Yaa Gyasi - Transcendent Kingdom

“You hide behind your work. You don’t let people in. When am I going to meet your family?”

The cracks in our relationship had begun to show. One crack—that I was bad at dinners. Another—that I worked too much. The biggest—my family.

I had told Raymond that I was an only child. I liked to think of it as a prolonged omission rather than an outright lie. He had asked if I had any siblings and I had said no. I’d continued saying no for months, and then by the time we started having the “When am I going to meet your family?” fight I couldn’t figure out a way to say yes again.

“My mom doesn’t like to travel,” I said.

“We’ll go to her. Alabama’s not that far away.”

“My dad lives in Ghana,” I said.

“I’ve never been to Ghana,” he said. “Always wanted to visit the motherland. Let’s do it.”

It annoyed me when he called Africa “the motherland.” It annoyed me that he felt close enough to it to do so. It was my motherland, my mother’s land, but the only memories I had of it were unpleasant ones of the heat, the mosquitoes, the packed bodies in Kejetia that summer when all I could think about was the brother I had lost and the mother I was losing.

I didn’t lose my mother that summer, but something inside of her left and never returned. I hadn’t even told her that I was seeing someone. Our phone calls, infrequent and short, were so terse it was like we spoke in code. “How are you?” I’d ask. “Fine,” she’d say, which meant, I’m alive and isn’t that enough? Was it enough? Raymond came from a big family, three older sisters, a mother and father, too many aunts and uncles and cousins to count. He talked to at least one of them every day. I’d met them all and smiled shyly as they praised my beauty, my intellect, as they called me a keeper.

“Don’t mess this up,” Raymond’s eldest sister had whispered, loudly enough for me to hear, as we left his parents’ house one evening.

But Raymond wasn’t an idiot. He knew there were things I wasn’t saying, and in the beginning, he was content to wait until I was ready to say them, but then, close to six months in, I could feel my grace period winding down.

“I’ll try harder, at the dinner parties. I’ll try harder,” I said one night after a fight had left us both ragged and teetering on the edge of our will to stay together.

He wiped a hand over his brow and closed his eyes. He couldn’t look at me. “It’s not about the fucking parties, Gifty,” he said softly. “Do you even want to be with me? I mean really be with me?”

I nodded. I moved to stand behind him and wrapped my arms around him. “Maybe next summer we can go to Ghana together,” I said.

He turned to face me, his eyes filled with suspicion, but also with hope. “Next summer?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll ask my mom if she wants to come too.”

If Raymond knew I was lying, he let me lie.

—

My mother has never been back to Ghana. It’s been more than three decades since she left with baby Nana in tow. After my fight with Raymond, I’d called her and asked if she ever thought about going back. She had money saved; she could live a simpler life there, not have to work all the time.

“Go back for what?” she said. “My life is here.” And I knew what she meant. Everything she had built for us and everything she had lost were held in this country. Most of her memories of Nana were in Alabama, in our house on the cul-de-sac at the top of that little hill. Even if there was pain in America, there had also been joy—the markings on the wall off our kitchen that showed how Nana shot up two feet in one year, the basketball hoop, rusted out from rain, disuse. There was me in California, my own separate branch on this family tree, growing slowly, but growing. In Ghana there was only my father, the Chin Chin Man, whom neither of us had spoken to in years.

I don’t think this place was everything my mother hoped for that day when she asked God where she should go to give her son the world. Though she didn’t ford a river or hike across mountains, she still did what so many pioneers before her had done, traveled recklessly, curiously, into the unknown in the hopes of finding something just a little bit better. And like them she suffered and she persevered, perhaps in equal measure. Whenever I looked at her, a castaway on the island of my queen-sized bed, it was hard for me to look past the suffering. It was hard for me not to take inventory of all that she had lost—her home country, her husband, her son. The losses just kept piling up. It was hard for me to see her there, hear her ragged breath, and think of how she had persevered, but she had. Just lying there in my bed was a testament to her perseverance, to the fact that she survived, even when she wasn’t sure she wanted to. I used to believe that God never gives us more than we can handle, but then my brother died and my mother and I were left with so much more; it crushed us.

It took me many years to realize that it’s hard to live in this world. I don’t mean the mechanics of living, because for most of us, our hearts will beat, our lungs will take in oxygen, without us doing anything at all to tell them to. For most of us, mechanically, physically, it’s harder to die than it is to live. But still we try to die. We drive too fast down winding roads, we have sex with strangers without wearing protection, we drink, we use drugs. We try to squeeze a little more life out of our lives. It’s natural to want to do that. But to be alive in the world, every day, as we are given more and more and more, as the nature of “what we can handle” changes and our methods for how we handle it change, too, that’s something of a miracle.

51

Katherine had been asking if she could come over.

“You don’t have to introduce me or anything. I could just come have a cup of coffee with you and then go. What do you think?”

Whenever she asked, I demurred. I recognized this old pattern in myself, my need to DIY my mother’s mental health, as though all it would take for her to get better was me with a glue gun, me with a Ghanaian cookbook and a tall glass of water, me with a slice of shortcake. It hadn’t worked then and it wasn’t working now. At some point I had to ask for, to accept, help.

I cleaned the house before Katherine came over. It wasn’t dirty, but old habits die hard. She came carrying a bouquet of flowers, and a plate of chocolate-chip cookies. I hugged her, invited her to sit at my little dining room table, and put a pot of coffee on.

“I can’t believe I haven’t been here before,” Katherine said, looking around. I had been living there for nearly four years, but you couldn’t tell by the look of things. I lived my life like a woman who was accustomed to having to leave at a moment’s notice. Raymond had called my apartment “The Witness Protection Pad.” No pictures of family, no pictures at all. We’d always gone to his place.

“I don’t really have people over very often,” I said. I hunted down a couple of mugs and filled them. I sat across from Katherine, cupping my mug, warming my hands.

She was watching me. Waiting for me to talk, waiting for me to take the lead somehow. I wanted to remind her that none of this had been my idea.

“She’s in there,” I whispered, pointing to my bedroom.

“Okay, we won’t bother her,” Katherine said. “How are you doing?”

I wanted to cry but I didn’t. I’d inherited that skill from my mother. I had become my mother in so many ways that it was hard to think of myself as a person distinct from her, hard to see my shut bedroom door and not imagine that, one day, it would be me on the other side. Me, in bed, except alone, without a child to care for me. Puberty had been such a shock. Before it I’d looked like no one, which is to say I’d looked like myself, but after it, I’d started to look like my mother, my body growing to fill the mold her shape had left. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t, wouldn’t cry. Like my mother, I had a locked box where I kept all my tears. My mother had only opened hers the day that Nana died and she had locked it again soon thereafter. A mouse fight had opened mine, but I was trying to close it back up again.