Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

• • •

It was a game in the beginning, as everything became there, a game between the two of them to keep them both sane somehow: never being allowed to say “father” or “dad” and having to pay if you slipped, a penalty the other twin chose (usually sneaking into the kitchen to steal milk biscuits for the both of them, three-packs wrapped in plastic, perfect for hiding for later use).

That was how they built the base.

Next they rewrote the stories.

This was a game they played mostly at night in that sticky second bedroom with the overhead fan and two creaky twin beds, the only room in the house that wasn’t furnished with a working A/C. Taiwo would go first, telling some story from Boston, like the time he woke them up in the middle of the night and made them put on their snowsuits and piled them in the Volvo and drove them to Lars Andersen Park.

It was two in the morning and the snow had just fallen, the whole vista white, a dog barking somewhere. He pulled five plastic sleds from the trunk of the car while they gawked at him, wide-eyed, Mom sucking her teeth. “Kweku, no,” she hissed softly, just now cottoning on, clapping her fingers together. Woolen mittens. “We’ll get arrested.”

Sadie wasn’t born yet.

The snow fresh and perfect.

The park dark and empty.

Stars winked their consent.

They didn’t get arrested. They sledded until dawn, even Mom, whispering, laughing, delirious with joy, with the mischief of it, ashy-skinned, an improbable picture: an African family playing alone in the snow.

But the way she retold it, their father wasn’t in it. It was Mom’s plan, night-sledding; there were four sleds, not five. Then Kehinde would tell one. And so on and so forth, short stories of snow, until they both fell asleep. Until the man was erased — from their stories and so their childhoods (which only existed as stories, Taiwo knew this, still knows). Not dead. Never dead. They never wished the man dead or pretended he was dead. Just deleted, walled off. Denied existence, present only in absence and silence. Reduced to a notion. No more than a thought. And a thought, which in itself was an arrangement of words, i.e., words they didn’t use — so, a thought they didn’t think.

• • •

Time passed and this wall grew higher.

Time passed and this wall grew weak.

Until, without warning, a thought. Where were his slippers? And again a week later. The crack in the wall. It was the one thing they forgot to erase from their stories, the disease-carrying mosquito on the evacuation plane: not a moment or a memory, a remembered detail in an anecdote, but a detail in every anecdote, omnipresent, the ground. So they missed them, didn’t delete them, let them stay where they were, where they’ve remained, present, latent, fomenting the past.

The slippers.

Battered slip-ons, brown, worn to the soles. Like leather pets with separation issues, loyal, his dogs. And his religion, what he believed in, the very basis of his morality: mash-up cosmopolitan asceticism, ritual, clean lines. The slipper . So simple in composition, so silent on wood, bringing clean, peace and quiet to God’s people the world over, every class and every culture, affordable for all, a unique form of protection against the dangers of home, e.g., splinters and bacteria and harm caused to wood, i.e., hand-scraped oak floorboards, fifty dollars per square foot. He’d visit other houses and take notice first and foremost of whether the family “practiced” slippers, all other judgments from there. And if anyone came to visit — God forbid, Taiwo’s friends, the teeming hordes of high-pitched classmates who had crushes on her twin — there he’d be, at the ready, in the doorway, “Do come in!” Gesturing grandly to the basket that he kept by the door.

Like a bin of rental ice skates.

Every style of slipper. Thick quilted-cotton slippers from fancy hotels, brilliant white with padded insoles and beige rubber treads; shiny polyester slippers bought in Chinatown in bulk, electric blue and hot pink, embroidered dragons on the toes; stiff, Flintstones-looking flip-flops from the airport in Ghana (whence the crazy MC Hammer pants in gye nyame print). Kehinde’s blushing stalkers almost always chose the dragons, glancing encouragingly at one another as they kicked off their Keds, pledging silent solidarity as they bravely marched in to this strange new world smelling of ginger and oil.

“Omigod, Taiwo, your dad’s so adorable !” one would giggle, reaching into her uppermost register for adorable .

“Omigod, Taylor, you’re so artificial ,” she’d be mocking when Kehinde appeared at her back. Materializing out of nowhere as only he could, without sound, entering the foyer in Moroccan babouches.

“Hello,” he would greet them, sounding shy, speaking quietly. Not really shy, Taiwo knew. Not really interested was all.

Hi was a three-syllable word in their mouths. Hi-i-i . As they caught sight of Kehinde, and blushed. Taiwo would observe this in Westin Hotel slippers. Four blond ponytails bowed in reverence before her brother’s babouches. Jealousy and bemusement would tangle, a knot. When the girls looked up Kehinde was gone.

Ninja slippers.

• • •

A religion or a fetish, like a form of podophilia — or so it suddenly seemed to Taiwo, encountering the word in eighth-grade Classics. Rather, auto-podophilia . She wrote this neatly in her notebook, shading the o ’s in with her pencil while someone asked, “Then what’s a pedophile?”

The teacher’s nervous laughter was a distant sound in Taiwo’s head, the shading of the o ’s her more immediate concern. She was thinking of her father and the lavish care he gave his feet: the salt scrubs and the peppermint oils and the vitamin E before bed. Love of feet. But later they’ll return to her, this laughter and its nervousness, the tension in the teacher’s face, the classroom air, the titters, every movement, sound, and image, every instant of that moment, plain: precisely the kind of moment one never knows for what it is.

An end.

A warning shot.

A boundary mark. Between “the way things were” and “when everything changed,” a moment within which one notices nothing, about which one remembers all. Which is the point. The difference between Taiwo’s life at twelve, before everything changed, and the life that came next is this: not noticing. Not having to notice, not knowing to notice. That she never looked out. Not “innocent” as such — she’s never thought herself innocent, not as Kehinde was innocent, of judgment, distrust — but insular , contented in the world in her head, a whole life taking rise from her dreams, her own thoughts.

She was thinking just then of her father’s “love of feet,” of his love of his feet, when someone asked about pedophiles and, half paying attention, she wrote the word down. A person who loves children. Who loves his own children.

Pedophile.

Auto-pedophile.

Auto-podophile.

And then. That familiar tingling in the pit of her stomach, the butterflies she felt when she knew she was right. Excitement and comfort and satisfaction mixed together with a touch of something heavier, more sinister: relief. Relief that she knew , that she’d gotten it right, tinged with terror at what might happen were she one day to be wrong. This is what she remembers most clearly ever after and laughs at most cruelly, her self-satisfaction that day: that she’d answered correctly, as she might have at a spelling bee, the question of who was her father?

One who loved his own feet and who loved his own children.