Black Gold of the Sun (13 page)

The wild spree of Horace de Graft Johnson – Escaping the past – Death and marriage on the Gold Coast – Great-uncle Nana Banyin – The two sons of Joseph de Graft – The Negro Prince of Prussia – The morality of slavery

After two days in Elmina, I rode by bus along the shore to Cape Coast to visit West de Graft Hall, the house where
my mother grew up along with eight brothers and sisters, and some thirty cousins, aunts, grandparents and other more remote relatives. A nineteenth-century flat-fronted town house that stands four storeys tall, it has sixteen rooms. Most of these housed an entire family, with the result that the place always thronged with adults chatting in the corridors, children playing riotous games in the back yard and groups of visitors in Kente cloth who'd hired the second-floor reception rooms for weddings and parties.

It was constructed in the 1890s by my mother's grandfather J. W. de Graft Johnson, who used the fortune he had made trading silk to build a house for each of his four wives. Wealth elevated J. W. into the company of Cape Coast aristocrats such as press magnate James Hutton Brew and the lawyer Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford, who thought of themselves as the country's natural rulers after the British – ‘the intelligent sons of the native soil'. His ascension to their ranks proved short-lived, however. While overseeing logging work on his lands in Assin Beraku in 1898, J. W. was knocked unconscious by a falling ebony tree. He died on his servants' shoulders as they carried him back to Cape Coast on a makeshift stretcher.

The obituary in the
Gold Coast Leader
described J. W. as a ‘man of fire and action who was all bustle, hustle and rustle'. After his death, though, his son Horace, a creature of fabulous indolence, became head of the household. On coming into his inheritance Horace took up a suite of rooms on the second floor of West de Graft Hall and devoted himself to the satiation of his many appetites.

Each morning at seven it was my mother's job to run to the United Africa Company store on the high street and buy a brace of Scottish kippers, which Horace would attack over a copy of the
Cape Coast Monitor
. After breakfast, draped in the woven cloth and gold sandals of a chief, he would be ‘available' to visitors. Shuffling up the stairs to his rooms would come a line of local petitioners, seeking help with their dilemmas of money and honour.

By night Horace shucked off respectability and surrendered to his baser pleasures. Drinking, gambling, roaring a wild spree through town, he acquired four wives and a couple of mistresses, lost lavishly at cards, gifted away houses on the promise of a kiss and, by the time of his death, managed to squander the whole of J. W. de Graft Johnson's considerable fortune.

All of this was to the great annoyance of Robert Newton, my mother's father, who was raising nine children on his government salary as an agricultural officer. Robert Newton: his paintbrush moustache and balding head; his high-waisted trousers and the sweet, musty scent of his pipe tobacco. He and my mother shared a love of books. In the evenings a young Adelaide would clamber into his lap and describe the unfolding events of her storybook in great and precise detail. In return he pulled a hardback from his shelves and revealed its dramas to her, so that by the time she started secondary school she knew as much about Prospero and Helen of Troy as she did the folk tales of Anansi. When her father was at work, she stretched out on one of the thick stone windowsills and found horses
and angels in the clouds, and imagined the house itself as a mutable place, a palace or an ocean liner bearing her to the azure horizon.

I'd visited the house once before, as a child. Most of the families had moved on by then. The upper floors were empty and sliding towards dilapidation. I arrived with my mother by bus from Accra. We walked to the house through Kotokuraba market.

‘Stay close to me,' she said, disappearing instantly into the crowd. I trailed after her, squeezing past the thighs of the market women and ducking the outstretched arms of the hawkers eager for a victim on whom to demonstrate the virtues of their patent curealls. The white haze of cooking fires drifted overhead, carrying with it the scent of seared goat meat.

I caught up with my mother and followed her up the rise of Coronation Street to where the house stood at the crest of the slope. We'd come to visit her parents, but as Robert Newton opened the door I was already trying to wriggle past him and go exploring. My mother shot me a warning look. I stayed put. Squirming beside her on the sofa I endured a minor lifetime of grown-up small talk before she allowed me to slip away. Leaving the adults behind I ran upstairs, their voices receding behind me as I climbed.

With no money for maintenance after Horace's free-spending years, the upper floors had been shut down. Amid the deserted rooms, I discovered a wall hung with portraits of J. W. de Graft Johnson and other family
members in stiff white collars. Some of the pictures were printed on china plates. The images had faded over time, so that, on one plate, only a pair of eyes was visible. The flared nostrils of another face peeked out of a gloaming as if their owner was drawing a last breath of life as the shadow realm beckoned.

Clambering into the attic with the help of a rickety ladder, I discovered a huge space apparently unoccupied since J. W.'s time. In the jumble of broken chairs and wornout rugs, the whole place swirling with dust, I found yellowed editions of the
Gold Coast Nation
and letters written in dense cursive script written on notepaper bearing J. W.'s personal crest, a tiger crouching. A catalogue advertising the sale of antique English shooting pistols lay on the floor, along with a children's atlas illustrated with drawings of angry-looking Russians in fur hats and smiling Negroes wearing loincloths.

I heard my mother calling from the floor below. I climbed down the stairs covered with dust and received a scolding. But as I see that scene again in my mind, I imagine myself staying up there for good. Beyond the attic dust falls like snow. Over millennia time sighs to a halt. Up in the attic I stay preserved at five years old for ever, just as the remnants of past lives have lain undisturbed for generations.

When I was twenty I used to say I couldn't remember my childhood. It was a surprisingly convincing lie. I even believed it myself.

With hindsight it's clear to me that it wasn't the facts of the past I was keen to avoid so much as their sensibility. I thought of the black-and-white minstrels and the kids at school tugging my hair. I heard my parents whispering about the coup and pictured Kodwo and me arguing in our comic-strewn bedroom. These things I recalled with a combination of shame and anger and regret. And at some point, I decided I'd rather forget about them altogether.

This is easily done when you are a student. On the day I started university at the London School of Economics, I waved goodbye to my parents, then, dragging a suitcase on its recalcitrant wheels to Kingsbury tube station, caught the underground to Russell Square. By the time I'd arrived at the Georgian terrace square in Bloomsbury where my hall of residence stood I was a different person.

Many students try to cut a dash through their first year with the help of an experimental haircut, a new-found political conviction or some other affectation. A wealthy Malaysian girl would arrive at LSE every day in full riding gear. Another kid, born in London to Middle Eastern parents, found himself on the front page of the
Sun
(‘Ban This Mad Mullah') after a series of fiery speeches at the student union. Everyone was changing their accent or
ditching the hometown sweetheart to whom they'd sworn everlasting fidelity. Everyone was looking for a new identity.

As for me, I favoured omission rather than reinvention. By shrugging off queries about where I'd grown up or gone to school, I realized that I could erase the past. Even the question that had dogged me all through life became unimportant.

‘Where you from, man?'

‘London.'

‘Cool.'

‘You heard the new Public Enemy album?'

The deadpanning of identity: it started as a conscious strategy and evolved into a habit. After a while I didn't notice what I was doing any more.

When I had left school I'd severed contact with every one of my old friends. With my parents move to Northampton during Christmas of the first term, there was nothing left to physically connect me to my childhood. Where was I from? London: that's all you needed to know. Not Kings-bury or Accra; neither English nor Fante. Now that we've cleared that up, let's talk about something that really matters. ‘How's that Public Enemy album?'

Congratulations were in order. By simply refusing to believe in its force, I believed I'd evaded history. The future stretched untroubled before me. That was the plan anyway, and for a while it seemed to be working.

Through a well-connected friend at LSE, I began hanging out at a grubby office in Camden. From there, some
of the capital's best club DJs, such as Norman Jay, Gilles Peterson, Jazzie B and Trevor Nelson, broadcast dance music every weekend as the pirate radio station Kiss FM. Having grown up with Kodwo's prog rock collection, the amount I knew about rare groove or New Jersey garage was minimal. Like LSE, though, Kiss struck me as a place of reinvention. Many of the DJs arrived at the station as small men, griping about money and girlfriends, and the other low blows life had struck them. Seat them behind a microphone, though, and their voices would deepen and their backs become straight. Beneficent to the listeners, wise in their selection of records, for the two hours of a show they were magisterial. Afterwards they packed up their records and slunk back into the straitened course of their existence.

I kept my mouth shut around them until I'd learned enough to talk with less than total ignorance about music. After a few months of loitering, they made me a reporter on a fifteen-minute weekend news show. I had a microphone and a tape recorder, and between lectures I'd go out and pester a visiting US rapper such as KRS One into giving me an interview. In my second year, Kiss closed down as a pirate to apply for a legal broadcasting licence. With the knowledge I'd gleaned from there I rang
The Face
magazine and began contributing small 200-word pieces about music and clubs.

Not without pride I regarded myself as a self-made man; an outsider turned initiate into the glamorous London of warehouse parties, white label 12s and evanescent fashion
trends. I'd snubbed history and triumphed. That was the plan, anyway. Later, I realized that by denying the past I risked making myself its prisoner. By then it was too late, though. I was already trapped.

In the same way that I'd left Hannah, I'd spent most of my life afraid to get too close to anyone. At LSE I told myself I was being cool. With Hannah I explained it as a matter of survival. Whatever the rationale, the end result was the same. I remained alone. Just as I'd fantasized in J. W. de Graft Johnson's attic, time had moved on while I'd stayed the same. Yet however much I denied them the memories of my childhood had not faded. They'd burrowed into my psyche. They'd come to control me – in my fear of intimacy; in the jealousy I felt towards Kodwo; in my sadness at the coup. Far from escaping the past, I walked with it every day.

The upper windows of West de Graft Hall had been boarded up in the years since my last visit. As I walked up Coronation Street towards the house I saw that the front door was chipped and weathered. I ducked round the side into the back yard. Three elderly women were crouched round a cooking fire preparing a saucepan of palm nut soup. There were still a few remaining tenant families occupying the ground floor of the house, but none of them was a direct relative. I waved at the women and carried on walking. They murmured after me in Fante, then turned their attention back to the saucepan. I opened the back door and let myself in. Ahead of me lay a passageway lined
with closed doors. I climbed a set of sagging stairs to the first floor, then the hall on the second floor that families used to hire for wedding receptions. The china-plate portraits that had hung there were gone. It was empty and dusty, the floorboards rotting and the walls peeled back to raw plaster.

I remembered a photograph my mother once showed me. It was shot in the yard behind the house. She and her brothers and sisters were gathered together before the camera; the youngsters in front included the twins, Peyin and Kakra, holding hands, eyes startled at the mystery of their aliveness. In the row behind stood my mother, a gamine twelve years old, regarding the camera with furious concentration. Robert Newton sat at their centre, a look of exhaustion and pride on his face.

I'd hoped to find an echo of those lives by returning to West de Graft Hall. I thought I might hear the ghosts of children running through the corridors or wedding parties dancing in the hall, but I saw now that it was just a deserted building. I traced a lattice of cracks along the wall with my finger until I found the place they coalesced to one point.

I'd spent my adult life running from my childhood. I shunned intimacy. I lived by myself and worked alone. Yet suppose it didn't have to be that way? What if the past wasn't a singular burden? What if home wasn't a place at all, but a nexus of histories? Perhaps it was more like the cracks on this wall as they came together to a single point? Something to be shared not suffered alone.

Stupid, really. Until then, I hadn't understood what
brought me to Ghana. Home was only part of it. There was something else as well, now that I thought about it. I was also searching for me.

I left West de Graft Hall and walked up through Cape Coast until I came to a nineteenth-century town house made of pale pink stone that stood on a hill overlooking the streets below. It was built by John Coleman de Graft Johnson, J. W.'s brother, and like West de Graft Hall it looked beaten down by time and weather.