Midnight (11 page)

“Maybe.”

Women were such a pain in the ass. He lay on the bed feeling woozy. The next day he couldn't get out of bed and didn't want to get out of bed. He felt like he had a giant case of flu.

Patience nursed him with pills, sugar cane, caring.

“How did you know I was sick?”

“Everybody in Osu knows about everybody in Osu.”

“But you're the one who decided to help me?”

“Take these three together at six o'clock. And this one before you go to bed.” She was such a no-nonsense type of person. And yet she wasn't a mother figure, something like an aunt. But more like a pure woman.

He flung himself out on the bed with hot-cold spells and huddled up in knots, trying to understand what was happening to his body.

Oh yeahh, this is what the yellow fever shot was like. Imagine if this shot was permanent
. Two days later he was strolling slowly to Patience's job, five thousand cedis in hand, and a note.

“Oh! Bap, it's OK, it's OK, thank you, please.”

“You helped me pull through. Patience; a lot of people won't do that for other people.”

He hugged her and pulled back, aroused. She was such a deep sister. A maid working in the big house, required to be available to do almost anything six days a week, around the clock. This woman is a slave. He squeezed her closer and felt sad and enlightened at the same time. This is what these old people meant when they talked about slavery. The only difference here is that they pay them a few cedis to be in slavery.

They kissed but couldn't reach the right emotional pitch to do anything else. They didn't.

“Patience, I'm goin' oh, see you later, OK?”

“OK.”

Ghanaian women seemed so submissive but he suspected a mad dog at the core of it.
They want what they want and will go through any lengths to get it
.

He strolled up the street wondering if the women in Accra hadn't developed a taste for dicks because they were always seeing one stuck out somewhere.

He freaked out the first time the saw a dude pull his stuff out and start pissing, right across from the police station. Bop stood aside, waiting to see what was going to happen. He was jolted by the sight of a man pissing onto a wall behind him.
Wowww.… Everybody pisses outdoors. Little girls slide their panties over to one side and stand up over drains and do it
.

He had seen a woman with pounds of fish on a platter on her head squat over a drainage ditch, with a baby on her back.

Well, I guess you'd have to piss somewhere if you didn't have outdoor toilets
. He found himself trying to remember things that Chester had told him about Ghana.

“Ghana is an old country with some super people in it, but they were subjected to an English PR historical blitz that drove a lot of them crazy. You'll find a lot of inequalities going on. Suffer with them and learn where they stem from.”

People were constantly dropping by to see the Vernons. A few of them wanted to talk about the Los Angeles he had just left. The Hungarian woman with the two Ghanaian children, for example. “You are saying that there was more than one riot?”

“Oh hell yes! There was riots inside of riots. Some people, most people, were rioting because of Rodney King, some people were rioting 'cause they was just mad in general.”

The Hungarian woman introduced him to well-made akpeteshie, loosening his tongue many degrees. “A lot of what was goin' on was totally fucked up. Like, hey, the police use to just mess with us 'cause they didn't have nothing else to do.”

“How do you mean … mess with you?”

“Uhhh you know, like makin' you lay flat out on the ground 'n shit.”

He strolled around the house naked after Magda left, mentally replaying his rap.
Yeahh, there were riots inside of riots. The anti-Korean riot was a damn good example. What made them people think we were gonna put up with their shit? That's the weird thing about America; everybody thinks that black people will put up with anything
.

“That's been one of the greatest Eurocentric flaws, Bop. They've always felt that they could dog people of color and get away with it. It just goes to show how deep-rooted racism is. The colored people of the planet have never submitted to the white man's shit and never will, but they don't seem to understand that.”

Chester, I wish you were here; man, you could straighten out a lot of shit in my head right now
.

He had to hurriedly pull on a pair of short pants to answer the door. Another visitor. Elena, with a large pot of something. “I brought you some omo tuo.”

He let her in, feeling slightly pissed. “Where you been? I thought you were gonna come back the other day. I damned near died of the heebie jeebies since I last saw you.”

“Oh!”

He had to laugh. Ghanaians could say “Oh!” in so many ways and at so many different tonal levels that “Oh” seemed to be a language by itself. He found himself saying “Oh!” when she told him she thought she was pregnant.

“Oh? You say what?”

“I think I'm pregnant, Bap.”

He suddenly felt the weak feeling he had when the fever was on him. He set her down beside him on his bed.

“Run this past me again. How could you be pregnant?”

Bop started urging his elementary math skills into play.

“Uhhh Elena, how could you be pregnant by me, baby? We ain't known each other but three weeks.”

“I'm just joking with you. Caun't you take a joke? Come, let's have some omo tuo.”

Omo tuo, the soup thing with the rice balls that were pounded into snowball shapes, the blackeyed peas, the smattering of greens, the smithering of greens, the fish. The stuff you ate with your right hand. Delicious.

She had shown him how to do it on an earlier occasion, just before a monumental case of lust had enveloped them.

“Yeahh, I could dig some omo tuo.”

Elena was gone and once again he was alone, staring out of his bedroom window at the rain washing the dirty blue sky. A lush, beautiful, soft rain. The rain made him feel like going out into the middle of it naked, throwing his head back and screaming, “Africa, goddamnit! I'm in Africa!”

Ten minutes later the soothing rain had seduced him into a heavy sleep, punctuated by warped dreams. “The police; look out, man! Here come the police!”

A wild chase and escape from the L.A.P.D. through the back alleys of South Central Los Angeles. Hundreds of hours of chases replayed themselves in his head; some of the chases were in slow motion, some went fast forward, a few were held in freeze frame.

He saw exploding bullets flying through the air, knives flashing in jagged patches of sunlight, bricks being dropped on his head.

He jerked himself away from the nightmare, grinding his teeth together and moaning from the recalled pain of being shot.

Accra was quiet; the rain had stopped and, for once, there were no roosters crowing in the rutted roads of Osu. He clicked on the bedside lamp and looked at his African continent watch (gotta write Aunt Lu and Uncle David tomorrow)—3:30
A.M.

Bop slowly sat up on the side of his bed, feeling alert but drained at the same time. He hadn't had a bad dream during the three weeks he had been in Africa, an unusual thing for him. This was the first.

He wrapped the top sheet around his body, subconsciously trying to imitate a man wearing the indigenous cloth, and shuffled into the kitchen. The mice circling the kitchen floor seemed to be dancing when the light went on. He barely glanced at their scurrying disappearance. They didn't disturb him at all. During his first week in the house he had jumped a few feet whenever he saw a lizard in the backyard. Now he took the lizards, the spiders, the mice, the odd changes of weather, the flies, mosquitoes, odd sounds of people and dogs made in the night, the sexy croaking of the frogs, the cars whizzing past his left hip on the rutted roads in stride.

He opened the refrigerator to scare up a possible snack. Pita bread, vegetables, cheeses, containers of food to be eaten.
Wish I had a Big Mac. Or a piece of fried chicken
.

“Bop, there's enough fruit, vegetables, and whatnot to last you for a month. If you feel the urge for something else, you can get it from one of these women walking up 'n down the streets.”

Fruit, vegetables, whatnot
. He pulled a large carrot out and munched on it.
What the hell, I ain't really hungry no way
.

He felt the sudden urge to go out in the streets but canceled the thought.
Where's there to go around here anyway?
He had made it his business to trip to all of the places that were supposed to be “in.”

Elena had given him a list. “These are places that you would like to go.”

“What's that mean, places that I would like to go?”

“Well, you know, they play very loud music and people do the latest American dances.”

He had gone to a few of the “loud music” places and felt out of place. One of the places alternated Kool Moe Dee with Natalie Cole. Another one played rap and something that sounded like Chinese opera. He wasn't enchanted by the loud music places.
Maybe I'm getting old
.

Four
A.M.
, Sunday morning, Kokrobite. Or Cocobitty. Or something like that.

“Bop, one Sunday, while we're gone, make it your business to get to Kokrobite. You'll dig it.”

“Fred, how's he going to get there?”

“Helene, sweetheart, Bop is from L.A.; he knows how to get around.”

He had gotten around. The Penta Hotel bar for gin and tonics, the Chez Mammie, the Kung Fu for Chinese food, the Bukom Night Club (in the Continental Hotel), Black Cesar's Night Club, the Kalamazoo, the Silver Cup, the Tip Toe, the Dew Drop Inn. Movies at the German place, the Labadi Beach scene, Makola market, everywhere a taxi in Accra would take him.

He finished off the carrot and shuffled back to bed, absently pulling out a large photo essay book that Fred and Helene had collaborated on.

He was wide awake as the sun mounted the horizon, slowly reading the text and staring at the pictures in the book.
The Children of Osu
.

Wowwww.… These is some bad motherfuckers here
. The pictures of some of the most beautiful black children he had ever seen were easy to understand. The seven-year-old girl carrying a huge tray of fresh baked bread on her head, the two-year-old balancing a teacup and saucer on his head, the girls in school uniform playing some kind of jumping game.

He had paused to watch the game on his way from place to place but didn't pause to watch it for too long because he seemed to be the only person interested.
What if they think I'm a child molester or something?
He struggled with the socio-historical text, returned to the pictures.

Ghana is a child molester's paradise. He stared at the picture of the trio of laughing third graders with their dresses hiked up, panties pulled to one side, shooting out glistening streams of young pee.

He shook his head, thinking about the men and boys who pissed up and down the streets, exposing themselves out of necessity, the two little brothers, eight and ten, who came to his back door at least once a day to see if he needed beer or his shorts washed.

He drifted off to sleep trying to figure out the meaning of “altruistic.”

Two
P.M.
, time to see what this “Cocobite” is.

Osu was dressed in her Sunday best. The little boys and girls who wore rags and carried pounds of stuff on their heads all week were dressed in pressed pants and ruffly taffeta, their parents in shirts and silks.

Bop felt like a part of the scene with his freshly ironed khakis and white-on-white short-sleeved shirt. The only difference between me 'n them is that I got fifty thousand cedis to blow.

He stood on the corner at the Shell station, near the so-called jazz joint called Bywells, waiting for a decent looking taxi. It seemed hard to believe that some of the taxis could still be running, judging from the looks of them.

“Hey, lookahere, brother, how much you charge me to take me to Cocobite?”

“Cocobite?”

“Yeah, you know, Cocobite Beach, like Labadi Beach.”

Bop felt proud of being able to tell the man where he wanted to go even though he had never been there.

“Cocobite?”

“Yeah, you know, where they play drums 'n shit on Sunday.”

“Oh! Kokrobite.”

“Ko-kro-bitey? You sure?”

“Ahh yes, Mustapha plays there, Kokrobite.”

It had to be the right place; the Vernons had mentioned Mustapha the drummer to him.

“He's been known to drum people right up out of their seats.”

“How much you charge to go there?”

“In and out?”

“Whaddaya mean, in and out?”

“I take you, wait for you.”

Bop ignored the traffic surging around his negotiation, the people gliding past with their Sunday best on. The idea of having a taxi wait on him, his own private car, appealed to him.

“OK, in and out, how much?”

He knew from the shrewd gleam in the driver's eyes that he was coming up with an outrageous price.

“Twenty thousand cedis.”

“That's too much, brother; why you wanna jack me up like that?”

The driver looked puzzled for a second, but obviously understood the essence of Bop's distress. “OK, fifteen.”

“How 'bout ten?”

The driver looked at a distant point for a couple seconds before beckoning for him to get in the taxi.

“OK, ten.”

Bop allowed himself a victorious grin. He found out a few days later that he could've gotten his trip for five thousand.

They drove. And drove. And drove.

“You goin' the right way to Cocobitey?”

“Yes, Kokrobite this way.”

They left the fringes of Accra and plunged into the countryside.

“How far is it?”