The Chin Chin Man was six years older than she was. Coddled by his own mother, he’d felt no need to marry. He had been raised Catholic, but once my mother got ahold of him, she dragged him to the Christ of her Pentecostal church. The same church where the two of them were married in the sweltering heat, with so many guests they’d stopped counting after two hundred.
They prayed for a baby, but month after month, year after year, no baby came. It was the first time my mother ever doubted God. After I am worn out, and my lord is old, shall I have pleasure?
“You can have a child with someone else,” she offered, taking initiative in God’s silence, but the Chin Chin Man laughed her away. My mother spent three days fasting and praying in the living room of my grandmother’s house. She must have looked as frightful as a witch, smelled as horrid as a stray dog, but when she left her prayer room, she said to my father, “Now,” and he went to her and they lay together. Nine months to the day later, my brother, Nana, my mother’s Isaac, was born.
My mother used to say, “You should have seen the way the Chin Chin Man smiled at Nana.” His entire face was in on it. His eyes brightened, his lips spread back until they were touching his ears, his ears lifted. Nana’s face returned the compliment, smiling in kind. My father’s heart was a lightbulb, dimming with age. Nana was pure light.
Nana could walk at seven months. That’s how they knew he would be tall. He was the darling of their compound. Neighbors used to request him at parties. “Would you bring Nana by?” they’d say, wanting to fill their apartment with his smile, his bowlegged baby dancing.
Every street vendor had a gift for Nana. A bag of koko, an ear of corn, a tiny drum. “What couldn’t he have?” my mother wondered. Why not the whole world? She knew the Chin Chin Man would agree. Nana, beloved and loving, deserved the best. But what was the best the world had to offer? For the Chin Chin Man, it was my grandmother’s achomo, the bustle of Kejetia, the red clay, his mother’s fufu pounded just so. It was Kumasi, Ghana. My mother was less certain of this. She had a cousin in America who sent money and clothes back to the family somewhat regularly, which surely meant there was money and clothes in abundance across the Atlantic. With Nana’s birth, Ghana had started to feel too cramped. My mother wanted room for him to grow.
They argued and argued and argued, but the Chin Chin Man’s easygoing nature meant he let my mother go easy, and so within a week she had applied for the green card lottery. It was a time when not many Ghanaians were immigrating to America, which is to say you could enter the lottery and win. My mother found out that she had been randomly selected for permanent residency in America a few months later. She packed what little she owned, bundled up baby Nana, and moved to Alabama, a state she had never heard of, but where she planned to stay with her cousin, who was finishing up her PhD. The Chin Chin Man would follow later, after they had saved up enough money for a second plane ticket and a home of their own.
6
My mother slept all day and all night, every day, every night. She was immovable. Whenever I could, I would try to convince her to eat something. I’d taken to making koko, my favorite childhood meal. I’d had to go to three different stores to find the right kind of millet, the right kind of corn husks, the right peanuts to sprinkle on top. I hoped the porridge would go down thoughtlessly. I’d leave a bowl of it by her bedside in the morning before I went to work, and when I returned the top layer would be covered in film; the layer underneath that hardened so that when I scraped it into the sink I felt the effort of it.
My mother’s back was always turned to me. It was like she had an internal sensor for when I’d be entering the room to deliver the koko. I could picture the movie montage of us, the days spelled out at the bottom of the screen, my outfits changing, our actions the same.
After about five days of this, I entered the room and my mother was awake and facing me.
“Gifty,” she said as I set the bowl of koko down. “Do you still pray?”
It would have been kinder to lie, but I wasn’t kind anymore. Maybe I never had been. I vaguely remembered a childhood kindness, but maybe I was conflating innocence and kindness. I felt so little continuity between who I was as a young child and who I was now that it seemed pointless to even consider showing my mother something like mercy. Would I have been merciful when I was a child?
“No,” I answered.
When I was a child I prayed. I studied my Bible and kept a journal with letters to God. I was a paranoid journal keeper, so I made code names for all the people in my life whom I wanted God to punish.
Reading the journal makes it clear that I was a real “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” kind of Christian, and I believed in the redemptive power of punishment. For it is said, that when that due Time, or appointed Time comes, their Foot shall slide. Then they shall be left to fall as they are inclined by their own Weight.
The code name I gave my mother was the Black Mamba, because we’d just learned about the snakes in school. The movie the teacher showed us that day featured a seven-foot-long snake that looked like a slender woman in a skintight leather dress, slithering across the Sahara in pursuit of a bush squirrel.
In my journal, the night we learned about the snakes, I wrote:
Dear God,
The Black Mamba has been really mean to me lately. Yesterday she told me that if I didn’t clean my room no one would want to marry me.
My brother, Nana, was code-named Buzz. I don’t remember why now. In the first few years of my journal keeping, Buzz was my hero:
Dear God,
Buzz ran after the ice cream truck today. He bought a firecracker popsicle for himself and a Flintstones pushpop for me.
Or:
Dear God,
At the rec center today, none of the other kids wanted to be my partner for the three-legged race because they said I was too little, but then Buzz came over and he said that he would do it! And guess what? We won and I got a trophy.
Sometimes he annoyed me, but back then, his offenses were innocuous, trivial.
Dear God,
Buzz keeps coming into my room without knocking! I can’t stand him!
But after a few years my pleas for God’s intervention became something else entirely.
Dear God,
When Buzz came home last night he started yelling at TBM and I could hear her crying, so I went downstairs to look even though I was supposed to be in bed. (I’m sorry.) She told him to keep quiet or he would wake me, but then he picked up the TV and smashed it on the floor and punched a hole in the wall and his hand was bleeding and TBM started crying and she looked up and saw me and I ran back to my room while Buzz screamed get the fuck out of here you nosy cunt. (What is a cunt?)