Transcendent Kingdom(4)

    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?)



    I was ten when I wrote that entry. I was smart enough to use the code names and make note of new vocabulary words but not smart enough to see that anyone who could read could easily crack my code. I hid the journal under my mattress, but because my mother is a person who thinks to clean underneath a mattress, I’m sure she must have found it at some point. If she did, she never mentioned it. After the broken-television incident, my mother had run up to my bedroom and locked the door while Nana raved downstairs. She grabbed me close and pulled the both of us down onto our knees behind the bed while she prayed in Twi.

Awurade, b? me ba barima ho ban. Awurade, b? me ba barima ho ban. Lord, protect my son. Lord, protect my son.

“You should pray,” my mother said then, reaching for the koko. I watched her eat two spoonfuls before setting it back down on the nightstand.