On Rotation(3)

“How did you know I didn’t make it?” Momma said.

I shot my mother a disbelieving look. Despite being the picture of the perfect Ghanaian woman, my mother’s skills in the kitchen were notoriously lacking. She could crank out a reasonable kontomire, throw together an ampesi that Grandma wouldn’t side-eye, but anything more complex was a wash. If it weren’t for our omnipresent crashing aunties, I probably would’ve grown up on takeout.

“Where’s Daddy?” I shouted, walking down the hall to drop off my bag in my room.

“Looking at himself,” Momma shouted back. “Tell him he has to hurry up. Christopher and Gregory will be here any minute.” When I circled back into the kitchen, she grabbed a hold of my arm, turning me around to face her. “So why isn’t Frederick here? It would have been good for him to watch, for when he knocks.”

Frederick, knocking, for me? When we first started dating, I’d seen it. Frederick standing at my door, bolstered by the parents I had never met, a bottle of ostentatiously expensive gin tucked under his arm. The image seemed preposterous now. Still, at its resurgence, my body ached with yearning.

“We broke up,” I admitted in a small voice.

Momma’s eyes widened. Then she released me, smoothing her hands down her dress with a huff.

“Ah, well, lawyers don’t make that much money these days anyway.” She narrowed her eyes critically at my hair, reaching up to fluff the crop of tight curls. “You know, I don’t think this hairstyle is helping you. You know how these men are; they like their women with hair down their backs. Before you leave, you should try on one of my wigs. And we can take you around church; a few nice young men joined the congregation recently, and Sister Lisa has said some of them are looking—”

“I’m going to check on Daddy,” I said with finality.

But before I could step toward my parents’ bedroom, the doorbell rang.

It was Chris, right on time at ten thirty. Chris was the most punctual Black person I had ever met, a peculiar match for the perpetually late Tabatha. Thankfully, his patience was about as infinite as his love for my sister. At least from the outside, their relationship was by the book. Chris and Tabatha dated for the appropriate amount of time—three years, long enough to prove that Chris was serious, not so long that his intentions could be questioned. He was respectful, tall (which Daddy liked), African American (which Daddy liked a little less), and had recently landed a six-figure job as a mechanical engineer three months after walking the stage at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. When Tabatha insisted on moving to Evanston to pursue her MBA after graduation, Chris left his beloved college town behind and followed her north, spending hours in our living room chatting with our father and sipping Muscatella. We all knew it was only a matter of time before he knocked, but when?

And then, last week, I got the phone call. Chris cleared his throat and asked me to please find a way to get Tabatha out of the house, and within minutes, the entire Appiah family, both domestic and international, knew that when was today.

“Hi, Angie,” Chris said, his smile a little shaky. He had spritzed on too much cologne, but otherwise looked smart in his blue button-down and dark wash jeans. He clasped a thin box that I knew contained the ceremonial liquor he would use to make his request. Behind him stood a heavyset middle-aged man. Chris’s father, Gregory Holmes, I remembered, just before clapping his large hand in mine. Chris had done his research. You can’t come alone to ask to marry a Ghanaian girl. My parents would have laughed him all the way back to Urbana.

“It’s nice to see you again, Angela,” Mr. Holmes said. “How’s medical school going?”

“Well,” I said, dismissing the many sleepless nights and the tearful breakdowns alone in a corner of the campus library in one woefully inadequate word. “Hard, but I’m enjoying myself.”

Mr. Holmes inhaled deeply, as though my admission had shifted something deep and old inside him back into alignment. He was sixty-something years old, of the generation that remembered scorched churches and sundown towns, and every young Black person’s success seemed to loosen the scars left by the state-sanctioned violence he had endured in his youth. He placed a heavy hand on my shoulder and squeezed, peering down at me over his bifocals.

“Good,” he said. “Good. We’re proud of you, you know.”

I smiled. Old Black people were always proud of me. It felt undeserved; my parents had grown up free.*

“Thanks, Mr. Holmes.”

I led them into the living room, where my father now sat, arranging himself like an Ashanti chief on our blood-red couch as if he hadn’t been preening in the bathroom seconds before. I’d disliked the decor in my childhood home for some years now, with its garish gold curtains, lavish green throw rugs, and custom coffee table with Gye-Nyame* engraved into the sides. It seemed desperate, a too-transparent proclamation of our family’s Ghanaian-ness. It was as if my parents—who’d been born in Ghana, educated in Ghana, then shipped off to England in their twenties for jobs that didn’t exist at home—had grown insecure in their heritage. When we first moved to the States, their habits and mannerisms had still been distinctly Other. Growing up, Tabatha and I had taken off our shoes before entering the house, folded our hands behind our backs when scolded, and were careful never to hand things to our elders from our left hands. But those habits were extinguished within a quarter of the time that it took for them to be ingrained in our parents in the first place. Even my parents’ accents had become something oddly inimitable, no longer the thundering brogue I used when describing to my friends what a Ghanaian accent sounded like, but something slightly English, slightly American, with a touch of a vague African something mostly audible in the r’s and t’s. The last time Momma went back to Tema and tried to haggle in Twi in the market, the seller accused her of being a foreigner and tried to charge her double. After that, our house was suddenly shrouded in red, gold, and greens, in adrinka symbols and carved ebony elephants. I was a bit surprised that Daddy hadn’t broken out the kente cloth for the occasion.