becoming a woman. Taiwo didn’t feel womanly. She felt irritable and uncomfortable (perhaps how womanhood felt?). Now here was Niké with this sheet with this bloodstain, which Taiwo hadn’t noticed at the time, fair enough. Easy to explain that she’d gotten her period. Harder to explain why they slept in one bed. Heretofore it hadn’t seemed odd, much less “disgusting,” but now as she started to speak, she had doubts.

Two memories returned, the one faint in its details, a bit like a dream recollected at dusk: of some morning, one of many she had woken beside Kehinde, a month ago, longer, maybe months, she didn’t know. All she remembered was waking from dreaming, very early, before sunrise, eyes blurred, still half-sleeping, and feeling something firm against the back of one thigh as she rolled from her back to her side, away from Kehinde. Eyes closed, barely conscious, she thought it’s his foot and reached down, mumbling, “Move, man,” to push it away. The feel of the erection in her palm was so foreign — so hard and so warm, yet so fleshy, so soft — that she didn’t for a moment fully process what she was holding. Her brother stirred, snoring. Alarmed, she let go. She lay there beside him, eyes open, heart pounding, afraid for some reason, of what she didn’t know. Maybe she thought she was dreaming, had dreamed it? She fell back asleep. Only remembered it now.

And the other, not a memory. A habit. “Disgusting.” The thing she started doing when they got out of school, when they started spending days in the apartment, lazy hours, floating idly in the swimming pool or watching cartoons. The one day she’d come from the pool to the bedroom to shower and change, leaving Kehinde afloat. She’d pulled off her bathing suit and was looking for a towel when she found the one book she had brought here from home. A massive encyclopedia of gods and mythology, a gift from their father the Christmas before. She’d become obsessed with the Muses that winter in Classics; he’d inserted a leather bookmark at the chapter on Calliope. Some conspiratorial houseboy had placed the large volume in the last dresser drawer where they hid stolen snacks. There with the three-packs of biscuits and towels was the book she’d assumed to be stolen or lost. Delighted to find it, she’d flopped down at once on the bed that she shared with her brother to read. And was lying there naked with her stomach on a pillow when she flipped to an illustration of “The Rape of Persephone,” a pink-fleshy picture of plump-breasted girls in a meadow of flowers with the accompanying text:

Persephone was gathering flowers in a meadow with her companions Artemis and Athena. There she was attracted to an exceptionally beautiful narcissus with one hundred blossoms. When she reached out to pick it, the ground split open and from deep within the earth, Hades came forth in a golden chariot pulled by black horses. He raped Persephone and took her to the underworld. She screamed for help from her father Zeus but he gave her no help.

Demeter also heard Persephone’s cries and rushed to find her. Carrying burning torches, she searched for nine days and nine nights over land and sea for her abducted daughter. She never stopped to eat, sleep or bathe in her frantic search. On the tenth day Helios, God of the Sun, told Demeter that Hades had kidnapped Persephone. Furthermore, he said that the abduction and rape of Persephone had been sanctioned by Zeus.

Standard fare. What came as a surprise was what she felt as she read, staring repeatedly at the image of Hades’s hand on the breast: a tingling pressure between her legs where the sheet was bunched up, which grew stronger and sharper until she peed on herself. She leapt up, alarmed and embarrassed, shut the book. She stared at the sheets, first ashamed, then confused. There was no spreading wet spot from where she had urinated. She patted her thighs, also dry. She hadn’t peed. Squinting at the sheet, she saw the little damp spot and the liquid, almost slimy, like a drop of egg white. This is what had come from her body, not urine. She wiped it away with the towel, and showered.

But began to do this daily, after swimming, before showering: ritually peeling off her suit, then to bed with the book, always the one-page description of the Rape of Persephone, with the sheets in a ball between her legs as before, always squeezing her thighs, always listening for Kehinde, always losing her breath when the egg white slipped out. And now wondering — mashing Weetabix, Niké repeating, “It’s disgusting!”—why it pleasured her to do this, did she want him to walk in? She knew she wouldn’t hear him if he slipped up to their doorway in the pointy-toed ninja red leather babouches. He was Kehinde. He could do that. Appear without warning. And still she would lie there, nude, wet, while he swam.

She put down her spoon, feeling heat in her fingers. Kehinde turned to look at her, chewing his lip. Whatever she was sensing was apparent in his expression. Niké chortled, “ Look at him!” Suspicions confirmed. “There are other stains, too,” she sneered, holding up the sheet again. “You think I don’t know what these white splotches are?”

Kehinde was staring at Taiwo. “What is it?” It was a question for his twin, who was looking away.