When she was in pain, her lips puckered like a purse drawn tight. Her wrinkles became more pronounced, dark lines in pale skin, etching on porcelain. I often looked out the window on a view of a bare tree, roots buried under the asphalt of the parking lot.
While she was ill, I asked about Francis Aggrey only once. She grew agitated when I said his name.
“I was all the family you needed. Didn’t I feed you and clothe you and love you? What else did you want?”
She tried to sit up and I eased her back down.
“I was just trying to make conversation,” I said.
The doctor said my mother’s personality might change as the tumor grew. I wondered whether her character had changed or merely revealed itself.
Towards the end, I moved her from the hospital to my guest bedroom.
“Where’s Robert?” she would ask most mornings. I told her but she always forgot.
I learned how to sponge her clean and check for bedsores, to feed her and wipe her chin, to ask before I did any of these things because she was an adult. She died on a May morning, Rose and I by the headboard, my husband, Robert, briefly reinstated at the foot.
Perhaps there would be something in Francis Aggrey’s diary about how he met my mother. She was often timid, unsure, almost fearful. From what I’d read so far, they didn’t seem an obvious match. I opened to where I had stopped.
I have joined a union for African students. I came to England to bowl with the English, and dance around their Maypoles, but the English will not have me. Not for tea. Not for scones. I attended my first meeting today. It is all young Africans like myself in worn shoes, and carefully brushed suits and big talk about politics. Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya have their independence. South Africa and Rhodesia must soon follow. Ghana has left the sterling standard and rightly so. Nigeria should align with the Communists. I sat in a corner and listened. They have had big men come out of this students’ union: a president in Central Africa, I have heard, although you could not tell it from the building. Crumbling walls and damp. “Where are you from?” a Rhodesian called Thomas Phiri asked when I got up to leave.
“Diamond Coast,” I said.
“That’s a slave name. Named for what they stole from us.”
It’s the only one I know.
In the photograph, Francis looked young, not far from Rose’s twenty-five. As I read his diary, my feelings were almost maternal. I was eager for my father to settle down, to make friends in his new playground, to stop feeling so rootless. I hoped this Thomas would be a good influence.
I have seen Thomas Phiri again. He is not so bad the second time around, a bit forward, but London does one of two things to a black man: cows him or turns him into a radical, which is what I think Thomas is. Compared to myself, at least. In the Diamond Coast, the politicians say we are too small for independence, that Ghana or Nigeria will try to swallow us up if we cut ourselves off from the British Empire. Nkrumah talks of a United States of Africa, but who will be the head of this United States? Not tiny D.C. Thomas does not agree with these arguments, which are not necessarily mine, but which I offer to counter his strong opinions.
The next page detailed Francis’s run-in with his landlady and her son. First, the mother complained about the noise, and then the son came to put the unruly black tenant in his place, or that was how Francis saw it.
I knew well the hours of agonizing that could follow such an incident. A woman crossing the road to avoid you. A shopkeeper who did not notice that you were next in line. Was that racist? Was it not?
My mother mostly erred on the side of not. People were rude, people were ignorant, but only racist if they called you an ape outright.
I have had the flu. Two days in my room with no one to attend to me, eating bread and water and feeling sorry for myself. I am my mother’s only child. I am used to being made much of when I am sick.
My mother never went to work when I was sick. She would sit by my bed and hold my hand, even when I was asleep. It was one of my earliest memories, waking up and feeling her hand in the dark.
Thomas has invited me for a meeting of the British Communist Party. I don’t think I will go. It is illegal to be a Communist in the Diamond Coast, and while a meeting in Russell Square may not get one arrested, it is sure to come to the notice of the government authorities in London that are rumored to keep an eye on foreign students.
Francis Aggrey was cautious like me. I’d always avoided large groups of people swimming in the same direction with one mind. I could never agree with all the tenets of a movement and so I could not join, but merely sympathize with feminists, with socialists, with Christians, with atheists, with vegans.