Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

Mr. Lamptey considered the stick figures. “Hmm. What kind of trees are these?”

“Never mind that,” Kweku muttered, considering the size of the plot. The pool would have to be smaller than he’d drawn it at the hospital, but there were four fewer swimmers to use it, so fair enough. They’d just need to chop down the mango, or uproot it. The thing was looming verdant in the middle of the view.

Mr. Lamptey laughed uproariously. He would do nothing of the sort. Had the mango ever harmed them, done them wrong in any way? To kill it would be like slitting his grandmother’s throat. “A bit rich,” Kweku said.

“I will not harm this tree.”

“For chrissake, you’re a carpenter. You work with harmed trees—”

“Jesus was a carpenter—”

“That’s quite beside the point.”

“You’re the one who brought up Christ—”

“For fuck’s sake, man, enough! Enough! ”

Mr. Lamptey stared at Kweku, surprised by the outburst. Kweku stared back at him, surprised by himself. But determined, he imagined, to assert some authority. In fact, he felt his vision slipping slowly from his grasp. No children sleeping peacefully, no Fola swimming glistening, and if the mango remained standing, no beach of bleached white. The tree had to go. “I’ll just hire someone else.”

“You will not.” Mr. Lamptey sat, saying no more.

Cross-legged and cloth-clad at the base of the mango for three days, two nights, smoking hash, keeping guard, rising at dawn for the yoga, otherwise immobile, and smug, Kofi smuggling him coconuts for water. He didn’t eat anything for the duration of the sit-in but the mangoes that dropped to his side, perfectly ripe, and the soft wet white meat of the young hard green coconuts.

Scooping out the jellied flesh with relish.

• • •

“You can’t sit here forever,” Kweku sneered through clenched teeth, coming to stand in front of Lamptey on the second day of protest. Mr. Lamptey puffed his joint, closed his eyes, saying nothing. Kweku sucked his teeth, storming off. On the third day he threatened to call the police to have the carpenter removed from the property for trespassing. But looking at the man — seventy-two now, half-naked, wearing a necklace of red string with a bell on it — he couldn’t. He imagined his cameraman filming the scene: Ghanaian sadhu dragged off by armed, bribe-fattened cops while grim Landowner smiles from the mouth of his tent. “This is silly ,” he said finally, unzipping his door, suddenly missing the sound of the hammer and saw. The Master Wing had been suitable for occupation for months, but he preferred Olu’s tent, the plastic skylight. “You’re almost done, man. Let’s just finish what we started.”

“With the tree,” said Mr. Lamptey.

“Come on then.”

• • •

Mr. Lamptey found a stick, began drawing in earth.

His vision for the view from the sunroom.

A garden.

Everything lush, soft, too verdant, nothing orderly or sterile, jagged love grass and fan palms the size of a child and scattered-around banana plants like palm trees without trunks and hibiscus on bushes and gloriosa in flames and those magenta-pink blossoms (Kweku can never remember their names) flowering wildly on crawlers overgrowing the gate. A commotion of color. Rebel uprising of green . “And a fountain here,” Mr. Lamptey concluded.

“Whatever for?”

Some long, baffling answer about the layout of a sacred space, the necessity of water, appropriate proportions, blue, green. Kweku followed none of it. He rubbed his brow, sighing, “Bah! I can’t maintain this.”

“I can and I will.”

“You’re a carpenter. Not a gardener.”

“I’m an artist. Like you—”

“Never mind. Plant your garden—”

“ Your garden.”

“Whichever.”

Mr. Lamptey waited for Kweku to continue. Kweku looked away, kicked a rock, a white pebble. When he looked up Mr. Lamptey was walking, a touch naughty, in the direction of the half-finished sunroom. Kweku watched, thinking they should scrap the big windows (keep down the cost of A/C, what was the point with no pool). He pulled out the blueprint and looked at it, rueful.

Stick figures on napkin.

One: waving, dripping wet.

• • •

And the other: every Monday coming to sit in this little sunroom, scanning the Graphic until distracted, somehow happening to glance up, always shocked to find a human being standing in his garden, always forgetting that it’s Monday, Mulching Monday, spilling coffee. Then their dance: the man’s eyes on him waiting for acknowledgment while he dabs at his pants leg, the petulant delay, until he gives up and looks up, sighs, forces a smile. Little wave of the napkin, in salutation and defeat.

There in his swami clothes and gardening gloves is Mr. Lamptey.

Smiling, clipping hedges, waving back.

But to look at the mango in the middle of the garden now, gravid, in bloom, bushy head held up high, he cannot for the life of him imagine it gone — though he might have said the same of himself years ago. Then, when he held Sadie in the bowl of his fingertips, her whole being trembling with the effort to be , he’d imagined himself irremovable, a fixture in the landscape. Intrinsic to the picture. The center, somehow. Then, for the life of him, he couldn’t have conceived of it, his absence from the life he was fighting to save. Of the landscape without him. An alternative view. Pulled up by his roots and replaced by a hole.

Still, he thinks of it now and it startles him, as earlier, when Taiwo dissolved silently outside the Living Wing door: with a pang, significantly sharper, so that he starts to fall forward and clutches the edge of the doorframe for balance. He shakes his head lightly, to knock the thought loose, but though it rocks back and forth, it doesn’t tumble, doesn’t fall. So he searches for another thought to bowl this one over, something duller, with more weight than his absence. He thinks:

what are you doing out here staring at a garden ?

It works. The spell breaks. The pang ebbs. He snaps back. Short of breath. “Grab a hold of yourself,” he mumbles aloud, partly coughing, partly chuckling to ensure that his cameraman knows that he, too, finds these musings absurd, that he’s not going crazy, was just lost in thought; indeed men lose their way in their thoughts all the time. Some oxygen is all, merry jaunt in the blossoms, make peace with the mango, smell roses, all that. He pushes the sliding door the rest of the way open.

He steps off the ledge to the garden and gasps.

• • •

Dewdrops on grass.

On the soles of his feet:

sudden, wet, unexpected, so shocking they hurt.

Only now does he notice that he’s not wearing slippers, with the sting of the cool on his bare-bottomed feet. How long has it been since he’s gone outside barefoot, gone anywhere barefoot, felt wet on his feet? Can’t recall. (Decades prior, in the darkness before daybreak with the ocean beside, moon above, long ago.) He jerks himself back as if jumping off coals, fully conscious. Thinks: where are my slippers?

For many years after, when Taiwo thinks of her father, she’ll picture him here in the garden like this, with his feet in the grass and the dew on his feet, and she’ll ask herself: where were his slippers? It is the least of all questions unasked and unanswered, the least of what’s wrong with the picture — man down, perhaps poisoned by an illiterate (Olu’s secret belief) or just dead in the tradition of people who just die (Mom’s) or punished by God for his various sins (Sadie’s) or exhausted by them (Kehinde’s) — but Taiwo will ask. Where were his slippers? When she thinks of her father, when she lets the thought form or it slips in disguised through a crack in the wall she and Kehinde erected those first lonely midnights in Lagos.