Free African Quilt : 24 Modern African Stories (9781101617441) by Jr. (EDT) W. Reginald Barbara H. (EDT); Rampone Solomon

but she smiles a slight, distracted smile before she hands the scarf back to Chika and turns to climb out of the window.

A MA A TA A IDOO
    Ama Ata Aidoo was born in 1942, the daughter of a Fante chief. She received her college education at the University of Ghana in Legon, where she majored in English, and around this time wrote her first play,
The Dilemma of a Ghost.
When it appeared in 1965, she became the first published African playwright. She has been a lecturer at the University of Cape Coast and a research fellow at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, and, in addition to her academic career, served as Minister of Education in 1982–83. Aidoo has lived in America, Britain, Germany, and Zimbabwe. Most recently, she held the post of visiting professor in the Africana Studies Department at Brown University. In the course of her prolific career, she has published the short story collections
No Sweetness Here
(1970) and
The Girl Who Can and Other Stories
(1997);
poetry collections such as
Someone Talking to Sometime
(1986),
Birds and Other Poems
(1987), and
An Angry Letter in January
(1992); and the novels
Our Sister Killjoy
(1977),
The Eagle and the Chicken
(1986), and
Changes: A Love Story
(1991). She won the 1987 Nelson Mandela Award for Poetry and the 1992 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Africa.
    Two Sisters
    (1970)
    A s she shakes out the typewriter cover and covers the machine with it, the thought of the bus she has to hurry to catch goes through her like a pain. It is her luck, she thinks. Everything is just her luck. Why, if she had one of those graduates for a boyfriend, wouldn’t he come and take her home every evening? And she knows that a girl does not herself have to be a graduate to get one of those boys. Certainly, Joe is dying to do exactly that—with his taxi. And he is as handsome as anything, and a good man, but you know . . . Besides, there are cars and there are cars. As for the possibility of the other actually coming to fetch her—oh well. She has to admit it will take some time before she can bring herself to make demands of that sort on
him.
She has also to admit that the temptation is extremely strong. Would it really be so dangerously indiscreet? Doesn’t one government car look like another? The hugeness of it? Its shaded glass? The uniformed chauffeur? She can already see herself stepping out to greet the dead-with-envy glances of the other girls. To begin with, she will insist on a little discretion. The driver can drop her under the
neem
trees in the morning and pick her up from there in the evening . . . anyway, she will have to wait a little while for that and it is all her luck.
    There are other ways, surely. One of these, for some reason, she has sworn to have nothing of. Her boss has a car and does not look bad. In fact, the man is all right. But she keeps telling herself that she does not fancy having some old and dried-out housewife walking into the office one afternoon to tear her hair out and make a row . . . Mm, so for the meantime it is going to continue to be the municipal bus with its grimy seats, its common passengers and impudent conductors . . . Jesus! She doesn’t wish herself dead or anything as stupidly final as that. Oh no. She just wishes she could sleep deep and only wake up on the morning of her glory.
    The new pair of black shoes are more realistic than their owner, though. As she walks down the corridor, they sing:
    Â 
    Count, Mercy, count your blessings
    Count, Mercy, count your blessings
    Count, count, count your blessings.
    Â 
    They sing along the corridor, into the avenue, across the road, and into the bus. And they resume their song along the gravel path as she opens the front gate and crosses the cemented courtyard to the door.
    â€œSissie!” she called.
    â€œ
Hei
Mercy.” And the door opened to show the face of Connie, big sister, six years or more older and