After my mother left, the house was no longer a ghost. There was something of great feeling that made up for the lack of sound that escaped mouths in motion. Whenever it got like that in the house, I knew Mama Mae was upstairs talking to the Lord and the ancestors. She’d taught me how to pray without bruising my knees when I was younger, and I’d spend an eternity thanking her for it. As I leaned back deeper into the couch, covered fantastically with one thick layer of plastic, I could hear my grandmother’s weighted feet slide across the floorboards from above. Withholding her sight, she’d pace in circles acquainting each corner of her prayer room, until she felt Spirit was appropriately appeased.   

​

The sounds carried from the upper room began to animate all that dwelled on the first floor of their home, that brick house which stood proudly on one of the smaller hills of the Blue Smoke, filled with relics of an unforgettable past. I listened with my eyes and all around me the house revealed the ways in which it spoke. The past few months I’d laid eyes on my grandparents in the yard through the opening of their front door, where only foiled food and kisses were passed in between the threshold. It had been a year since I’d spent the night.  

​

From the farthest end of the living room, I gazed through the narrow hallway that was the bridge between the unknown and familiarity. Trying not to wake him, I tiptoed past Granddaddy to the front of the house. He’d dozed off again in his chair, and by the heaviness of his snores, he was deep in it too. Before making my way to the foyer I grabbed the broom out of the closet by the staircase. The hardwood was a magnet for the things on people’s clothes that grew legs in search of a new home, so I swept most times I was here. It didn’t help also that the front door was frequently left open in the warmer months. Most times I’d have to go back over what I’d done earlier in the day. I decided to start at the window facing the porch, gathering dust from up against the wall and just below the curtains. The small room beside the foyer crowded with keepsakes was a room where celebrations took place, everyone called it the family room. On the back wall of the room was a brick fireplace, but nothing had burned in that box for years. Handwritten cards and letters taped to its mantle’s top shelf dangled below a neat row of framed photographs of aunts, uncles, and newborns.   

​

After some time, I made my way to the middle of the room, lifting the patterned rug that ran beneath three armchairs and a table, to gather what had been compiled underneath. As I knelt on the floor, I smiled, noticing the pictures of my grandfather that had once been on the mantle, in their new special place in the middle of the short coffee table. The pictures of Granddaddy were at a simpler time in his life. His hair was a deep shade of brown, no longer grey, and he had all his teeth. Others were of him and Mama Mae kissing in faraway places and the children they’d borne. My grandparents had once been city people until all that plagued our people in the confines of a borough drove them out.   

​

It was during the early sixties in New York City, when they’d first met. Granddaddy had just been naturalized and in his rejection of Western indoctrination, he worked in the shipyard. Mama Mae, at the time, had left the Lowcountry to study medicine in the big city. Many years after getting married, having four children, and dedicating the former years of their adulthood to the liberation struggle in Kings County, they played with the thought of repatriation. After my mother announced she was pregnant with me —their first grandchild, they abandoned their dreams of returning to the Motherland. My attention quickly shifted from the group of frames to one distinct photograph I didn’t recognize. The age of the black and white photo was revealed in the orange hue cast across its black subjects. In the arms of one another, four men stood shirtless on an oceanfront, illuminating the best parts of boyhood. Granddaddy stood in the middle smiling and crouching under the spray of water from a thrashing wave.

​

“Who were these boys?” I whispered to myself as I picked up the frame. My grandfather was his mother’s only son, I stared perplexed for a while. Suddenly, I turned behind me to Granddaddy standing at the arch opening of the room, with a half-smile plastered on his face as he eyed the frame I held.

 

“In Sekondi, we was kin,” he said without taking his eyes off the ones reflecting back at him from the vintage keepsake.   

​

My grandparents told their lives to us like wisdom teachings. Granddaddy in particular talked to us all the time about our history, and I had always appreciated him for that. He was a sentimental man who played with the possibilities of time. He’d often mock the artificial barrier placed in between the past and present, making use of a memory in ways most could not. My brother and I grew up listening at his feet about his becoming of a man in Africa and all that lived in and below deepwater. However, he rarely spoke of leaving Africa and would start stories off with what awaited him years after arriving on the shores of this side of the world. My younger brother Celou loved his stories of the sixties, hearing of the movement and all its glory. For some time, it did the same thing for my heart too. But over the years, hope had slipped through my hands the more I’d put my ears to his stories and realized life could never be as good as it once been, so I’d learned how to tune him out without appearing disinterested.   

​

“When was this?” I asked, walking up to him with the photograph in my hand.

 

He silently took the frame and held it up to the ceiling as if to get a better view of it. The skin above his cheekbones folded into itself as he squinted his eyes. Lowering it from above his face, he walked over to one of the armchairs and motioned for me to sit down beside him. Quickly, I leaned the broom against the wall and sat in the empty chair by my grandfather, scooching it closer to him so he wouldn’t have to strain his neck. With a shaky finger he slid up the latch on the back of the frame and pried open the wooden cover.

 

“These were my brothers,” he said, sliding the photo out and then turning it over. He pointed to each of the grinning faces and smiled. “The skinny one is Kwesi, the one on the end is Emmanual, and this one here with the round face next to me, that is Ofori.” He turned to the window slowly as if something had called out to him from outside. It startled me. “We would have given our Earthly lives for one another,” he said, after a long pause, holding firmly on both arms of the chair, nodding and still staring. The photo was now faced down on coffee table.   

“Nana, tell me what happened?” I asked. As my hand met his tender back, he straightened his posture and reached for the glasses tucked inside his shirt. With shaky hands he picked up the photograph and brought it closer to his chest.

 

“Two Saturdays ago, your grandmother and I were laid up, when we heard a loud thump above our bedroom. She talked me into climbing through them floorboards to see about the racket,” he said shaking his head. A chill ran down my spine as I remembered their attic and the oval-shaped window near the roof that was the stuffy garret’s only source of light. “She had me cram all that couldn’t fit throughout the house up there. Not enough space in the world for all her little knickknacks. I never liked going up there like she did, it's too much dust and my bones get cold. So, I only let it see the better half of me on that ladder, and from what my eyes told nothing seemed out of order,” Grandaddy said, talking with his hands and the photograph on his lap.  

​

“After I got down from off that ladder she came round that corner and asked me to leave its legs down.” Granddaddy went on to explain how Mama Mae ended up going behind him, because she knew he hadn’t let his feet touch the fiberglass to fully to investigate. “In her doings, she found a box that had fallen on its face with remitments of a past life spillin’ out,” he said sort of reluctantly. The photograph staring up at us had been buried in a box amongst papers they thought had been lost after their initial move here.  A marriage and several childbirths, both his and all his children’s, stood in between Granddaddy and the last time he’d laid eyes on that photo.

 

“Couldn’t bring myself to feel nothing but empty when my parents told my sisters and I we would be leaving Ghana permanently. It was my fault we left, and I knew’d it too,” Granddaddy said, shaking his head. Perplexed, I leaned my chin into my hands that were propped up on my legs. I’d never heard this part of the story he’d usually tell. “M’awofoɔ— home to the Ahanta and Nzima. We lived together as a strong people, acknowledging our uniqueness and commonness. This coastal region was called the ‘Land of Twins’. The enemies of you and I’s ancestors shed blood for many years on those shores, until the life force of our communities was placed on slave boats and we was conquered. M’nananom raised us to be proud of our heritage unlike m’awofoɔ whose spirits were held captive by fear. M’nananom would tell the children of my family to never abandon tradition and remember the warrior that lived in each of us. Ghana’s entire economy under British occupation was privatized by foreigners, filling the bellies of the white man and his children back in Europe, while our lands wilted, and our children starved. Each harvest I’d watch my family of cocoa planters, give the entirety of their cultivated crops to an oburoni.”   

Granddaddy got up from his seat and began slowly pacing around the room. I adjusted myself in my seat, knowing this was only the beginning. The stairs creaked as Mama Mae came around the corner, sitting in the chair Granddaddy had left.

 

“At sixteen, m’awofoɔ sent me to Catholic seminary in Accra where my uncle was a clergyman. I resented m’awofoɔ for such an abrupt departure, and for a long time I hated the backseat of a van for the memories it would stir up in me. Back then, Accra was six long hours away from Sekondi, and riding through the bush without roads was something I’d never forget. It wasn’t until I met Ofori, who was also sent from Sekondi, that I no longer dreaded living. There I was under the direct guardianship of my uncle Adafo and his wife, Abena, who had adopted the surname, Williams. At Saint Ignatius of Loyola we was completely denied our own worldview as African children. Our school days were often filled with instruction from an overbearing schoolmaster who force-fed European interpretations of the human experience to us like water in a calabash. As much as it tried, the Jesuit school could never truly possess the spirits of its student body. See you had children from all over the country who had been reared by the wisdom of the ancestors, in secrecy. Not even our own awofoɔ could contain the energies seepin’ out of us since birth.   

  

“The white man’s second war had just ended, and those on the outside were growing as irrepressible as we were inside the school walls. Although the country’s first African political party had been formed, many questioned its effectiveness in driving out the British completely and placing Africans back in control of their own territories. One night, Ofori and I snuck away from the school’s dormitory to attend an underground political meeting. I had just turned seventeen at the time, and in a year, I would have to decide if I was going to continue my studies at university or return to a place that once had been called home —a place that haunted me due to the passage of time. I stood painfully at a crossroad with no clear path forward.  

​

“The meeting was held in a part of the city that operated after dark without the perversions of the colonial police. That night we met two Ga brothers named Emmanual and Kwesi who would later get us front row seats to see members of an emerging nationalist group articulate the political conditions of the region. Out of all the fiery speakers, my favorite was a young Nzmina brother named Kwame Nkrumah.  With his words he ordered us to our posts and resurrected our dignity. He made us see how what was happening to us in Ghana, was happening not just in other countries in Africa, but to Black people all over the world. Back then, we really were a part of something greater than ourselves. He gave me new reasons to live that night. We really was...” Granddaddy trailed off with a sigh. He finally took a seat in the armchair across from Mama Mae and me. By the look in his eyes, I could tell that he had retreated to the past, but an unspoken place, so we let silence fill the room.   

  

  

 The next day, the house demanded silence be felt again. The morning had been slow so when the afternoon came it didn’t surprise me much. I laid across my bed after having scrolled on my phone until my hands got tired. All that awaited my responsible return in the city left my mind as I stared blankly at the coved ceiling. I soon heard feet approaching the other side of the closed door. My bedroom door creaked open, revealing Mama Mae’s round copper face. She carried a food tray with two cups of water and some sliced fruit. Beside the small plate of fruit was a folded-up piece of paper.

​

“Thought I’d join you wasting away in here,” she said with a smile. I sat up and took the tray from her hands, sitting it on the dresser by the bed. At the foot of the bed, she sat and motioned for me to hand her one of the glasses next to me. We talked briefly about how good breakfast had been and then the usual questions about how life had been treating me started up. So, I shared and so did she. “How’d you let your father convince you to do that? You let that man, talk you out yo dream?” she exclaimed. I stung in my realization that I’d swapped the one of magic for an empty one in pursuit of the dollar. A few months ago, I had ditched my bookmarks and writing pen for a calculator.

 

“It’s not just him, everybody been saying how it won't make me no money. It's good for nothing, but a fleeting feel-good,” I said in defense. In my telling her of how naive I’d once been about life; she got how old folks get and told me to keep living in between full-throated laughs. “Gon’ get your shoes baby, there's something I want to show you,” she said in a comforting tone. She slipped the piece of paper on the tray into her pocket.  

   

I followed her out and went downstairs to the sunroom. Grandmother’s sunroom was my favorite room in the house. Mostly for the way it smelled during this time of year and the scenic views it revealed of the mountainside. Miles of yellow grass were bleeding into a springtime shade of green. A large bookcase was pushed close to the wall and blooming potted plants were scattered around the carpeted room, some hanging from the ceiling others closer to the ground. I laced my sneakers as Granddaddy watered one of Mama Mae’s spider plants.

 

“What’s my Celia up to?” he asked.     

​

“Mamma Mae’s taking me somewhere, not quite sure where,” I said.

  

“Well y’all be careful out there in that tall grass. No telling what’s out there fixin’ ta get yall,” he joked, looking over his shoulder at me then tending back to the plant. 

 

“We will Nana,” I said with my hand on his shoulder.   

  

Outside, Mama Mae faced the mountain. Her hair, as red as the shutters above her porch, was hidden under a large straw hat. The spruce-carved walking stick, grandaddy made for her, leaned against the railing. As I slid the screen door closed, she turned from her gaze to greet me. The view of the Shaconage from the back of their home was a lot different from the ride up. Flat land stretched for miles and a mountain range could be seen in the distance. The top of the hills looked blue from where we stood and the trees below were in partial bloom, everything felt still. Mama Mae turned and looked at me.

 

“You ready to foot this trail?” I nodded and took her free hand.   

​

We walked down the spiraling steps until we reached grassy ground. This particular trail led from their house to a stream by the thicket. Celou and I used to play barefoot in the water and would collect stones to bring back to the house to show off proudly to my grandparents. I hadn’t been on the trail in almost two years and my eagerness to hike it revealed just how much I’d missed it. Mama Mae and I spent an hour footing, bird watching, and sitting on large rocks to hear the trees as she liked to call it. When we reached the thicket, the sound of rushing water excited us both. So much so we raced to the edge of the stream.

  

Grandmother lost her old age as I watched her run beside me, showing all her teeth and holding down her straw hat so that it wouldn’t blow away in the warm wind. She had left behind her walking stick at the last set of rocks we sat on. I let out a spirited laugh once we ended the race. Along the stream I stood, panting, and also amazed at how perfectly the stream existed in between the tall trees. Mama Mae took a seat on the ground and began stroking the reed grass. I knelt down, pushed my pant legs up, and kicked off my shoes. Gently, I placed one foot into the cold water and let the other follow. The shallow stream was filled with tiny rocks, so I kicked over a pile of them until I felt the firm sand of the waterway in between my toes. I stood staring out at the water for a while wishing I could spend all eternity.   

  

“Celia,” Mama Mae said.   

​

“Yes,” I sung back. Back on the grass, grandmother waved for me to come to her. I  made my way back to her on land, shaking off the wet sand from feet and grinning at the stains the Earth had left on them.

  

“Something I want to share with you.”  I folded myself up beside her and leaned on her shoulder as she began to speak. “How did you feel down there in that water?” she asked as we both stared at the stream. 

​

“I felt free.”     

​

“That there is how you ought to feel every second of your life. You blessed chile you know that right?” I looked up at her and silently nodded. “Your Granddaddy didn’t want to upset you yesterday. But I think you strong, so I’m gon’ tell you the rest of the story.”

  

I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought about Granddaddy’s mentions of his youth in Sekondi. I was curious about what he meant by it being his fault that the family moved to America, but I knew not to press him on certain things.   

​

“After them boys left the meeting that night in Accra, your Granddaddy’s mind wouldn’t shut off at the idea of another man having control over his life—over his people’s lives. For the next few months, he and his friends would sneak out of school to help organize with a political group. Groups of them would go from village to village translating the speeches of the party’s most radical members and reading pages out of the Evening Newspaper to the rural folks. As Granddaddy rose in rank, he was tasked with leading the efforts in the labor movement.  

Ghanaians were growing frustrated at the living conditions and the inflated prices of basic goods. A mass movement was uncontrollably brewing from under the surface and the British was getting nervous.” Mama Mae’s eyes narrowed onto the water.   

  

“Growing suspicious of his absences at school, Granddaddy’s uncle started having him followed. Granddaddy and his close friends had worked their way into leadership roles and had been called that day to Makola Market. The group was planning a boycott of foreign goods and businesses, and Granddaddy and his friends had been called in to strategize how the youth of the country could be reached. Unbeknownst to them, one of their peers stood amongst the sea of rallied people and would later take back all he heard to Granddaddy’s uncle. When his uncle learned of your grandfather’s involvement in the decolonization movement, he was furious. Rather than disciplining him on the spot, he concealed his knowledge and consulted with Granddaddy’s awofoɔ to determine a justifiable punishment. This lasted for two months until 1948. It was one of the new months, I think February, when a riot broke out in Accra after British police opened fire on a group of veterans. Shot them men dead in the street, just like how they did us over here. Now when the people learned of what happened, they tore the city up for five straight days, and Granddaddy and his friends were amongst those revolting. On the spot, arrests were made of the party’s leaders, and their co-conspirators were sought out. On the last day of the riots Granddaddy’s uncle beat him and forbade him from leaving his home next to the school grounds after learning he looted a British store.  

 

“Back in Sekondi, Granddaddy’s father, in cahoots with his uncle, had been planning to move the family to America to escape the dysfunction of the nation-state. As a clergyman and administrative assistant for the colonial government, his uncle’s and aunt’s salary combined funded the immediacy of the move. They would first go to London and then take a ship to the eastern coast of America.”   

Mama Mae went on to explain how as Granddaddy was being prepared to be sent back to Sekondi the next day, the police arrested his friends, who had also looted the store, on the spot and he never saw them again. She pulled the mystery piece of paper out of her pocket.  

“This was taped to the back of that picture I found of your Granddaddy up in the attic a few days back.” She handed it to me then waved her fingers through the tall grass. I opened the paper. It was a handwritten note dated seventy-five years ago with a small signature in the lower left corner.  

  

March 6th, 1948,   

  

Just as the sun must set, for day to become night. Just as the wind must blow the leaves into hushed whirlwinds. Just as water grants all with the possibility of new life, I will always be with you, and you with me. The greatest gift your friendships gave to me was clear vision. I rejoice in our collective redemption. I bask in Ghana’s glory. Africa stands tall on our mighty shoulders, brothers. She is free in my heart and soon in sight. Although I may be far from you, I have not forgotten you. Land nor sea will inhibit our reunion. One day I will fly back home as the eagle that peruses the village. Keep me in your breastbone.   

  

Kofo   

  

In less than three minutes, I felt all the ways in which my grandfather, in his eighty-one years of living, had mourned a country he once knew as home—friends he used to call brothers, and a mission left unfinished. For what a proper departure couldn’t offer, he had attempted to make sense of his forced exodus by immortalizing an undelivered farewell. After reading it twice, I lifted my eyes slowly from the paper and turned to my grandmother. She reached out to hug me.  

​

“Babygirl, don’t ever turn lose your dreams, many a’ folks done sacrificed for you to be where you at now—a position of choice. In this life let that thing up in your chest guide you,” she said rubbing circles into my back.  We stayed like that for a while, until her hands got tired and so we turned back to the water. “When you was a youngin’ you always made it known that what you had to say deserved some ears to listen, even if it was just one pair,” she said, and we laughed aloud together. Mama Mae had always been that one pair for me.

​

“I remember,” I said nodding. I knew she had told me the rest of Granddaddy’s story because she had painfully observed what letting fear creep up in my heart was doing to me.

 

“Let’s get back, before your granddaddy have a fit”, she said getting up from where she sat. As I picked myself up off the grass with the hand she extended to me, I thought of the race man Granddaddy had been so deeply moved by back in Ghana and what he could have said that night in Accra that changed the course of his life. I smiled knowing that someone had been there for him, just as they had for me.  

 

From a nearby tree an eagle flew past us toward the direction of the house. I stood watching the large brown bird’s immense wingspan, first in disbelief and then with uncontainable joy because I had just rescued my dream.