Somebody's Heart Is Burning (11 page)

“They were never Ashanti,” I heard one man say, and the other nodded.

“They are weak!”

Onstage, the band had gathered around the group of Americans. The men strained toward each other, near blows. Nadhiri placed her hand on the shoulder of one of the American men in a calming gesture. My stomach alive, I began to make my way through to the edge of the crowd. A hand circled my wrist. It was Brown’s.

“No,” he said. “You must stay. They must not insult you like this. I will beat them.”

The crowd pressed in. I fought for air among the ripe bodies, the rising heat.

“Sweetie, I have to get out.”

“You have not to be scared,” he shouted in my ear. “The students, they are not angry with you. They are angry with these lazy, these no-good people who insult our guests.”

Headrush. Turning in the tightening crowd, searching for an opening, I put my hands in front of me like a blind woman, pushing. The crowd thinned, and I emerged at the side of the stage beside a palm tree. A breeze picked out my sweaty body like a breath of heaven. I leaned back against the scaly bark. The microphone squealed again.

“My brothahs! My sistahs! Order! Order!” From where I stood, I saw the partial profile of a slight, bookish-looking young man in a blue oxford shirt and dark, pressed pants. He removed the microphone from its stand. The African American students and the band members paused in their argument and turned slightly toward him.

“Brothahs and sistahs, I am president of students at Legon University here, and I am deeply saddened by what I have just heard. I beg of our white brothahs and sistahs present that you have not taken offense.”

Shouts of “Here! Here!” from the crowd.

“I beg you, it is not our custom in Ghana here to tell our guests that they are not welcome. I beg you, you are welcome. Then, if there are those people at this party who must ask other people to leave, I must ask those people that they themselves might leave.”

Cheering. Scattered applause.

“Now, as this is a party, and the band has not yet finished playing, perhaps we may once again dance.”

Loud cheering. The young man moved away from the microphone. There was a moment of silence, the African Americans and the band members face-to-face. Then, slowly, the drummer sat down on his stool and pulled a
djembe
between his knees; the marimba player picked up his mallets. A signal passed between the Americans. They turned as a unit and walked down the steps at the side of the stage. As Nadhiri passed me, our eyes met and held. She saw that I was afraid. And I saw that she was crying. As she turned her head sharply away, her face darkened, and I saw there the same thing I felt rising in my own chest. Hot, leaden, inescapable shame.

“They have brought the troubles on themselves,” Brown said to me the next day, sitting on the wooden steps outside the volunteer hostel. “They are lazy, I know this for a fact. They could be rich, living in America, but instead they take drugs, and steal, and shoot people with guns.”

“That isn’t true at all! Millions of black Americans are working themselves to the bone every day.” I scratched around an enormous bite on my leg. Insects didn’t usually go for me, which was fortunate, because I didn’t much care for repellent. Last night, however, an itinerant mosquito had found its way inside my net and covered my ankles in angry red spots.

“I have read it,” Brown insisted. “They are criminals, they are all in jail.”

“Not
all,
a small percentage—”

“I have read.
Time
magazine. All the black males are in prison.”

“Oh Brown,” I sighed. His attitude was not uncommon. I’d encountered a surprising amount of prejudice among Africans against black Americans, gleaned mostly, I supposed, from the news media and the blockbuster movies that made their way here. African Americans visiting Ghana rarely got the kind of special treatment whites got. A black Peace Corps volunteer I met at a bar in Accra told me that when she arrived in her village for the first time, the villagers looked at her with dismay.

“They thought they’d been shortchanged,” she said, shaking her head ruefully. “One lady wanted to know if their village had lost some kind of lottery. She said her cousin’s village had gotten a white one!”

She told the story lightly, over a beer, but I sensed the heart-break behind it. She’d come here, like so many black Americans, expecting to find home. To be treated as a second-class citizen in her ancestral homeland produced a desolation I could scarcely imagine.

How strange, I thought, not for the first time, that Ghanaians had such affection for white people, given their recent history of colonization. But then, perhaps the very nearness of that experience provided the explanation. The effects of colonial education were so fresh that the majority of Ghanaians still esteemed their former colonizers rather than resenting them. The absence of a significant white population also helped. There was no European aristocracy in residence, lording its wealth over the local people. Almost all the
obroni
to be found in Ghana were aid workers, students, or volunteers.

I sighed again, trying to collect my thoughts.

“It’s true there are a disproportionate number of black men in American jails,” I told Brown, “but the reasons for that are very complicated. Generations of economic oppression, racism, the police, the courts . . .” I scratched the bite fiercely, drawing blood.

“But look how they behave,” he said. “They are rude.”

“It’s . . .” I sighed, abandoning the insatiable itch. “It’s complicated. There’s a lot of anger built up. But this group isn’t representative, either. Most black Americans aren’t separatists.”

“I will beat them,” he said.

I looked at him, and we burst out laughing. I picked up his hand, pressing his calloused yellow palm against mine. “My hero, defending my good name.”

The jovial guard at the gated American Embassy compound refused to believe there were homeless people in the U.S.

“No!” he shouted at me. “No one begs in America. It is not possible.”

“I’m sorry,” I told him, “but it’s more than possible. It’s the truth.”

“I will never believe it.”

“Okay,” I shrugged and moved to enter the building.

“You must marry me and bring me there, and then I will see for myself,” he called after me. I didn’t respond and he tried again, “Why not?”

I turned back to him, grinning. “You want to marry me? I’d make a horrible wife. I barely cook; I hate to clean . . . And when you got to the U.S. and saw all the homeless people, you’d divorce me and head straight back to Ghana.”

“Never! Others will cook and clean; no problem.”

I laughed, shaking my head helplessly. “And what if you didn’t like it there? What if you couldn’t find a job?”

He laughed and laughed, calling out something to the other guard in Twi. They were handsome in their dark blue uniforms, their faces shiny from the heat. “I will have no trouble in America,” he said, wiping his eyes. “Do not worry. My brother is in America. He writes me, he has two cars. He lives in Dallas; he is married with a white lady. His name is Atineku. You have met him?”

“I don’t think so. I’ve never been to Dallas.”

He laughed again. “Good. When do we go?”

My daypack passed inspection, and I entered a low-ceilinged room filled with yellow plastic chairs. The air-conditioning iced my bare arms, and I shivered. At one end of the room, separated by a glass partition, a U.S. official sat behind a counter listening to Ghanaians plead their cases for visitors’ visas to the U.S. Their task was to persuade him that they would return to Ghana once the visa expired. Unless they had a secure, well-paying job in Ghana that could reasonably tempt them back, their chances of getting a visa were slim. This ruled out 98 percent of the population. All the same, the room was full of people, dressed in festival clothes, clutching letters of recommendation from American friends.

The counter for American citizens was on my right as I entered the room, and there was only one person in line: Nadhiri. I hadn’t seen her since the Marcus Garvey event, a week ago.

“Hi,” I said, approaching the counter.

Her face went blank when she saw me. She nodded slightly. I felt an obstinate desire to push the connection, to force her to acknowledge me.

“What are you doing?” I asked her.

She indicated the form she was filling out.

“Registering? That’s smart; I never bothered to do that. I’m adding some pages to my passport.” I flipped it open, displaying the pages filled with stamps. “I’m thinking of going to Mali.”

She finished filling out the form and handed it to the woman behind the desk, thanking her.

“Goodbye,” I said, as she headed for the door.

She didn’t want to answer. She wanted to keep going, but something, some law of politeness drilled into her from an early age, caused her to turn slightly and nod in my direction before she pushed through the heavy glass door.

Over the next few weeks in Accra, I watched for her. Sometimes she hung out on the wooden steps in front of the hostel, chatting with the Ghanaian volunteers. With them she was a different person, laughing, putting her arms around them, slapping their legs. She had learned a bit of Twi, and they laughed at her pronunciation, teasing her. Watching her with them, I felt a nameless longing, an ache so strong I had to turn away.

Without exactly trying to, I discovered her habits. I bumped into her now at least once a day—buying pineapple on the street corner, inspecting printed cloth in the bustling Makola Market, standing in line at the post office, waiting in the crowded car park for a
tro-tro
to the beach. Each time I saw her, I said hello. Just that: “Hello.”

I’d discovered her weakness. I took perverse glee in watching her fight and lose the inner battle over whether or not to respond. It was a short-lived, joyless rush. I could make her nod at me, but I couldn’t make her see me, or recognize our bond.

And then one day she was gone.