But the signs were bad. Now when Tracey was asked to take her coat off in class she no longer refused, instead performing the action with terrible relish, unzipping slowly and in such a way that her breasts were presented to the rest of us with as much impact as possible, barely contained by an unsuitable top that showed off her abundance where the rest of us still had only nipples and bone. Everybody “knew” it cost 50p to “touch Tracey’s tits.” I had no idea whether this was true or not, but all the girls united in shunning her, black, white and brown. We were nice girls. We did not let people touch our non-existent tits, we were no longer the crazed things we’d been back in Year Three. Now we had “boyfriends,” chosen for us by other girls, in notes passed from desk to desk, or in long, tortuous phone calls (“Want to know who fancies you and told everyone he fancies you?”), and once these boyfriends had been formally assigned we stood solemnly with them in the playground in the thin winter sun, hand in hand—more often than not a head taller than them—until the inevitable moment came for us to break up (the timing of this, too, was decided by our friends) and the round of notes and calls would begin again. You could not take part in this process without belonging to a clique of willing females and Tracey had no girlfriends left, only me, and only then when she chose to be friendly. She took to spending her break-times in the boys’ football cage, sometimes cursing them, even picking up the ball and stopping play, but more often than not acting as their accomplice, laughing with them as they teased us, never attached to any boy in particular and yet, in the school’s imagination, freely handled by all. If she saw me through the bars, playing with Lily or doing Double Dutch with the other black and brown girls, she would make a show of turning and talking with her male circle, whispering with them, laughing, as if she, too, had an opinion on whether or not we wore bras or had started our periods. Once when I was walking past the football cage in a very dignified way, hand in hand with my new “boyfriend”—Paul Barron, the policeman’s son—she stopped what she was doing, gripped the bars of the cage and smiled out at me. Not a nice smile, a deeply sarcastic smile, as if to say: Oh, is that who you’re pretending to be now?
Three
By the time we’d escaped the kankurang, and passed through all intervening checkpoints, and after our taxi had made it through the clogged, pot-holed streets of the market town and on to the ferry port, by then it was too late, we were out of time, we ran down the gangway but found ourselves stranded with at least a hundred others, watching the rusty, hulking prow push forward into the water. The river split this finger of land in half throughout its length, and the airport was on the other side. I looked up at the ferry’s chaotic three-story cargo: mothers and their babies, schoolchildren, farmers and workers, animals, cars, trucks, bags of grain, tourist tat, oil drums, suitcases, furniture. The children waved at us. Nobody seemed sure if it was the last ferry. We waited. Time passed, the sky turned pink. I thought of Aimee, at the airport, having to make small talk with the Minister of Education—and of Judy in a rage, hunched over her phone, calling me over and over and getting nowhere—but these thoughts did not have their expected effect. I felt quite calm as I waited, resigned, alongside all these other people who seemed likewise to betray no impatience, or at least did not express impatience in any form I recognized. I had no network, there was nothing I could do. I was completely unreachable, for the first time in years. It gave me an unexpected but not unpleasant sense of stillness, of being outside of time: it reminded me somehow of childhood. I waited, leaning on the bonnet of the taxi. Others sat on their own luggage, or hitched themselves up on to the lids of oil drums. An old man rested on half of a giant bedstead. Two little girls straddled a cage of chickens. Periodically, articulated lorries inched their way along the gangway, shunting black diesel smoke down all our throats, honking to alert whoever might be sitting or sleeping in their path, but finding nowhere to go and nothing to do soon joined us in this wait that seemed to have no beginning and no end: we had always been looking out across the water for the ferry and always would be. At sunset our driver threw in the towel. Turned his taxi round, inched back through the crowd, and was away. To avoid a woman determined to sell me a watch I moved, too, toward the edge of the water, and sat down. But Lamin was concerned for me, he was always concerned for me, a person like me should be in the waiting room, which cost two of the filthy, crumpled notes I had balled up in my pocket, and for that reason naturally he would not go with me, but still he was insistent that I must go there, yes, the waiting room was certainly the place for a person like me.
“But why can’t we just wait where we are?”
He gave me his agonized smile, the only kind he had.
“For me it’s OK . . . but for you?”
It was still forty degrees outside: the idea of being in a room was nauseating. Instead I made him sit with me, our feet dangling over the water, kicking our heels against the heaps of dead oysters cemented to the struts of the pier. All the other young men in the village had dance music on their phones, precisely to listen to at times like these, but Lamin, a serious young man, preferred the World Service, and so taking one earbud each we listened to a story about the cost of university tuition in Ghana. Below us, at the shoreline, topless, broad-backed boys carried determined travelers on their shoulders, through the choppy shallows, to some brightly painted, perilous-looking narrowboats. I pointed to a very fat woman with a baby strapped to her back being hoisted on to the shoulders of one of them. Her thighs crushed his sweating head.
“Why can’t we do that? We’d be across in twenty minutes!”
“For me it’s OK,” Lamin whispered—it was as if every conversation we had were somehow shameful to him and must not be overheard—“not for you. You should go to the waiting room. It will be a long time.”
I watched the beach boy, soaking wet now up to his thighs, lower his passenger on to her seat. He looked less pained, shifting this cargo, than Lamin looked simply talking to me.
• • •
As it began to get dark, Lamin entered the crowd to ask questions, becoming another Lamin altogether, not the monosyllabic whisperer he was with me but what must have been the real Lamin, serious and respected by everyone, funny and loquacious, seeming to know everybody, greeted with warm, fraternal affection by beautiful young people wherever we went. His “age mates,” he called them, and this could mean either that he had grown up in the village with them, or that they had been in the same class in school, or else in his year at the teachers’ college. It was a tiny country: age mates were everywhere. The girl who sold us cashews in the market was his age mate, also a security guard in the airport. Sometimes age mates turned out to be one of the young police or army cadets who stopped us at the checkpoints, and that always felt like a piece of luck, the tension dissipated, they took their hands off their guns, leaned in through the passenger window and happily indulged in nostalgia. Age mates gave you a better price, issued tickets more quickly, waved you through. And now here was another one, a bosomy girl in the ferry office, wearing a confounding combination of items I had seen on many local girls and looked forward to showing Aimee, with the superior knowledge of the traveler who has arrived a whole week earlier. Skin-tight, low-riding, studded jeans, the skimpiest of vests—revealing the neon edges of a lacy bra—and a scarlet-red hijab, wrapped modestly round the face and secured with a glittering pink pin. I watched Lamin and this girl talk for a long time, in one of the several local languages Lamin spoke, and I tried to imagine how the simple answers we were seeking to the questions “Is there another ferry? When will it come?” could possibly be turned into as involved a debate as the two of them seemed to be having. Across the bay I heard a honking sound and saw a great shadowy shape moving toward us in the water. I ran over to Lamin and gripped his elbow.
“Is that it? Lamin, is that it?”
The girl stopped her chattering and turned to look at me. She could tell I was no age mate. She examined
the drab, utilitarian clothes I had bought especially for wearing in her country: olive cargo pants, long-sleeved wrinkled linen shirt, an ex-boyfriend’s battered old pair of Converse and a black scarf I’d felt silly and self-conscious wearing and so had slipped off my head and now wore round my neck.
“That is a container ship,” she said, with undisguised pity. “You miss the last ferry.”
We paid what Lamin considered an exorbitant amount for our narrowboat passage, despite fierce negotiations, and the moment my giant boy lowered me on to my seat a dozen young men appeared from nowhere and joined us, sitting on every viable piece of the boat’s frame and transforming us from private water taxi into public boat. But on the other side of the water, my network reappeared and we learned that Aimee had decided to stay in one of the beach hotels and set out for the village tomorrow. The giant boy was delighted: we paid him again and thus subsidized another trip for some local kids, sailing back the way we’d come. Once on shore, we made our way finally to the village, in a beat-up minibus. The idea of two boats and two cabs in a single day was excruciating to Lamin, even if I paid for the second ride, even if the price quoted—which made him wince—would not buy me a bottle of water on Broadway. He sat on the roof of the vehicle, with another boy who could not be squeezed in, and as my fellow passengers talked and slept and prayed and ate and fed babies and shouted at the driver to let them off at what appeared to me to be completely deserted intersections, I could hear Lamin beating out a rhythm on the roof, over my head, and for two hours it was the only language I understood. We reached the village after ten. I was staying with a local family, and had never been outside their compound at that hour, or realized the total darkness that surrounded us, through which Lamin walked now with complete confidence, as if it were floodlit. I scurried behind him through the many narrow, sandy, trash-strewn paths I could not see, past the corrugated-iron sheets that marked each breeze-block single-story compound from the next, until we reached the Al Kalo’s compound, no grander or taller than the rest, but with a large open wasteground in front of it, in which at least a hundred children, in the uniform of their school—the school we were here ultimately to replace—huddled under the canopy of a single mango tree. They’d waited six hours to do their dance for a woman called Aimee: now it fell to Lamin to explain why this lady would not be arriving today. But when Lamin had finished speaking the chief appeared to want it explained to him all over again. I waited as the two men discussed the matter, their hands moving in an animated way, while the children grew ever more bored and agitated, until the women lay aside the drums they would not now play and told the children finally to stand, and in dribs and drabs sent them running back to their homes. I held up my phone. It cast its artificial light over the Al Kalo. He was not, I thought, the great African chief Aimee had in her mind. Small, ashy, wrinkled and toothless, in a threadbare Man U T-shirt, tracksuit bottoms and plastic Nike house slippers held together with gaffer tape. And how surprised the Al Kalo would be, in turn, to hear what a figure he had become for us all, in New York! It had started with an e-mail from Miriam—subject heading: Protocol—which outlined, in Miriam’s view, what any visitor to the village must present to its Al Kalo upon arrival, as a mark of respect. Scrolling through it, Judy released her seal-bark and put her phone in my face: “This a joke?”
I read the list:
Reading glasses
Paracetamol
Aspirin
Batteries
Body wash
Toothpaste
Antiseptic cream
“Don’t think so . . . Miriam doesn’t make jokes.”
Judy smiled fondly at her screen: “Well, I think we can swing that.”
Not many things charmed Judy, but that list did. It charmed Aimee even more, and for a few weeks afterward, whenever any good people of means visited us, in the Hudson Valley house, or in Washington Square, Aimee would repeat this list with mock-solemnity and then ask everybody present if they could even imagine, and everybody would confess they could hardly even imagine and seemed very moved and comforted by this failure to imagine, it was taken as a sign of purity, both in the Al Kalo and in themselves.
“But it’s just so challenging to make that translation,” commented a young man from Silicon Valley, on one of these nights—he was leaning over the dining table into a candle centerpiece and his face seemed lit from below with his own insight—“I mean, between one reality and the other. Like passing through the matrix.” Everybody at the table nodded and agreed that it was, and later I caught Aimee seamlessly adding this dinner-party line to her recitations of the Al Kalo’s now famous list, as if it were her own.
“What’s he saying?” I whispered to Lamin. I was tired of waiting. I lowered my phone.
Lamin put a hand gently on the chief’s shoulder, but the old man continued to make his endless, agitated address to the darkness.
“The Al Kalo is saying,” Lamin whispered, “that things are very difficult here.”
• • •
The next morning I went with Lamin to the school and charged my phone in the headmaster’s office, through the sole outlet in the village, run on a solar-powered generator and paid for by an Italian charity years earlier. Around midday network mysteriously reappeared. I read through my fifty texts and established I had two more days alone here before I would have to go back to the ferry and collect Aimee: she was “resting” in a city hotel. At first I was excited by this unexpected solitude, and surprised myself with all kinds of plans. I told Lamin I wished to go to the famous compound of the rebel slave, two hours away, and that I wanted to see at last, with my own eyes, the shore from which the ships had left, carrying their cargo of humans, destined for my mother’s island, and then on to the Americas and Britain, bearing the sugar and the cotton, before turning back again, a triangle that had produced—among its numberless consequences—my own existence. Yet two weeks earlier, in front of my mother and Miriam, I had called all of this, contemptuously, “diaspora tourism.” Now I told Lamin I would ride a minibus unaccompanied to the old slave forts that once held my ancestors. Lamin smiled and seemed to agree but in practice stepped between all such plans and me. Between me and all attempted interactions, personal or economic, between me and the incomprehensible village, between me and the elders and me and the children, meeting any questions or requests with his anxious smile and his favored—whispered—explanation: “Things are difficult here.” I was not allowed to walk into the bush, pick my own cashews, help cook any meals or wash my own clothes. It dawned on me that he saw me as a sort of child, someone to be treated with kid gloves and presented with reality by degrees. Then I realized everyone in the village thought of me that same way. Where grandmothers crouched to eat from the communal bowl, resting on their powerful haunches, gathering up rice and scraps of ladyfish or garden egg in their fingers, I was brought a plastic chair and a knife and fork, because it was assumed, correctly, that I would be too weak to assume the position. As I poured a full liter of water down the drop toilet, to flush out a cockroach that disturbed me, not one of the dozen young girls I lived with ever let me know exactly how far she’d walked that day for that liter. When I snuck off by myself, to the market, to buy a red-and-purple wrapper for my mother, Lamin smiled his anxious smile but spared me the knowledge of what proportion of his yearly teacher’s salary I’d just spent on a single piece of cloth.
Toward the end of that first week I worked out that the preparations for my dinner began moments after my breakfast had been served. But when I tried to approach the corner of the yard where all those women and girls were hunkering in the dust to peel and cut and pound and salt, they laughed at me and sent me back to my leisure, to sit on a plastic chair in my dark room and read the American newspapers I’d brought with me—now crumpled and comically irrelevant—so that I never did discover how, exactly, with no oven and no electricity, they made the oven fries I did not want, or
the great bowls of more appetizing rice they cooked for themselves. Food preparation was not for me, nor was washing, or fetching water or pulling up onions or even feeding the goats and chickens. I was, in the strictest sense of the term, good-for-nothing. Even babies were handed to me ironically, and people laughed when they saw me holding one. Yes, great care was taken at all times to protect me from reality. They’d met people like me before. They knew how little reality we can take.
• • •
The night before we were to pick up Aimee I was woken very early, by the call to prayer and the hysterical roosters, and finding that it was not yet insanely hot I got dressed in the darkness and left my compound, alone, without any of the small army of women and children I lived with—as Lamin had insisted I must never do—and went looking for Lamin. I wanted to tell him I was going to the old slave fort today, whether he liked it or not, I was going. As morning broke I found myself followed by many barefoot, curious children—“Good morning, how is your morning?”—like so many shadows, as here and there I paused to say Lamin’s name to the dozens of women I passed, already heading off to work on the communal farm. They nodded and pointed me on, through the scrub, down this path and that, round the bright green concrete mosque half eaten on each side by twelve-foot orange termite hills, past all those dusty front yards that were swept, at this hour, by sullen, half-dressed teenage girls, who rested on their brooms to watch me pass. Everywhere I looked women were working: mothering, digging, carrying, feeding, cleaning, dragging, scrubbing, building, fixing. I didn’t see a man until I found Lamin’s compound, finally, at the outskirts of the village, before the farmland. It was very dark and dank, even by local standards: no front door, only a bed sheet, no huge wooden couch, only a single plastic chair, no floor covering, only earth, and a tin bucket of water with which he must have only recently finished washing himself, for he was on his knees beside it, soaking wet in a pair of football shorts. On the breeze-block wall behind him I could make out the crudely drawn logo of Man United, daubed in red paint. Topless, slender, made only of muscle, skin incandescent with its own youth—flawless. How pale, practically colorless, I looked beside him! It made me think of Tracey, of the many times, as a child, she’d placed her arm next to mine, to check once again that she was still a little paler than me—as she proudly maintained that she was—just in case summer or winter had changed this state of affairs since last she’d checked. I didn’t dare tell her that I lay out on our balcony on any hot day, aiming at exactly the quality she seemed to dread: more color, darkness, for all my freckles to join and merge and leave me with the same deep dark brown of my mother. But Lamin, like most people in the village, was as many times dark as my mother was to me, and looking at him now I found the contrast between his beauty and these surroundings to be—among many other things—surreal. He turned and saw me standing over him. His face was full of hurt—I had broken some unspoken contract. He excused himself. Stood the other side of a rag-curtain that notionally separated one part of the dismal space from the other. But I could still see him, pulling on his pristine white Calvin Klein shirt with the monogram, and his white chinos and white sandals, all of it kept white by a means I couldn’t imagine, covered as I was every day in red dust. His fathers and uncles mostly wore jellabas, his many young cousins and siblings ran around in the ubiquitous threadbare soccer shirts and crumbling denim, barefoot, but Lamin wore his Western whites, almost every time I saw him, and a big silver wristwatch, studded with zirconia, whose hands were perpetually stuck at 10:04. On Sunday, when the whole village gathered for a meeting, he wore a tan, bishop-collared suit, and sat close to me, whispering in my ear like a UN delegate, translating only whatever he chose to translate of whatever was being discussed. All the young male teachers in the village dressed in this way, in traditional bishop-collars or sharp chinos and shirts, with big watches and thin black bags, their flip-phones and huge-screened androids always in hand, even if they didn’t work. It was an attitude I remembered from the old neighborhood, a way of representing, which in the village meant dressing for a certain part: I am one of the serious, modern young men. I am the future of my country. I always felt absurd next to them. Compared to their sense of personal destiny, I looked like I was in the world by mere accident, having given no thought at all to what I represented, dressed in my wrinkled olive cargo pants and my filthy Converse, dragging a battered rucksack around.