Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi Page A

street were ablaze in the sunset. He pulled into the driveway and turned off the car. He knew, though didn’t think it, that he couldn’t face Fola now (knowing, not knowledge), that he couldn’t brook the sight. To see Fola’s face on Kehinde’s for that instant was sufficient. To see his failure on Fola’s seemed too much to bear.
    The light above the garage came on. All the lights in the house were on. Neither he nor Kehinde stirred nor spoke to acknowledge not moving. They sat as men do: side by side, facing forward, both silent and patient, waiting for something to say. “Do you want to see my painting?” Kehinde asked after a while. Kweku turned to him, embarrassed. He hadn’t thought to ask.
    “Thank you, I would, please.”
    Kehinde nodded. “One second.” He unzipped his portfolio and pulled out the piece.
    •   •   •
    Even in bad light it was breathtakingly beautiful. Not that Kweku began to know how to judge a piece of art. But it didn’t take an expert to see the achievement, the intelligence of the image, the simplicity of the forms. A boy and a woman, from the back, holding hands. Kweku pointed to the woman. “Who’s that?” Though he knew.
    “That’s Mom,” Kehinde answered.
    “And that must be you.”
    “No, that’s—”
    “Olu?”
    “Um, no.”
    “But it’s a boy, right?”
    “It’s you.”
    “Me?!” Kweku laughed. A sudden sound in the quiet.
    “. . .” Stalling.
    Still laughing. “But why am I so
small
?”
    “Because Mom says she always has to be the bigger person.”
    Kweku laughed so hard now he started to cry. “Genius.”
    A small smile, fifteen seconds and not longer. “You like it?”
    “I love it. Pure genius.” He caught his breath. “She
does
say that, doesn’t she?”
    “With ‘don’t I’ at the end of it. I always have to be the bigger person,
don’t I
?”
    Kweku laughed harder, tears streaming down his cheeks. “Right.”
    Kehinde giggled bashfully and glanced at the house. “It was supposed to be for Mom. But you can have it if you want it.”
    “I would love that. She won’t mind?”
    “Mom? No. She has loads.”
    “Right.” It was he who didn’t know that they had birthed a little Basquiat, not she. She was the parent. He was the provider. He stopped laughing. “I’d l-l-love it.” His voice breaking (other parts of him also). “How do I . . . take it?”
    “I roll it. Like this.”
    “Wait. Don’t you have to sign it first?”
    “Only famous artists sign their paintings.”
    “Only foolish artists wait until they’re famous. Do you have a pen?”
    Kehinde was smiling too widely to speak. He reached for his backpack. Kweku stopped him.
    “Use this.” He plucked the silver pen from his unused scrubs pocket (a graduation gift from Fola, for prescriptions, engraved). Kehinde took the pen and turned it over in his fingers.
    “It’s so nice. Where’d you get it?”
    “From your mother. Of course.”
    Kehinde nodded, smiling. Another glance at the house. He laid the painting on the dashboard to consider where to mark. Kweku considered Kehinde with some wonder at the change in him: how at ease he became as his hand touched the paper, how his shoulders relaxed, breath released, standing down.
He
was the same with a body on a table, silver knife in lieu of silver pen. How had he missed it?
    So often he’d confided in Fola at night that he just didn’t “get” this slim good-looking boy; unlike Olu who reminded him so much of himself, Kehinde was a veritable black hole. Fola always said something vague in reply about the inscrutable nature of the second-born twin or recited again with great jingoistic pride the Yoruba myth of
ibeji.
    The myth:
    ibeji
(twins) are two halves of one spirit, a spirit too massive to fit in one body, and liminal beings, half human, half deity, to be honored, even worshipped accordingly. The second twin specifically—the changeling and the trickster, less fascinated by the affairs of