#proseseries

[souslejaune]

When I was twelve I met my father’s father, FatherGrandpa...

ii

When I was twelve I met my father’s father, FatherGrandpa, for the third time. He was a man who laughed at his own jokes. After a stint as a bookkeeper with the Governor of the Gold Coast, he became a merchant. No one knows how he amassed the wealth he was famous for, but he claimed to have profited from the Second World War. As a direct result of his trading activities, the Ribeiro Trading Company had children in many major port cities in the world: Monrovia, Liverpool, Port of Spain… He kept a list. He came to visit GeeMaa who had just had a hip operation. It was the first time he had come to our house.

He sat. Raised his long, heavy legs onto a patterned sheepskin cushion on the floor. He reached for the water my mother brought him and drank. Sunlight from the living room window cast slatted streaks across his balding head. My father, mother, Naana and I stood in order of decreasing height in front of him. He repeated an old joke as if it was new.

“Ah, Kojo, I see you inherited my taste for fine women!”

He laughed and slapped his left shoulder with his right hand. The sound of his glee was reminiscent of the gurgle of an emptying bath. We barely smiled, but he carried on.

“Where is the beautiful cripple?”

Our parents sat down in the cane armchairs to FatherGrandpa’s left.

“Go and get GeeMaa,” my father instructed.

Naana and I went to GeeMaa’s room to call her. Because of the newness of the operation she walked with the slant and rhythm of a wink. We heard FatherGrandpa laughing as she approached the living room. We looked at each other, shook our heads, and went to sit under the neem tree in our front yard. The neem tree was familiar territory although I hadn’t been to it for a while. It was where I cut chewing sticks for GeeMaa and myself until I went to boarding school.

I didn’t want to be teased in school for chewing sticks while everyone else used fluoride and toothbrushes, so I stopped chewing the sticks. I had felt no ill effects, but I had been unhappy. GeeMaa’s health had been bad since I left for school and it worried me.

I looked across at Naana and smiled. We were still close even though, as my father put it, she was a woman with a vote now. She passed me a stick of green Wrigley’s chewing gum.

“Thank you.”

The tree filtered a net of sunlight that dappled our faces and we sat ensnared within it.

“I’m glad GeeMaa made our names Oppong-Ribeiro.”

I understood Naana. Plain Ribeiro would mean immediate association with our cavalier grandfather. Naana was studying at the University of Ghana, a place where reputations were made, and her image was important to her. I didn’t care much about image, but I understood.

FatherGrandpa summoned me as he was leaving. He opened his red address book (the one that held details of his children) and gave me an address in Trinidad. The book was indexed by name, age, profession and mother’s name. It was well worn but tidy inside.

“Ebo, I saw one of your photos on the wall. That address is for your uncle Sanjit in Trinidad. He is an artist. He will like it.”

“Thank you.”

His height made me feel humble. Though seventy-seven years old, he held himself like an eager cadet.

“Don't thank me,” he laughed. “You have thirty-three uncles and aunties. You have to start knowing them early!”

As he said that I imagined that Miss Havisham would definitely have had her own child if he had been engaged to her. Then she wouldn’t have had time to wallow in self-pity and become so mean. The thought made me smile.

He slapped my back and made me stumble. Then he laughed harder as he sauntered to his chauffeur-driven Lincoln.

I wrote to Uncle Sanjit the next day; a long letter, written on good blue writing paper from my father’s office. The office was simply a table fitted into one corner of the dining room. In the letter I explained to Uncle Sanjit how I got his address, then drew a family tree to show how we were related. For his mother’s name, I drew a dash. I asked for the meaning of his name and added a selection of the pictures I had taken in the five years since Auntie Dee Dee died.

His reply came in a large flat package that my father drove all the way to my boarding school to show me. My school was the Prince of Wales College in the days when Ghana was still called the Gold Coast, but by the time I got there it was called Achimota School. It was my father’s alma mater.

My father helped me open the package with a screwdriver from his glove compartment. It contained a painting and a short note. I painted the picture I liked. It was a pastel rendering of the hills of Aburi at sunset. I had taken that picture during a school trip to play football with the students of Akosombo Secondary School. P.S. My name means he who is always victorious. Keep in touch.

I stared at his interpretation of my picture. Surely he had smelled the evening mist with me, heard the firm crunch of gravel under the tyres of the school bus, seen the sky change from blue to orange to purple. Uncle Sanjit revealed in his next letter that he had studied Art in London and New York, and now ran a small gallery below his studio in Port of Spain. He thought that I had a very good eye and could become an artist if I chose to. For days, I reread his letter, trying to imagine myself as an artist. I loved reading, and taking photographs was something that had helped channel my confusion after Auntie Dee Dee's death – something I had come to love. In the light and shades of its practice, I had come to better appreciate the travel of thoughts across faces. The extra filter it gave to my visualisation enriched my reading and I had come to value storytelling even more. But I didn't think of photography as art, and I had never thought of myself as an artist. I was entranced. I wrote to Uncle Sanjit every two weeks. He wrote back –  about one letter for every four I wrote. They were long letters that described every corner of our separate worlds in delicate detail; the way lizards in Ghana dart around in daytime sun like couriers, how the green of the trees in Trinidad seemed to have blood pumping in them. He told me that his mother was of Indian origin with Hindu roots and ran a food hut by the port. He tried to convey in writing the enchanting singsong rhythm of Trinidadian speech, while I translated and wrote short volleys of Ghanaian proverbs, explaining their origins when I could eke the information out of my parents or Auntie Aba, the waache seller. He ended his letters with quotes from an endless list of luminaries. Benedict Spinoza, Patrice Lumumba, Indira Gandhi. I hadn’t heard of half of them so I found myself spending even more time in the library at school just to keep up. I told him that because he was only twenty-six, I thought of him as my bruncle. I sent Uncle Sanjit hundreds of pictures; insects splattered startled on the windscreen of a truck returned from the countryside, electric pylons straddling rubbish dumps, barefoot children playing with handmade footballs, the fragile-looking wooden shack that was our local corn mill, two-toned sunsets, reeds, flowers and trees caught from unusual angles. It must have taken a lot of his time, but he often replied with short notes and prints of paintings of his favourite shots. I sold some of the prints he sent to my father’s friends, but most of them ended up either on my bedroom wall or with Naana. When GeeMaa died two years after her hip operation, I sent him pictures of the funeral. GeeMaa’s coffin was designed in the traditional Ga manner. Carved and painted as an ambulance to honour her forty years of service as a nurse and midwife. Because she was over seventy years old her funeral was of a light mood. 

“She had all her time on earth.” 

“She has gone to a better place.” 

“God called her.” 

“She has gone to help HIM.” 

Condolences wore clichéd chrysalids. People came wearing white smiles on dark faces. Clothed in black and white; black to signify the death of a friend, white to celebrate her passing on to a better life. A few of the women had glittering white damask and chiffon with black lace scarves thrown artistically across their shoulders. I took a picture of one of them. Head-shaking guests of all ages came. They came bearing nothing but their empty bellies, which they proceeded to fill with food bought with my father’s hard-earned savings. Some claimed GeeMaa had delivered them as babies. Others claimed she had healed them. Every last person had a story to tell. Piecing these anecdotes together, I tried to construct the parts of GeeMaa's life that she had not told me about. Things she had perhaps considered too mundane to share. One of the second intake of British-trained nurses, she had been the only child – boy or girl – from her fishing community sent to the mission school. As she tuned her ears to the clipped tones of sunburnt priests, her playmates and their parents saved treats that the fishermen gave away from the canoes coming in – eels, didɛ bibii and tsile – and waited; first, to hear stories of peculiar behaviour by the missionaries, then, to listen to her reading and translating from her books. She repaid them, after she had qualified as a nurse-midwife, by treating their sick out of hours and teaching the young to read. By 1935, successful young men, social climbers, emerging business magnates and charlatans were camping outside her father's door, hoping to win the affections of the woman one of her friends called 'the best Charleston dancer in Accra'. As such, there was a collective sigh of dismay when FatherGrandpa went to Korle Bu with a broken finger and walked out with a plaster cast and GeeMaa's heart. These stories floated around on the suspension of grief and remembrance, maintaining a steady hubbub on our courtyard. In every corner, a story; not always believable, but a story nonetheless. 

“Oh, she was a great woman. Always smiling…” 

“Ei, she was good oh! Better than some of the doctors.” 

“I have a photo of her with my Kwame when he was born. Look at him now.” The black and white clad bundle of mothering flesh pulled her boy towards her by the sleeve. “Isn’t he handsome?” 

 Kwame smiled one of those smiles designed to support the social efforts of preening mothers. Lifting his cheeks slightly as though he were swallowing a bitter pill. 

By nine a.m. our courtyard was full of chattering mourners. Our square cream-painted house was like a piece of sponge cake besieged by flies. I took a picture from a distance. On the large veranda that led to our front door, GeeMaa’s body lay in state. As the visitors glided past the neat corpse, they stopped and shook hands with my father and his siblings. Auntie Patience, Auntie Ama and Uncle Tommy had all insisted on a big funeral, yet none of them offered to help with the cost of organising it. 

“But she died with you,” they said. As though my father had somehow killed GeeMaa. 

I overheard my father telling my mother that they were already arguing about who would inherit GeeMaa’s two houses in Adabraka. Yet they sat there, looking fashionably solemn in matching fabric permutated into different outfits. Matching envelopes of discontent – to be opened after the funeral.

continued >> here <<… | start from beginning? | current projects: The City Will Love You and a collection of poems, The Geez

[oliviasose-blog]

This writer confessed his feelings after he accidentally killed a child. Now on the blog, link in bio👆👆👆👆👆👆. Don't forget to share your thoughts and also share the story on Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Google+, and Pin it 😘😘😘😘😘 _______________________________#blogpost #blogger #writer #writerscommunity #writerssociety #writersofig #blog #lifestyleblogger #africanwriters #youngwriters #poet #poetrycommunity #poetsociety #words #reader #readersofinstagram #proseseries

[souslejaune]

At ten a.m. the entire congregation relocated

At ten a.m. the entire congregation relocated to the Osu Presbyterian Church. We travelled in waves of sound and dust: The hearse leading the way with its horns blaring like a faulty ambulance; the family thrown together within the confines of two Peugeot 504 caravans; followed by the guests – some on foot, some in a bus hired for the occasion. 

On the bus, the guests sang local spirituals at the top of their raspy morning voices, drawing eyes as the cortège wound its loud progress around Kwame Nkrumah circle and swept down the dual carriageway of the Ring Road. The family was silent. I sat sandwiched between Naana and my mother, my hands stuffed between my legs. Occasionally I glanced in the driver’s mirror to catch my father’s eye and to make sure that my face was as composed as a fourteen-year-old’s should be in a situation like this. I felt no identifiable emotion; every pure emotion was countered by a conflicting one. A giggle of relief burgeoned just below the surface of my grief, a part of me wanted to jump for joy. In the midst of the chaos, I thought of Mr Trabb in Great Expectations arranging Mrs Gargery’s funeral; grateful that we didn’t have anyone like him to push us around. I wouldn’t have refused Joe’s company though. I imagined him saying “she were a fine figure of a woman.” I couldn’t cry. My throat felt two sizes too big. The world felt too small. 

The preacher extolled the virtues of giving. Spoke of the grace that comes from living a selfless life, and then decided to “take advantage of the passing of our sister” to address the “lost sheep” amongst us. “There are no second chances. The good book says it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle…” 

I took a picture of his mouth – a non-symmetric oval with white spittle framing his coloured utterances – and lost myself in the loneliness of things I couldn’t speak of. I thought of the discussions I had had with GeeMaa about my gift – what she preferred to call my sensitivity – and wondered if I had let her down by my unwillingness to embrace it, my isolation when she encouraged engagement. I replayed my encounter with the wide-eyed old man at Kaneshie Market where I went to buy yam for a feast of Otɔ to celebrate my fourteenth birthday. Belatedly. My birthday had come during the school year so I was in the boarding house on the day itself. Still my mother refused to break the tradition that our family had kept up ever since Naana started eating solid food. Generations of my paternal family had done the same thing for years. 

GeeMaa supported her loudly. “You can’t be a man if you haven’t eaten your Otɔ.” Her slanted walk was then smoother. Almost seductive. Her curly white hair was a mute admonition for me not to argue any further. The unblemished ivory of each strand glowed with an inner darkness of a kind that defied logical explanation. 

I gave in with a smile. “As long as you all remember that I’m a man now!” 

Naana stuck her head out from the living room. “Yes, but a little man…” 

They all laughed. My mother holding her side, Naana shaking her head, GeeMaa clucking deep within her throat, mother hen style. Three generations of Oppong-Ribeiro women. Shaking like tambourines, but producing the more melodic music of mirth. 

I decided to lose the battle to save myself from torture. I took the money my mother had placed on the kitchen table and left the house chuckling to myself. The sky had the look of a pale blue cloth someone had spat on. It was difficult to look at. It seemed to be having a joke at my expense too. As I headed out, I greeted Auntie Aba the waache seller and the shoemaker with his rickety workbench. 

“Ayekoo.” 

“Yaaye.” 

Our ritualised greeting required nothing more to be said. I was warmed by the simple call and response. 

I walked with an energetic swing in my stride, staying on the shady side of the street whenever I could. Especially by the cemetery at Awudome with its profusion of well-nourished neem trees. When I got to the market, my feet were dusty. I stamped a few times before going to seek out Sister Joy – my mother’s preferred yam seller. I was almost at her corner when I stumbled and stepped on a tomato. Its sweet juices spread like thinning blood across the dirty floor. 

“Bɛlɛoo ei! Wɔsɛɛ e baa tɔ o ŋga. I pity your future wife.”

A tomato seller had dropped some of her merchandise. I apologised to her and offered to pay for the tomato but she laughed it off. 

“It’s nothing. I was only joking.” 

I smiled. 

“Ayekoo.” 

It was another voice: familiar yet completely new. I turned to see an old man leaning against a pillar with a box of sweets and lollipops. 

I had never seen him in the market before so I frowned before I answered. 

“Yaaye.” 

He smiled. Offered me a sweet. I hesitated, and then reached out. As my hand reached the box he stopped me and closed the box. I noticed two deep scars on his leathery face. He pointed to a hand-sized hole in the top of the box indicating that I should pick a sweet by chance. I reached in. The belly of the box felt like a damp sponge. It was warm and there was nothing solid in it, yet when I took my hand out I realised I was holding a round black-and-white mint. A solid mint. 

“Harmony,” he said. 

“Excuse me?” 

“Harmony. A circle. Black and white. There will be some changes in your family to preserve harmony.” 

He walked towards an exit. 

“What kind of changes?” 

“You know.” 

 I stood in the same spot until a trio of market porters bumped into me. 

“Small, why?” 

“Are you OK?” 

I shook my head apologetically and went to buy the yam. 

At home GeeMaa insisted on cooking the Otɔ for me. Said she was getting old and might not have the strength to do it again. She poured some palm oil carefully into a small pan as the yam boiled, lit one of the gas hobs and put the palm oil on it to heat. She seasoned the oil with onions and pepper and some leaves she picked from the courtyard. When the yam was cooked she put fourteen eggs in a saucepan to boil as she told me stories of more soothsayers and medicine women and men in her family. It was a noble calling; there was more pain in watching others suffer than suffering yourself. 

“That’s what I was taught. It’s not surprising I became a nurse,” she smiled. 

I wasn't convinced. 

She mashed the yam with a pestle and mixed it with the seasoned palm oil. Soon she had an orange mountain of palm-oil-coloured yam, which she put in a large wooden bowl. An edible volcano. Then she took the eggs off the boil. 

I helped her shell them and place one egg for every year of my life on the orange mountain. When the mountain came down, we couldn’t stop licking our fingers. Naana had two eggs and told us that the rest of us would have flatulence because three eggs each was well over our daily protein requirements. Twelve eggs disappeared like alien moons down our throats. We didn’t care how they came out. 

  It was hard to imagine GeeMaa gone within two weeks of that meal. I was angry. I was angry when the hearse left the church to lead us back to Awudome Cemetery. I was angry as I tossed dust onto the roof of GeeMaa’s ambulance. I was angry at the sight of the woman wailing and being held back from jumping into GeeMaa’s grave. Producing sounds so outrageous that the over-abundant bats that rested upside-down in close-by neem trees during the day dispersed – briefly darkening the sky. She sounded like a djama chant, two beats out of step, and one note out of tune. I knew she was a professional mourner. My father had told me at Aunt Dee Dee’s funeral when I asked why she was so hysterical. I would recognise that wail anywhere. I was angry when we returned to our house for refreshments: The catering company blocked off the entire road in front of our house to make space for canopies and chairs. They didn’t care that they were causing a minor traffic jam. They revelled in the society’s acceptance of funerals as a reason to do as you please. Live as you wish. For a moment at least. Mostly I was angry because I hadn’t understood the old man at the market. I was angry because the rectangular-lipped earth had just swallowed the only person I could talk to about my confusion. I was angry because on the morning of her death I ran away and missed her last words. I kept a straight face and said little. I overheard people whispering. Saying I was odd. 

“There’s something wrong with that kid.” 

Of course there was something wrong with me. I had lost my grandmother. And she may have “done her duty on earth,” or “gone to help HIM,” but I wanted my grandmother to be with me. 

Night fell and my spirits fell with it. I went to my room and turned off the lights. 

My father came in and hugged me and cried. 

My mother came in and hugged me and cried. 

I didn’t cry. I just stared at them like I was looking at a painting of life. 

Naana came and sat by me in my bed. Her eyes were like pimples – pointy and swollen. 

“I’m tired of crying,” she said. 

I lay down. “I want to cry. I just can’t.” 

“Why?” 

“I think was my fault.” 

“That’s nonsense. She was old.” 

“But she was strong.” I didn’t say that I thought GeeMaa had become ill because I went to boarding school and stopped chewing my neem sticks. I didn’t say I thought that GeeMaa had died because I had become a man. 

“I know. Did you hear about FatherGrandpa?” 

“No. Is he dead too?” 

“No, silly. He couldn’t come because he was too sad.” 

“Good excuse.” I sat up again. “He didn’t care about her.” 

“No. No. Daddy went to see him; every time he looked at Daddy he would start sobbing. He couldn’t control himself.” 

Naana had a pained expression on her face. I laughed at the ridiculousness of the situation. All I could see was an image of FatherGrandpa slapping his left shoulder to kick-start his faulty laughter and finding only tears. Naana pushed my head and laughed too. 

“Daddy said he just has a great capacity for love. That’s why he never stays with one woman.” 

“Poor fool!” 

We laughed and laughed. Then I cried. All the tears I’d carried since GeeMaa died came rushing down my cheeks. Then I bawled. Loud enough for the dead to hear. 

Our parents came back to the room and sat by Naana and I. The walls were covered with photographs and captions I had put up. Naana’s periodic table had gone when she went to live on the university campus. 

“It’s hard…” I tried to speak but felt a fish-bone of grief rising up my throat. By now my whole body was racked with sorrow. I shook like a sapling in a storm. 

My mother held me and started crying. 

My father always cried when my mother cried. 

Naana couldn’t help herself. 

Within minutes we were a wet huddle. A rock hollowed out. GeeMaa took a part of us all with her and left us all with a part of her. I was uncomfortable with the part I thought she had left me. 

“Mum, do you believe some people can read the future?” 

“I don’t know. I suppose there are prophets… Why?” 

“Nothing.” There was nothing to be said.

Uncle Sanjit wrote to the family to extend his condolences.

continued next week… | start from beginning? | current projects: The City Will Love You and a collection of poems, The Geez