Angry, she kept walking. Her backpack straps were heavy against her shoulders, and she knew they would leave marks.
Marjorie was in Ghana visiting her grandmother, as she did every summer. Some time ago, the woman had moved to Cape Coast to be near the water. In Edweso, where she had lived before, everyone called her Crazy Woman, but in Cape Coast they knew her only as Old Lady. So old, they said, she could recite the entire history of Ghana from memory alone.
“Is that my child coming to me?” the woman asked. She was leaning on a cane made of curved wood, and her back mimicked that curve, rounding down so that the woman looked like she was in constant supplication. “Akwaaba. Akwaaba. Akwaaba,” she said.
“My Old Lady. I’ve missed you,” Marjorie said. She hugged her grandmother too forcefully and the woman yelped.
“Eh, have you come to break me?”
“Sorry, sorry.”
Old Lady called her house boy to take Marjorie’s bag, and slowly, gingerly, Marjorie pulled the straps from her aching shoulders.
Her grandmother saw her wince and asked, “Are you hurt?”
“It’s nothing.”
The response was a reflex. Whenever her father or grandmother asked her about pain, Marjorie would say she had never known it. As a young child, someone had told her that the scars her father wore on his face and her grandmother on her hands and feet were born of great pain. And because Marjorie had no scars that resembled those, she could never bring herself to complain of pain. Once, when she was just a little girl, she had watched a ringworm on her knee grow and grow and grow. She’d hidden it from her parents for nearly two weeks, until the worm overtook the curve where thigh met calf, making it difficult for her to bend. When she’d finally shown her parents, her mother had vomited, and her father had snatched her in his arms and rushed her to the emergency room. The orderly who came to call them back had been startled, not by the worm, but by her father’s scar. She’d asked if he was the one who needed help.
Looking at her grandmother’s hands now, it was almost impossible to distinguish scarred from wrinkled skin. The whole landscape of the woman’s body had transformed into a ruin; the young woman had been toppled, leaving this.
They took a cab back to Old Lady’s house. Marjorie’s grandmother lived in a big, open bungalow on the beach, like the kind the few white people who lived in town had. When Marjorie was in third grade, her father and mother had left Alabama and returned to Ghana in order to help Old Lady build it. They stayed for many months, leaving Marjorie in the care of a friend of theirs. When summer came and Marjorie was finally able to go visit them, she fell in love with the beautiful house with no doors. It was five times the size of her family’s tiny apartment in Huntsville, and its front yard was the beach, not a sad slab of dying grass like the yard she had always known. She spent that whole summer wondering how her parents could leave a place like this.
“Have you been good, my own child?” Old Lady asked, handing Marjorie some of the chocolate she kept in the kitchen. Marjorie had a sweet tooth reserved for chocolate. Her mother often joked that Marjorie must have been birthed from a cocoa nut, split open and wide.
Marjorie nodded, accepting the treat. “Are we going to the water today?” she asked, her mouth full, the chocolate melting.
“Speak Twi,” her grandmother answered sharply, knocking Marjorie on the back of her head.
“Sorry,” Marjorie mumbled. At home in Huntsville, her parents spoke to her in Twi and she answered them in English. They had done this since the day Marjorie had brought a note home from her kindergarten teacher. The note read:
Marjorie does not volunteer to answer questions. She rarely speaks. Does she know English? If she doesn’t, you should consider English as a Second Language classes. Or perhaps Marjorie would benefit from special care? We have great Special Ed classes here.
Her parents were livid. Her father read the note aloud four times, shouting, “What does this foolish woman know?” after each repetition, but from then on they had quizzed Marjorie on her English every night. When she tried to answer their questions in Twi, they would say, “Speak English,” until now it was the first language that popped into her head. She had to remind herself that her grandmother required the opposite.
“Yes, we will go to the water now. Put away your things.”
Going to the beach with Old Lady was one of Marjorie’s favorite things in the world to do. Her grandmother was not like other grandmothers. At night, Old Lady spoke in her sleep. Sometimes she fought; sometimes she paced the room. Marjorie had heard the stories about the burns her grandmother carried on her hands and feet, about the one on her father’s face. She knew why the Edweso people had called her Crazy Woman, but to her, her grandmother had never been crazy. Old Lady dreamed dreams and saw visions.
They walked to the beach. Old Lady moved so slowly, it was like she wasn’t moving at all. Neither of them wore shoes, and when they got to the edge of the sand, they waited for the water to come up and lick the spaces between their toes, clean the sand that was hidden there. Marjorie watched as her grandmother closed her eyes, and she waited patiently for the old woman to speak. It was what they had come for, what they always came for.
“Are you wearing the stone?” her grandmother asked.
Instinctively, Marjorie raised her hand to the necklace. Her father had given it to her only a year before, saying that she was finally old enough to care for it. It had belonged to Old Lady and to Abena before her, and to James, and Quey, and Effia the Beauty before that. It had begun with Maame, the woman who had set a great fire. Her father had told her that the necklace was a part of their family history and she was to never take it off, never give it away. Now it reflected the ocean water before them, gold waves shimmering in the black stone.
“Yes, Old Lady,” she said.
Her grandmother took her hand and once more they fell silent. “You are in this water,” she finally said.
Marjorie nodded her head soberly. The day she was born, thirteen years ago, all the way across the Atlantic, her parents had mailed her umbilical cord to Old Lady so that the woman could put it into the ocean. It was Old Lady’s only request, that if her son and daughter-in-law, both old themselves by the time they decided to get married and move to America, ever had a child they would send something of that child back to Ghana.
“Our family began here, in Cape Coast,” Old Lady said. She pointed to the Cape Coast Castle. “In my dreams I kept seeing this castle, but I did not know why. One day, I came to these waters and I could feel the spirits of our ancestors calling to me. Some were free, and they spoke to me from the sand, but some others were trapped deep, deep, deep in the water so that I had to wade out to hear their voices. I waded out so far, the water almost took me down to meet those spirits that were trapped so deep in the sea that they would never be free. When they were living they had not known where they came from, and so dead, they did not know how to get to dry land. I put you in here so that if your spirit ever wandered, you would know where home was.”
Marjorie nodded as her grandmother took her hand and walked her farther and farther out into the water. It was their summer ritual, her grandmother reminding her how to come home.
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