“Hypothetically, dude? Yeah, they’re going to Hell.”

I was shocked by this answer, by the smugly satisfied way in which P.T. had consigned an entire helpless village of Africans to eternal damnation without so much as a blink. He didn’t spend even the length of an exhale thinking about Nana’s question, working on a way out. He didn’t say, for example, that God doesn’t deal in hypotheticals, a perfectly reasonable answer to a not entirely reasonable question. His willingness to play into Nana’s game was itself a sign that he saw God as a kind of prize that only some were good enough to win. It was like he wanted Hell for those villagers, like he believed there were people for whom Hell is a given, deserved.

    And the part that bothered me most was that I couldn’t shake the feeling that the people P.T. believed deserved Hell were people who looked like Nana and me. I was seven, but I wasn’t stupid. I had seen the pamphlets that proclaimed the great need for missionaries in various other countries. The children in those pamphlets, their distended bellies, the flies buzzing around their eyes, their soiled clothing, they were all the same deep, dark brown as me. I already understood the spectacle of poverty, the competing impulses to help and to look away that such images spurred, but I understood, too, that poverty was not a black and brown phenomenon. I had seen the way the kids at school who came from the trailer park walked around, their short fuses sparked by a careless word about their tight shoes or “flooding” pants, and I had seen the rotted-out barns and farmhouses off the back roads in the Podunk towns just minutes outside my city. “Don’t let our car break down in this dirty village,” my mother would pray in Twi whenever we passed through one of these towns. She used the word akuraase, the same word she would use for a village in Ghana, but I had already been conditioned to see America as somehow elevated in relation to the rest of the world, and so I was convinced that an Alabama village couldn’t be an akuraase in the same way that a Ghanaian village could. Years after P.T.’s remarks I started to see the ridiculousness of that idea, the idea of a refined and elevated American poverty that implies a base, subhuman third world. The belief in this subhumanity was what made those posters and infomercials so effective, no different really from the commercials for animal shelters, the people in these infomercials no better than dogs. P.T.’s unconsidered answer was no doubt just a careless thought from a man who was not accustomed to thinking too deeply about why he held fast to his faith, but for me, that day, his words set that very kind of thinking into motion.

    I watched P.T. set his chair legs back down on the ground and continue his teaching, being careful not to let his eyes fall on Nana. Across the room, Nana also had a smug look on his face. He didn’t go to youth services much after that.

20

        Dear God,

    Buzz says that Christianity is a cult except that it started so long ago that people didn’t know what cults were yet. He said we’re smarter now than we were back then. Is that true?

    Dear God,

    Would you show me that you’re real?

21

My apartment smelled like oil, like pepper, like rice and plantains. I set my bag down in the entryway and rushed to the kitchen to find a sight as familiar to me as my own body: my mother cooking.

“You’re up,” I said, and immediately regretted the choked excitement in my voice. I didn’t want to frighten her. I’d seen videos of cornered black mambas, striking before slipping away, faster than a blink. Was my mother capable of the same?

“You don’t have eggs. You don’t have milk. You don’t have flour. What do you eat?” she said. She was wearing a robe she must have found in one of my drawers. Her left breast, deflated from the weight loss and shriveled with age, peeked out through the thin fabric. When we were children, her propensity for nakedness had embarrassed Nana and me no end. Now, I was so happy to see her, all of her, I didn’t care.

“I don’t really cook,” I said.

She sucked her teeth at me and continued working, slicing the plantains, salting the jollof. I heard the sizzle of the oil, and that smell of hot, wet grease was enough to make my mouth water.

    “If you had spent time in the kitchen with me, helping me, you would know how to make all of this. You would know how to feed yourself properly.”

I held my breath and counted to three, waiting for the urge to say something mean to pass. “You’re here now. I can learn now.”

She snorted. So, this was how it would go. I watched her lean over the pot of oil. She grabbed a handful of plantains and dropped them in, her hand so low, so close to the oil. The oil sputtered as it swallowed the plantains, and when my mother lifted her hand from the pot, I could see glistening specks from where the oil had spit at her. She wiped the spots with her index finger, touched her finger to her tongue. How many times had she been burned like this? She must have been immune.

“Do you remember that time you put hot oil on Nana’s foot?” I asked from my spot at the counter. I wanted to get up and help her, but I was nervous that she would make fun of me or, worse, tell me how every move I made was wrong. She was right that I had avoided her kitchen my entire childhood, but even now, even with my small sample size of days spent cooking with her, it’s her voice I hear, saying, “You clean as you go, you clean as you go,” whenever I cook.

“What are you talking about?”

“You don’t remember? We were having a party at the house and you put oil—”

She sharply turned to face me. She was holding a mesh strainer in her hand, high up in the air like a gavel she could bring down at any moment. I saw panic in her face, panic that covered the blankness that had been there since she’d arrived.

“I never did that,” she said. “I never, never did that.”

I was going to press her but then I looked into her eyes and knew immediately that I had made a mistake. Not in the memory, carried back to me through that smell of hot oil, but in the reminder.

    “I’m sorry. I must have dreamed it,” I said, and she brought the gavel down.

* * *

—

My mother rarely threw parties, and when she did, she spent the entire week leading up to them in enough of a cooking/cleaning frenzy to make you wonder if we were hosting royalty. There were a handful of Ghanaians in Alabama who made up the Ghana Association, and many of them had to drive upward of two hours to come to any of the gatherings. My mother, never the life of the party, only went to a meeting if the drive was under an hour, and she only hosted if she had four days off in a row, a rare enough occurrence to mean that she only hosted twice.

She’d bought me a new dress and Nana new slacks. She pressed them in the morning and then laid them out on our beds, threatening death if we so much as looked at them wrong before it was time to get into them, and then she spent the rest of the day cooking. By the time the first guests arrived, the house was practically sparkling, fragrant with the scents of Ghana.

It was the first time many of the other Ghanaians were seeing us since the Chin Chin Man’s departure, and Nana and I, already outcasts for our taciturn mother, were dreading the party, the stares, the unsolicited advice from the grown-ups, the teasing from the other kids.

“We’ll stay for five minutes and then we can fake sick,” Nana whispered through his smile as we greeted an auntie who smelled like baby powder.

“She’ll know we’re lying,” I whispered back, remembering her CIA-level interrogation into the mystery of who had stolen a Malta from the back of her closet.