Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

Of the many things Fola thinks, holding her daughter, is the thought that it’s useless to love with such force, for the force doesn’t travel, doesn’t keep them, protect them, doesn’t go where they go, doesn’t act as a shield — and yet how to love otherwise? What else might she feel but this raw, desperate love as she clutches the girl, wishing only to protect her, to act as a shield, and this raw, desperate grief, having long ago failed? “I’m sorry,” she whispers, stroking Taiwo’s long dreadlocks, knowing sorry won’t do, not knowing where else to start.

She’s never before felt what she feels in this moment. Three feelings at war for her breath, for her strength: first the anger at Femi, the pure, crystal hatred, a rage undiluted by pity or doubt; then the grief that is Taiwo’s, her shame and her sorrow, a well of it rushing beneath the right breast; then her own shame and sorrow, to know what has happened, to know what she’s sensed all along in her twins, who got hurt , she thinks, badly, because they didn’t have their mother . Because their mother thought they didn’t need a mother like her. “I thought,” she tells Taiwo, as she thinks of it, anguished, “I thought I was helping. That you’d be better off. I thought that your uncle—” heaves once and continues—“I thought he could provide things I couldn’t afford. I wanted you to have, I don’t know, to have more …”

“More than what ?”

“Than a single mother. Than a mother like me. I didn’t know what I was doing. I never had a mother. I was making it up as I went. I was scared. I was lonely. I was a coward. I was afraid of disappointing you, of holding you back from the things you deserved. You were gifted, so brilliant, even smarter than Olu. Your teachers all said it. ‘She’s special,’ they said. ‘Make sure that you challenge her, stimulate, encourage her.’ I feared I’d be the reason that you didn’t excel. I was afraid that I’d fail you. So I sent you to… him… and he hurt you. And Kehinde. I failed anyhow.” Fola stops talking abruptly, embarrassed. This isn’t at all what she wants to be saying. Taiwo is silent, her arms around Fola, her chest quivering palpably against Fola’s breasts. Fola pulls back, just enough to see Taiwo, to hold the girl’s face with her fingers. “I’m sorry.”

Her daughter looks back at her, blinking, eyes bloodshot, dry-raw from the salt of her tears and her sweat. She looks like an infant , thinks Fola. My infant. My baby, my daughter. And not Somayina. The eyes don’t remind her at all of her mother’s, perhaps for the first time since Taiwo was born. The clear amber eyes look to Fola like Taiwo’s: the eyes of a child, not a ghost’s but a girl’s. Taiwo says nothing, just stares at her mother, who stares at her child, overwhelmed by her want. She wants to give healing and comfort and answers. She wants to undo what was done to her twins. She wants to find Kehinde and hold him here also. She wants to find Femi, to kill him. By hand. Very slowly. To torture him. She wants to stop crying. She wants to make Taiwo stop crying. But can’t. All she can do is stand weeping with Taiwo alone on this beach in the bearing down heat, knowing someone has damaged her children irreparably, unable to fix it. Able only to hold.

She kisses Taiwo’s forehead, still holding her cheeks in her palms, and is moving to hug her again when she, Taiwo, says, “Don’t,” thinking Fola has kissed her by way of hard stop and will now pull away.

“Don’t go,” whispers Taiwo, and startles her mother by grabbing her fiercely and gripping her waist. “Don’t let me go yet, please don’t let me go.”

“I won’t,” whispers Fola, and doesn’t.

vii

Olu is getting annoyed now. Where are they? His mother and sister just up and disappeared, leaving the rest of the family to receive the food offering, a beans-and-rice dish served on plates made of tin. They ate this politely, chewing, nodding, and smiling, then gulped down warm Fanta, surrendered their plates. Sadie hurried off with her newfound instructor to learn further dance moves behind some mud hut while Benson received a call on his cell and began pacing the clearing in search of reception. “Hello? Hello?” Kehinde dematerialized in typical fashion, leaving Olu and Ling with this Shormeh and Naa, the two sisters in black whom his father never mentioned, both older by the look of it, sixty or more. Naa, the somewhat friendlier, dead ringer for Sadie, asks would they like to come see the old house? “That’s okay,” says Olu as Ling gushes, “Yes!” and they’re ushered along to the hut at the back.

He noticed the roof when they entered the compound — a triangular dome stitched of some sort of reed, five feet taller at least than the tin roofs surrounding it — but only now thinks of his father’s remark. Kweku, in a ramble about renting versus owning, said something about a father having “designed his own property.” Olu asks Naa, “Who designed this? Who built it?”

“His father,” she answers. “Your grandfather. Come.”

They duck in the door and stand still for an instant, adjusting to the relative darkness and silence. The space is much cooler than seems possible given the burdensome heat in the courtyard outside. Olu peers around at the rounded clay walls, at the sixteen-foot roof, one small window, faint light. Intelligent construction , he thinks. Ling takes pictures, the flash from the phone bouncing off this and that.

“There were six of us, then, with your father,” says Naa. “And our mother. Ehn , seven. We all slept in here.”

“Eight, with your father,” says Olu. “My grandfather.”

“No,” Naa says brusquely. “That man disappeared. He wasn’t our father. Just Kweku and Ekua’s.”

“He died?” Olu asks.

“No. He left.”

“To go where?”

“Jesus knows,” Naa says, shrugging. “By now he is dead. Both his children are, too. And his wife. Prideful man. That one, our mother, she loved him too much, oh. Too much. And for what, ehn ? You came when she died. The woman was gone but he brought you to see her. He never came back here apart from that time.” She laughs without joy. “Now the space is sufficient. Your father would always fuss, fuss, for the space. ‘It’s too small,’ ‘it’s too hot,’ always hot, like a white man.” She sucks her teeth. “ Obroni . Too hot in the shade.” She is quiet for a moment, her hands at her elbows. Then, her voice breaking, “A shame, oh. So young. My own junior brother. That foolish boy Kweku.” She wipes off her eyes with the back of one arm. “They say he bought a big, big house. Someplace very, very cold.”

Olu nods. “Yes.”

“Then he did it.” Tiny smile. “You wait. I am coming.” She dabs at her eyes again, shuffles to the doorway, ducks out. “I go and come.”

Ling comes to Olu by the one wooden bed. “What are you looking at?”

But Olu doesn’t know. He thought he saw something, a bird or an insect, flittering briskly around the window near the top of the dome, but when he points to it now he sees nothing but light spilling in full of dust to the mats on the floor.

viii

Kehinde comes tentatively to the entrance to the compound and stops by the wall, looking left, looking right. The outhouse was empty and so is the road, Benson’s car left alone on its tilt in the groove. He approaches the window to peer in to see if the driver is sleeping, but no one is there. He looks up the road at the line of small kiosks and sees, just past these, one large stand-alone shack. It looks like those cabins, the square wooden cabins they slept in, in Boy Scouts, the one year he tried, age eleven, before abandoning the pretense of boyness in favor of painting and working with beads. He can make out some movement inside it, a shadow, and thinks to go ask if the person here saw either Taiwo or Fola or Benson’s lost driver these last twenty minutes they’ve all disappeared? He walks the short way to the large wooden structure and stops at the doorway before ducking in, a low door, squinting twice in the dim of the space that is the coffin maker’s workshop and a clinic in the clutch.