Something She Can Feel

“Akwaaba,” the one in the middle, whose cheeks were striped with cuts, said when Dame and I appeared in front of them.

And then she did something I hadn’t seen her do to anyone else. She opened her arms and came to me smiling.

“Welcome home,” she said into my ear as she hugged me. She backed up and looked into my eyes while holding my cheeks as if I were her own child. “We’ve missed you sorely.”

“Thank you,” was all I could say, but that?

??s not nearly what I’d felt. In her eyes I saw the faces of every mother and sister at the church who’d kissed me in this same way when I was a child. She looked nothing like them. We’d been so mixed over in our history that even the darkest one of us didn’t look as unaffected as the face in front of me. But in her eyes, I could still see them. It was an undeniable reflection of our connection. And no matter how far we’d come, looking there, into her eyes, I knew it was true; this was where we were from.

While it was completely spontaneous going to Ghana meant a lot to me, probably more than I’d told Dame when he asked me to come, but I didn’t expect to feel all this so quickly. I didn’t want it to be the cliché experience of black people who stepped off the plane, kissed the ground, and did a happy dance that they’d returned to “Mother Africa.” But really, inside, I was dancing. I was hopping, dancing, screaming, and crying. Because the woman, who was probably just doing her job and had kissed every black woman who walked off the plane for the same response, was right. I was returning home.

Dame hadn’t lied. He kept the same driver in every city. When we left the airport, Benji was already out front, helping the driver pack their bags into a little minivan. Dame greeted the driver like he was an old friend and slid a few bills into his hand. “Brother Kofi,” he said, and they went on talking and laughing about something that had happened the last time Dame was in Ghana. “No trouble this time, Brother Sisi,” Kofi said, calling Dame by his Akan name that Kofi later explained simply told what day Dame was born on—Sunday. My name, Kofi added, was “Adowa” because I was born on a Tuesday.

As I’d seen from the sky, the streets of Accra were tight. Cars clogged the sometimes dirt and sometimes paved roads like taxi cabs in Times Square. And in between each car was a man, moving about from driver to driver, selling anything, sometimes stopping for a long time and other times just nodding and moving on. Like we did in Alabama, when they wanted to chat for a while, the traffic just kind of stopped as people waited for the meeting to move on.

Women and children crowded the sidewalks. Some walking and others sitting and selling things like the men in the road. The most beautiful thing to see was the way the women held their babies so close to them as they worked. The babies’ little brown heads were popping out of the sides of the women’s backs where ample cloth was used to hold the children snug and in place as they hung in a kind of simple sling that seemed so tight that it left little room for the baby to cry or wiggle around. Instead, they either slept as the mother moved, or observed the goings-on like a grown person.

“No, no, no,” Brother Kofi said to me when I tried using Dame’s camera to snap a quick picture of one of the women carrying her baby. “You must ask the mother first. Never take a picture until you have consent. . . or give a dash.”

“A dash?”

“That’s a tip,” Dame said, laughing with Benji at Brother Kofi’s honesty. “Everyone dashes in Ghana. These are your people.”

After three days in Ghana, I knew that Dame was right—these were my people. I could tell by how they communicated with one another in loud tones and expressive faces. The women all seemed so proud and unapologetically complicated, and the men, they always had something charming to say and a smile that meant more than one thing. Yeah, I was far from home, but these were definitely my people.

I learned that Accra had a way of making repose a state of mind. The heat or something in the crowded air eased my mind into a constant state of relaxation and even if I wanted to worry about something, the need quickly drifted away in the breeze.

“Am I gonna have to leave you here when I go home?” Dame asked one morning when he was getting ready to go to the studio for one of his daily sessions. I was still in bed. He’d been spending most of his mornings working on his music and sometimes meeting with local artists and visitors, but I mostly stayed behind, walking around the parts of the city that seemed safe and having Brother Kofi drive me to others. I was wearing a full wardrobe of African dresses I bought at the craft market, and decorated our hotel room with beaded masks and Ashanti stools, where Dame and I were sleeping in separate beds.

“I am Mother Africa,” I joked, pulling my hair off my face. Drenched in sweat, it refused to be straightened even after I washed it each morning. So I’d let it curl up into a loose Afro.

“Okay, Mother Africa,” Dame said, pulling clothes from his bag. “Just don’t forget who your real mother is. I’m sure she’s already pulled a switch for you from the backyard.”

“Oh, don’t bring that up again.” I rolled over in the bed and pulled the sheets over my head. I’d told him about what happened with my family the first evening.

“You’re gonna have to face her soon. Just call, so she knows everything’s okay. You’ve been gone a few days.” He pulled the sheets off me.

“I’ll call!” I said, looking at Dame.

“Today?” he asked.

“Today!”

“You promise?” He sat down next to me on my bed.

“Yes.”

“Hey, why don’t you come down to the studio later this afternoon?”

“I can’t,” I said. “Brother Kofi is taking me to the slave dungeon again.”

“Again?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I don’t know why you went in the first place.”

“You never went?”