Sankofa(10)

I have dishonored myself. I chose to stay home this Friday, instead of joining Mr. Bain at the pub. Around 9 p.m., needing to relieve myself, I went down to the toilet. The door was unlocked and I found Bronwen sitting on the rim of the bathtub with her feet soaking in a bucket of water. She was wearing a dressing gown that stopped at her knees. She blushed.

“Sorry. I should have locked the door. I’ll be out now.”

And like an experienced seducer, I asked, “Might a massage help?”

Before she could reply, I had knelt and lifted her foot out of the bucket. It was small and slender, the length of my palm, the width of four fingers. I began. I have seen it done in Segu. First the arch is bent back and forth, then the heel squeezed, then the toes splayed, fingers pushing in and out of the gaps.

“Does it hurt?” I asked. She shook her head and so I took out the next foot. My hands slid to her leg. It was slim and strong, the muscles firm from walking miles of shop floor. I inched to her knee, wondering at my daring. There was a graze, a dark line not fully healed. I touched it with the tip of my tongue. The flesh was cool and salty, the taste of the sea. Black man cannibal. My hand crawled under her dressing gown. She was naked underneath. When I touched her part, she gasped.

For the first time, I looked in her face.

“Shall I stop?” I asked, suddenly unsure of myself.

“Yes,” she said. There were tears in her eyes. I withdrew my hand. Black man rapist. The evidence of my ministrations was already apparent. My fingers had left marks on her pale skin.

“I beg your pardon,” I said.

I heard a key turning in the front door and I fled. I have abused Mr. Bain’s trust. I have taken advantage of Caryl’s young sister. Me, a grown man of twenty-five. I will give my notice tomorrow and start looking for new accommodation.



She was only eighteen, I want to shout. Predatory is what you would call Francis today. I’d guessed already that he was “an older man,” but still, I had hoped the story of their romance would be less sordid, less entangled in the grey area of consent. I wished I could read my mother’s version of events.

“Madam, shall I take this?” the waiter asks with his hand on the edge of my bowl. The restaurant has emptied. The lunch crowd is gone. The evening patrons are anticipated. A corner of my pasta remains uneaten, cold and congealed. I am bent over the diary, my nose almost touching the page.

“Yes, please.”

“Shall I bring the bill?”

“Coffee, please,” I say.


I am still in the Bain household. I go out early and return late. Menelik has returned from his speaking tour. We went on a march against neo-imperialism today. I shouted myself hoarse against predatory capitalism, but afterwards I wondered to what end? Losing my voice will not displace Western business interests in Africa. Perhaps it is time I began thinking of what I, personally, can do when I return home after my studies.

Coming in tonight, I saw Bronwen’s back in the kitchen but I hurried past her. The holiday will be over in ten days and then I will be too busy to dwell on that embarrassing episode.



How did she feel living in the same house with him? Had she tried to avoid him too?


Things have fallen apart. Menelik has been arrested and charged with treason. They say he bought arms illegally from a Russian dealer and plans to sell them to the ANC in South Africa. His flat was ransacked and sealed, his papers seized. They are looking for his contacts. “It is best to stay low,” Thomas said. Blessing is angry that Thomas has put them in danger by associating with what she calls riff-raff. Menelik is from Guyana. His real name is George Hamilton.

Riff-raff fraud.

Thomas advised me to burn you. His words. “Burn that book you’re always snitching into.”

Another thing Thomas said to me before we parted. Never marry.



With my mother, Francis was predator. With Menelik, he was prey. He had naively fallen in with a dangerous crowd. Was this why he had left England? To escape arrest?


I have found a note slipped into my room. It says:

I didn’t want you to stop.

This is what I have drafted in reply:

Dear Miss Bain, You must forgive my taking advantage of you. I am seven years your senior but alas lacking in both wisdom and common sense. It was an abuse of the hospitality your father has shown me. Please let us not speak of that evening again.



I still felt she was too young, too easily swept away by attention from this urbane, older man. He would have seemed that way to her, a teenage department-store attendant with no university education. At least the relationship appeared to be consensual.


We have kissed. I am playing with fire.



And my mother had gotten burned. A single mother before she was twenty.


The matter is done, through no working of mine. Friday evening. Mr. Bain was out. I climbed up to my room and discovered the door ajar. I turned on the light and found her inside, barefoot in her dressing gown, the belt of the robe untied. I am a man like—



Two thirds of the page has been blacked out. My mother had wielded the censor’s pen and erased the details of their first night together. She was always mildly prudish. She said intercourse instead of sex.


She was a virgin. This I discovered after the deed was done. In Segu a man does not take a woman’s maidenhead lightly. The family can force the culprit to marry her.