Sankofa Page 2

  I fried two sausages when I got home. Their skins ruptured, hot mince spilling out like lava. I covered them in baked beans. I forgot to buy bread. I fetched Francis Aggrey from upstairs when I was done. He was familiar to me, a friend, almost.

  I have been thrown out of my lodgings. Thomas came here the other day and made a racket. He turned up my record player and stomped around until my landlady herself came to knock. I felt chastised when I saw the old lady, not far from my grandmother’s age, woken from sleep to ask us to keep it down. But Thomas shouted at her, “Ma’am, now you have a real complaint for your racist son!”

  Reprisal was swift. The son came two days later with a tough behind him. He won’t have any coons insulting his mother. Clear out or they’ll break my bones. I made a meek protest, citing tenancy agreements and contracts. Then he decided to become violent. He pushed me in the chest and so I pushed him back. I have not wrestled with street boys in Segu to have an English midget shove me about. I was ready to fight them both when the useless back-up said, “If you give any trouble, we’ll call the police and get you done for assault.” I have chosen not to test the impartiality of the London police force. I am writing this from Thomas’s flat. As he was the one who began my troubles, I will stay here until I find a new place.

  I want to cheer for young Francis. He would have taught me how to fight, how to make a fist and throw a punch. Not like my mother, who raised me to have nice manners no matter the provocation. I was told to shrink from conflict even when it sought you out, even when it thrust its finger in your face and said, “Go back to your fucking country.” Tell them this is your fucking country, Francis Aggrey would have said.

  He wrote about living with Thomas, two young men in close quarters. My father was the tidier of the two, the more domestic. Thomas arranged their social affairs, dragging my father to meetings with what he termed the “British left.” Francis was skeptical but he went. He had traveled some distance from the Francis sitting alone in the British Museum, ogled by strangers.

  I have had a letter from home. It is my mother asking how my studies are. I have not set foot in a lecture hall in two weeks, while my poor mother is in Segu, trading fish up and down the coast so I can pay my fees and have a little spending money. Thomas is a bad influence. We are out till the early hours of the morning and we spend our days dissipated as drunks. I must find new lodgings.

  Grandpa Owen was the only grandparent I knew. He taught me some chess strategies and called me Shirley Bassey when I sang off key. I would have liked Francis to write more about my grandmother, but he was too busy discovering London with Thomas.

  Francis and Thomas attended a lecture on West African decolonization and Francis’s tone grew fierier. He bristled at an English woman being an expert on West Africa, and Thomas was pleased that his protégé was “waking up.” It seemed my father had fallen prey to politics in the end.

  I have been introduced to a man called Ras Menelik. He is Thomas’s mentor, and I have been kept from meeting him because Thomas did not feel I was ready. Perhaps he is right. Had I met Menelik two months ago, I might have laughed in his face. No barber has touched his hair in years. He is like John the Baptist in the wilderness, or one of the mendicant men rooting for food in the rubbish of Segu. He has a bevy of young English girls around him, typing his ideas into articles and pamphlets and chapters. They are the secretaries of his movement, which is to emancipate Africa. I took two of his pamphlets away: “Africa: A New Dawn” and “Sunrise in Ethiop.” I cannot tell if it is bombast or visionary. He sends his writings all over the world. People are reading his ideas as far as Tokyo, Thomas tells me.

  I have been a few more times to Menelik’s flat. It appears I am the first man from the Diamond Coast to join their circle. I was deliberately sought out because there are few students from the Diamond Coast in Britain. We are a poor colony. “Why is that?” Menelik asked me yesterday. “You say you are from the Diamond Coast and yet you are poor?” The truth is, few of us in the D.C. have anything to do with diamonds. In my mother’s tribe we are fishermen. We have no diamonds on our land and we pay little heed to what goes on in the diamond towns of the north. We fish as our ancestors have always done. Menelik showed me photographs of what he said were miners in Mion. They go down the mines in rags, Menelik says. They die in the tunnels and their bodies are left to rot, or they are blown up if the tunnel is still in use. They are paid too little to live on and are forever in debt to the mining companies for food and other basics. And what am I to do with this information, I wondered, as I stared at the bony limbs of my compatriots.

  Run, you foolish boy, I thought. The world would always have people like this Menelik, trying to press guilt on you, forcing pamphlets with gory pictures into your hands, holding you personally responsible for wars, famines, genocides. Why not be of use to those around you? Why rile my father with atrocities he could do nothing about?

  I have made friends with one of Menelik’s secretaries. She is a bookkeeper during the week but comes to Menelik’s flat on Saturdays to lend her hand to the liberation. She is the first obroni woman I have spoken to in any depth. Her hair is the color of ripened tomatoes, which makes her almost as rare as I am on the streets of London. I asked why she cares so much about Africans. She says she is from a colonized people herself. By that, she means she is Welsh.

  A redheaded, radical Welsh bookkeeper. It must be Aunt Caryl! So absorbed was I in Francis’s London life that I had almost forgotten that he must meet my mother at some point.

  It seemed he had met Aunt Caryl first. She was always a few steps ahead of her younger sister. Four years older, a head taller, and first to Francis Aggrey, too. My mother was more beautiful, but Aunt Caryl had the glamour, a certain recklessness.

  There were some more entries about her. They’d had a romance of sorts. Thomas, used to dalliances with white women, encouraged the match. He also had a wife in Rhodesia, a woman Francis was hearing of for the first time. I wonder what my father thought of his friend’s philandering. The diary didn’t say.

  Francis’s attachment to my aunt seemed shallow. He was curious about white women but cautious. He had a fear of being turned into a black sex object. He “walked out” a few times with her but there didn’t seem to be more. Still, my aunt might have been my mother, or some other person like me, Bain and Aggrey mingled. She was better equipped perhaps to have a mixed-race child, but my mother was softer, the more maternal.

  How did the sisters get on after sharing a man? How did they live with it? They were like the Boleyn girls, except Francis Aggrey was not a king, just a poor student living in a single room.

  I wanted to speak to someone. I wanted to go out, but I no longer had places to go. I had shed my friends in the past eighteen months, more Robert’s friends than mine. My mother was six months dead and I had been six months in the grave as well, or so it felt that evening when I was ready to rush out trailing my winding sheets. I called Rose.

  “Mum! Hello. I was just wondering whether I should call to say bye.”

  It was not the first time she had traveled without telling me. My daughter had a life removed from mine. I glimpsed it on her social media pages: photographs with people I didn’t know, in places I’d never been to. Her pose was always the same, legs angled to highlight her slim thighs, smile wide like a commercial. It was what you hoped for your child after twenty-one: independence. And yet, once in a while, the severance still came as a shock.

  “Where are you off to now?” I asked.

  “Mumbai, for work. I’m part of a team helping a car manufacturer get back on its feet. I know. I’m sorry. I should have mentioned it but it was decided at the last minute and I’ve been so busy. I have to switch off.”

  “I’ve been reading about Bamana,” I said.

  “What’s that you said? Panama? Yes, I’m getting off. Just saying bye to my mum. Sorry about that. I have to go. We’ll talk about Panama when I get back. I love you. I miss you.”

 
; My daughter had the strange habit of never saying bye. She said she preferred to leave things on a comma, not a full stop.

  I put my phone down and set the kettle to boil. Where was Francis Aggrey now? Was he alive? Did he have another family? He was a handsome man. I couldn’t imagine him still single.

  I put a tea bag in a mug and poured boiling water over it. Steam rose. The water turned black. I took out the tea bag but I didn’t throw it away. Aunt Caryl always said a woman and a tea bag were the same. No matter how many times you boiled one, there was always something left.

  3

  It is a Sunday the next day and I go to the park. The sun is out, a rare winter sun that raises a glare. There are families with small children on leashes, tugging at the cords that bind them to their parents. Dogs roam free, ranging far from their owners.

  If Francis Aggrey had stayed in London we would have been a colored family, welcome only in Notting Hill or Brixton. I saw the marches on television in the seventies, the placards, KEEP BRITAIN WHITE, the faces of the race warriors, bared to the cameras, unashamed.

  “Switch it off,” my mother always said.

  “Let her see it,” Aunt Caryl would retort.

  Grandpa Owen always concluded, “The English are shites.”

  A woman sits on the far end of my bench with a child clinging to her. Her hair, done up in a bun this morning, is escaping from the knot, falling down her face like wisps of dry grass. She holds a cigarette in her free hand, unlit, poised.

  Aunt Caryl was a smoker. My mother was not. My grandfather had a pipe he lit occasionally. He was from a Welsh mining family. He showed me a picture of his father once, up from the mine with a dozen other men, faces covered in soot.

  “Looked like a colored fella when he came home.”

  I was the only black child on our street. The shopkeeper called me Sambo and gave me free sweets, sherbets and cherry suckers that turned my tongue bright red. Jenny Jenkins was my neighbor and my best friend. When we quarreled, she called me a stinking wog.

  “Can you watch him for me, please?”

  It is the woman on the bench. She is speaking to me, leaning across the gap between us.

  “Pardon?”

  “Just for a moment. I need a smoke. Please. I’m just going across there.” She points to a tree a few steps away. She props the child against the bench before I can answer. He is bundled in a red jacket stiff with padding, his arms sticking out like a scarecrow. She smokes and paces, watching us, turning her back on us. The child whimpers but does not cry. The wind picks up. Tar and nicotine invade our lungs. She drops the cigarette, only half smoked, and stamps out its spark.

  “Thanks. I don’t usually,” she says. “I’m trying to quit.” She picks up the child and is gone.

  I remember my first year with Rose. The feeling of being watched and judged. I wanted someone to guide me through the rituals, someone who had been there before, any mother except mine. We couldn’t talk—not about anything serious.

  I watched a documentary after I had married and had Rose, in the nineties, when the personal trauma of ordinary people was becoming regular programming. It was about single mothers who had given up their children for adoption. The cameras tracked down the white mothers and the dark grown-up children. The producers staged meetings between the two parties then filmed the results: tears, anger, accusations, faux reconciliations, prime television. The next time I saw my mother, I asked, “Did you ever think of giving me up?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “For adoption.”

  “Of course not,” she said.

  “Didn’t you mind? Being a white woman alone with a black child?”

  “You’re just the same as me, Anna. I didn’t think about it.”

  We’re just the same. It was her lie, her special fantasy. Francis Aggrey would have known I was different, would have been proud of it.

  A couple walk past, holding gloved hands, leather on leather. They eye my bench but don’t stop. I remember when Robert and I would rather have walked miles than have a third intrude. He was so direct, so relentless, so sure it was me and no one else. All I had to do was build my house on his assurances. Plus he knew about solid homes. His parents were thirty years married when I met him and are still married now. They have outlasted us with ease.

  The sun is waning when I stand to go. I don’t open my father’s diary when I get back home. It is Sunday. I rest from Francis Aggrey.

  I open my curtains when I wake up the next morning. I shower. I wash my hair and put on clothes that hang loose on me. Rose has booked an appointment with a divorce lawyer. Her office is on a high street with black letters stenciled on the display window: CAMPBELL AND HENSHAW FAMILY LAW. You can see into the waiting room, to the lone potted plant by the water dispenser, to the empty foam chairs. I am reluctant to go inside.

  Rose does not approve of a two-year separation that tapers off into divorce. In her words, Robert has put my life on hold. I need the closure that a divorce will bring so I can heal and move on. I don’t know where she has picked up this language, the wording of celebrity gurus tripping glibly out of her mouth.

  I push open the door and a bell rings.

  “Good morning,” the receptionist says. She is about my age but she does not dye her hair.

  “Morning. I have an appointment with Ms. Henshaw for eleven.”

  “Your name, please?”

  “Anna Graham.”

  “Please take a seat. Ms. Henshaw will see you shortly.”

  Everything I have read says children should be kept out of a divorce, and yet I am here because I want my daughter’s approval. I do not want to appear weak or passive to Rose. I know what it is to find a mother wanting.

  There is a range of bland magazines fanned across the coffee table, neutral so as not to upset or remind people why they are here. Healthy, smiling faces but nothing sultry or semi-nude, no reminders of clandestine sex.

  “Ms. Graham?”

  The receptionist is standing in front of me.

  “Yes?”

  “Ms. Henshaw is ready now, if you’ll follow me.”

  We climb up a flight of stairs. There are three doors, one with a WC sign. The receptionist knocks.

  “Come in.”

  The room is spacious with large windows. Ms. Henshaw rises from behind her desk. She is married, I see, when she puts out her hand to shake me.

  “Anna,” I say.

  “You can call me Anna also. Although if you do become my client we might find things a little confusing.”

  She looks like an Anna. Her hair is light brown and her eyes are blue. Her coloring is the type that flushes after a glass of wine.

  “Please, let’s sit where it’s more comfortable.”

  She ushers me to the sofa. I would prefer her to remain behind the table, unseen below the waist, a professional torso.

  “Can I get you anything to drink?” she asks.

  “I’m fine, thank you.”

  A notepad and pen lie still in her lap. She is wearing lavender perfume. It wafts off her like scent from a plug-in air freshener.

  “I always start by asking: do you want a divorce?”

  “Well I—I’ve come to see a divorce lawyer.”

  “I know, but do you want a divorce?”

  “I have grounds for it. My husband slept with another woman.”

  “That isn’t what I asked.”

  There is a pause. Her questions are direct but her manner is gentle. She sweeps her hair back from her forehead. It is cut to graze her shoulders and she has styled it without a parting. It is the only impractical thing about her. Her trousers are black, her shoes are flat, and in her ears are discreet silver studs.

  I feel the need to convince this sleek Anna.

  “We’ve been separated for a year. A divorce is the next obvious step,” I say.

  “Have you tried counseling?”

  “We went for a few sessions.”

  “And?”

&n
bsp; “We stopped.”

  That was all there was to it. I wasn’t suited for the probing questions of a stranger.

  “What is your husband’s profession?” she asks.

  “Investment banker. Boutique firm. Things changed a bit for us after the crash. A few bad investments.”

  “And yours?”

  “Housewife,” I say. “But my mother died and left me her flat in Islington. It’s been on the market for three months. Ex-council, unrefurbished, so proving a bit difficult to sell, but still, it’s in a coveted area.”

  “And where are you living at the moment?”

  “In our home. He moved out.”

  “And would you like to go on living there after the divorce?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes I think I’d like something much smaller and more central, if I can afford it, and other times I think I would prefer a cottage in the countryside.”

  It was the effect of daytime television and all those people who felt they could reinvent their lives by escaping to green fields and the scent of manure.

  “Any children under the age of eighteen?” she asks.

  “I just have the one daughter. She’s twenty-five.”

  “Do you still love your husband?”

  She is auditioning me with these impertinent questions, weighing whether or not I am a worthy client. “Does it matter?” I ask.

  “It can make the divorce process a lot harder.”

  “I’m here because my daughter booked this meeting. She thinks finalizing a divorce will give me closure.”

  “And you? What do you think?”

  “It’s a bit simplistic. You can’t end twenty-six years with a piece of paper.”