Somebody's Heart Is Burning by Tanya Shaffer Page B

many more women than men in Afranguah that I’d scarcely registered it. Most of the young men had migrated to the cities, looking for work, while the women stayed in the village, farming and caring for the children and a few elderly parents. While the women carried water, pounded
fufu
, nursed babies, and bent over the millet stalks in the fields outside of town, the few remaining men (with the exception of Amoah, the schoolteacher) spent their days hanging around the bar, drinking
apeteshi—
or so it appeared to me. I was struck now, not for the first time, by how little I knew about the people I considered friends.

    When I stepped outside Billy Akwah Graham’s house the next morning, Minessi was waiting for me. She was wrapped from head to toe in beautiful printed cloth. The cloth was bright orange and stiff, as though just purchased for a festival. Yao was strapped to her back, asleep. I leaned close and kissed his soft cheek, listening to the low uneven motor of his breath.
    The walk from Afranguah to Saltpond Junction, where we could catch a
tro-tro
to the midsized town of Saltpond, took about forty-five minutes. The heat of the day hadn’t settled in yet, and I enjoyed the cool silence as we headed down the dirt path through the luxurious greenery. I asked Minessi where she’d learned English, but she didn’t seem to understand the question, answering only “yes.” I asked her if she wanted more children.
    “No!” she said firmly. “Finished. Four children. Enough.”
    “Four children? I thought you had only Yao!” I looked at her closely, wondering how old she was. Her queenly bearing made her seem older, but looking at her dewy, unlined face I guessed that she was in her early twenties.
    “Three girls!” she laughed. “They stay with my sistah. Cape Coast.”
    “What are they doing there?”
    “School. Her husband, he is guide. At the monument.”
    The “monument” in Cape Coast was a fort, built in the sixteenth century, that was later used as a base for the slave trade. Tourists came from all over the world to bear witness to that grim piece of history, following the guides through the waist-high dungeons where African men, women, and children once lay shackled in darkness, waiting to be shipped overseas. All that foreign income probably provided Cape Coast with better-equipped schools than those in Afranguah, which had neither paper nor pencils nor books.
    “You must miss your girls a lot,” I said.
    “I will go to them. I want to learn.” She touched her hair and gestured: twisting, braiding, arranging; her long, tapered fingers moving nimbly through the air.
    “You want to be a hairdresser!” I cried, absurdly delighted by this small confidence. For all the laughter we’d shared, Minessi had a kind of detachment, an underlying reserve that I’d never been able to penetrate.
    She nodded. “Then I go to live in Cape Coast, too.”
    At Saltpond Junction we waited for two hours while the
tro-tro
accumulated passengers. While I wandered around outside with Yao in my arms, Minessi preferred to sit in the sweltering vehicle, holding our places. She leaned her head against a window, gazing out.
    None of the windows opened, which made the ride to Saltpond a kind of low-grade torture that gathered intensity as the trip progressed. I kept my head down and breathed deeply, trying to ignore the sensation that I was a cauliflower trapped in a steamer. It was past noon by the time we arrived, and the whole town was wilting in the midday sun. We walked to the hospital, the sultry air dragging at our limbs. Yao, strapped to Minessi’s back, groaned in his sleep like an achy old man.
    The hospital was a modern cement building with bare, scrubbed hallways. A few people waited in the entryway. It was nothing like the hospital in Accra, with its outdoor courtyard crowded with patients from morning till night. Perhaps the people in this region, accustomed to traditional methods of healing, were suspicious