Take Her Man

“So, I was supposed to give it to him and then he was just gonna let us walk out of there? It don’t work like that.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I know that you didn’t have to let things get out of control.”

“Look, I ain’t no country nigga that’s about to have some fool that ain’t even pointed a gun at me take my shit. He took the gun out first. He should’ve used it first. I ain’t no pussy and if you want a pussy, I believe you got one at home waiting on you.”

“Don’t bring him into this.”

“Well, that’s what you wanted, right?” Dame stopped again and looked at me, his dark eyes seemingly looking right through me. “Me to talk it out and shit? Give that motherfucker my watch and then buy him dinner? Drinks on me? Right?” He turned to me and I could see beads of sweat swelling across his tattoo-covered skin. A picture of Mary and Jesus on his stomach; a cross etched over his chest; his grandmother’s name on his right arm; the entire continent of Africa across his back, the northernmost tip near his left ear and the southernmost by his rear. He was all strength. His muscles moved in consistent, solid shapes when he took a single step. Massive and strong. I once loved this. But now he seemed larger than anything I could handle. Almost dangerous. He snatched the bag from the bed and turned around, nearly hitting me with it.

“I just don’t understand you.”

“Understand me?” He threw the bag down angrily and hurried over to me, grabbing my arms and pushing me up against the wall. A vein shuddered in his right temple. I saw the devil in him suddenly, pulsing in erratic red threads in his eyes. He wasn’t even thinking. Pressed against me, I could feel his heart thumping madly, faster than the seconds that ran by. “Don’t try to fucking understand me. I told you not to.” His voice was hard and distant. “I ain’t that man. I ain’t him. I ain’t…” He shoved me against the wall again and pushed away from me. “Shit,” he shouted, turning away and balling up his fists, punching at the air in anger. “I knew this would happen if I brought you here. You don’t belong here.”

“What?” Still up against the wall and afraid to move, I began crying. Now my heart was thumping and twitching in fear. I struggled to breathe. “Now I don’t belong here? What about everything you said?”

“Look,” he turned and came back to me, “I ain’t trying to be understood. I ain’t that motherfucker. I’m from the street. All I know how to do is live. Stay alive.” Spit gathered at the sides of his mouth and tears glossed his eyes, but in his rage not one would fall. “I’m an animal.” He swung at the wall to the right of my head and his fist went right through to the other side. He pulled his hand out of the wall and blood dripped to the floor. “I’m a fucking king. No one in the world understands me. Not supposed to.”

“Oh, my God, what did you do?” I said. I tried to grab his arm, but he pushed me to the floor.

“Take the car and go,” he said, his voice now void of any emotion. He reached into his pocket, pulled out the car keys and threw them at me. “Go back to Accra and get on the first plane back to Alabama. Get as far away from me as you can.”

“But, Dame,” I said, picking up the keys and fighting to see him through the tears in my eyes. He wasn’t thinking. “They’re gonna come for you.”

He looked at me hard and just before a single tear fell from his right eye, calm and clear as the waves outside the door, he whispered, “Go,” and walked out.

Journey…Just Living

June 23, 2008 Sunrise

My father lied to me. Love does hurt. In fact, sometimes, love can hurt so badly it burns your insides fast and heartless like the reddest part of a flame. Now I’d known this for a long time. I’d seen that red flame in my mother’s eyes when my father didn’t come home from Bible study some nights, even heard it in the cut

ting cries of my best friend when the love of her life hurt her and let her down again and again, so hard all she could do was weep. But I’d never felt it for myself. Never been there, out on the flame, burning and ready to die for something I’d loved with all of my living heart. I’d been safe from it all. In the incubator my life had built around me. Until that morning. The morning after Dame left me alone on the floor of a hotel room in the middle of nowhere in the world. Through the blue-black night, I’d found my way out of Kumasi and to the airport just as the sun rose in the sky. After spending every nickel I had on each of the plastic cards in my wallet to get on a plane home, I was standing outside on the tarmac of the runway waiting to board a plane back to the United States.

Flicking the ticket in my hand back and forth to create some coolness in the already-humid morning heat, I felt a sinking in my insides I’d never known. Hours ago I had everything I ever wanted. Freedom. Music. And true love. Out of my incubator, I’d convinced myself that that was all I needed from the world to survive. I’d risked everything for that. Walked away from my whole life. And now it was all gone. Just like that. I was going home. Alone. Hopeless. And feeling like a complete fool. My mother was right. I was thirty-three years old and playing with my life like I was a child.

I kept running through everything that had happened. Dame’s hand on my thigh. The man sitting at our table. The watch. The gun. The bang. The fight. It wasn’t real. I wanted so badly to hate Dame for everything that had gone wrong. For leaving me. But the Dame from last night wasn’t the Dame I knew. Wasn’t the Dame I loved. And standing there in that line, hurt from everything else in the world, my heart felt pain because I really wanted him to come chase after me. To at least apologize. Even I knew that was crazy. But it was true. Hidden in my heart, it was true. And I kept peeking over my shoulder to see if he’d appear. Lord, I prayed he’d come running. To make this all right. To make me not seem so crazy for turning my back on my life—my family, my friends, my world—for him. Foolish. But I looked and looked and he never came.

“Mother Africa will wait for you to return. Don’t worry,” a voice announcd behind me as I looked out of the window after boarding the plane. I turned to see a slender, dark brown man, dressed in a navy blue business suit seated next to me in the aisle. He was handsome and I could tell by his accent that he was Ghanaian.

“I hope so,” I said weakly and praying he would just leave me with my thoughts. I didn’t feel like talking. I looked back at the gate door outside of the window.

“Oh, I see this all of the time—people crying as they lift off. Thinking this lovely place will just disappear. Just die. But no worries. Your mother is stronger than time. She has a secret and she is the only continent that can survive a living death. She’ll survive forever. She’ll always be here for you.” He sounded eloquent and melancholy, like a poet. Through the corner of my eye I saw him ease back in his seat and put on his seatbelt as the flight attendant walked by.

“You must fly a lot then,” I said.

“More than I’d like to. But it comes with the job.” He extended his hand to shake mine. “Kweku Emmanuel Onyeche, attorney at law.”

“Journey Cash. And I’m…just…living.”

It takes sixteen hours to get to the United States from Ghana—and that doesn’t include the layover. When I first got on the plane on the way over to Ghana with Dame, I wasn’t even worried about the time. Others had Sudoku and laptops and DVDS and iPods, anything to keep them busy. All I had was my hand in Dame’s and a smile plastered on my face. We’d laugh and joke and touch the whole way and even when we slept, we’d still be together. It seemed then that that was all that mattered.

Now I was two hours into my return flight and with only my mind to occupy me, I was feeling restless and burdened by my sadness. A baby, who’d been wailing during takeoff, probably because of the air pressure building up, had finally been calmed and the flight attendants were busy serving drinks in the aisles, so I couldn’t get up to walk around. Kweku, who I could tell was a bit older than me by his graying, distinguished side burns, was reading a magazine and clearly avoiding a stack of papers he’d set on the table in from of him. I looked out of the window at the blueness surrounding the plane and thought of Dame. Of our poem.

“I am worried about what people will say,” I heard Kweku say. I turned to see him still looking at his magazine, so I didn’t say anything. Perhaps he was reading aloud. “I wonder what they will say if I let you return to the U.S. looking so sad, ‘Journey Cash…just living.’”

“I stopped caring about what people had to say a long time ago,” I said, looking back to the blueness.

“Point taken. But this is my homeland we’re talking about here. And I can’t have them thinking it was Ghana that gave you such a sad face. So I’m thinking, “Kweku, how do you get rid of this sad face to ensure the positive image of your country?’ Ah! I must cheer up this pretty girl.” He wagged his index finger in my face knowingly and we both laughed. “Now I could turn on my lethal charm and romance her like any true Ghanaian man would…but something tells me that perhaps it is not the attention of a man she needs.” He tilted his head toward me for a response.