—

“Who did this?” my mother said, pulling an empty granola bar wrapper from the trash. The jig was up. Nana and I had been careful, but clearly not careful enough. Even the trash wasn’t safe from our mother’s exacting eye.

“Who did this? Where did you find it?”

I burst into tears, giving us away. I was ready to confess to all of our crimes, but the Chin Chin Man chimed in. “Leave the kids alone. Do you want them to starve? Is that what you want?”

My mother pulled something out of her purse. A bill? A receipt? “We will all starve if we don’t start making more money. We can’t afford to live like this any longer.”

“You were the one who wanted to come here, remember?”

And so it went. Gently, gently, Nana took my hand and led me out of the room. We went to his bedroom and he closed the door. He pulled a coloring book from his bookshelf and grabbed me the crayons. Before long I wasn’t listening anymore.

    “Good job, Gifty,” he said as I showed him my work. “Good job,” and outside the sound of chaos swirled on.

14

Toward the middle of my first year of graduate school, Raymond and I started seeing each other more seriously. I couldn’t get enough of him. He smelled like vetiver and musk and the jojoba oil he put in his hair. Hours after I’d left him, I would find traces of those scents on my fingers, my neck, my breasts, all those places where we had brushed up against each other, touched. After our first night in bed together, I’d learned that Raymond’s father was a preacher at an African Methodist Episcopal church in Philadelphia, and I’d laughed. “So that’s why I like you,” I said. “You’re the son of a preacher man.”

“You like me, huh?” he said with that deep voice, that sly grin, as he moved toward me so that we could begin again.

It was my first real relationship, and I was so smitten that I felt like I was a living lily of the valley, a rose of Sharon. Like an apple tree among the trees of the forest is my beloved among the young men. I delight to sit in his shade, and his fruit is sweet to my taste. My friend Bethany and I used to read passages from Song of Solomon to each other, crouched beneath the pale blue pews in the empty sanctuary of the First Assemblies of God. It felt illicit to read about all of that flesh—breasts like fawns, necks like ivory towers—in the pages of this holy book. It was an incongruous thrill, to feel that flush of desire well up between my legs as Bethany and I giggled through those verses. Where is all of this pleasure coming from? I’d think, my voice getting huskier and huskier with each chapter. Raymond was the closest I’d come to recapturing that feeling, the pleasure as well as the sense of forbiddenness. The fact that he wanted to be with me at all made me feel like I was getting away with some con.

    He lived on campus, in an Escondido Village low-rise, and pretty soon I was spending most of my time there. He liked to cook these sumptuous meals, five-hour braises with homemade bread and salads of shaved radishes and fennel. He’d invite all of his colleagues from Modern Thought and Literature, and they would have intense, detailed conversations about things I had never heard of. I’d nod and smile at the mentions of the use of allegory in Ben Okri’s Stars of the New Curfew or generational trauma among diasporic communities.

Afterward, I would wash the dishes the way my mother taught me, turning off the water as I soaped down the pots and pans, trying to get rid of the elaborate mess Raymond’s cooking always left behind.

“You’re so quiet,” he said, coming up behind me to wrap his arms around my waist, to kiss my neck.

“I haven’t read any of the books y’all were talking about.”

He turned me around to face him, grinned. I almost never let a “y’all” slip from my lips, and when I did Raymond seemed to savor it like a drop of honey on his tongue. That word used sparingly, thoughtlessly, was the only remaining evidence of my Alabama years. I’d spent a decade carefully burying everything else.

“Talk about your own work, then. Let us know how the mice are doing. I just want them to get to know you a little better. I want everyone to see what I see,” he said.

    What did he see? I wondered. I’d usually bat him away so that I could finish washing the dishes.

That year was the beginning of my final thesis experiment. I put the mice in a behavioral testing chamber, a clear-walled structure with a lever and a metal tube. I trained the mice to seek reward. When they pressed the lever, Ensure would flood into the tube. Pretty soon they were pressing the lever as often as possible, drinking up their reward with abandon. Once they’d gotten the hang of this, I changed the conditions. When the mice pressed the lever, sometimes they got Ensure, but sometimes they got a mild foot-shock instead.

The foot-shock was randomized, so there was no pattern for them to figure out. The mice just had to decide if they wanted to keep pressing the lever, keep risking that shock in the pursuit of pleasure. Some of the mice stopped pressing the lever right away. After a shock or two, they did the mouse equivalent of throwing up their hands and never went near the lever again. Some of the mice stopped, but it took time. They liked the Ensure enough to keep holding out hope that the shocks would stop. When they realized they wouldn’t, those mice, reluctantly, gave up. Then there was the final group of mice, the ones who never stopped. Day after day, shock after shock, they pressed the lever.

* * *

—

My parents started fighting every day. They fought about money, how there was never enough. They fought about time, about displays of affection, about the minivan, about the height of the grass in the lawn, about Scripture. But at the beginning of creation God made them male and female. For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.

    The Chin Chin Man hadn’t just left his father and his mother; he’d left his country as well, and he wouldn’t let my mother forget it.

“In my country, neighbors will greet you instead of turning their heads away like they don’t know you.”

“In my country, you can eat food fresh from the ground. Corn, hard on its cob, not soft like the spirits of these people.”

“In my country, there is no word for half-sibling, stepsibling, aunt, or uncle. There is only sister, brother, mother, father. We are not divided.”

“In my country, people may not have money, but they have happiness in abundance. In abundance. No one in America is enjoying.”

These mini-lectures on Ghana were delivered to the three of us with increasing frequency. My mother would gently remind my father that Ghana was her country too, our country. She nodded and agreed. America is a difficult place, but look at what we’ve been able to build here. Sometimes Nana would come into my room and pretend to be him. “In my country, we do not eat the red M&M’s,” he’d say, throwing the red M&M’s at me.

It was hard for Nana and me to see America the way our father saw it. Nana couldn’t remember Ghana, and I had never been. Southeast Huntsville, northern Alabama, was all we knew, the physical location of our entire conscious lives. Were there places in the world where neighbors would have greeted us instead of turning away? Places where my classmates wouldn’t have made fun of my name—called me charcoal, called me monkey, called me worse? I couldn’t imagine it. I couldn’t let myself imagine it, because if I did, if I saw it—that other world—I would have wanted to go.

    It should have been obvious to us. We should have seen it coming, but we didn’t see what we didn’t want to see.

“I’m going home to visit my brother,” the Chin Chin Man said, and then he never came back.

In those first few weeks, he called every once in a while. “I wish you could see how brilliant the sun is here, Nana. Do you remember? Do you remember it?” Nana ran home from school every Tuesday in order to make their 3:30 telephone calls.

“When are you coming back?” Nana asked.

“Soon, soon, soon.”