Today I visited the house of Mrs. Sackey, my host mother here for three months. I hadn't intended to call, but I was in the neighborhood, so my friend Orlando and I decided to swing by. We walked down from my newspaper office, past the Karldorf bar and along the dirt paths that serve as sidewalks. When their wasn't enough room for two to walk abreast, one of us would step over the sewer ditch that divides the path from the road and walk on the pavement until a car came. We strolled under the green leafy trees, thick with branches that would be infested with bats when dusk came. The walls of villas lined the side of the road, and we peeked over here and there to see the huge, but not exactly wealthy looking, houses inside.
From the main road we passed left on to the street that led to Mrs. Sackey's. The concrete of the road crumbled to rocks and then dust beneath our feet. The street bent right under the white washed walls of a villa, and stretched out straight before us. It is a quiet street, lined with palm trees and the almost-grand houses of the rich. And beneath their windows are the wooden stands that serve as shops in the day and houses at night. Rich and poor share the same space, and the same attitudes, in Ghana.
Behind a low wall on the left there is a chop bar that serves local food. It is always swarming with women and their young kids, and everything is such a mess that I can hardly imagine they know which kid is whose. But one of kids is distinct from the others. I stepped inside the wall and spotted him in the corner. He was standing looking in to space. I waved to all the women, who instantly recognized me and the scene that was going to follow. One of the woman yelled to the child, who looked up, saw me, and began screaming in terror. As he ran away yelling, the tears gushed from his eyes like they were waiting there, just for this moment. All of the women laughed uproariously, of course, and I, too, admit to seeing the humor in scaring the wits out of a poor kid who once told his mother that I was an 'agent of satan'. Well, this demon has visited that child six times now, and there has never been any abatement in the pure unadultered terror I instill. I wish I had this power over some other people!
Well, next we passed the little old lady who is always sitting on an upturned crate by the side of the road. We had to be careful, she is definitely suffering from some kind of dementia, and always wants to talk for an endlessly. The next gates on our left were the entrance to Dromie Villa, the Sackey residence. I peeked over the top; Mr. Boeti, the security man was there. I woke him from his doze, and he opened the gates a crack to talk to me. He thanked me profusely for the gifts I had given him when I had left the house, and called upon God to bless me so many times that if God was watching he might have seen me blushing.
Then there was a voice from inside the house.
Mr. Boeti: (whispered) Quick, go, before she sees you. (yelled in response) gobbledeegook Orlando blablablarg.
Orlando: (playing his part admirably well) Hi Mami, how are you?
Me: I run around the corner and wait while Mrs. Sackey comes out and talks to Orlando for a while. What were they talking about? Me, of course. She has told Orlando that she was very angry because I had yelled at her on the phone that day. She had been in a rush, and it had been very rude of me to ask for the ten seconds of her time that it took for me ask if I had left any keys in the house and her to respond in the negative. She hadn't stopped there, however, but had gone on to explain how badly she had been treated by whites when she had visited New York, or, more specifically, JFK airport. She also had passed something to Orlando that we was supposed to turn over to me: a little neatly wrapped parcel containing exactly everything I had left in my room: 600 cedis, or six cents. I could accuse her of nothing.
If running and hiding from her seems stupid to you, its seems stupid to me, too. That said, I have always taken a little illicit thrill in these of cat and mouse that we play. I go to the kichen at night and make some toast; she finds out and hides the toaster, 'to save electricity'. I go to the kitchen at night and eat a banana; she locks the bananas in the dining room (thank god there's no lock on the door to the kitchen like there is on every other fucking door, cabinet, drawer in this fucking house). I go to the kitchen at night and make a sandwich, quietly... no response, no countermeasures. Again, I go to the kitchen at night and make a sandwich, quietly... I do it again and again and am not stopped! Victory? well, perhaps, but I wish that there were more edible things in her fridge than cheap jelly. White bread and and jelly can come together to make a sandwich, but not a good one. Still, I do it again and again, and never leave any evidence of infraction other than a few missing slices of bread. Does she count the slices, once in the evening and again in the morning? Does she measure the height of the jelly? I wouldn't put it past her.
I'm not sure how Mrs. Sackey has spent her younger years, but if there was any meaning to her life, it has long since departed. As far as I can tell, her life consists of cleaning the house, yelling at the numerous underlings she keeps to clean the house for her, locking things at night, and harassing her grandchildren. How could their parents be so unwitting as to leave them in the grips of this robustly evil old lady? The girl, Gifa, she punishes relentlessly for such crimes as fidgeting and talking. 'Why do you always worry me?'
The boy, Ethan, is just a toddler, and Mrs. Sackey actually professes affection for him. But she expresses this affection by rushing after him and scooping him up everytime he gets to far away. For Ethan's benefit, the screen doors for the kitchen and the front entrance have both been replaced by models with heavier springs. Also he has been supplied with the most annoying invention known to man, little shoes that squeak when he walks. If I had to wear squeaking shoes, I would certainly go crazy, but maybe Ethan wants to stay sane until he's old enough to take his revenge on his torturess.
Well, Mrs. Sackey may hate her grandchildren, but I think they are wonderfully cute. As she was trying to make Gifa stand still, I would dance with her and chase her around the house. I think my bad influence on her kids biased her against me even more than my messy room or my late night ventures in to the kitchen. I could tell she didn't like me because of the coldness and condescending attitude of servility she always put on around me. But it was very rare that she would actually admonish me to my face for percieved faults, although she did sometimes complain about me in front of my face to someone else. I wasn't perfect, I could have kept my room tidier and taken more care towards keeping her everyday scrubbed tile floors totally white, but if communication is the key to a good relationship, she might as well have been speaking in Twi.
Thats why it came as a surprise when, one morning, coming home, I found the staff of Projects Abroad sitting on the patio talking with Mrs. Sackey about me. I should have expected something; the night before Katie and Fergal had shaved my head in to a mohawk (which I still have, by the way, although the hair on the sides of my head have grown out long enough to prevent anybody from thinking I look like a 'mafia' anymore). But I had seen Mrs. Sackey that morning, and she hadn't said anything to me, although I had of course tried to keep my distance from her.
I went out for an hour, came back at ten or a eleven, and, voila, Mrs. Sackey had called Projects Abroad and told them she 'couldn't live with me anymore.' So I sat down with everyone else, and Mrs. Sackey still went on about how awful I was with out ever once looking me in the eye. Highest on my list of offences was me 'being naked around the house.' collective GASP! When were you naked in the house Matthew? I, too, was nervous. What could she be talking about? Then I remembered that one night when I and some volunteer friends and some of her grandkids and their nannies were all goofing around out front of the house, and Mrs. Sackey was skulking somewhere inside, I had mooned Fergal. Funny at the time, yes, but one of the nannies had told Mrs. Sackey, and, between my bald ass and the bald sides of my head, Mrs. Sackey could not concieve of a more despicable person than myself.
Well, she was not serious about her threat to throw me out of the house, and the only result of that meeting was a sort of tacit agreement between Sackey and I that we would never speak again. Sometimes, when we were forced to share the space of the same room at the same time, she chuckled in her ugly way, 'heh heh'. She continued to speak to other people about me, even taking my friend Orlando as a confidante. He would communicate what she said to me, and I was surprised that she invented outright lies about me. I forget most of them, but i do know that she pretended to Orlando that my messiness was the reason that my room mate Fergal had left the house (he had moved out of Accra to work in an orphange) and that also she also said that she had had a long talk with my mother during which they traded stories about how bad I was.
In fact, she was always telling little lies like this, right until the last day, when we wanted to take a picture with her. 'Oh no, heh heh, I won't take pictures with you people, heh heh. You people always tell me that you will send them to me and then you never do.' Well, first of all, who said this picture was for your benefit, you old hag? But whats worse is that I knew this was not the real reason she didn't want to take a picture with me. The reason was simple: she didn't like me, and if she could hurt me by refusing to pose for a picture with me, she would do it. Well, I've lived with you for the last three months, but if you want to forget me and you want me to forget you, fine.
I have written all this, though, just so I will not forget you, Mrs. Sackey. Not that you are such a memorable character, but you are enough example of how not to live that you are worth writing about. I don't even feel any real sort of grudge or anger towards you, despite the obvious vitriol of my writing. Mostly this little rant was inspired by what I'm reading now, Philip Roth's 'Portnoy's Complaint'. And I should add here that you can be hospitable enough when you choose to be, and you worked diligently enough preparing me the same four dishes for three months of dinners, although perhaps your boiled yam was bit dry. But if its true what you told me, 'you white people are look down on us blacks, you always expect us to do something for me' (I asked you to put on some water to boil for tea! And I would have done it myself if only you let me!), then perhaps you should let the whites find their own way in Ghana from now on and not waste their time like you wasted mine.