Somebody's Heart Is Burning by Tanya Shaffer Page B

his mallets. A signal passed between the Americans. They turned as a unit and walked down the steps at the side of the stage. As Nadhiri passed me, our eyes met and held. She saw that I was afraid. And I saw that she was crying. As she turned her head sharply away, her face darkened, and I saw there the same thing I felt rising in my own chest. Hot, leaden, inescapable shame.

    “They have brought the troubles on themselves,” Brown said to me the next day, sitting on the wooden steps outside the volunteer hostel. “They are lazy, I know this for a fact. They could be rich, living in America, but instead they take drugs, and steal, and shoot people with guns.”
    “That isn’t true at all! Millions of black Americans are working themselves to the bone every day.” I scratched around an enormous bite on my leg. Insects didn’t usually go for me, which was fortunate, because I didn’t much care for repellent. Last night, however, an itinerant mosquito had found its way inside my net and covered my ankles in angry red spots.
    “I have read it,” Brown insisted. “They are criminals, they are all in jail.”
    “Not
all,
a small percentage—”
    “I have read.
Time
magazine. All the black males are in prison.”
    “Oh Brown,” I sighed. His attitude was not uncommon. I’d encountered a surprising amount of prejudice among Africans against black Americans, gleaned mostly, I supposed, from the news media and the blockbuster movies that made their way here. African Americans visiting Ghana rarely got the kind of special treatment whites got. A black Peace Corps volunteer I met at a bar in Accra told me that when she arrived in her village for the first time, the villagers looked at her with dismay.
    “They thought they’d been shortchanged,” she said, shaking her head ruefully. “One lady wanted to know if their village had lost some kind of lottery. She said her cousin’s village had gotten a white one!”
    She told the story lightly, over a beer, but I sensed the heart-break behind it. She’d come here, like so many black Americans, expecting to find home. To be treated as a second-class citizen in her ancestral homeland produced a desolation I could scarcely imagine.
    How strange, I thought, not for the first time, that Ghanaians had such affection for white people, given their recent history of colonization. But then, perhaps the very nearness of that experience provided the explanation. The effects of colonial education were so fresh that the majority of Ghanaians still esteemed their former colonizers rather than resenting them. The absence of a significant white population also helped. There was no European aristocracy in residence, lording its wealth over the local people. Almost all the
obroni
to be found in Ghana were aid workers, students, or volunteers.
    I sighed again, trying to collect my thoughts.
    “It’s true there are a disproportionate number of black men in American jails,” I told Brown, “but the reasons for that are very complicated. Generations of economic oppression, racism, the police, the courts . . .” I scratched the bite fiercely, drawing blood.
    “But look how they behave,” he said. “They are rude.”
    “It’s . . .” I sighed, abandoning the insatiable itch. “It’s complicated. There’s a lot of anger built up. But this group isn’t representative, either. Most black Americans aren’t separatists.”
    “I will beat them,” he said.
    I looked at him, and we burst out laughing. I picked up his hand, pressing his calloused yellow palm against mine. “My hero, defending my good name.”

    The jovial guard at the gated American Embassy compound refused to believe there were homeless people in the U.S.
    “No!” he shouted at me. “No one begs in America. It is not possible.”
    “I’m sorry,” I told him, “but it’s more than possible. It’s the truth.”
    “I will never believe it.”
    “Okay,” I shrugged and moved to enter the building.
    “You