Africa39 (43 page)

There is not a trace of the green vegetation or the water that sustained it, regardless of how vivid his recollection and how unchanged the exact spot at which the python had stood. The paralysing reality is of the frogs that have metamorphosed. They now bare sharp malevolent teeth that remind the hunter of a mad-with-hunger hyena. With bloated bellies, the frogs emit violent grating sounds, ruefully eyeing the serpent's dry white skeleton. There is no doubt in the hunter's mind that they are the ones that devoured the serpent. Now they are satiated while the breeze lashes at the serpent's skeleton. Gone too are all traces of the precious fluid that had issued from the mouth of the serpent. Maybe that has also been consumed by the frogs. And now the frogs are struggling as they drag their big bellies along the ground. He fights the bile of rage and nausea that wells up from his gut.

Now the rapacious frogs turn on one another and begin a gory, blood-churning spectacle of tearing and ripping at each other. The sun, as if to turn its back on a world gone awry, begins rapidly descending to its nocturnal abode. It leaves behind a savannah reluctant to bid it farewell.

The hunter turns his gaze up at the grey streaked clouds that seem to assume the shape of arrows. Every day the clouds and the land seem to put up a fight against the departure of the sun, an occurrence they cannot stop and every morning they welcome the sun even before men and women begin to stir. The constant positive and negative interplay seems, to the hunter's mind, to be a primal pattern. He wonders though, where is the mid-point between the positive and negative. Maybe it is not necessary since the cycle always repeats itself.

He finds his steps homeward bound. But he stops and fights this stirring urge within him to return; he looks to the python's skeleton for some moments. Then he starts walking towards it, passing the frogs immersed in their ritual blood bath. Seeing him pass, heading towards where the snake's skeleton hangs, the frogs bare their sharp fangs and violently swing their clawed limbs at the hunter's feet. Unrelenting, the hunter dodges the attacks, pushes them aside with his feet and heads to the acacia tree where the python's skeleton hangs. He loads its body on to his shoulders. The python's skeleton wraps around the hunter's torso like a beaded mantle. The sound of the frogs gnashing at each other is now no more significant than the breeze playing through the trees around him and caressing his face. The frogs register the calm on the hunter's face as they try to catch the last rays of the sun at the door of their rocky hideouts.

He walks away shouldering the smooth bones of the python, and says out loud, ‘We are going home.'

from the novel
Ghana Must Go

Taiye Selasi

Fola wakes breathless that Sunday at sunrise, hot, dreaming of drowning, a roaring like waves. Dark. Curtains drawn, humid, the wet bed an ocean: half sleeping still, eyes closed, she sits up, cries out. But her ‘Kweku!’ is silent, two bubbles in water that now, her lips parted, run in down her throat, where they find, being water, more water within her, her belly, below that, her thighs, dripping wet – the once-white satin nightdress soaked, wet from the inside, and outside, a second skin, now brown with sweat – and, becoming a tide, turn, return up the middle, thighs, belly, heart, higher, then burst through her chest.

The sob is so loud that it rouses her fully. She opens her eyes and the water pours out. She is sobbing uncontrollably when the tide subsides abruptly, leaving no trace whatsoever of the dream as it does (much as waves erase sand-script, washing in without warning, wiping the writings of children and of lovers away). Only fear remains vaguely, come unhooked from its storyline, left on damp sand like a thin sparkling foam. And the roaring: sharp racket in dull humid darkness, the A/C as noisy as one that still works.

Sparkling fear-foam, and roaring.

She sits up, disoriented, unable to see for the drawn mustard drapes so just sitting there, baffled, unclear what’s just happened, or why she was crying, or why she’s just stopped. With the usual questions: what time is it? where is she?
In Ghana
, something answers, the bulbul outside, so-called ‘pepper birds’ bemusedly joining the racket in ode to oblivion to things that don’t work. So not night-time, then: pepper birds, the morning in Ghana, the place that she’s moved to, or fled to.

Again.

Without fanfare or forethought, as flocks move, or soldiers, on instinct, without luggage, setting off at first light: found the letter on a Monday, in the morning, in Boston, sorting mail at the counter (coffee, WBUR, ‘a member station supported by listeners like you’), bills for school fees, utilities. One dropped to the floor. Rather, floated to: pastel blue, flimsy, a feather, slipping silently from the catalogues of Monday’s thick mail. A proper letter. And lay there. In the white light of winter, that cheap airmail paper no one uses any more.

She opened it. Read it. Twice. Set it on the countertop. Left for the flower shop, leaving it there. Came home in the dark to the emptiness, retrieved it. Read again that Sena Wosornu, surrogate father, was dead.

Was dead and had left her, ‘Miss’ Folasadé Savage, a three-bedroom house in West Airport, Accra. Stood, stunned, in her coat in the kitchen and silence, soft silver-black darkness, tiles iced by the moon.

Monday evening. Left Friday. JFK to Kotoka. Nonstop. Without fanfare.

Just packed up and left.

Now she squints at the darkness and makes out the bedroom, unfamiliar entirely after only six weeks. Unfamiliar shapes, shadows, and the space here beside her, unfamiliar entirely after sixteen years, still.

She touches her nightdress, alarmed at the wetness. She peels the drenched satin away from her skin. She touches her stomach as she does when this happens, when fear hovers shyly, not showing its face yet, when something is wrong but she doesn’t know what or with which of the offspring that sprang from this spot. And the stomach answers always (the ‘womb’ maybe, more, but the word sounds absurd to her,
womb
, always has. A
womb
. Something cavernous, mysterious, a basement. A word with a shadow, a draft. Rhymes with
tomb
). She touches her stomach in the four different places, the quadrants of her torso between waist and chest: first the upper right (Olu) beneath her right breast, then the lower right (Taiwo) where she has the small scar, then the lower left (Kehinde) adjacent to Taiwo, then the upper left (Sadie), the baby, her heart. Stopping briefly at each to observe the sensation, the movement or stillness beneath the one palm. Sensing: Olu – all quiet. The sadness as usual, as soft and persistent as the sound of a fan. Taiwo – the tension. Light tugging sensation. But no sense of danger, no cause for alarm. Kehinde – the absence, the echoing silence made bearable by the certainty that
if
, she would know (as she knew when it happened, as she knew the very instant, cutting pastel-blue hydrangea at the counter in the shop, suddenly feeling a sort of seizure, lower left, crying, ‘Kehinde!’ with the knife slipping sideways and slicing her hand. Dripping blood on the counter, on the stems and the blossoms, on the phone as she dialled, already knowing which it was; getting voicemail, ‘This is Keh—’ call waiting, clicking over, frantic sobbing, ‘Mom, it’s Taiwo. Something happened.’ ‘I know.’ She knew as did Taiwo the very instant that it happened, as the blade made its way through the skin, the first wrist. So that now, a year later – more, nearly two years later – having neither seen nor heard from him, she knows. That she’d know). Last, Sadie – fluttering, butterflies, a new thing this restlessness, this looking for something, not finding it.

Fine.

Sadness, tension, absence, angst – but
fine
, as she birthed them, alive if not well, in the world, fish in water, in the condition she delivered them (breathing and struggling) and this is enough. Perhaps not for others, Fola thinks, other mothers who pray for great fortune and fame for their young, epic romance and joy (better mothers quite likely; small, bright-smiling, hard-driving, minivan-mothers), but for her who would kill, maim, and die for each child but who knows that the willingness to die has its limits.

That death is indifferent.

Not
she
(though she seems) but her age-old opponent, her enemy,
theirs,
the common enemy of all mothers – death, harm to the child – which will defeat her, she knows.

But not today.

The fear recedes. The roaring persists. The rough snuffling slosh of the broken machine. The heat grows assertive, as if feeing ignored.

The bedsheet and nightgown go suddenly cold.

She gets out of bed, knocking her knee as she does, quietly cursing the house, its deficient A/C. The night watchman Mr Ghartey was meant to have fixed it, or meant to have had his electrician-cousin come fix it, or meant to have called the white man who installed it to come fix it – the plan remains largely unclear. ‘He is coming’ is the answer whenever she asks. ‘I beg, he is coming.’ For weeks now, hot air. But the relationship is young, between her and her staff, and she knows to go slow, to tread lightly. She is a woman, first; unmarried, worse; a Nigerian, worst; and fair-skinned. As suspicious persons go in Ghana, she might as well be a known terrorist. The staff, whom she inherited along with the house and its 1970s orange-wool-upholstered wooden furniture, sort of tiptoe around her, poorly masking their shock. That she moved here alone. To sell
flowers
.

Worse: that she arrived on that Saturday, from the airport, in the morning, in the white linen outfit and open-toe shoes and, alighting the cab, said, ‘How
are
you?’ incomprehensibly, with British
a
and American
r
. Worst: that no man alighted the taxi thereafter.

That she shook their hands, seeking their eyes.

That, leaving her suitcases (three? were there more? was this all? a whole life in America?) by the cab, she proceeded directly to the wall to put her face in the crawlers. ‘Bougainv
iii
i
llea!’ Still incomprehensible.

That she greets them in the morning with this same odd ‘How
are
you?’ and thanks them as bizarrely for doing their jobs. ‘
Thank
you’ to the houseboy when he washes her clothing. ‘
Thank
you’ to the cook when he sets out her meals. ‘
Thank
you’ to the gatekeeper when he opens the gate and again as he closes it.

That she smokes.

That she wears shorts.

That she wanders around the garden in these shorts and a sun hat with cigarettes and clippers, snipping this, snipping that, hauling her catch into the kitchen, where she stands at the counter, not pounding yam, not shelling beans, but arranging
flowers
. It amuses her, always has, this disregard of Africans for flowers, the indifference of the abundantly blessed (or psychologically battered – the chronic self-loather who can’t accept, even with evidence, that anything native to him, occurring in abundance, in excess, without effort, has value).

They watch as research scientists observe a new species, a hybrid, herbivorous, likely harmless, maybe not. Masked, feeding her, washing for her, examining her clothing when they think she’s not looking, whispering, watching her eat. She hasn’t yet told them that she once lived in Ghana, that she understands all they say in hushed Twi about her flowers, flowered nightdresses, distressing eating habits like pulling out and eating the weeds (lemongrass). She learned this from her father, who spoke the major Nigerian languages plus French, Swahili, Arabic, and snatches of Twi. ‘Always learn the local language. Never let on to the locals,’ he’d say, a cigar at the end of its life on his lips, giving birth to a laugh – upper left.

There it is.

The movement she was feeling for.

Left upper quadrant, in the vicinity of Sadie but closer to the heart, not a tugging or a tightening or a throbbing of dread but an echo, an emptiness, an emptying out. A familiar sensation. Not the one she was feeling for, fearful of (auguring harm done the child) but remembered, unmistakable, from four decades prior, a memory she forgot she still has.

She sits back down absently, abandoning her mission, whatever it was, a word with Mr Ghartey perhaps, or a smack to the side of the wall-mounted machine, or a fresh set of bed sheets, a post-nightmare drink.

And thinks:
odd,
to be returned to the death of her father, which she thinks of so rarely, as one recounts dreams, out of focus, diluted, not the event but the emotion, a sadness that’s faded, dried, curled, lost its colour. The
event
she can see clear as day even now: Lagos, July 1966, the short chain of events. First: the waking up gasping, cold, thirteen years old, all her posters of the Beatles stuck with tacks to the walls, sitting alarmed in the dark with that space in her chest, unfamiliar with the feeling (the same odd emptiness as now). Second: making her way from her room down the hall, to her father’s room, forgetting that he’d travelled to the North, gone to see about his in-laws, her ‘grandparents’, the Nwaneris, whom she’d never actually met and never would. No one said it. Never him, her kind, broad-shouldered, woolly-haired father, who wept for the loss of his bride every night, kneeling down by his bed beneath the portrait above it, Somayina Nwaneri, fair, gold-eyed. A ghost. Twenty-seven.