“My passport!” I pulled my purse off my shoulder and pried it open.
“Yes... . Yes! Your passport,” Dame said so loudly that Benji turned to us.
“I keep it in my purse. I have it. I have it!” The way I said this, it sounded as if the passport carried all of the winnings of a lotto ticket. But then, it was priceless. It had gone unused and without reason within my purse for months and now, suddenly my ridiculous New Year’s resolution made perfect sense.
“You keep your passport in your purse?” Emily asked as I pulled it out.
“It’s a long story,” I said. “I figured I’d need it one day for something real special.”
As expected, it took Emily more than an hour to get to Dame’s contact at the Ghanaian embassy in Washington, but the fact that it was even an option proved how powerful celebrity could be. My father had a certain amount of power in the South and certainly in Alabama, but Dame’s connections were reaching over oceans and the fact that people seemed to want to help was both exhilarating and exciting. The ambassador himself demanded to chat with Dame and I was sure it was supposed to be official business, but when Emily handed Dame the phone he just laughed, exchanged a few words, and in minutes, Emily announced that he would handle it.
“Just when I think you’re amazing, you do something else to impress me,” I said to Dame after listening to him chattering with the ambassador as if they’d gone to Princeton together.
“Well, that’s a big surprise.”
“Why?”
“I never knew I impressed you at all.”
After we missed the initial flight and changed airlines, Dame and I walked through security, huddled together under Benji and Emily’s jackets as photographers and fans who no doubt got word that Dame was in the airport followed along. I was being pushed and pulled and questioned. There was so much going on, but nothing mattered more than who I was with.
I held Dame’s arm tight and didn’t let go until we were on the plane and up in the air. And even then, we started to hold on to each other, staring straight into each other’s soul with so much desire, the flight seemed like a short hop over a puddle on a pogo stick. Yes, it was funny—time, between two people who had found each other, melted like butter in a hot skillet. First we were laughing and then smiling and before I knew it, we’d passed through Amsterdam and were on our way to Africa.
Chapter Twenty-five
The day I die, I always imagine myself lying in a bed, surrounded by family—my children, my grandchildren, cousins, nieces and nephews, and anyone else who’d come into my heart by that inevitable date. And as I lie just hours, minutes from closing my eyes forever, I will tell the story of my life. Not everything. Just highlights. The day Justin almost died drowning in the ocean at Mobile. It was the first time I’d seen my father cry. When Billie and I stripped naked and jumped into the lake in the back of the old church and we both came up with leeches all over our bodies. But we were afraid to go home and tell what had happened, so we somehow got the idea to burn them all off with matches. We had burns all over our bodies for weeks. The day I was strong enough to walk away from the only man I was sure I would ever love, without knowing what would come next. And now, to this list, I had to add the day I arrived in Africa.
Dame was asleep. He’d been snoring and grunting like a big old baby for hours and only moved once to lay his head on my shoulder. Seated beside the window, I leaned away from him, so he could have my whole shoulder. Resting my head against a pillow placed on the closed window shade, I looked at him quizzically. How could such a big, bold man sleep so serenely in a metal box zipping through the skies? He seemed so vulnerable and tender leaning against me. I could watch him like this forever.
“Something about the sky,” one of the flight attendants said, leaning on the chair in front of Dame. “Just lulls men to sleep.”
“He’s been like this for hours.”
“Enjoy it,” she said, smiling wickedly. She turned to walk away, but then stopped suddenly. “May want to put your shade up. Some pretty stuff passing by.”
“Oh, sure,” I said, easing up in my seat. Dame felt my rustle and turned sleepily to his other side without so much as wrinkling an eyelid. I set the pillow between us and pushed up the shade with my left hand. As it came up, the sun, which I’d last seen many hours ago, came stalking in fast. It was bright. Like we were just inches away, floating in the sky. And I wondered if maybe it seemed so big because I hadn’t seen light in so many hours, but when I peeked out the window, I saw that it was true. The sun was so close that I felt I could break through the glass of the window and just push my hand into it. Grab it and think that it felt like what orange juice tastes like—waking and friendly.
When my eyes adjusted to the rays, I leaned into the window a bit farther and turned my head to look down at the surface below the plane. See what the flight attendant, Shola, was speaking of.
What was there was an impossibly big blanket of tan. Everywhere. Sometimes it looked like waves, like an ocean of land, ripples riding for miles. And then somewhere, out of nowhere, a tree would push up and green leaves, dotted sparsely like dollar bills hanging from a birthday girl’s shirt, gave a bit of color in the middle. Then there were spirals of different tans with some brown and blue black mixed together. The plane dipped lower and then I saw that one of these spirals was unraveling into what I could see was a river trail. It opened and sprang big like the trunk of a tree, going like this for miles until it just divided again and began to branch out into so many limbs. It was past beautiful. Simple and quietly alive.
“Makes you want to jump out there and swim in the sand, don’t it,” Dame said lazily, pulling his chair up after the flight attendants announced that we were preparing for landing.
“It’s brilliant,” I replied, but I didn’t think he could hear me.
Seeing all of that quiet openness for so many miles in no way prepared me for the hectic hubbub of Accra. From the edge of the city, I watched the sand roll into rivers and led to trees, and then forests, and then roads, and then the tops of homes packed so tight that I could hardly see the ground anymore. I kept trying to connect this vision to something I had seen before, but there was nothing else like it. It was suffocating and hypnotizing. And that was just from the plane.
When Dame and I exited the plane, I didn’t know if I’d arrived in Ghana or if it had arrived in me. Standing at the top of the steps that led to the tarmac with other passengers who’d deboarded and were gathering at the bottom, I immediately felt the heat. It was quick, merciless. Steamy and almost visible, opening my pores like I’d just stepped into a sauna. Growing up in Alabama, I knew what the hottest days of summer felt like and had learned to live with them, but I instantly knew this was different. My hair immediately surrendered at its roots and beads of sweat gathered at my temples.
Dame grabbed my hand and looked back at me before walking down the steps.
“You feel that heat?”
I nodded.
“You’ll get used to it. You’ll like it soon.”
There was a group of three short and stout Ghanaian women standing by the entrance of the airport. Singing and welcoming each passerby, they looked like they were in their late fifties and were wearing colorful native clothes that matched just enough to appear as costumes. Their heads were wrapped in white linen, and beaded earrings, the color of the sand waves, hung from their ears. A sign above them read “Akwaaba.” I’d learn later that this meant “Welcome” in their native language.