Accra Noir Read online

  —They want you back on the force.

  —Is that what they told you?

  —We need strong officers. You know that. They want you back.

  —You are here to ask me to leave my perfect life to go back to that life?

  —I am.

  —I left because I knew after I did it that I was dangerous. I did not even breathe heavily. I found the cutlass, looked at the blade. Then I took his pillow and put it over his head. I climbed on the bed and put my knee on the pillow, and I was amazed at how few chops it took for the thing to fall away. He was jumping, and there was blood. So much blood. But I held him down until he stopped. People do not want to die. And yet, I just walked out of the room and back to the station, just slightly straining my muscles from the labor, but in no time, I was washed and at my desk. I gave the girl some money and told her to go back home. I was too cool. At first, I hoped it was shock. But I stayed cool. Even now, I feel the same way. And because I know I can do that . . .

  —Sometimes that is what it is like.

  —I don’t think so.

  —But we still want you back.

  —We?

  —Yes, the church.

  —Oh, Pastor, I believe I have backslidden too far.

  —It is never too late.

  —Ma, it is late, we should go now.

  —Yes, Kwaku, get the baskets.

  —I can give you a lift down to the junction.

  —You see that boy? That is why I have not tried to go back. The problem with the woman officer is that unless she can find a wife, her family will suffer. I do not have a wife. You have a wife, I know. You look satisfied. That night, while I sat there waiting for morning, I started to wonder where my boy was. He was sleeping, I thought. But I did not know for sure. We make these connections. I knew I could not continue. I did not want another officer to be slicing off another young man’s penis and wondering where his mother is. I did not even bother to wake him up . . .

  —Ah! There it is again. Look!

  —Yes, yes. Oh. It is very big tonight.

  —Look how the place is shining. My goodness.

  —It is beautiful.

  —It is.

  After “Advantage” by Colin Channer, from Providential (Akashic Books, 2015)

  Fantasia in Fans and Flat Screens

  by Kofi Blankson Ocansey

  Jamestown

  The joke about doors in Jamestown was that each carpenter measured differently. No two doors looked alike. Not only did the carpenters measure differently, they even built the doors wrong and would have to plane them down on-site to fit them in the frames. It was not uncommon to see doors whose lower edge slanted to accommodate the unevenness of the concrete floor.

  On the other hand, it meant that the rooms always had a draft. You could sort of catch some sleep after midnight when the day’s heat had finally dissipated and the cooling breezes blew in from the ocean.

  Naa stirred. Her dress had shifted in the night, bunched up around her thighs, and nestled within her considerable cleavage. The little beads of sweat that formed no matter what she did—turn the fan on or turn it off—had made a line that traced the seam of the garment. She breathed in the scent of her body, just awakened, before a shower and the daily application of powder and fragrances. It was a dark, heavy scent, particularly around her armpits. She felt the prick of stubble and sniffed at the coating of sweaty musk that had formed overnight.

  Her home was part of a series of “chamber and hall” apartments—two-room apartments consisting of a bed and a hall—that were a step up from the communal rooms that most of the residents of Jamestown shared. Everyone who lived in a compound house, for that’s what these arrangements were called, entered their dwellings from a communal yard, and most cooked their meals right in front of the doors leading to their halls.

  The chamber was the bedroom, the hall was the sitting room, where Naa received her guests. She could also have her meals there and basically afford to sit around with her blouse either undone or totally off, her bra cradling her breasts, her going-out clothes exchanged for something simpler and lighter. This casualness didn’t feel strange in the privacy of her home; once she stepped outside she could see many of her neighbors similarly partly uncovered. Men of all ages hung out bare-chested. Naa herself understood that this was not erotic. Not much could be read into accommodating oneself to the humid tropical climate.

  Overall, her life suited her, given the liberal outlook on coupling she grew up in and the indulgences she allowed herself from time to time. Well, really, more like those she lived in all the time. She was a frequent presence in the culture of heavy partying in Accra; those in the know took it for granted that on most weekends, at funerals, ironically, the after-parties could turn into combinations of impromptu partnerships.

  * * *

  It was the still of the night. Naa heard the sound of a man’s voice; it came from just outside her window, from the alley that led to yet another alley that led to the water’s edge. It was a familiar voice. In fact, it belonged to Nii Teiko, a man she knew well. His voice, as she knew it, was level, relaxed with a deep timbre. She was accustomed to listening to it in steady conversation. The voice she was hearing now was rushed, out of rhythm, wavering.

  The neighborhood’s streets and alleys were agnostic. The piety of children and matrons heading to church was cheerfully balanced by the evening traffic of the drunk, the pickpocket, the trick turner, the odd civil servant, or the errant lawyer persuaded to risk career and limb on some wild delight. The more fanciful of the people who thronged the streets this late in the day believed they were breathing some heady old scent from a time when white men, soaked in whiskey and gin, with their mottled skin and scurvy-blasted mouths, plied these grounds, avid participants in the trade of black humans destined for a damned existence in the land beyond the oceans.

  Naa heard the blows, gut punches in rapid succession. They were the sounds made by hard fists banging against yielding skin stretched over bone. A moment of sympathetic feeling had her believe the blows were landing on her. It made her cringe. Her entire being had entered into a heightened sense of alertness. This suddenly allowed her to make out what he was saying.

  “Kwɛ! Kwɛ!!” Look, look. “You are killing me,” the muffled groans came out. Nii Teiko was trying to draw out a measure of mercy.

  “Feemɔ diŋŋ.” Shut up. The response was severe and merciless, imposing an eerie silence.

  The second voice was also familiar to Naa. He was another man she knew, Nii Odoi. This made her even more chilled by its implacability. There was determination in the voice; its owner recognized that at this point the plan that was unfolding this evening had to be carried out. Not a scintilla of doubt could be entertained. He barked, “Kɛjeee nɔ ko kulɛ, wɔbaafo ogbɛi.” We’d cut your dick off if we could.

  Nii Teiko twisted and lunged against a wall, banging his head against a set of jalousies, slowing down the grimly resolute parade to the rocks. He knew he was in mortal danger. He had grown up in Jamestown. Death was no stranger here, it would leave a little memento mori in these alleyways from time to time. Once a year or so, some really stupid thief, perhaps too desperate to remember that one didn’t steal around here, would try his luck and end up stiff and glassy-eyed on a curb, waiting for the city authorities to cart him away to a mortuary. The police really didn’t bother to investigate these deaths.

  Nii Teiko could guess that if he were to die in the next few minutes, it would happen painfully. And he was correct. He was stabbed in the side, his face bashed in against the outcrop and his body thrown into the waters he had swum in as a child.

  Nii Teiko wasted his last lungfuls of air trying to summon help from the sleeping masses. He knew everyone behind each frame of paired windows, he was sure that they could hear his wails. Each cry for help was answered by a buffeting that turned his mouth into a bloody mess. Fifty yards past Naa’s window, Nii Teiko braced himself against the ground, uselessly trying to
protect his head. Instincts die hard, it seemed. He lifted his head and said, rather incongruously, given the sort of man he had been, “I will lift up my eyes unto the hills.”

  That prayer was punctuated with a heavy thwack, not unlike a bass drumbeat, a silencing blow and a determined, if nervous, rejoinder: “Onyɛ sɔɔ mli.” Your mother’s cunt.

  Nii Teiko was weakening, using the last reserves of his strength to tie up some of the loose-end thoughts that flitted across his consciousness. He looked Nii Odoi in the face and uttered his last coherent words: “Mibi oo kaaha ohiɛ kpa amɛ nɔ, ni Nyɔŋmɔ aakwɛ onɔ.” My children, don’t forget them, and may God keep you.

  “Fool, you are calling God. Even devils call God. Buuluu. Fool,” was Nii Odoi’s unshaken response.

  Naa shrank back from the window. Had it really come to this? She heard Nii Odoi’s tirades about injustice so often that she had considered them part of their evenings together. It often felt that he thrived on this wellspring of energy, and that when it possessed him fully, he had the necessary focus to really be with her.

  Naa’s mouth didn’t work. A gasp caught in her throat, she tried to push it out but couldn’t. Her lips were dry, instantly chapped. She had to brace herself against a wall; on it lay the lupine shadow of her arm, cast by the dim bulb hanging from her ceiling.

  Naa was trying to come to terms with the fact that she knew both men. The reasons why flooded over her. She couldn’t tease apart the strands of memory that tied the three of them together in playful scrapes, in the occasional very bitter divisions, but mostly in the wobbly tug and push of their overlapping lives.

  Nii Odoi had bought the fan. It came in a large white box that had the words Happy Life over the photograph of a smiling red-lipsticked Asian woman. Nii Odoi, after she’d let him in, had asked her to go into the chamber for a minute. She could hear him knocking about, requesting that something be placed just so and then politely ushering someone out. After a few seconds, the ceiling light went off. Sitting on her bed, Naa saw a peacock’s tail of multicolored lights pulse its way under the ill-fitting door that separated the chamber from the hall. The accompanying hum delivered with it a breeze that stirred up dust motes.

  When Nii Odoi finally opened the door, she thought he looked a little flushed, but he motioned her out and pointed in the direction of the noise and lights. When she saw the gift, her hands flew upward to cup her face. It was a standing fan, with several speeds and an illuminated middle section—three bulbs that rotated in a vertical plane. There was a button that changed the steady beam into a strobe; the effect of combining that with the highest fan speed was in itself a conversation piece. Certainly, sex that night with Nii Odoi was disorienting, but in a pleasant and enticing way, one that led to an experience that was out of the ordinary.

  The other man, Nii Teiko, destined in the by-and-by to be nothing but a liquefying mass of alcohol and putrefaction, had bought the medium-sized flat screen in Naa’s hall. Unlike Nii Odoi, Nii Teiko had sent his gift. There’d been a quick call to Naa to alert her that the present was on its way, but that was all. The little bit of propriety he allowed to guide his life suggested that a gentleman didn’t shame his family by being seen taking gifts to the homes of single women. That’s what he’d told himself, but in truth, there were probably too many single women in his life, and too little time.

  When it all came into focus for Naa, the moment she realized that she represented a point of a triangle once jocular and teasing, the savage procession had already passed her window, the fan and blank-faced TV bearing witness. She felt pressed down by a weight and couldn’t move her limbs. In her all-too-quiet room, now that the sound from outside had subsided, her stomach rose and fell in difficult contractions, her breath released in gales. She managed the four steps it took to walk into her bedroom, and saw the backlit image of the woman she had just become reflected in the mirror on the dressing table. She almost didn’t recognize herself, worn, frightened, looking more like her mother’s sister than she cared to admit. She couldn’t control the images of warmth and death that flickered on her retinas. Her right hand, thickened and made strong by work, curled into her left palm. She brought both of them to her stomach as she sat on her bed. Sleep would come no more that night.

  Naa spent the rest of the morning hours trapped in bed; her eyes were fixed on the wooden battens of the ceiling. In the middle of the panel directly above her head, a leak had produced a discolored map of a land that was often her secret refuge.

  She felt a strong pressure in her bladder but couldn’t move. Eventually, unable to hold it any longer, she started to dribble, signaling that the fear of this area that she’d lived in for most of her life was now total. She just didn’t know what might happen if her legs carried her past the bolted door into the courtyard, toward the toilet she shared with the three other families in the compound. After tonight, she knew that anything was possible.

  Naa had been in her fair share of fights over men. Wives here took it out on the other women, never on their men. Taking it out on a man would lead to questions about one’s mental stability. Philandering was what men did, after all. That was what it meant to be one. The fault lay with the ashao, the whore, who would spread her lagbaŋ for him. She was the one who had to be taught a lesson. And, sadly, Naa, who rather naively thought of herself as more of a courtesan than an ashao, got lumped in with the young girls, barely out of their teens, whose initiation into womanhood was to be the pliant, adoring booty call of any man who could drop fifty cedis on them.

  Naa knew that it wouldn’t take too long for the dots to be connected. Everyone would be talking about how she had been the friend of both men. Actually, she was the friend of a lot of men like them. She was a free woman. She had a little import business that her main lover had set her up with many years before, so she was financially independent. She lived alone; her divorce had happened so long ago that it would often take her a minute to remember the actual year. In Jamestown, women didn’t really live alone. A woman stayed home. That is, her bags stayed home. Her personal effects were to remain in the communal house she grew up in until she married and moved out. No single women rented rooms before they got married. It’s doubtful that any landlord or landlady would have even given a twenty-year-old with the rent in her hand a room. It would have been like saying that the red-light district had arrived.

  Naa was supposed to have gone back home after her husband had returned the drinks to her family, as dictated by custom and tradition, signifying the end of their marriage. The work of the lawyers, as dictated by government, always took a bit longer. Naa hadn’t gone back home because she knew how unforgiving the chatter would’ve been. “Akɛɛ, akɛɛ.” They say, they say. The famous opening lines of the rumor mill.

  “They say the man found her with another woman in their bedroom.”

  Eiiisshhh!

  “They say when he walked in, she was with two men; she had one of them in her mouth, the other was gyrating behind her.”

  Eissshhh, eissshhhh!

  “They say she was doing styles!”

  Eeeiiiiiiiiiisssssshhhhh—ooo eish!!!

  * * *

  The first light had yet to fully establish itself; the improvident had made their way to the beach to relieve themselves of the night’s production of excreta. You went early enough that the dawn afforded you a measure of privacy, and you were less likely to find the beach dotted with your neighbors’ leavings. These quiet ruminative mediations between man—and woman, let’s not forget our sisters—and nature that morning were overthrown by the strong, persistent buzzing of a horde of flying insects as they hovered above the rocks in a cruciform over the body of the dead man.

  Jamestown police were summoned from their barracks close to the white man’s cemetery. At a certain time, the Europeans who succumbed to malaria, and weren’t important enough to be pickled and potted for the return trip to Shropshire, were interred in this field, a cozy spot dotted with tombstones, crosses, ange
ls on pedestals, and a monument commemorating the valiant British lost in some campaign. It sat at a long diagonal from the famed lighthouse; it was on the outskirts of Jamestown, close to the Korle—the big lagoon . . . Eventually, though, as the town had grown toward the graveyard, some of these dead had been disinterred and reburied elsewhere; the rest were conveniently tarred over, awaiting, their discovery, perhaps, in some future archaeological dig.

  Nii Teiko’s corpse was still in the early stages of death, but as grotesque as it looked, with its swollen and split lips, the bruises around its throat, and the blood-encrusted slit on the left side of its rib cage, it still looked somewhat like the fixer he had been. The last time any of the early birds had seen him, he was most likely parading between the neighborhood where his All People’s Congress plywood offices had been, on the edge of the busy market, and Maŋtsɛ agbo naa (a Ga phrase rendered loosely, and incomprehensibly, in English, as “the outside of the King”), the huge park in front of the traditional ruler’s palace. It was between these two locations that the future of Jamestown, and maybe even Accra, had been decided for a long time, and it was where Nii Teiko plied his trade.

  The following week, the neighborhood continued to vibrate with the news of Nii Teiko’s death. He really had been a “big man” around there, and it unnerved many to think that such a person could be taken down.

  * * *

  Now that I am effectively in the ground, let me tell you what it was like to be on the ground, how it worked and why you needed me. This is where I was born. I knew every inch of the area. I knew everyone who lives in these buildings. I even knew their grandparents. I had to: they were my money. I was the person who got the politicians into office—I was never shy about saying that in life, and I’m certainly not shy about saying it now. I was the one who made sure that a grandmother could go to her final rest in a good coffin when her family couldn’t afford one. Between these two things, the town moves ahead.

  You might walk along these Jamestown streets and see nothing but poverty, but I saw progress. I still see progress. Progress is peace, I would tell my boys. Over and over again I would tell them that if we have peace you can achieve your dreams; we all can. I would say it so often it felt like I’d become possessed by “the voice” of the politicians. To get peace, you need the right member of Parliament to be elected. The right MP knows how to tap into the consolidated fund, how to get the right contractors on board. He knows how to make the right inspectors see double: all of a sudden that two-inch subsurface is a four-inch subsurface, a mile of that is half a million dollars that the right MP can do good with. Scholarships for children of loyal voters, a car for the Maŋtsɛ, a sickly child saved, a woman set up in trade. So what if some of it goes to the boys, or if some of it ends up in the right MP’s overseas account. So what? Here, we say everyone eats around their job.