I couldn’t imagine sleeping with Ken now, climbing up to his room, clear-eyed and calm-headed, asking if he had a condom before I took off my clothes.
When I was dry and dressed, I brought out Francis Aggrey’s diary from the safe to remind myself why I was here. I chose an entry at random.
I have had Sunday lunch with the Bains. I am billed for lodging alone, but Mr. Bain didn’t begrudge me a few gratis slices of roast beef and potatoes. They are a close family. There was much discussion as the food was passed around. Bronwen cooked the meal, although Caryl said it was her recipe.
“Older sisters take credit for everything,” Bronwen said, looking me in the face and smiling, confident with her family around her. Mr. Bain is fond of his daughters. A Segu man would feel cheated if he had no sons, but the Welsh do not seem to mind.
At breakfast the next morning, I saw Ken sitting on his own. I returned his smile but found an empty table. I remembered the film How Stella Got Her Groove Back: a beach holiday, a middle-aged black woman, and a young Jamaican lover who looked nothing like Ken. I snorted into my cup of tea.
After breakfast, I went to the hotel bureau de change and exchanged two hundred pounds for twenty thousand Bamanaian cowries. My father’s face was on the fifty-and hundred-cowrie notes. In one image, he faced the artist with a gentle expression. In the other, he was drawn in profile, his nose almost aquiline, more Roman than it looked in real life.
I did not need anyone to show me around. I was in my father’s country. I took a taxi to Oxford Street Market, which was listed in all the online tourist guides. This Oxford Street was more alive than the one in London. Stalls lined the road on both sides, stretching as far as the eye could see. Shirts, dresses, and skirts lined racks that rose into the sky, dancing on hangers, moving like flags in the breeze.
“Obroni!”
A man approached with a tray of sunglasses.
“Obroni, you need sunglass?”
“I’m not an obroni,” I said, and walked into the market.
I paused to study the prints. I wished I had brought my sketchbook. Some were geometric: hexagons and octagons, intersecting in a dizzying manner. On others, a single motif was repeated: a fan, a lampshade, a crown. What did it mean? And the colors. Four colors on a fabric, or six, or nine. I held a few against my arm. They were made for a richer, darker hue than mine.
Everywhere I turned, I was reminded of my relative paleness. Sellers called out to me, “Obroni, obroni, obroni, come and see.” I was as conspicuous here as I had been in my childhood.
I bought a dress, a quiet print with only three colors—blue and orange circles on a black background. I wandered until I chanced on an open-air salon.
“Obroni, you wan’ make your hair?” the hairdresser asked. She was young and heavily pregnant.
“Okay,” I said. “But not braids.”
“Which style you want?”
“Corn rows.”
“Sit down. I’ll make it fine for you.”
She sat on a high stool while I sat on the lower. Her touch was gentle when she undid my hair from its bun.
“Your hair is very thick. And long. And soft. Me, I like half-caste hair. If my baby can have hair like this, I will be so happy.”
There was something in her tone that made “half-caste” almost seem a compliment. She rested my head against her thigh. She was warm, like a pebble left in the sun. She smelled of fish and smoke. Her wooden comb slid down my scalp, dividing my hair into sections. Halfway through each track, she bent forward and I felt her breath on my neck.
My mother was afraid of my hair. When she washed it, it would knot. When she brushed it, it would shed. I bit her once, after a bristle snagged on a knot and she kept pulling. Aunt Caryl read somewhere that oil was good for black hair and so, for a month, my hair was doused with vegetable oil in the mornings. There was no improvement, except that I left smears of oil on every surface I leaned against.
Some hawkers paused with their wares.
“Obroni, biscuit?”
“Obroni, lipstick?”
“Obroni, chewing gum?”
They stared openly at the curious specimen in front of them. I remembered those stares from walking down the street with my grandfather. A neighbor used to say, “There goes the Welshman and his coon.” There was no shade for me anywhere. Not here. Not in England. I began to feel faint.
“Are you almost done?” I asked.
A few moments later, she gave me a hand mirror. My face was exposed, every single hair scraped back. My eyes looked larger, my forehead wider. She’d wound gold thread through each corn row, like seams of ore.