Free Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi

and chuckled before. “We thought she was napping,” of beloved old Grandma, rushed putrefied to hospital days after death.
Idiots,
he’d think. Now he understood the confusion. She looked like she was sleeping. But was making no noise. Wasn’t dreaming of the places that she’d never been to.
    She was dead, in the village, the only place she’d ever go.
    His heart broke in one place. The first break. He didn’t feel it. Olu giggled, soft, the only sound in the room. Kweku looked at Olu, suddenly remembering that he was holding him. Olu looked, awestruck, at the butterfly on her toe.
    Black and blue (swordtail), just coming to rest, an almost neon shade of turquoise, black markings, white dots. It fluttered around his mother’s foot, a lazy lap, then lifted off, flapping blithely toward the triangular dome and out the little window. Gone.
    “This is your grandmother.” Changed the tense. “
Was
.” Olu looked at Kweku, not recognizing the voice. And he at his mother. “I told you,” he mustered. “I told you I’d return—” but couldn’t manage the rest.
    So he sat on the floor, on a raffia mat. In the heat and the smell of it, the stench of new death. He rubbed Olu’s back until the child fell asleep (fifteen minutes, not more, such a well-behaved boy). Then stayed in semidarkness, who knows for how long, maybe hours, with the sunlight changing, shifting, on the wall.
    He didn’t think what he thought he’d think. That he shouldn’t have left. Without saying good-bye. That the last time he saw her—when they’d had that horrid argument about whether he should accept the full scholarship or not, when she’d said that he was needed
here
, not “Pencil-wherever”—he shouldn’t have said what he said.
    That she was “jealous.”
    Of course she was jealous. She was thirty-eight years old. She had never left Ghana. Her youngest daughter was dead. Her genius-husband had absconded with the tide in the moonlight (or abandoned her, more likely, unable to face her for shame). Now here was her son—her genius-son, sixteen, shoeless—trying to abscond with American missionaries to the president’s alma mater (motto: “if the son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.” Indeed. And if the son shall win a scholarship?). In her mother-heart she knew.
    That he would
not
“go and come,” that there was nothing to come back to, that he would learn—as she had wanted, a gifted youngster herself, plucked from school at age seven to fetch firewood and water—and leave. As she wanted.
    It didn’t need to be said.
    •   •   •
    Those thoughts came later. (And for many years after, when he’d try to unsmell the damp stench of new death.) What he thought as he sat was: how different the quiet. It had never been this quiet in this hut, growing up. And that he might have rather liked it if he only could have
sat
in it, like this, alone and quiet. And that she must have felt the same. This is why she’d made them all wake up so early and leave the hut, all of them, five A.M .,
out!,
not for “idle hands” or “early birds,” or whatever else the mission had Ghanaian mothers hawking to their
pikin
in those days. It was so she could lie on her back on her mattress in silence and solitude, arms at her side. Just looking at the reeds arching in toward the center high above her. Clever structure: on your back it felt huge. Clever lover: hoping, praying, that he’d one day make the widow “wife”—the one with the little black transistor radio that she carried with her everywhere she went like a pet—had designed his mud hut so a girl on his bed would look up and feel distance, expansiveness, height. She’d sent them away so she could: feel some distance. Some quiet. Just lie there. Five, ten minutes max. Soon they’d be back from the well and their washing, six children (then five), two boys, four skinny girls. Soon the whole hut would be full of their motion, then so full of moisture,