We left Tɔgã Pious’s house in Aunty’s car. I was tired and my feet were sore; I wanted nothing more than to ease into bed and stay there for a long time, but my mother and my in-laws wouldn’t allow it. We were on our way to Aunty’s where the family would call Eli and share the details of the day. They would send him the pictures and video later. After that, the driver would take Aunty, my mother, and me to the parish where we would meet with Father Wisdom to ensure that all was set for Sunday mass where our union would be blessed. My mother and I would begin packing after mass; Aunty wanted us to leave for Accra as soon as possible.
“You are his wife now, you have to live in his house,” she said in her calm but firm way when I climbed into the back seat between her and my mother. Children waved and cheered as we set off, gift bags from the wedding littered the ground around them. Aunty waved back. “You have to claim your rightful place,” she added when she turned away from the window. She didn’t have to say that at present my place was being occupied by the Liberian woman, a woman who wasn’t Eli’s wife, who despised his family, who looked down on our ways. She didn’t have to say it because we all knew. It was what kept us up at night, what woke us up with a start at dawn. It was the problem I had been chosen to solve.
Two
On Monday, I slept past midday. I had never slept past midday. My mother would never allow it. I had heard her sweeping at dawn when I woke up to empty my bladder, which pulsed with the Malta Guinness I had downed at the reception held after the church service the day before. It had always been my job to sweep up the brown, withered leaves of the almond trees in our small, unfenced dirt yard while the morning coolness still buffeted us from the approaching heat. Only three years at a public boarding school, several towns away, had gotten me out of this chore in the past, and now marriage, marriage to Eli Ganyo. I realized, then, that I didn’t know my name. Was I now Mrs. Afi Ganyo or still Afi Tekple? Did the “Mrs.” and the new last name only come with a church wedding or could a traditional wedding, like what we held in Tɔgã Pious’s house, confer these changes? I don’t think anyone in either of our families had thought of this. To them what mattered was that I was recognized as his wife before our people and before God. But my father, if he were alive, would have insisted on me getting a marriage certificate.
My father, Illustrious Tekple, had been a stickler for legitimacy, for doing things the way they should be done. He had married my mother at the registrar’s office, when many people didn’t mind not having their marriage officially recognized by the state, and had proudly displayed their marriage certificate in our bungalow, assigned to us by the Ministry of Roads and Highways where he had worked as a road engineer. He had allowed only one of his nephews, Mawusi’s oldest half-brother, Dodzi, to live with us because it wasn’t right to cram too many people into a small house, and because my mother had insisted.
“But your sitting room is there, your kitchen floor is there,” Tɔgã Pious, his most demanding brother, had declared in protest, his face scrunched up until it resembled the wrinkled, toffee-colored exterior of a tiger nut. “Even your verandah is there, it has a roof,” he had added, leaving my father to wonder if that last part was meant as a joke. They were in the sitting room and I was hiding behind the doorway curtain, eavesdropping at the behest of my mother, but also because I was a nosy eight-year-old and knew that my uncle walked hand-in-hand with drama.
“Fo Pious, first of all, having too many people in such a small house is a health hazard. And also think about my wife, my daughter—I can’t force them to share our small house with so many people. You know how women are. My wife needs to move freely in the house. How is she supposed to cook in the kitchen when my relatives are sleeping in there?”
Tɔgã Pious had shaken his head slowly in disbelief at the foolishness of his brother, the kind of foolishness that plagued Ghanaians who spent too much time in school. “What is health hazard? And why will my children living in their uncle’s house bother his wife? Are you not their uncle? Is your house not also their house? How much space does Afinɔ need? And Afi, small like that, how much space does she need?” He bounced his upturned palms in front of his chest in a motion that straddled a plea and an interrogation. At that time he had eleven children by his three wives and operated a small poultry farm, which was mostly worked by the women and children. He had taken over my grandfather’s compound house years before, while the old man was still alive, and had since divided the rooms among his wives and children. He would later rent out two of the chamber and hall apartments when the older children moved out, and he kept the proceeds, even though those apartments rightfully belonged to his four younger siblings, including my father and his sister, Sylvia.
“That brother of yours! Even if we gave him half of everything we have, he wouldn’t be satisfied,” my mother had complained to my father when she returned from the market one day to find a second cousin, his meager belongings in a jute bag, awaiting her on the porch. “What kind of man expects other people to raise his children for him when he is perfectly able to do so himself? Are you supposed to carry everybody’s burden because you receive a salary? Isn’t the money that he gets from selling his chickens the same color as the money the government pays you?” she had shouted in the bedroom I shared with them, not caring that my two cousins, pretending to watch TV in the sitting room, could hear her.
“Olivia, don’t forget that Fo Pious paid my school fees in the university.”
“And so what? Is he the first person to look after a sibling? Which older brother or sister has not sacrificed something for the younger ones? Do you have to spend the rest of your life repaying him? Do you now have to shoulder all of his responsibilities?”
“It’s okay,” my father said in an effort to quiet her.
“It’s okay that your brother is turning my house into a boarding school?”
“Olivia, remember that he’s my older brother,” my father said gravely. Even at that age I knew that he agreed with my mother but was reluctant to speak out against his brother.
“And remember that I’m your wife!”
After this exchange, my father drove one of my cousins back to Tɔgã Pious’s, on the other side of town; he would pay his school fees but the boy would have to live with his father. Tɔgã Pious had angrily accepted this offer and then proceeded to tell every person who cared to listen—and that was everyone we knew—about how his brother’s wife had driven the boy out of his uncle’s house. So when my father died and the ministry people gave us one week to vacate the bungalow, Tɔgã Pious and all who had listened to his story stood with hands on their hips, rocking from side to side and whispering to one another: “Let’s see where she will go.”
When the ministry people heaped our belongings in front of the brown metal gates of the house, it was Mawusi and her mother, Daavi Christy, who came to help us cart them to Tɔgã Pious’s house. My mother placed a plastic tub full of dishes on each of our heads and we set off down the road, doing our best to ignore the stares of those who had come to witness our misfortune, and chatting about what my new life in our family house would look like. We made two trips back and forth that day and would have done more if some members of the Women’s Guild hadn’t rented a truck to move the rest of the things. Tɔgã Pious hadn’t lifted a finger to help us, and he was supposed to be my father, now that my father was no more.