Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

No one ever needed the details.

There was the one basic storyline, which everyone knew, with the few custom endings to choose now and again. Basic: humming grandmas and polycentric dancing and drinks made from tree sap and patriarchy. Custom: boy-child Gets Out, good at science or soccer, dies young, becomes priest, child-soldier or similar. Nothing remarkable and so nothing to remember.

Nothing to remember and so nothing to grieve.

• • •

Just the knot in his chest, which he tried to laugh off, at the sight of those eyes on the face of that boy. The boy started laughing, too, quietly, delightedly, unaware that such laughter could break a grown man.

“Sa, are you fine?” he asked. His sister tugged his hand. The boy tried to stop smiling but couldn’t. He stopped trying.

“I’m fine.” Kweku smiled, straightened up, cleared his throat. He glanced at the old woman, who was glowering, bored. He looked at the girl, who was mopping her brow. He looked at the boy, who smiled hopefully back. And sighed. Could now see where this whole thing was headed. Asked, “You, what’s your name?” though he already knew.

Kofi, the houseboy he’d sketched on the napkin.

“Kofi, sa,” the boy said, holding out his free hand.

The woman sucked her teeth again, impatient with the pleasantries. “Take him to the carpenter,” she said, and waddled off.

• • •

Mr. Lamptey.

The yogi.

Who “slept by the ocean” as advertised, a treehouse some thirteen feet high. Here, he served tea, a bitter brew of moringa he had harvested during Harmattan, he said. Lit a joint. “That’s very old!” objected Kweku, reaching protectively for the napkin Mr. Lamptey was scanning intently mere inches from the joint. “So am I,” quipped Mr. Lamptey, not lowering the napkin. In Ga: “That doesn’t mean I’m going to go up in smoke.”

Kofi laughed. Kweku didn’t. Mr. Lamptey returned to the blueprint. A gentle breeze wafted in smelling of salt. They were sitting on the floor on braided raffia mats, the only seats in the large, airy cabinlike space. Decor notwithstanding, it was phenomenally well done: in lieu of walls slatted shutters, floorboards sanded down to silk. Kweku sipped his tea, mute, admiring the workmanship. After a moment ran his palm across the floor by his mat. Smooth. This was why he wanted to find a Ghanaian to build his dreamhouse. No one in the world did better woodwork (when they tried).

When he looked up Mr. Lamptey was watching him, smiling. “When did you build this?”

“It hasn’t been built.”

Mr. Lamptey chuckled softly. “But it has,” he said firmly. Kweku waited for him to continue. He didn’t. He puffed his joint.

“What do you mean, ‘built’? You’ve seen a house like this in Ghana?”

“No,” said Mr. Lamptey. “But you have, have you not?”

“Seen it where?” Kweku chuckled, not following the logic. But the answer drifted toward him: in one instant, all there . Mr. Lamptey tapped his forehead and pointed at Kweku. Kweku grew uncomfortable and shifted on his mat. “If you mean ‘where did I design it,’ I designed it in med school.”

“In med school?”

“Yes. Medical school.”

“But why would you do that?”

“Design a house?”

“Go to medical school.”

“To become a doctor.” Kweku laughed.

Mr. Lamptey laughed harder. “But why would you do that?”

Kweku stopped laughing. “Do what?”

“Become a doctor. You’re an artist.”

“You’re very kind.”

“I’m very old.” The man winked. He held up Kweku’s napkin. “And these? All of these rooms? They’re for all of your children?”

“No.”

“Patients?”

“Just me.”

“Hmm.” He turned over the napkin as if looking for a better answer.

Kweku said quickly, defensive, “There’s nothing else.”

“Just you.” Another puff. Mr. Lamptey pointed to Kofi. “And him.” Held up the napkin. “And this. ‘Nothing else.’”

Kweku got up. “I’m not sure what you’re getting at…” Mr. Lamptey exhaled a curling little tendril of smoke. But said nothing. “But I’m looking for a builder, not a Buddha.”

“And have you found one?”

Kweku faltered. He said nothing. He had not.

This was his eighth such encounter and counting. The plot had been vacant for over a year. He looked at the carpenter, the “old man,” this Mr. Lamptey, there cross-legged and cloth-clad, the six-pack contracted, the cataracts glowing bluish like the bellies of candle flames. He looked like some bizarre sort of African Gandhi. With ganja. Nonviolent. Nonplussing. Triumphant. Kweku wiped his face, took a breath as to speak. But for the first time since arriving noticed the shhh of the waves. So fell quiet. And stood there, feeling foolish now for standing, his head a few inches from the thatch roof above.

He considered the thatch pattern, which was vaguely familiar (though the memory was too heavy to catch up from behind: rounded hut in Kokrobité not an hour from this treehouse, its roof, also thatch, much, much higher than this one, conceived of by an eccentric not so different from Mr. Lamptey, absent father, wheezing sister: heavy memory, too slow).

A second breeze, smelling of a pyre of twigs.

Someone burning something somewhere.

Kweku suddenly felt tired. “If you can build it, by all means the project is yours.”

Mr. Lamptey said simply, “I can and I will.”

• • •

And did, in two years, arriving each morning at four, not a moment before or after, while the sky was still dark, to do sun salutations on the then-empty plot, sixty minutes more or less, until sunrise.

Kweku — afraid that his materials would be stolen, by appointment if he got a watchman, by yard boys if not (and they were costly materials, imported marble, slabs of slate; it wasn’t cheap establishing order in overgrown grass) — slept in a tent in those days, the one Olu had forgotten, wiry Kofi keeping guard with their adopted stray dog. Around a quarter past five they’d be woken by the racket song, hammer banging nail, handsaw moving through wood, both more swiftly than a seventy-year-old should have been able to manage, and more elegantly than any blade he’d managed himself. Indeed, six months in he took to shadowing Mr. Lamptey once a week for an hour, sipping coffee, hanging back. Mr. Lamptey, who sang, but never spoke, while he was carpentering, consented to be watched but refused to be helped. So Kweku loitered, attentive, with his Thermos, in his glasses, not helping, merely observing with mounting jealousy and awe, trying to learn what he could of the eyes-half-closed calm with which the man made incisions. “You should’ve been a surgeon,” he’d say.

Mr. Lamptey would suck his teeth, spit, answer opaquely, not pausing his sawing to puff on his joint. “I should have been what I was destined to be. I should be what I am,” and on. But he built the house perfectly, i.e., precisely as instructed, an unprecedented occurrence for Kweku in Ghana. He had never hired a Ghanaian to do anything (or anything aesthetic) without that Ghanaian reinterpreting his instructions somehow. “No starch on my shirts, please,” and the launderer would starch them, insisting, unrepentant, “It’s better this way.” Or “paint the doors white,” and Kofi painted them blue. “Sa, is nice, oh, too nice,” with the indefatigable smile. Mr. Lamptey made no changes, mounted no objections, offered no suggestions, cut no corners whatsoever.

Until his last week of work.

• • •

The issue was the landscaping, such as it was, there being less than a quarter-acre of land left to “scape.” Most of the plot had been cleared for the house, with a remnant patch of jungle off the sunroom.