Somebody's Heart Is Burning

by Tanya Shaffer

  Twenty-five hundred cedis for ampicillin. Twenty-one hundred for paracetamol. Minessi looked on with an incredulous expression, shaking her head slightly as I fished out the money for the medications. On the way back to the hospital, she repeatedly removed the medicines from their paper bag and looked at them.

  “Are you all right, Minessi?” I asked, but she didn’t respond.

  Back at the hospital, she sat down on a cot with Yao. In a flat voice, she asked me to tell her husband to come tonight with clothes for her and the baby, and some water.

  I began to leave, but she stopped me. “Chop money,” she said, her face turned away. I gave her 1,500 cedis for food and told her to send word with her husband if she needed more. She took the money without comment and didn’t look at me as I walked to the door.

  Yao and Minessi stayed in the hospital a week. When they returned, Yao’s eyes were clear and bright. His breath flowed unimpeded, a strong sweet column of air.

  “I’m so glad he’s better,” I said to Minessi as she pounded fufu in a corner of the yard. She had been distant toward me since her return from the hospital. My feelings toward her had changed, too. I had an agenda now: to keep Yao healthy. Where I once thought Minessi an ally, I now feared she might be an obstacle. I kept my tone cheery, trying to neutralize the tension by ignoring it.

  “Isn’t it a relief that Yao is back? Maybe we could go together and buy some milk for him. I could set up some kind of a milk fund.”

  She continued to pound silently, the muscles in her back working.

  “Sistah Korkor!” called Amoah, from across the yard. “You people know so much! Here we thought the boy is fine. He smiles, he looks around, this is a healthy boy. And now we find that the boy was so sick. We know nothing!”

  I sensed, more than saw, a bristling from Minessi. The pounding sped up.

  “Oh no,” I said. “Minessi knows a lot more than I do. She just couldn’t—she didn’t—”

  “No!” Amoah laughed. “She is a foolish African woman. Not smart, like you. Is it not true, Minessi?”

  Minessi stopped pounding; her pestle hung midair. “Yes,” she said suddenly, loudly. “Before Sistah Korkor and her friend the doctor we know nothing. We do not know Yao is sick, we do not know Yao is well. We know nothing; we can do nothing. We must say thank you to Sistah Korkor.” She turned to me, her jaw taut. The veins stood out in her neck and arms.

  “Thank you, Sistah,” she said, her voice low and shaking. “Thank you for the life of Yao.”

  She turned her back. The thud of her pestle filled the air like a mournful drum, a rhythmic counterpoint to the other women pounding out their dinners in nearby huts.

  5

  Musical Chairs

  In Apam, every time I step outside the door I attract a following. Foreign visitors are rare here, and people shout “obroni” at me—white person—from morning till night. Mothers bring their youngsters close, point a finger right in my face, and pronounce the word slowly so that the children can learn. Yesterday a group of children trooped after me through the streets, exuberantly chanting, “Obroni / How are you? / I am fine / Thank you!” Toddlers start to cry when they see me, and their mothers seem to find nothing funnier than to drag them toward me, saying in Fanti, “Take him to your country.” Even Santana and her family refer to me as “the white lady.” I overhear them saying to each other, “The white lady is up; the white lady is hungry; the white lady is taking a bath.”

  Saturday nights at the Afranguah camp, we took turns sharing party games from our countries. On our first Game Night, an English volunteer introduced “telephone,” in which a whispered message is passed around the circle. First time around, when the last link in our forty-five person chain was asked to relay the message he’d received, he said quizzically, “Fun-dee?”

  “How did you hear fun-dee?” shouted Ayatollah, who’d originated the message. “I said, ‘The small girl is pounding fufu.’ ”

  “I said to him ‘fund me,’ ” said Gorbachev, the penultimate player. “I thought Ayatollah asks us to pay his fees at university.”

  Everyone laughed at that.

  “Let us trace this,” said Virgin Billy, the baby-faced home secretary. Though not officially on staff, Billy was in charge when the camp leader was otherwise occupied, and he took his position seriously.

  “This can be scientific,” he said enthusiastically, “to find how the words underwent mutation, from ‘the small girl is pounding fufu’ to ‘fund me.’ Ballistic, what is it that you passed to Gorbachev?”

  “I also heard ‘fund me.’ ”

  “And Okoto, what have you passed to Ballistic?”

  Okoto, a lumbering Australian, worked as a marine biologist back home and had therefore been named after the Twi word for crab. He was about to respond, when a large Ghanaian woman seated in the middle of the chain could no longer contain her mirth.

  “I said, ‘Fuck me!’ ” she crowed. “I did not request you to pay my school fees.”

  The crowd erupted. All the Ghanaian men shouted at once.

  “Santana, you have ruined the whole game!”

  “You make us ashamed with this language!”

  “How is it that you, one person, should spoil it for all the rest?”

  Grace Appialeh Odoom, a.k.a. Santana, radiant in a maroon satin dress, surveyed the uproar with delight. Tipping back in her chair, she shouted with laughter.

  “Sistah Korkor, this is no good,” Virgin Billy told me at the end of the evening. We were cleaning up the dining room, scooting the chairs and tables into place. “Santana should be expelled from the camp.”

  “Expel her for having a little fun?” I asked. The camp consisted of thirty Ghanaians and fifteen foreigners. Of the thirty Ghanaians on the project, only two were women.

  “She has shamed us. It is not natural to talk this way. To be this way.”

  “Oh Billy, come on.”

  “The Europeans will get the wrong impression of Ghana women!”

  “I think the Europeans are used to women acting all kinds of ways,” I said.

  He pursed his lips primly. “In Ghana we are not.”

  Santana took up space. She talked out of order at meetings, served herself more food than was allotted, and mocked the male volunteers mercilessly on the construction site. She called them weak and challenged them to competitions of strength. They declined to participate, declaring it beneath them to compete with a woman. Santana’s body was round and firm, her voice deep and gravelly. Her clothes, too, were constantly surprising. She worked all day in a shapeless nightgown or housedress, her hair a frizzy cloud, but in the evening she pulled out the stops. Her wardrobe contained a seemingly limitless parade of dresses that looked like they belonged at a high school prom—puffy-sleeved, ruffly satins in purples and reds and emerald greens. She had African clothes as well, and occasionally showed up at dinner wrapped head to toe in illustrious cotton batiks and prints, her hair oiled and pressed to her head or wrapped in a tower of cloth. The more flamboyant her outfit, the more delight she seemed to take in wearing it.

  A week and a half into the camp, I came down with dysentery. For several days, while the other volunteers toiled at the construction site, I lay prostrate on top of my sleeping bag on the cement floor of a classroom in the village school—out of session for the summer—that provided our housing. By the third day, I felt well enough to read and write and was beginning to enjoy the quiet hours. I was perched on the front steps with my notebook when Santana returned from the site for an early lunch.

  “Eh! Sistah Korkor!” she shouted.

  “Sistah Santana.” I smiled; I didn’t think she knew my name.

  “Three days now, you don’t work. They say you are sick, but to me you don’t look so sick.” She put her hand on my cheek. “You are not hot.”

  “I don’t have a fever,” I said.

  “Then you must work! Other people, they work harder because you lie in bed.”

  “I’m h
aving stomach problems,” I told her.

  Santana laughed. “So is Sistah Mansah, from England. So is Brothah Okoto, from Australia. So am I. Why do you think your stomach is more important than my stomach?”

  “I don’t!” I said, bridling. “I just think it’d be hard for me to work if I had to run to Chicago every fifteen minutes!”

  “Chicago” was our nickname for the camp toilet, a clean-swept room with a chrome-covered hole in the floor.

  “It is true that you could not work while you were visiting Chicago, but when you returned from Chicago you could work for fifteen minutes before visiting Chicago again. And so, throughout the day, it is entirely possible that you could work many hours.”

  I glared at her.

  “You think it is something very special when a small insect is living inside you,” she continued. “If an African man went to the hospital for a test, he would find thirty or forty different insects living inside him.”

  “Fine,” I said resentfully, “I’ll come back to work tomorrow.”

  “Eh heh!” said Santana, giving me an I’ll-believe-it-when-I-see- it look. “The association is not buying your food so that you may have a rest vacation.” She disappeared into the room.

  I returned to work the next day, cursing Santana every time I had to drop my shovel and dash to Chicago.

  The camp leader requested a fee of 200 cedis each to cover transportation for a weekend excursion to the nearby village of Enyana Abassa to witness a new chief’s inauguration ceremony. Many of the African volunteers couldn’t afford the fee, so Virgin Billy made an announcement requesting foreigners to sponsor them. Santana was standing next to me with her hand raised, indicating that she needed sponsorship.

  “I’ll sponsor you,” I said.

  “You, lazy girl?” She raised an eyebrow.

  “If you shut up about that.”

  “Eh heh! I am not very good at ‘shut up.’ ”

  “Great, then there’s potential for growth.”

  She laughed a deep, scratchy belly laugh, and took my hand. “You will be my sistah tomorrow. So you do not go missing. This place will be so crowded.”

  “You’re going to look out for me?”

  She smiled. “Will you trust me?”

  In Enyana Abassa, we were crunched all day long in a joyous welter of bodies. I strained to get a glimpse of the new chief, who was carried through town on a bier. Men walked beside the bier, beating with hooked sticks on the taut, fur-covered heads of enormous wooden drums. The young chief was swaddled head to toe in exquisite layers of kente, the traditional handwoven Ghanaian cloth, its rich blue, red, and gold dazzling in the midday sun. On his head was a colorful hat, shaped like an upside-down canoe. Beneath the hat, his face was round and unlined, its expression oddly impassive, as though his mind were somewhere far away. Beads of sweat glistened on his broad forehead. An adolescent girl sat in front of him, also wrapped in kente, with a stern expression on her face.

  “Why do they look so gloomy?” I asked Santana.

  “They must not smile during the festival.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugged, looking bored. “It is the rule.”

  A long line of women with painted faces stood waiting, with gifts for the chief balanced on their heads. Their offerings included tall pyramids of oranges, yams, and tomatoes; towering piles of folded cloth; and hand-carved wooden stools. One woman carried a large wooden table upside down on her head, while another toted three antique sewing machines, one on top of the other. I went crazy with my camera, trying to record these astounding feats of balance. In a dusty central square, rifles were fired into the air, and a man in a bird suit danced.

  When I asked Santana the meaning of the dance, she just shrugged again.

  “Our grandparents knew,” she said. “To us, it is just a party.”

  A man crouched on the ground, covered head to toe in white powder, wearing only a loincloth. A circle of children surrounded him. When I raised my camera, he lunged toward me, shouting.

  Santana sprang into motion, pushing him back. She bellowed in Fanti until the man spun around and walked away. Then she turned to me, grinning broadly.

  “He wanted you to pay him for taking his photograph.”

  “All he had to do was ask.”

  “He expected to frighten you into giving him too much money, but I have sent him away. I have told him that I have a strong family fetish. I said if he bothers you, I will curse his family for three generations to come.”

  “I didn’t know you practiced traditional religion.”

  She smiled. “Oh, sistah,” she said, “I practice everything, when it is useful.”

  “I want to marry white,” Virgin Billy told me the next morning over a breakfast of bland maize porridge, called koko, with sugar dumped on top.

  “Why?” I asked suspiciously.

  “I would like to have half-caste children. I like the color.”

  “So it’s an aesthetic thing?”

  “Yes,” he nodded. “And I like white people. I like the way they live.”

  “You mean money.”

  “Not just money,” he protested. “They are educated. I would like my children to go to school in Europe, or the United States. Then they can become lawyers, or write books, or be bank managers, or artists.”

  I smiled at this unusual assemblage of occupations. “Artists?” I said, “Why artists?”

  “Artists are paid very well,” said Billy.

  “Not in the U.S.”

  “Here in Ghana they are,” he insisted. “You can make one picture, a simple picture, and sell it for 20,000 cedis. Or weave some kente and sell it for 8,000. Some artists own five buildings.”

  “A word of advice,” I said. “If you meet an American or European woman whom you want to marry, don’t mention to her that you want to marry white. Just pretend that she, as an individual, is the kindest, smartest, most beautiful woman you’ve ever known in your life.”

  He nodded soberly. “Thank you for these words.”

  When Billy got up and brought his plate to the kitchen, Santana slid into the seat beside me.

  “Sistah Korkor,” she said to me, “whatever he tells you, you must not marry this man. He hates himself, and he will hate you even more.”

  “Billy?” I asked with surprise. “Why would you think that?”

  “There are some men in Ghana here,” she said, “they hate themselves and love white people. But if a white woman will love them, soon she will become just like a black woman to them. I have seen this before.”

  “The white man brought us civilization,” Billy told me the next afternoon as we stood side by side at the construction site, applying mortar and bricks to a growing wall.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Before the white man came, we were living in trees. We were uncivilized. Then when he came we were afraid, and we ran into the jungle.” He put down the brick he was carrying and flailed his hands in the air, imitating a frightened villager running for cover. “It is only unfortunate that we have not retained better relations with the British. Look at Ivory Coast. They are wealthier than we are, because they have kept a good relationship with the French. Kwame Nkrumah should not have thrown out the British so fast. When you leave your mother’s house, you should not shun her. You should keep good relations with her, so that you can come to her for guidance and support.”

  I was so stunned that for a moment I didn’t know what to say. Ghana, formerly Gold Coast, had gained its independence from the British in 1957, making it the first sub-Saharan African nation to break free of colonialism. Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, leader of the Ghanaian independence movement, first president of the new Ghana, and an early African nationalist, was a hero here. It was he who had given present-day Ghana its name, after a prosperous West African kingdom that flourished between the fourth and eleventh centuries. I had thought Dr. Nkrumah uniformly revered. Billy was the first person in Ghana I’d heard criticize him.
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  “Africa has the oldest civilization on earth!” I sputtered. “Look at the ancient universities of Timbuktu! You had elaborate systems of government long before the British came and carved the place up. If people ran toward the forest when they saw white faces, they were smart to do it. Look what the whites did to this continent! Slavery! Colonization! Generations of exploitation!”

  “Yes, yes,” he said dismissively, “but it was all for the best.”

  “Sistah Korkor, I am not happy,” Santana told me. “I have not been happy for some six months.”

  The camp was over, and I was spending a week in Apam with Santana’s family before heading north to another camp. Apam was a fishing town on the coast. Before his death, Santana’s father had owned a small fleet of boats there. As a teenager, Santana often took the bus to Accra, carrying batches of smoked fish to sell at the market. Whenever possible, she used these trips to develop her English skills. She had attended six years of school— a lot for a small-town Ghanaian woman of her generation, but not enough to satisfy her curiosity about the world. Whenever she met white people, she spoke to them. She’d heard about the voluntary association from a German woman she met on the bus.

  Apam had a peculiar beauty all its own—a dreamy, unruly splendor. Looking down on the town’s flat expanse from Fort Patience, the seventeenth-century Dutch fort perched on a hill just outside of town, you saw a jumbled maze of houses built of gray cement or red mud, their sloping bamboo or corrugated tin roofs reaching outward to the slate blue sea. Shabby, brightly painted wooden sailboats and rowboats were jammed together on a sandbar, which stretched like a tawny arm between the shallows. A few of the small crafts boasted outboard motors.