There were pleasure boats painted in primary colors stacked under a shed, the colors of boiled sweets. Kofi took off his shoes, rolled up his trousers, and began to drag one to the water. I left my shoes on the shore and joined him, pushing from behind, wading knee-deep into the lake. The water was cold and clear. I could see my feet distort as light passed from air to water. My toes looked like bleached slugs.
Kofi held the boat steady while I climbed in. The bottom was littered with dead leaves and shriveled insects. The oars were old and starting to splinter. We sat facing each other, our knees a few inches apart. He took the first turn with clean strokes. The blades dipped and rose with almost no splash.
“So is our modest city of Gbadolite to your liking?”
“It’s unusual. Very different from the village,” I said.
“The villagers wouldn’t want to live in a place like this. They have a very separate conception of the world. One must respect that.”
“What are your other children like?”
“Afua, who you have met, is a judge. Kwabena is in the UN—peaceful, diplomatic, as befits his job. Benita, named for my wife’s mother, is the youngest, an artist of some sort. I don’t understand the work myself but her art is popular in Sweden. Kweku works in an oil company.”
“What would you have named me?”
“If I had been there at your birth?”
“Yes.”
“I would have called you Nana. It means ‘Queen.’”
The air over the lake was still. The noise of our rowing was the only sound. Two crescents of sweat darkened the armpits of his shirt.
“Would you like a turn?”
“Yes, please.”
The oars were heavy. My strokes fell at an angle that met the most resistance. The boat moved off course, away from the line Kofi had set. I had never been so close to Kofi’s face. I had his nose. I had the strong jaw that was too wide for a woman, an artist once told me. Kofi had shaved that morning but his chin was already sprouting silver.
“Don’t fight the water, Anna. Relax your shoulders. Use your arms. That’s better.”
I could feel the drag of the oars in my stomach and thighs. I drew in air through my mouth, in audible breaths.
“I have been thinking about what we spoke of in Segu,” Kofi said. “I want you to know that immediately after my mother’s funeral I did consider returning to England to complete my degree and, of course, marry your mother. What stopped me was the thought of our children. If I raised them in England they would be completely lost. Like you described.”
“I wasn’t completely lost.”
I was suddenly protective of my mother. There had been no one to teach her how to raise a black child. She had done her best. She had dared to keep me where others gave up.
“Well, I wanted all my children to be raised here,” he said.
“She could have moved.”
“How could I bring a European woman to my family home in 1969? To an outdoor kitchen. Food bought from an open-air market.”
“You could have done the cooking.”
“Well, yes. I didn’t think of that. I was quite a conventional young man.”
He laughed and showed the open cave of his mouth, his pink tongue scraped clean.
“Yes,” he said. “I suppose I could have gone to the market and done the cooking, and everyone would say a white woman had bewitched me.”
“She was very beautiful.”
“Yes, she was. Eyes like the Atlantic at noon.”
He had read Francis Aggrey’s diary as closely as I had. Like me, he had gone through its pages and picked out favorite phrases.
“What would I have known if I had been born here?”
“That the world was made in four days, not seven. Abbana made land on the first day. Animals on the second. Birds on the third. When he saw the beauty of his creation, he wept on the fourth day and his tears made the ocean. Abbana means Father. We had a revelation of a loving God long before the missionaries came. In fact, their version was rather harsh.”
His voice had a soothing cadence, modulated for storytelling. He would have been good at bedtime.
“What else would I have known?” I asked.
“There are initiation ceremonies for girls. At thirteen you would have been inducted into womanhood.”
“That seems young.”
“People lived shorter life spans in the old days. My daughters took part in the ceremonies. As a man, I am not privy to the exact details, but it is mostly symbolic. They went back to school at the end, not to a husband’s house.”