Sankofa by Chibundu Onuzo
1
My mother was six months dead when I opened the trunk I found under her bed. I opened the trunk on the same day her headstone was erected. Rose, my daughter, accompanied me to the cemetery. I wore black, like it was a second funeral. Grass had grown over her grave, the earth erasing all memory of its disturbance. The headstone was marble, paid for by my mother’s funeral insurance. Rose chose the gold-lettered inscription.
Bronwen Elizabeth Bain
1951–2018
Beloved Mother, Grandmother, Daughter and Sister
Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land.
The Rossetti quote was a touch melancholic, but so was my mother and, for that matter, so was Rose. We laid flowers, fresh white chrysanthemums. Rose said a few words, addressing my mother as if she were present. When she finished, she turned to me. I shook my head. The practice felt too foreign and fanciful.
Afterwards, we had lunch near Rose’s office, in what my mother would have called a smart restaurant, a ma?tre d’ by the door, thick cloth napkins on the tables. Rose went back to work, and I returned home to retrieve my mother’s trunk from the storage cupboard. The day’s ritual had left me wanting to touch something that belonged to her.
The trunk looked old. Brass fastenings and studs. Rose would have called it vintage. I avoided it for a long time. I had not enjoyed my previous experience of sorting through my mother’s things. There had been no catharsis, only a strange fatigue after holding the clothes she had worn and the books she had read. It became clear I did not know her very well. Madame Bovary was on her bedside table. In the recesses of a wardrobe, I found a pair of sequined gloves.
The trunk fastenings were stiff and took some force to spring open. I lifted the lid and took out what appeared to be a scrapbook. There was a copy of my birth certificate stuck to the first page; on the next, a photograph of me by the seaside. My skin was as brown as the sand. There was a clump of my hair glued in place. My mother had written under the cutting: From little Anna’s head. She cries when I brush it.
The book was a sort of monument to my childhood, a small shrine of memories. In a picture from my confirmation aged thirteen, I wore a puff-sleeved dress. Plaits sprouted from my head like twigs and ribbons streamed from their ends, prayers knotted to branches. She had kept my letters from university, a swatch of red fabric, and a white rose, pressed yellow with age.
There were some loose pictures of my mother and her sister when they were girls. Aunt Caryl was tall, almost scrawny, with her red hair disguised by sepia. My mother was smaller and sleeker with shiny black curls. My mother looked like a Bain, dark hair and blue eyes, a winning combination that obscured the plainer family features of thin lips and a weak chin. Aunt Caryl was an alien, or adopted, or ask the milkman.
In the months I avoided the trunk, it occurred to me that information about my father might be inside. I was very curious about him in my childhood. I knew his name, Francis Aggrey. I knew that he had arrived in England in the late sixties to go to university. I knew he had lodged in the spare attic room of my grandfather’s house, and that he and my mother had some sort of affair. When he returned to his country, Bamana, she didn’t know she was pregnant with me. They never saw each other again.
Why didn’t she write? She didn’t have an address. Why didn’t he write? How would she know? Why didn’t she go to Bamana?
“I couldn’t afford it,” she would say. “We can barely afford to go to Blackpool.”
What was he like?
“I don’t know, Anna. It was so long ago. He was only here for a few months.”
Her answers never changed. There was nothing more to tell. I didn’t even know what he looked like.
By the time I was eighteen, I’d stopped trying to find out about him. Although, once in a while, I would daydream about traveling to Bamana, stopping strangers in the street and asking if they knew a Francis Aggrey. I don’t remember when that dream died.
I’d gone through all the photographs. The box looked empty. I shook it and heard sliding, objects rubbing against each other. I turned the trunk upside down and banged it. A false cardboard bottom came loose. Two notebooks fell out along with a black-and-white photograph the size of a playing card.
The man in the picture was the darkest tint in the human spectrum. Clean-shaven, smooth-skinned, almost oiled. I had his jaw, that straight square jaw that no other Bain had. His suit was pale, either grey or light blue. A metal pin held his tie in place, a silk pocket square bloomed from his breast pocket. His hair was cropped close, freshly clipped, shining with hair oil. I turned the picture over. To my white rose, with love, F.K.A., 1969. The ink was faded, the letters cramped to fit into the small space, except his initials, which took up half the inscription. It could be my father. Francis K. Aggrey. What did the K stand for?
I opened the first notebook, cheaply bound and filled with the same tight script.
London is afraid of me. Black man cannibal. Black man rapist. Hide your fat wives and your dumpy virgin daughters. Shut your door in my face. Look out. Tollund Man is coming.
The author’s voice was strong and alive, as if he had walked into the room and begun speaking. An intelligent black man, angry, humorous. Surely not my father, hidden away in this box by a woman who told me there was little to know but his name.