Sankofa(2)

I do not know how to write in a book like this. I am not used to talking to myself, but where else will I keep my confidences? A student drowned himself last week. Ghanaian boy with mother and family back home in Accra, and he threw himself off a bridge because someone called him a nigger. One time is nothing. Nigger, coon, darkie—you hear it like a mosquito flying past your ear. But a year of traveling in a crowded bus with an empty seat next to you, of old landladies opening their doors and quivering at the sight of you, “Francis Aggrey? I thought you were a Scotsman,” “Francis Aggrey, I thought you were white,” and the bottom of the Thames might begin to look like home.



It was my father, Francis Aggrey, trapped between these pages for decades. I was suddenly cautious. What if this diary revealed something discreditable? Some crime he had committed, some fraudulent stain from which my mother thought it best to shield me.

I read on slowly. The next few entries were sketches of places I recognized. He was an accurate draftsman. On a double leaf he had drawn the fa?ade of the British Museum with this caption:


I go to the Africa Section to sit in the warmth. Masks, stolen from my ancestors, surround me. These masks are made grotesque by their setting, the sacred turned ridiculous under the gaze of the uninitiated. The British public glance at me often, eyes darting from fertility goddesses to my black face. One of these days, I’ll climb into a glass case to oblige them.



I had enacted this scene several times in my youth. Young Anna walking into an affluent space, a jewelry store, for example, or a gallery. Cue side glances tracking my movement, nervous and on edge. I tried to explain it to my mother once. “Don’t be so sensitive,” she said.


There is something unseemly in running home to tell tales in these blank pages instead of speaking my mind like a man. Just on the corner today, I was running late for a lecture and I asked a man for the time. “Twenty minutes to noon,” he said, before adding, “You talk nice for a nigger, don’t you?” In Fanti, my response would have been out before he finished speaking. “You talk nice for a fool.” But in English, this language I learned from missionaries, linguistically trained to turn the other cheek, all I could manage was, “I wish you good day, sir.”

Years from now, when I am back in the Diamond Coast, among my own people where I am most confident, to open these pages would be to release the sharp stink of unaired retorts.



I shut the diary. I did not want to meet my father in one sitting. I put the scrapbook and loose photos back in the box. I kept the books and Francis Aggrey’s photograph. I double-locked my front door and checked the kitchen window was shut. I left the stair lights on to show I was awake and in lunging distance of a panic button. Next year, perhaps, I would sell the house and move to a flat with other families stacked like crates above and below me.

I went upstairs to my bedroom. I changed into my sexless pajamas and turned off the lights. I still slept on one side of the bed, pinned to my half of the sheets, facing the space my husband once occupied. In the mornings, one side was always ruffled, the other smooth as an egg: portrait of a single woman’s bed.





2


I woke up thinking about Francis Aggrey. I looked again at his picture, dated 1969. It was taken just after Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech, the worst of times for my father and my mother to fall in love. Or perhaps they were never in love. I was merely the result of a hapless fling, conceived hastily in 1969 and born nine months later, in January 1970.

Surely my grandfather had been foolish to take on such a handsome lodger with a teenage daughter in the house. My mother was nineteen when she had me, which meant she was eighteen when they met. How had she dared look at Francis Aggrey, let alone sleep with him, creeping past Grandpa Owen’s door and up to his bedroom?

I would never know. Her death was swift and unexpected. Light headaches had surged into blinding migraines, brought on by a brain tumor that was metastasizing. I sat by her while she lay under the standard-issue NHS blanket, shrouded to her neck, hiding the tangle of tubes that fed into her arms.

When she was in pain, her lips puckered like a purse drawn tight. Her wrinkles became more pronounced, dark lines in pale skin, etching on porcelain. I often looked out the window on a view of a bare tree, roots buried under the asphalt of the parking lot.

While she was ill, I asked about Francis Aggrey only once. She grew agitated when I said his name.

“I was all the family you needed. Didn’t I feed you and clothe you and love you? What else did you want?”

She tried to sit up and I eased her back down.

“I was just trying to make conversation,” I said.

The doctor said my mother’s personality might change as the tumor grew. I wondered whether her character had changed or merely revealed itself.

Towards the end, I moved her from the hospital to my guest bedroom.

“Where’s Robert?” she would ask most mornings. I told her but she always forgot.

I learned how to sponge her clean and check for bedsores, to feed her and wipe her chin, to ask before I did any of these things because she was an adult. She died on a May morning, Rose and I by the headboard, my husband, Robert, briefly reinstated at the foot.

Perhaps there would be something in Francis Aggrey’s diary about how he met my mother. She was often timid, unsure, almost fearful. From what I’d read so far, they didn’t seem an obvious match. I opened to where I had stopped.