by Taiye Selasi
5.
They pile into Benson’s SUV after breakfast, each shut in the silent glass box of his thoughts, seven boxes, locked, soundproof and shatter-resistant; the eighth man, the driver, hums, present, alone. The day has dawned coolish, deceptively clement, sun covered by clouds, a thick coat of pale gray with bright whiteness behind it, a threat or a promise, breeze running its fingers through leaves, not yet noon. In thirty or so minutes the clouds will start parting, the leaves will stop moving, the air will stand still; the sun will stop playing demure and come forward; the day will turn muggy, unbearably hot. The weather in December is like this in Ghana: an in-taken breath held until the world spins, trail of tears to the New Year through sopping humidity, the worst of the heat, then the respite of rain.
ii
An hour outside of the city: the ocean.
Unannounced, unambitious.
Just suddenly there.
They’ve flown up the freshly paved road to the junction, where they turn up a hill lined on both sides by homes. The main road is bustling with noonday commotion, plump women bearing water and goods on their heads, thin children in uniform, dark brown and light orange, trotting briskly down the road to catch a tro-tro to lunch. The men are less visible. A few stand in doorways in loose faded trousers and wifebeater shirts, peering out, partially squinting, partially frowning, undecided, as Benson’s Benz truck rumbles past, stirring dust.
Benson is seated up front with the driver, in straw hat and Ray-Bans, a safari tour guide. Ling, between Fola and Olu, sits tensely. Sadie between Taiwo and Kehinde, behind.
“I remember this road,” murmurs Fola.
“You’ve been here?” Benson turns to face Fola, and Olu shrinks back.
“Only once. And too late.” She touches Olu on the shoulder blade. “You came too, darling.” A twinge, upper right.
• • •
The car crests the hill and descends by the water, the road belted in from the beach by a field. They all turn to stare as one does when he hasn’t seen ocean in months, shocked afresh by the scope. Even Sadie stops pretending to sleep on her brother, sits up, and leans over to stare out the glass.
A halfhearted wall made of mortar and concrete block starts and then stops like a six-year-old’s smile, with huge gaps between bits of it exposing the goats grazing lazily on grass, in no rush, a large herd. To the right of the road the steep hill continues upward, red earth densely greened with tall grass and short trees; to the left a low field, a mile deep, flowering shrubs, knotted crawlers, wild grass thinning out into sand. Then the beach. It is farther than it seems from the car, where one thinks if he wanted he could simply leap out and make a beeline for the water like a toddler, peeling clothes off, kicking shoes off, screaming, joyous, for his freedom as he ran. In fact, it would take more than a little bit of effort to approach through the weeds at this point in the road; better access lies ahead at the edge of the village, where the fishermen have beaten out a trail through the grass.
Still, the water beckons, stretched flat to the horizon, the same moody shade as the clouds overhead, not the prettiest beach in the world but there’s something, a calm getting on with it, calming to behold. Palms stretching forward at forty-five-degree angles appear to be shaking out their hair on the sand over long wooden boats in spectacular colors festooned with black seaweed, white, blue and green nets. Just visible in the distance, three women are walking with babies tucked into their lappas, bare feet, three abreast, with a touch of the patriotic to the lappas, one goldish, one red, one a bright emerald green.
Benson begins speaking to no one in particular, a rambling little speech in a tight, chipper voice. “I came here with Kweku when he first moved to Ghana to treat some young nephew who’d broken his leg, and so happened to meet the local maker of coffins, who was also the local physician, it seemed. Ga people believe that a coffin should be a reflection of the life of the person inside it. So a fisherman’s coffin might be shaped like a fish or a carpenter’s shaped like a hammer, I guess, or a woman who likes shoes, in the shape of a shoe. They can be quite elaborate.”
Fola offers, “Indeed.”
“What’s this town called?” Olu asks. (Benson answers.) “Kokrobité,” repeats Olu. “Sounds Japanese.” Disappointed.
“Reminds me of Jamaica,” Ling murmurs. “Ocho Rios.”
Different palette, thinks Kehinde. Less azure, more red.
“Village,” says Fola. “Less a town than a village.”
“I didn’t know he grew up by the ocean,” Taiwo says.
“That’s why we always had a house near the water. The harbor, the river, in Brookline the pond . . .” Fola trails off, seeing trees in the distance, the boats beached on sand.
They are silent again.
• • •
The road travels on past the first glimpse of ocean and into the village, where it loses the view—and the paving and straightness, becoming instead a dirt path winding, rock-strewn and rough, through the homes. They’re single-room structures—of wood, brick, or concrete, some mud, with tin roofs, a few thatch, glassless windows, wooden shutters—in clusters, with clotheslines and open-air stoves and bath buckets and trees between clusters. Women bent over these buckets wash clothing and very young children, who wave as they pass. Chickens wander pecking at earth, as do goats, these much dirtier and skinnier than the ones by the beach. The elderly sit watching ancient TVs under shade trees, in a circle beneath the leaf cover. Barbershops mingle with braiding stalls, signboards, BLOOD ON THE CROSS CUT & SHAVE, CROWN OF THORNS BRAIDS, kiosks sell calling cards and top-up cards and aliment, with wares stacked in piles to the roof, blocks of color: yellow (Lipton, Maggi), green (Milo, Wrigley’s), red (oil, tomato paste, corned beef, instant coffee).
The holes in the road make for truly rough going, which inevitably begins to feel like the fault of the driver. When he finally stops abruptly by a small walled-in compound, one tire in a groove, tilting off the main road, they glare at him, nauseous, unaware that he’s parked and not simply run the car into a ditch by mistake. Benson turns to speak, stopping short at their faces. He manages a halting “Yes. Right. Okay. So.”
The air has gone heavy with the stopping of the vehicle, the moment they’ve been waiting for appearing to have come. Fola touches Olu on the knee, which stops the bouncing. Ling observes the gesture, notes that Olu doesn’t flinch. Kehinde mouths to Sadie you okay? She nods her head. He looks across at Taiwo, who is staring out the back. Benson tries again, removing Ray-Bans and sunhat, and forcing a slightly less chipper “We’re here.”
iii
“Here” is a compound at the edge of the village, a square of nine huts in a large patch of dust with a tree in the middle befitting the context, the same type of tree found in every such patch: massive, ancient, gray, twisted, thick trunk a small fortress, raised roots bursting up through the hardened red earth, knotted branches fanned out in imperial fashion, horizontal, dropping leaves on their way to the roofs. A behemoth. Beneath it are five wooden benches arranged in a circle, to a social effect. Around it, six huts form a three-sided square with their doors standing open to dark, bed-less rooms; behind these two more, and behind that the biggest, or tallest, a mud hut with massive thatch roof.
The driver has stopped in the groove by an entrance marked off by a wall made of crumbling red brick. They get out in silence, first Benson, then Olu, then the rest of them, shading their eyes with their hands. A heavyset woman is waiting to meet them in a traditional outfit of simple black cloth. She’s fashioned a swath of this cloth as a head wrap with bow tie in front, short gray hair tucked inside. Her skin is so smooth that she could be much younger, but she stands like a woman of seventy hard years: with her elbow on the wall and her head on her fist and her hip pushing out, other hand on that hip, as if seeking to rest the full weight of her past on this crumbling brick wall for these one or two breaths.
&
nbsp; Fola steps forward, arms extended, ever gracious. “Shormeh,” she says.
“I am Naa.” The woman sighs.
“Naa, excuse me. Of course.” Fola laughs. “It’s been ages. God.”
Naa doesn’t laugh. “You are welcome in Ghana.” She straightens up slowly, taking her head off her fist and her elbow off the wall and her eyes off of Fola, a shift in position that draws her attention to Sadie at the edge of the circle.
iv
Sadie feels the gaze on her face, with the humidity, a pressure or a magnet: it tugs at her eyes, though her chin, out of habit, resists the ascension and sinks to her chest while her eyes travel up. She rarely looks people in the eye when she meets them, preferring their mouths or her hands as an audience—anything to throw off the would-be observer, to avoid being looked at too closely, too long. She’s doing it now, standing slightly behind Taiwo in the broken-doll position she perfected in high school, with shoulders hunched forward and flip-flops turned inward, an arrangement of limbs that conveys such unease that the onlooker invariably feels uneasy himself and after one or two seconds looks away. Undaunted, indifferent, or accustomed to uneasiness, Naa gazes on, drawing Sadie’s eyes upward—and holding them put: Sadie can’t look back down, for her shock at the striking resemblance.
She could be her mother, this heavyset Naa, with the same angled eyes (“half-Chinesey,” per Philae), same stature, short, sturdy, same negligible eyebrows, round face, rounded nose, like a button for coins. The joke of genetics. That of all of his children it should have been she who inherited this appearance, the one who would spend the least time with their father and come to so loathe his particular features. They worked out just fine on his face: he was handsome in the way that a man can be, without being pretty, with the skin like this Naa’s or like Olu’s, so flawless. A tidy face. Elegant.
Not so her own.
Philae likes to call her “a natural beauty,” while Fola uses phrases like “you’ll come into your own” (in a tone reminiscent of “we’ll find your hidden talent”), but Sadie knows better. She isn’t pretty. End of story. Her eyes are too small and her nose is too round and she hasn’t got cheekbones like Taiwo or Philae, nor long slender limbs nor a clean chiseled jaw nor a dipping-in waist nor a jutting-out clavicle. She’s five foot four, solid, not fat per se, stocky, pale milky-tea skin, number-four-colored hair, neither tall nor petite, with no edges, no angles; she looks like a doll, one she wouldn’t have wanted. It isn’t worth trying to explain this to Philae, nor to Fola for that matter. They wouldn’t understand it. They’re pretty, a state of being they both take for granted, through no fault of theirs (through the joke of genetics). Their empathy is bound within the limits of their reality, Sadie knows. They can’t imagine it, not being pretty. A bit like, say, a woman might imagine being a man—can merely close her eyes and picture it, whatever “being a man” may mean to her—but can’t in fact picture not being a woman, would have nothing to draw on, however she tried. So the pretty woman’s imagination is limited, absent reference for the experience of not being seen. Most of the time she herself can’t be bothered to sort through the reasons the world doesn’t see her. It all seems a bit too cliché, melodramatic, for a girl with her sarcasm and level of education. She accepts that the media are to blame for her bulimia, her quiet, abiding desire to be reborn a blond waif; vigorously castigates Photoshop as a public health threat; has examined and condemned her childhood taste for white Barbies; and so on. Isn’t stupid. Can see the thing clearly. But the fact remains: she is invisible. Unpretty.
The sense of being looked at is new and alarming. “H-h-hello,” Sadie stutters, flushing, offering a hand.
Naa takes the hand, frowning deeply, squeezing tightly. “Ekua,” she says.
“Um, I’m Sadie.” Sadie smiles. “My name is Sadie. Nice to meet you.”
But Naa is insistent. “Ekua,” she repeats. “Sister Ekua. It’s you.”
Sadie laughs nervously, not following. “I’m Sadie. That’s my middle name. Ekua.”
Naa nods. “Welcome back.”
Sadie thinks to clarify that she’s never been to Ghana, but Naa moves on to Olu, and on down the line. A second heavy woman in the simple black muslin with head tie appears with a large plastic tray piled with bottles of Coke, Fanta, Malta, Bitter Lemon.
Fola tries again. “Hello, Shormeh.”
Correct.
The soft drinks are distributed with hardened eyes, pleasantries, introductions made briefly, condolences exchanged. “We have prepared a small welcome,” says Shormeh. “Please be seated.” She gestures to the benches in a circle in the shade.
• • •
The sun has stopped playing demure and come forward, the air pressing down on their arms like a hand. They sit on the benches with their sodas, sweating lightly. A small crowd has gathered to observe the affair. They are children mostly, appearing from inside the modest houses dressed in faded American clothing, wearing cautious, watchful smiles. Girls, Sadie notices after trying to place the feeling that there’s something here she’s missing. All the children are girls.
“Where are the boys?” she asks Fola beside her.
Fola chuckles wryly. “They’re at school.”
Case in point, a small troupe of girls dressed in indigo batik lines up neatly in the space between the houses and the benches. Three teenage boys with large drums, dressed in tunics take up position to the side of these girls in the shade. Naa takes a plastic chair, sipping a Malta. Shormeh remains standing, a hand on Naa’s chair. The girls—there are six of them, ranging in age from the smallest, maybe eight, to the oldest, chubby, twelve—look dutifully at Shormeh, who nods to them curtly. With no introduction, the drumming begins.
Ling finds her phone in her purse, takes a picture. Sadie sits up straight, rather bracing herself. But the sound of the drums is unexpectedly calming, as relaxed and at ease in this space as she isn’t. She’s never been particularly drawn to this music, to African drumming, though she wonders why not: the reaction is visceral, she feels her heart slow, or succumb to this new form of beating, more ordered. Only now does it occur to her that her heart has been pounding, quite literally throbbing, since they left Fola’s house, such that now she is sore, bodily sore, physically exhausted, as if she’s been exercising, running for miles. This pounding becomes harder but also calmer with the drumming, her breath breaking off from the pace of her thoughts, following instead the mounting rhythm as it builds in its complexities. A surrogate heartbeat. Harder, calmer, and surer. Why don’t I listen to this music? she thinks. Or enjoy it? It is wonderful. It drowns out all thoughts. As lulling as that sitar and flute they’re always playing where she goes to do yoga with Philae. Transporting. She closes her eyes for a moment, feels dizzy. When she opens them the girls have come closer, gained speed.
They are moving in a circle, in perfect precision. Feet out, feet in. Hips out, hips in. The drummers change pace, and the girls change formation, from a line to a half-circle. The youngest comes forward. She dances a little solo, then returns to the circle. The next one comes forward. And on down the line. Others from the village have trickled into the compound to watch the performance; they clap for each girl. The last of the dancers, the eldest, short, chubby, shimmies forward, beaming brightly, to the delight of the crowd. She doesn’t have the look of a dancer, thinks Sadie. She rather has the appearance of Sadie herself, or of Naa: of a substance, a thick sort of substance, less long dancer limbs, liquid-fluid, than land mass: thick arms, thighs, high buttocks, broad shoulders, small bosom, the same solid body that she has. And hates. It startles her to think this so clearly of another, so cruelly, of this dancer, but the thought comes again. I hate this body, she thinks as she stares at the girl, I hate this body, it is ugly, I hate how it looks.
There.
Very simply.
This body is ugly.
Never mind the more gentle “un
pretty,” the face; it’s the body she hates, if she thinks of it, really. The body is the difference between her and the rest. How much easier to see it of this young chubby dancer, or to say it, thinks Sadie, than to say of herself what she saw in that mirror, sees here with her siblings. The body is the reason she cannot be seen. She considers the dancer with something like sadness, for both of them, a sadness made soft by acceptance. Preparing to watch this girl’s solo, sympathetic, she crosses her arms with a pitying smile.
Funny how it happens.
How the girl begins moving. Almost awkward at first, sort of jerky. Stiff movements. The crowd begins clapping and Sadie laughs softly, suspicions confirmed. An ugly body can’t dance. The girl is still beaming, her narrow eyes twinkling, maybe laughing at the joke of genetics as well. She rolls her hips once to the right, then the left. Looks directly at Sadie, waves a hand, and begins.
Incomprehensible, indescribable how this girl moves her body. Virtuosic, without effort, without edges, without angles: an infinity of tiny movements made with thighs, feet, and torso, and in time to syncopation that only she hears, and the drummers: a current, round body electric, the crowd cheering wildly as the hips whirl around, until the one drum goes crack! and she stops before Sadie, her right hand extended, one foot off the ground.
Sadie, who is staring, mouth open, breath suspended, doesn’t at first process what the gesture implies. The drummers resume drumming, the girl resumes whirling, the crowd resumes clapping, then crack! She stops again. A hand out to Sadie.
Sadie turns to Fola. “I-i-is she asking for money?”
“She’s asking you to dance.”
“Bra, bra, bra,” says the girl, palms turned upward. “Please sees-tah, come. Come and dance, please, I beg.” She takes Sadie’s hand, takes a little step back, making Sadie lean forward, then rise off the bench. The assembled crowd claps with delight at this progress. Sadie flushes red, shakes her head, “No, I can’t.” She is seconds from weeping; she feels the thing building, the knot in her stomach, the accumulating bile. She takes a step back, but the girl pulls her forward, and she hasn’t the heart to use force to break free. Her siblings are watching with what looks like a mixture of worry and encouragement, their eyes and smiles wide, as if watching a baby trying to learn how to walk, ready to spring to their feet when she falls.