Something She Can Feel (33 page)

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Authors: Grace Octavia

BOOK: Something She Can Feel
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Chapter Twenty-five
T
he day I die, I always imagine myself lying in a bed, surrounded by family—my children, my grandchildren, cousins, nieces and nephews, and anyone else who'd come into my heart by that inevitable date. And as I lie just hours, minutes from closing my eyes forever, I will tell the story of my life. Not everything. Just highlights. The day Justin almost died drowning in the ocean at Mobile. It was the first time I'd seen my father cry. When Billie and I stripped naked and jumped into the lake in the back of the old church and we both came up with leeches all over our bodies. But we were afraid to go home and tell what had happened, so we somehow got the idea to burn them all off with matches. We had burns all over our bodies for weeks. The day I was strong enough to walk away from the only man I was sure I would ever love, without knowing what would come next. And now, to this list, I had to add the day I arrived in Africa.
Dame was asleep. He'd been snoring and grunting like a big old baby for hours and only moved once to lay his head on my shoulder. Seated beside the window, I leaned away from him, so he could have my whole shoulder. Resting my head against a pillow placed on the closed window shade, I looked at him quizzically. How could such a big, bold man sleep so serenely in a metal box zipping through the skies? He seemed so vulnerable and tender leaning against me. I could watch him like this forever.
“Something about the sky,” one of the flight attendants said, leaning on the chair in front of Dame. “Just lulls men to sleep.”
“He's been like this for hours.”
“Enjoy it,” she said, smiling wickedly. She turned to walk away, but then stopped suddenly. “May want to put your shade up. Some pretty stuff passing by.”
“Oh, sure,” I said, easing up in my seat. Dame felt my rustle and turned sleepily to his other side without so much as wrinkling an eyelid. I set the pillow between us and pushed up the shade with my left hand. As it came up, the sun, which I'd last seen many hours ago, came stalking in fast. It was bright. Like we were just inches away, floating in the sky. And I wondered if maybe it seemed so big because I hadn't seen light in so many hours, but when I peeked out the window, I saw that it was true. The sun was so close that I felt I could break through the glass of the window and just push my hand into it. Grab it and think that it felt like what orange juice tastes like—waking and friendly.
When my eyes adjusted to the rays, I leaned into the window a bit farther and turned my head to look down at the surface below the plane. See what the flight attendant, Shola, was speaking of.
What was there was an impossibly big blanket of tan. Everywhere. Sometimes it looked like waves, like an ocean of land, ripples riding for miles. And then somewhere, out of nowhere, a tree would push up and green leaves, dotted sparsely like dollar bills hanging from a birthday girl's shirt, gave a bit of color in the middle. Then there were spirals of different tans with some brown and blue black mixed together. The plane dipped lower and then I saw that one of these spirals was unraveling into what I could see was a river trail. It opened and sprang big like the trunk of a tree, going like this for miles until it just divided again and began to branch out into so many limbs. It was past beautiful. Simple and quietly alive.
“Makes you want to jump out there and swim in the sand, don't it,” Dame said lazily, pulling his chair up after the flight attendants announced that we were preparing for landing.
“It's brilliant,” I replied, but I didn't think he could hear me.
Seeing all of that quiet openness for so many miles in no way prepared me for the hectic hubbub of Accra. From the edge of the city, I watched the sand roll into rivers and led to trees, and then forests, and then roads, and then the tops of homes packed so tight that I could hardly see the ground anymore. I kept trying to connect this vision to something I had seen before, but there was nothing else like it. It was suffocating and hypnotizing. And that was just from the plane.
When Dame and I exited the plane, I didn't know if I'd arrived in Ghana or if it had arrived in me. Standing at the top of the steps that led to the tarmac with other passengers who'd deboarded and were gathering at the bottom, I immediately felt the heat. It was quick, merciless. Steamy and almost visible, opening my pores like I'd just stepped into a sauna. Growing up in Alabama, I knew what the hottest days of summer felt like and had learned to live with them, but I instantly knew this was different. My hair immediately surrendered at its roots and beads of sweat gathered at my temples.
Dame grabbed my hand and looked back at me before walking down the steps.
“You feel that heat?”
I nodded.
“You'll get used to it. You'll like it soon.”
There was a group of three short and stout Ghanaian women standing by the entrance of the airport. Singing and welcoming each passerby, they looked like they were in their late fifties and were wearing colorful native clothes that matched just enough to appear as costumes. Their heads were wrapped in white linen, and beaded earrings, the color of the sand waves, hung from their ears. A sign above them read “Akwaaba.” I'd learn later that this meant “Welcome” in their native language.
“Akwaaba,” the one in the middle, whose cheeks were striped with cuts, said when Dame and I appeared in front of them.
And then she did something I hadn't seen her do to anyone else. She opened her arms and came to me smiling.
“Welcome home,” she said into my ear as she hugged me. She backed up and looked into my eyes while holding my cheeks as if I were her own child. “We've missed you sorely.”
“Thank you,” was all I could say, but that's not nearly what I'd felt. In her eyes I saw the faces of every mother and sister at the church who'd kissed me in this same way when I was a child. She looked nothing like them. We'd been so mixed over in our history that even the darkest one of us didn't look as unaffected as the face in front of me. But in her eyes, I could still see them. It was an undeniable reflection of our connection. And no matter how far we'd come, looking there, into her eyes, I knew it was true; this was where we were from.
While it was completely spontaneous going to Ghana meant a lot to me, probably more than I'd told Dame when he asked me to come, but I didn't expect to feel all this so quickly. I didn't want it to be the cliché experience of black people who stepped off the plane, kissed the ground, and did a happy dance that they'd returned to “Mother Africa.” But really, inside, I was dancing. I was hopping, dancing, screaming, and crying. Because the woman, who was probably just doing her job and had kissed every black woman who walked off the plane for the same response, was right. I was returning home.
 
 
Dame hadn't lied. He kept the same driver in every city. When we left the airport, Benji was already out front, helping the driver pack their bags into a little minivan. Dame greeted the driver like he was an old friend and slid a few bills into his hand. “Brother Kofi,” he said, and they went on talking and laughing about something that had happened the last time Dame was in Ghana. “No trouble this time, Brother Sisi,” Kofi said, calling Dame by his Akan name that Kofi later explained simply told what day Dame was born on—Sunday. My name, Kofi added, was “Adowa” because I was born on a Tuesday.
As I'd seen from the sky, the streets of Accra were tight. Cars clogged the sometimes dirt and sometimes paved roads like taxi cabs in Times Square. And in between each car was a man, moving about from driver to driver, selling anything, sometimes stopping for a long time and other times just nodding and moving on. Like we did in Alabama, when they wanted to chat for a while, the traffic just kind of stopped as people waited for the meeting to move on.
Women and children crowded the sidewalks. Some walking and others sitting and selling things like the men in the road. The most beautiful thing to see was the way the women held their babies so close to them as they worked. The babies' little brown heads were popping out of the sides of the women's backs where ample cloth was used to hold the children snug and in place as they hung in a kind of simple sling that seemed so tight that it left little room for the baby to cry or wiggle around. Instead, they either slept as the mother moved, or observed the goings-on like a grown person.
“No, no, no,” Brother Kofi said to me when I tried using Dame's camera to snap a quick picture of one of the women carrying her baby. “You must ask the mother first. Never take a picture until you have consent. . . or give a dash.”
“A dash?”
“That's a tip,” Dame said, laughing with Benji at Brother Kofi's honesty. “Everyone dashes in Ghana. These are your people.”
 
 
After three days in Ghana, I knew that Dame was right—these were my people. I could tell by how they communicated with one another in loud tones and expressive faces. The women all seemed so proud and unapologetically complicated, and the men, they always had something charming to say and a smile that meant more than one thing. Yeah, I was far from home, but these were definitely my people.
I learned that Accra had a way of making repose a state of mind. The heat or something in the crowded air eased my mind into a constant state of relaxation and even if I wanted to worry about something, the need quickly drifted away in the breeze.
“Am I gonna have to leave you here when I go home?” Dame asked one morning when he was getting ready to go to the studio for one of his daily sessions. I was still in bed. He'd been spending most of his mornings working on his music and sometimes meeting with local artists and visitors, but I mostly stayed behind, walking around the parts of the city that seemed safe and having Brother Kofi drive me to others. I was wearing a full wardrobe of African dresses I bought at the craft market, and decorated our hotel room with beaded masks and Ashanti stools, where Dame and I were sleeping in separate beds.
“I am Mother Africa,” I joked, pulling my hair off my face. Drenched in sweat, it refused to be straightened even after I washed it each morning. So I'd let it curl up into a loose Afro.
“Okay, Mother Africa,” Dame said, pulling clothes from his bag. “Just don't forget who your real mother is. I'm sure she's already pulled a switch for you from the backyard.”
“Oh, don't bring that up again.” I rolled over in the bed and pulled the sheets over my head. I'd told him about what happened with my family the first evening.
“You're gonna have to face her soon. Just call, so she knows everything's okay. You've been gone a few days.” He pulled the sheets off me.
“I'll call!” I said, looking at Dame.
“Today?” he asked.
“Today!”
“You promise?” He sat down next to me on my bed.
“Yes.”
“Hey, why don't you come down to the studio later this afternoon?”
“I can't,” I said. “Brother Kofi is taking me to the slave dungeon again.”
“Again?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I don't know why you went in the first place.”
“You never went?”
“No,” he said quickly. “Slavery happened. I know that. I don't need a damn reminder. I was raised in the United States—in the South. I've had reminders all my life. All I need to know now is that we're not slaves anymore.”
“It was still something to see where it all began,” I said, remembering the feeling of closure I had when I stood in the female slave dungeons and saw the shackles that had been used to bind these women together. It was sad. It was heartbreaking, but somehow I felt that my return after hundreds of years to pay my respect to these women and men and attempt to remember what happened to them made the bitter feeling dissolve just a bit.
“Africa's about more than just slavery,” Dame said. “There's a whole big continent of people out there right now trying to make money and enter into the world market. We have to let them outlive that past.”
“Preach, Brother Malcolm,” I joked, shaking one of my beaded necklaces at him.
“Oh, you got jokes?” Dame laughed at me. He got up and slid the undershirt he was wearing right off and threw it over onto the floor. “We'll see how many jokes you have when I come in here tonight.”
He looked at me suggestively and just stood there. With the new shine the African sun cast on his already dark skin, he'd become spectacular to look at. I was salivating. Worse, in our small hotel room, he'd taken to dressing and undressing right in front of me. It was beyond tempting, but still, I didn't know what to do with him. We'd kissed, we'd hugged, and even fallen asleep beside each other on the beach, but I was still married to another man and had never been so close to anyone but him. I knew Dame, who now had unimaginably gorgeous African women throwing themselves at him right in front of me, must have been frustrated by this coquettish behavior, but he never pushed the subject. It seemed we were both just waiting for passion to overtake reason.

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