And then, last week, I got the phone call. Chris cleared his throat and asked me to please find a way to get Tabatha out of the house, and within minutes, the entire Appiah family, both domestic and international, knew that when was today.
“Hi, Angie,” Chris said, his smile a little shaky. He had spritzed on too much cologne, but otherwise looked smart in his blue button-down and dark wash jeans. He clasped a thin box that I knew contained the ceremonial liquor he would use to make his request. Behind him stood a heavyset middle-aged man. Chris’s father, Gregory Holmes, I remembered, just before clapping his large hand in mine. Chris had done his research. You can’t come alone to ask to marry a Ghanaian girl. My parents would have laughed him all the way back to Urbana.
“It’s nice to see you again, Angela,” Mr. Holmes said. “How’s medical school going?”
“Well,” I said, dismissing the many sleepless nights and the tearful breakdowns alone in a corner of the campus library in one woefully inadequate word. “Hard, but I’m enjoying myself.”
Mr. Holmes inhaled deeply, as though my admission had shifted something deep and old inside him back into alignment. He was sixty-something years old, of the generation that remembered scorched churches and sundown towns, and every young Black person’s success seemed to loosen the scars left by the state-sanctioned violence he had endured in his youth. He placed a heavy hand on my shoulder and squeezed, peering down at me over his bifocals.
“Good,” he said. “Good. We’re proud of you, you know.”
I smiled. Old Black people were always proud of me. It felt undeserved; my parents had grown up free.*
“Thanks, Mr. Holmes.”
I led them into the living room, where my father now sat, arranging himself like an Ashanti chief on our blood-red couch as if he hadn’t been preening in the bathroom seconds before. I’d disliked the decor in my childhood home for some years now, with its garish gold curtains, lavish green throw rugs, and custom coffee table with Gye-Nyame* engraved into the sides. It seemed desperate, a too-transparent proclamation of our family’s Ghanaian-ness. It was as if my parents—who’d been born in Ghana, educated in Ghana, then shipped off to England in their twenties for jobs that didn’t exist at home—had grown insecure in their heritage. When we first moved to the States, their habits and mannerisms had still been distinctly Other. Growing up, Tabatha and I had taken off our shoes before entering the house, folded our hands behind our backs when scolded, and were careful never to hand things to our elders from our left hands. But those habits were extinguished within a quarter of the time that it took for them to be ingrained in our parents in the first place. Even my parents’ accents had become something oddly inimitable, no longer the thundering brogue I used when describing to my friends what a Ghanaian accent sounded like, but something slightly English, slightly American, with a touch of a vague African something mostly audible in the r’s and t’s. The last time Momma went back to Tema and tried to haggle in Twi in the market, the seller accused her of being a foreigner and tried to charge her double. After that, our house was suddenly shrouded in red, gold, and greens, in adrinka symbols and carved ebony elephants. I was a bit surprised that Daddy hadn’t broken out the kente cloth for the occasion.
Daddy didn’t stand until Chris and Mr. Holmes stopped in the center of the living room. He regarded them with a cool smugness for a half second before languorously getting to his feet, moving with the syrupy slowness of a man who considered himself a great benefactor.
“Chris, good to see you!” he said, clapping him on the back with one hand. With the other, he reached for Mr. Holmes’s hand. “Oh, Greg, Chris was telling me you were coming into town. How was the trip?”
The niceties continued. Daddy asked after Chris’s mother, who unfortunately could not make it, and oohed and aahed over pictures of Mr. Holmes’s new BMW. When they settled into their chairs, Daddy shot me a look, reminding me to execute my duties as eldest daughter and serve our nice guests. I put on my most serene smile and asked them whether they would like anything to drink （orange juice for Mr. Holmes and water for Daddy and Chris）， any biscuits*—We have some good shortbread, you really have to try some—and shuffled to the kitchen to help prepare the arrangement. The presentation had to be perfect—biscuits arranged so that not a crumb fell out of place, glasses filled to three quarters height with just two cubes of ice in Daddy’s water, napkins folded into neat triangles, all balanced on a large silver serving tray. The first time Chris came over and my father sent me to the kitchen to prepare the tray, he had seemed uncomfortable being served. Now he barely acknowledged me before plucking a biscuit from the plate.