by Yaa Gyasi
Like the children’s church pastor, P.T. talked a lot about sin, but he wasn’t partial to puppets. He paid little attention to me and interpreted Scripture as he saw fit.
He said, “If girls only knew what boys think about when they wear those low-cut things and those high-cut things, they wouldn’t wear them anymore.”
He said, “There are a lot of people out there who’ve never heard the Gospel, and they’re just busy walking in sin until we spread the good news.”
He said, “God glories in our commitment to him. Remember, he is our bridegroom and we are his bride. We must be faithful to none other.”
P.T. was forever smirking and drumming his fingers on the lip of the table as he talked. He was the kind of youth pastor who wanted to make God hip in a way that almost felt exclusionary. His wasn’t the God of bookworms and science geeks. He was the God of punk rock. P.T. liked wearing a shirt that proclaimed JESUS FREAK across the front. The word “freak” written there next to “Jesus” was purposefully combative, incongruous, as if to shout, “This isn’t your mother’s Christianity.” If Jesus was a club, P.T. and other youth pastors like him were the bouncers.
One day Nana called bullshit on an exclusionary God. He raised his hand, and P.T. paused his drumming, tilted his seat back. “Shoot, bro,” he said.
“So what if there’s a tiny village somewhere in Africa that is so incredibly remote that no one has found it yet, which means no Christians have been able to go there as missionaries and spread the Gospel, right? Are all of those villagers going to Hell, even though there’s no way that they could have heard about Jesus?”
P.T.’s smirk set in and his eyes narrowed at Nana a bit. “God would have made a way for them to hear the good news,” he said.
“Okay, but hypothetically.”
“Hypothetically, dude? Yeah, they’re going to Hell.”
I was shocked by this answer, by the smugly satisfied way in which P.T. had consigned an entire helpless village of Africans to eternal damnation without so much as a blink. He didn’t spend even the length of an exhale thinking about Nana’s question, working on a way out. He didn’t say, for example, that God doesn’t deal in hypotheticals, a perfectly reasonable answer to a not entirely reasonable question. His willingness to play into Nana’s game was itself a sign that he saw God as a kind of prize that only some were good enough to win. It was like he wanted Hell for those villagers, like he believed there were people for whom Hell is a given, deserved.
And the part that bothered me most was that I couldn’t shake the feeling that the people P.T. believed deserved Hell were people who looked like Nana and me. I was seven, but I wasn’t stupid. I had seen the pamphlets that proclaimed the great need for missionaries in various other countries. The children in those pamphlets, their distended bellies, the flies buzzing around their eyes, their soiled clothing, they were all the same deep, dark brown as me. I already understood the spectacle of poverty, the competing impulses to help and to look away that such images spurred, but I understood, too, that poverty was not a black and brown phenomenon. I had seen the way the kids at school who came from the trailer park walked around, their short fuses sparked by a careless word about their tight shoes or “flooding” pants, and I had seen the rotted-out barns and farmhouses off the back roads in the Podunk towns just minutes outside my city. “Don’t let our car break down in this dirty village,” my mother would pray in Twi whenever we passed through one of these towns. She used the word akuraase, the same word she would use for a village in Ghana, but I had already been conditioned to see America as somehow elevated in relation to the rest of the world, and so I was convinced that an Alabama village couldn’t be an akuraase in the same way that a Ghanaian village could. Years after P.T.’s remarks I started to see the ridiculousness of that idea, the idea of a refined and elevated American poverty that implies a base, subhuman third world. The belief in this subhumanity was what made those posters and infomercials so effective, no different really from the commercials for animal shelters, the people in these infomercials no better than dogs. P.T.’s unconsidered answer was no doubt just a careless thought from a man who was not accustomed to thinking too deeply about why he held fast to his faith, but for me, that day, his words set that very kind of thinking into motion.
I watched P.T. set his chair legs back down on the ground and continue his teaching, being careful not to let his eyes fall on Nana. Across the room, Nana also had a smug look on his face. He didn’t go to youth services much after that.
20
Dear God,
Buzz says that Christianity is a cult except that it started so long ago that people didn’t know what cults were yet. He said we’re smarter now than we were back then. Is that true?
Dear God,
Would you show me that you’re real?
21
My apartment smelled like oil, like pepper, like rice and plantains. I set my bag down in the entryway and rushed to the kitchen to find a sight as familiar to me as my own body: my mother cooking.
“You’re up,” I said, and immediately regretted the choked excitement in my voice. I didn’t want to frighten her. I’d seen videos of cornered black mambas, striking before slipping away, faster than a blink. Was my mother capable of the same?
“You don’t have eggs. You don’t have milk. You don’t have flour. What do you eat?” she said. She was wearing a robe she must have found in one of my drawers. Her left breast, deflated from the weight loss and shriveled with age, peeked out through the thin fabric. When we were children, her propensity for nakedness had embarrassed Nana and me no end. Now, I was so happy to see her, all of her, I didn’t care.
“I don’t really cook,” I said.
She sucked her teeth at me and continued working, slicing the plantains, salting the jollof. I heard the sizzle of the oil, and that smell of hot, wet grease was enough to make my mouth water.
“If you had spent time in the kitchen with me, helping me, you would know how to make all of this. You would know how to feed yourself properly.”
I held my breath and counted to three, waiting for the urge to say something mean to pass. “You’re here now. I can learn now.”
She snorted. So, this was how it would go. I watched her lean over the pot of oil. She grabbed a handful of plantains and dropped them in, her hand so low, so close to the oil. The oil sputtered as it swallowed the plantains, and when my mother lifted her hand from the pot, I could see glistening specks from where the oil had spit at her. She wiped the spots with her index finger, touched her finger to her tongue. How many times had she been burned like this? She must have been immune.
“Do you remember that time you put hot oil on Nana’s foot?” I asked from my spot at the counter. I wanted to get up and help her, but I was nervous that she would make fun of me or, worse, tell me how every move I made was wrong. She was right that I had avoided her kitchen my entire childhood, but even now, even with my small sample size of days spent cooking with her, it’s her voice I hear, saying, “You clean as you go, you clean as you go,” whenever I cook.
“What are you talking about?”
“You don’t remember? We were having a party at the house and you put oil—”
She sharply turned to face me. She was holding a mesh strainer in her hand, high up in the air like a gavel she could bring down at any moment. I saw panic in her face, panic that covered the blankness that had been there since she’d arrived.
“I never did that,” she said. “I never, never did that.”
I was going to press her but then I looked into her eyes and knew immediately that I had made a mistake. Not in the memory, carried back to me through that smell of hot oil, but in the reminder.
“I’m sorry. I must have dreamed it,” I said, and she brought the gavel down.
* * *
—
My mother ra
rely threw parties, and when she did, she spent the entire week leading up to them in enough of a cooking/cleaning frenzy to make you wonder if we were hosting royalty. There were a handful of Ghanaians in Alabama who made up the Ghana Association, and many of them had to drive upward of two hours to come to any of the gatherings. My mother, never the life of the party, only went to a meeting if the drive was under an hour, and she only hosted if she had four days off in a row, a rare enough occurrence to mean that she only hosted twice.
She’d bought me a new dress and Nana new slacks. She pressed them in the morning and then laid them out on our beds, threatening death if we so much as looked at them wrong before it was time to get into them, and then she spent the rest of the day cooking. By the time the first guests arrived, the house was practically sparkling, fragrant with the scents of Ghana.
It was the first time many of the other Ghanaians were seeing us since the Chin Chin Man’s departure, and Nana and I, already outcasts for our taciturn mother, were dreading the party, the stares, the unsolicited advice from the grown-ups, the teasing from the other kids.
“We’ll stay for five minutes and then we can fake sick,” Nana whispered through his smile as we greeted an auntie who smelled like baby powder.
“She’ll know we’re lying,” I whispered back, remembering her CIA-level interrogation into the mystery of who had stolen a Malta from the back of her closet.
It didn’t come to that. By the time the other children showed up, Nana and I had moved from enduring to enjoying the party. My mother had made bofrot, puff-puff, balls of fried dough, and before long all of the children were engaged in an all-out war, the bofrot as our weapon. The rules were ill-defined, but the general idea of the game was that if you were hit with a flying bofrot then you were out.
Nana was, as usual, an expert player. He was fast, he had a good arm, and he was especially adept at escaping detection, for we all knew that if the adults caught us wasting food by throwing it at each other, the game, and our lives, would surely end. I knew I wasn’t fast enough to outrun Nana, and so I hid behind our couch, waiting with my pile of bofrots, listening for the frustrated sighs and giggles of the other children who’d been pelted out. That couch, the only couch I’d ever known, was so old, so ugly, that it was slowly giving up on itself. The seams on one of the cushions had burst, leaving its stuffing, like guts, spilling out from the sides. The left arm of the couch had a decorative wooden piece nailed in, but every so often the piece would fall off, nails out, and Nana, my mother, or I would have to shove it back into the upholstery. I must have knocked the wooden piece off to get behind the couch that day, because it wasn’t long before I heard Nana scream. I slunk out from behind the couch to find him with the wooden piece nailed to the bottom of his foot.
Every uncle and auntie in the room came over to hold court. My mother could hardly shove her way through before everyone had offered up their solutions to the problem. I quickly ate my bofrots, hiding the evidence of my involvement, as the adults in the room got louder and louder. Finally, my mother got to Nana. She sat him down on that treacherous couch and, without a hint of ceremony, pulled the wooden piece, nail and all, from Nana’s foot, leaving behind a perfect, bleeding hole.
“Lockjaw, my sister,” one of the aunties said.
“It’s true, that nail might give him lockjaw. You can’t take any chances.”
The din started up again as the adults discussed tetanus prevention. Nana and I rolled our eyes at each other, waiting for the grown-ups to stop their posturing, slap a Band-Aid on his foot, and call it a day. But there was something about their talk, the way they were working themselves up with memories and ideas of Ghana, their old home. It was like they were turning themselves on with these mentions of folk remedies, turning themselves on and showing each other up, proving that they hadn’t lost it, their Ghanaianness.
My mother scooped Nana up into her arms and carried him into the kitchen, the entire party trailing after her. She put a small pot of oil on the stove and dipped a silver spoon in it and, with Nana screaming, the grown-ups encouraging, and the children looking on in fear, she touched the hot oiled spoon to the hole in Nana’s foot.
Could my mother have forgotten that? The time she had stopped believing in the powers of a tetanus vaccination and had instead left Nana’s health up to folk wisdom. Nana had been so angry at her afterward, so angry and confused. Surely, she remembered.
I set the table while my mother scooped rice and fried plantains onto two plates. She sat down next to me and the two of us ate in silence. That food was better than anything I had eaten in months, years even, better still for having been the one sign of life from a woman who had done nothing but sleep since her arrival. I ate it hungrily. I accepted seconds and did the dishes while my mother looked on. Evening came, and she got back into bed, and by the time I left for the lab the next morning, she still had not gotten up.
22
A mouse with a fiber-optic implant on its head looks like something out of a science-fiction movie, though I suppose any creature with a fiber-optic implant on its head would. I often attached such implants to my mice’s heads so that I could deliver light into their brains during my experiments. Han came into the lab one day to find me attaching a fiber-optic patch cord to one of my mice’s implants. Both Han and the mouse didn’t seem the least bit interested in what I was doing.
“Don’t you think it’s weird how quickly we get used to things?” I said to Han. The patch cord was connected to a blue LED that I would use to deliver light the next time the mouse performed the lever experiment.
Han hardly looked up from his own work. “What do you mean?” he said.
“I mean that if anyone else walked in here and saw this mouse with all of this intense hardware fastened onto its head they’d find it a little strange. They’d think we were creating cyborgs.”
“We are creating cyborgs,” he said. And then he paused, looked at me. “I mean, there’s some debate about whether nonhumans can be considered cyborgs, but given the fact that ‘cyborg’ itself is an abbreviation of ‘cybernetic organism,’ I think it’s safe to say you can extend the definition to any organic matter that’s been biomechanically engineered, right?”
I’d brought this on myself. I spent the next fifteen minutes listening to Han talk about the Future of Science Fiction, which was perhaps the most I’d ever heard him talk about anything. I was bored by the conversation at first, but it was nice to see him so animated by something that I ended up getting caught up in it despite myself.
“My brother always said he wanted bionic legs so that he could be faster on the basketball court,” I said without thinking.
Han pushed up his glasses and leaned in closer to his mouse. “I didn’t know you had a brother,” he said. “Does he still play basketball?”
“He, um. He…” I couldn’t seem to get the words out. I didn’t want to see Han’s ears turn red, that telltale sign of mortification or pity. I wanted to remain who I was to him, without coloring our relationship with stories of my personal life.
Han finally looked up from his work and turned to face me. “Gifty?” he said.
“He died. It was a long time ago.”
“Jesus, I’m so sorry,” Han said. He held my gaze for a long time, longer than either of us was used to, and I was grateful that he didn’t say anything more. That he didn’t ask, as so many people do, how it happened. It embarrassed me to know that I would have been embarrassed to talk about Nana’s addiction with Han.
Instead I said, “He was incredible at basketball. He didn’t need the bionic legs.”
Han nodded and flashed me a sweet, quiet smile. Neither of us really knew what to do or say next, so I asked Han who his favorite science-fiction writers were, hoping that a change of subject might melt away the lump that was forming in my throat. Han took the hint.
* * *
—
A year or so after my mother shoved the box of Nana’s cleats and jerseys and soccer balls into the corner of our garage, Nana came home from school with a note from his P.E. teacher. “Basketball tryouts on Wednesday. We’d love to see Nana there,” the note said.
That summer, Nana had hit six feet tall at just thirteen years old. I’d helped my mother measure him on the wall just off the kitchen, climbing up onto her shoulders and placing the faint pencil mark where Nana’s head touched. “Ey, Nana, we’ll have to lift the ceiling soon,” my mother teased once the tape measure snapped back into its case. Nana rolled his eyes, but he was smiling, proud of his genetic luck.
Basketball was, of course, a logical sport for a tall, athletically gifted child, but we were a soccer family in football country. It never really occurred to any of us. And, though we never admitted it to ourselves or to each other, we all felt like a change in sport would be an insult to the Chin Chin Man, who had once said that his time would be better spent watching giraffes in the wild than watching basketball players on television.
But, clearly, Nana missed sports. His body was of a kind that needed to be in motion for him to feel at ease. He was always fidgeting, bouncing his legs, rolling his neck, cracking his knuckles. He wasn’t meant to sit still, and those of us who had loved to watch him play soccer knew that there was something right, true, real about Nana in motion. He was himself, beautiful. My mother signed the consent form.