Obroni and the Chocolate Factory

by Steven Wallace

  “Dr. Sar-war,” said the meticulous Punjabi, coaching me.

  “Sar-war,” I dutifully repeated.

  “No, say, ‘Sar-war.’”

  “Sar-war,” I intoned; the good doctor looked at me as if I were linguistically a lost cause.

  “Sar-war. Okay. You are not well? That is too bad. I was the same when I first came to Ghana years ago. From Chandigarh. Ah! The food here is so very spicy—more than India!”

  What possible circumstances persuaded Dr. Sarwar to leave India to come to Sunyani, of all places? Both countries teemed with their share of sick people, according to the American popular imagination. Could my doctor with the Nehru-collared lab coat have been defrocked from practicing medicine on the subcontinent? What type of transgression would merit such a punishment?

  “Steven, I want you to drink this.” He handed me a glass of white liquid that looked as if sticks of schoolroom chalk had been grated into water. The liquid smelled clean, it smelled … cold. I looked at Yaw Brobbey, who had gone to such trouble on my behalf, his invalid obroni son who couldn’t stomach the most common of local foods. Yaw Brobbey nodded kindly and raised an empty hand in an imaginary toast to my health. I took a small sip, barely enough to swallow. I just couldn’t manage to choke down the astringent, metallic-tasting liquid.

  “Please, you must try. It will stopper you up,” the doctor said encouragingly.

  “It’s hard to get down,” I said. “Do you have anything else to drink?” I was the most ungrateful patient imaginable.

  “You can wash it down with a mineral when we get home,” Yaw Brobbey said. A “mineral” was a carbonated soda, such as the locally bottled Orange Fanta, a rare treat. The doctor looked dismayed, unused to such a recalcitrant patient, and his tight lips pursed even thinner. His body language looked as if he were about to say, “Why do these American obronis come to Ghana anyway?”—but he relented and allowed me to take the glass home with me.

  “You must also have a jab, Steven,” Dr. Sarwar added. “Your father will show you where to go. You will please give them this.” Dr. Sarwar handed me a slip of paper.

  “Thank you, Dr. Sar-war.”

  “Please remember to drink this medicine,” he said, with a look of forlorn kindness. A softening. “I remember how it was when I first came to Ghana. Oooooh! I felt weak for six months!”

  I could tell that poor Yaw Brobbey, used to being in control of people and situations, invincible in his Toyota and sandals, felt personally responsible for my ill health. In an awkward gesture, he put his arm around me. I leaned into his warm girth. Yet this made me feel even more strongly like a complete embarrassment to him and to myself. I fought back tears.

  “We will make you bettah, Steven,” he said gently. And then he beamed. “Our food is quite hot, quite spicy indeed!”

  I was thankful that I didn’t have to choke down the vile-tasting medicine in front of Yaw Brobbey and Dr. Sarwar. Weeks of eating fufu had given me a hypersensitive gag reflex. By now, I was unable to swallow anything at all without a strong urge to retch. I preferred to drink the chalky potion in the privacy of my room, where I could gag in solitude. By comparison, the prospect of getting an injection didn’t seem so bad. I waited in line for my turn behind a white-linen modesty screen. Maybe it was the tiny sip of chalk water, but for a moment I began to feel better.

  “Please, sir. Step over here,” said the nurse. Like so many Ghanaians, she looked preternaturally young, and her gorgeous skin no doubt belied her true age by two decades or more. Her serious mien, the result of attending to an unrelenting succession of sick Sunyani faces, suddenly brightened at the prospect of injecting an obroni.

  “Come here,” she said, motioning to me. An assistant took my slip of paper and chose a vial of medicine from a table strewn with cotton balls and tiny glass bottles. In a shallow enameled pan, four thick needles soaked in antiseptic solution the color of Jamaican rum. “Drop your pants, please. And bend over.”

  The modesty curtain was imperfectly placed—perhaps intentionally? As I bent forward, I can see that most of the waiting room stared at my pale buttocks. The chatter grew quiet. Curious dark faces regard the impending spectacle with a combination of polite fascination and glee. The assistant fished out one of the needles submerged in the pan and screwed it atop the hypodermic. “Bend over tighter, sir.”

  A low groan escaped from me as the needle pushed deep into my buttocks.

  Sometimes you have to feel worse in order to feel better. But there was comfort in the expectation that my remaining days in Sunyani wouldn’t be defined by toilet triangulations and cramps and endless embarrassment. By morning, I felt slightly, perceptibly better.

  * * *

  On my last night in Sunyani, I emerged from my bedroom after spending three hours packing my bags. I couldn’t explain why the task was so challenging. It’s not as if I accumulated a lot more stuff than I had when I came here. Maybe I don’t really want to leave, I thought.

  And yet I did! I missed familiar food and could barely remember what it was like not being sick. I was ready for my own bed and my real brother and my real parents and a thousand other comforts of home. And yet—

  Yaw Brobbey was waiting for me. He held out a Tata beer.

  “To you, Steven.”

  “To you, Dad.”

  “I have lived all my life in this district. I have never traveled too far abroad,” he said thoughtfully. “Someday, maybe I will come to America, and you can teach me.”

  “I’d like that,” I said.

  “A man on the moon!” He snorted, shaking his head. “Well, many things are different in America. But maybe you, you will be a little more Ghana now. You know, I did not think so, not when you came here.”

  “I didn’t think so, either,” I admitted. “I’m still not sure I’m very Ghana. Not at-TALL.”

  Dad Brobbey laughed. “Oh, yes, you are a little more Ghana now.”

  “Definitely more Sunyani than anybody else at my school.”

  He laughed again. “You are a good son, Steven. I have many sons, you know—but only one obroni.”

  The beer still tasted terrible. But sweeter, somehow.

  “Now come, Steven. You must have your dinner. Goat stew!” Then he added, with a sly smile, “And fufu.”

  * * *

  In some ways, I was aware already that Yaw Brobbey was right, and that my journey had led me to some small purchase of understanding about Ghana. Back in Accra, on the day of my departure for Milwaukee, I watched fresh-faced college students and earnest missionary groups arriving at the airport; many, I surmised, were making their first visit to this remarkable country. I wondered what sort of conclusions they would draw in three months’ time.

  Not all my thoughts were so cerebral; there were more startling aperçus. These new arrivals seemed impossibly white, for one thing. I was no longer so used to seeing Caucasians—and I didn’t have the chance to look at myself often in a mirror in Sunyani. Now that I was back in Accra, I found it odd to regard my own visage. (Where was my color?!) In the airport, a group of ardent, young American evangelicals huddled in prayer with Father Bob, his guitar case next to a backpack. No doubt, they came to Accra to spread the word of God. Did they realize that Ghanaians are among the most devout evangelical Christians in the world? And what of the earnest Ivy Leaguers who came bringing campus feminism to this firmly matriarchal society—did they have any idea that women were part and parcel of the leadership of this country and culture—and had been quietly running families, companies, civic institutions, and ministries for decades?

  A Pan Am 707 idled on the tarmac—is there not a more perfect embodiment of American exceptionalism? As I entered the cabin, I paused just before stepping over the aluminum threshold. I wondered if I’d ever see Ghana again. I had no reason to believe that I would.

  Wo bas a asa bne a, se no sε: w’asa yi εnyε fε; na εnse no sε: ra tete wo ho gu mu.

  If your child dances clumsily in public, be bold
in saying it; do not placate him.

  “If your child performs poorly, admonish him; do not say, ‘you are doing a good job.’”

  CHAPTER 3

  Dancing Clumsily

  Ten years later, daydreams of Sunyani still preoccupied me, even back in Milwaukee, where I worked for the family T-shirt business, which my father affectionately and modestly referred to as “the rag trade,” or the “the schmatta business.” Instead of admonishing me to continue in the practice of law in Washington, DC, Dad welcomed me home enthusiastically. With me on board, the family business would extend for a third generation—or so we thought. I took a 60 percent pay cut to work with my father. I thought it a fair deal.

  I called my father “DW”—his initials—as did everyone at the office, no matter how junior. The practice was started by my younger brother Jonathan when he was twelve or thirteen, and it surprised schoolmates when we’d call our father by his initials. “Does it bother you that we don’t call you Dad?” I asked him once.

  DW laughed. “I’m just happy we all still speak to each other so often,” he said. “And with love and affection. Who cares what you call me?” Titles meant little to him. People meant everything.

  Working alongside DW, I quickly realized that I was nearly as ignorant of his business practices as I’d been of Yaw Brobbey’s. Granted, I’d grown up with the family business all around me, wearing sample shirts and sweaters for as long as I could remember, seeing my mother and father modeling in the company catalog. But I had a lot to learn.

  DW loved coming to the office, reveled in working with his staff, and derived satisfaction from keeping inventory in place and a column of numbers balanced to the penny. From an old building in Milwaukee’s Third Ward, the former garment and produce district, Midstates Sportswear sold blank T-shirts and sweatshirts to the embroidery and screen-printing trade. We were wholesale distributors, buying big boxes of T-shirts, breaking bulk, and selling shirts by the dozen or even by the piece. Between all the sizes, colors, and styles we maintained in inventory, the number of “SKUs,” or stock-keeping units, topped three thousand. My father plotted all his purchasing by hand, without the benefit of a computer. His favorite use of data-processing technology was taking dozens of sheets of the now obsolete, green-and-white striped, fan-folded, tractor-fed computer paper, and laying them out on the conference table as scratch paper. DW liked a large canvas. Then, using a pencil and a few pink rubber erasers, he’d decide how many youth-size medium, navy blue, all-cotton, ringer T-shirts we needed for the coming year. And he got it right with uncanny frequency. The man could smell when we were low on inventory. We occasionally missed sales when we ran out of stock, but we rarely were stuck with outdated inventory. Or he would simply walk the aisles of the old warehouse and, through some magical osmosis, borne of years of experience in the trade, just know if a gross of sweatshirts had been mislabeled. My father was fastidious and intuitive about many things.

  Occasionally, a customer wanted to return items long after the sale—not that there was anything wrong with the merchandise; the customer often ordered too many size mediums, for example, their evanescent profit margin disappearing if a few extra garments remained unsold. Ever the young lawyer, I would remind my father of our return policy—written on the back of each invoice—that precluded refunding the money if a customer did not act in a timely fashion. “Mine firstborn son, the last angry man,” my father would tease. Invariably, my father would reach an accommodation with the customer and refund the money. At first, this would frustrate me, but DW taught me that any courtesy we extend to others is a down payment in the karmic bank of commerce.

  Lesson Number 1: In my father’s reckoning, life was too short to worry about small problems. “Steven, the refund won’t make him rich, and it won’t make us poor. There is more to life than this.”

  Nearly every day, we’d eat together. The meal consisted of brown bag lunches packed by my mother. I’d encourage my father to call up a friend for lunch, but he preferred to eat at his desk. I’d sit across from him, and like a magician of the old school, he’d peer into the paper bag and draw out … an orange … a peanut butter and jelly sandwich … a turkey sandwich … and best of all, last of all … red licorice! My father would begin by meticulously peeling the orange with his pen knife, quartering it with care and offering me the first slice, his own form of libation, in honor of his son.

  It was a testament to my father’s frugality and my mother’s culinary originality that sometimes the sandwiches came out in unorthodox fashion: turkey, lettuce, and tomato on cinnamon-raisin toast. But my father always took delight in such inventive compromise. We’d have the same conversation every day, a Milwaukee version of Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau: “Steverino, mine firstborn, what do you want, PB & J or turkey?” “You’re the boss, you choose,” I’d reply. “Let’s split ‘em, whaddya say?” The same conversation, same result, every day for three years. And every day, at every lunch, he’d conclude with a grin, “That Junie Cookie!” (His pet name for my mother.) “She’s something special!”

  Lesson Number 2: Take joy in the little things and give credit to those who pack your lunch—celebrate those who sustain you in ways both large and small.

  DW would end each lunch by taking the aluminum foil from our sandwiches, folding it, neatly squaring the corners, and saving it to take home for the next day’s lunch. My father’s frugality was not centered solely on money, though he was a child of the Great Depression and a certain fiscal worry pervaded his psyche. He was no high roller. But his frugality was most significantly marked by an economy of speech, his ability to listen to others, his insistence on understanding disparate and often competing points of view, and to hold them both equally in his mind, in suspended animation—the mark, I think, of a true intellectual—before trying to reconcile them. He abhorred pomposity and intellectual bullying. He wore his education and his intellect lightly. He listened—rather than reacted—in order to better understand. When a smug salesman from one of the large mills in Alabama came to deliver the news that under a new quota system, we no longer qualified for “most favored nation” pricing unless we grew 40 percent in one year—a practical impossibility—my father was the picture of equanimity. DW explained that while he saw the mill’s point of view, the inevitable consolidation of regional distributors would mean that, the mills, long accustomed to dictating terms of sale to a passel of obedient distributors, soon would find themselves beholden to the two or three largest national distributors—and did they really want such an outcome? Had the mills thought about that? And what need would the mills have of traveling salesmen if they had only three large, national customers they could service as inside house accounts?

  Lesson Number 3: Don’t get furious, get curious.

  From my father, I inherited a knack for physics—especially the concept of a half-life, which is the interval required for a quantity of matter to decay to half of its initial value. In the cosmology of our family, the half-life concept usually centered on the last piece of sour cream coffee cake, a treasured family recipe from our Aunt Min, Monya Tolkan. Aunt Min had taught DW that it is the height of good manners to leave the last piece of coffee cake for someone else. That said, she saw nothing wrong in cutting the last piece in half and enjoying one of the halves—and continuing to halve the cake until only a sliver remained on the plate. Under Aunt Min’s tutelage, DW became the Enrico Fermi of the kitchen table, surgically slicing the cake into ever-smaller halves, the David Wallace Theorem of Culinary Half-Lives. At last my mother in exasperation would throw a dish towel: “David, for crying out loud, just finish the ever-loving cake!” And sheepishly, he would answer, “I only wanted a bite.” Then, with mock resignation—if you insist—he’d take the very last bite, smacking his lips and daubing the plate with the back of the fork to capture every crumb. He never lost this game with my mother in forty-eight years of marriage. From DW I learned how important it is to keep your spouse—that most valuable of stake
holders in any entrepreneurial venture—content and happy as possible. And if you do, your business often lives to see another day.

  Lesson Number 4: There is an internal pace to every transaction, every negotiation; don’t try to rush things. Be patient, play your role. Don’t rush your lines, and you usually get what you want.

  This rule applies in business, naturally, but one of my father’s greatest planning triumphs came at the expense of my wife, Linda, who is a year and a half older than I am, a fact that gives rise to much teasing; it allows me to claim that I am her boy toy.

  During the first year of my marriage to Linda, my father gave me one of those birthday cards recounting historical events that occurred during the year of your birth. Instead of using the correct 1961 card, he bought the 1962 card, effectively making me two and a half years younger than Linda. I opened the card, commented on the price of bread in 1962, and passed the card around the table. Linda, whose quick mathematical mind promptly discerned my age, looked at me, astonished and a little hurt.

  “You said you were born in 1961. When were you really born?”

  “1962,” I lied.

  Linda, the lawyer, whom my father had lovingly nicknamed “The Little General,” flew into battle mode. “Where is your birth certificate? I want to see it now! Go get it.” Now my father had anticipated this and prepared a copy of my real birth certificate, forging the 1962 date on it. He sulked out to his bedroom, fossicked about his desk for a believable interlude, and came back with my forged birth certificate. Linda examined the evidence, shrieked, and lit into the both of us before we could keep straight faces no longer and admitted the ruse, howling with laughter.