Praise Song for the Butterflies. Bernice L. McFadden

      8

      The following week, Serafine talked Wasik into driving them to the Cape Coast of Ghana for an overnight stay. “It’s important that Didi visits the slave castle,” Serafine pushed when Wasik began to make excuses.

      They invited Grandmother, but she clucked her tongue. “What I want to go there for?”

      The normally three-hour drive took four and a half hours. A truck carrying diesel fuel had overturned, blocking traffic for miles. On top of that, it seemed to Wasik that all of the black Americans visiting Ghana had chosen that day to make the trip to the place that had made their descendants orphans in their own land.

      When he expressed this, followed by a smug laugh, Didi made a sound in her throat, admonishing him through clenched teeth that she didn’t think slavery was a joking matter.

      Wasik mumbled an apology and turned the volume up on the radio to conceal his humiliation.

      Abeo stared out the back window watching the chaos of Port Masi fade. The traffic eventually thinned and Wasik was able to accelerate, racing past burgundy hills, rows and rows of cotton and pineapple fields, savannas dotted with orange and cacao trees.

      Serafine closed her eyes and fell asleep. Abeo and Didi remained awake, chattering like excited sparrows.

      Halfway through their journey, Abeo lowered her window and waved at a line of children marching single file, singing and swinging their long dark arms. The kids smiled and waved back.

      The traffic came to a halt at the foot of a drawbridge that had been raised over a trickle of a river.

      Hawkers swarmed the still vehicles, peddling everything from food to jumper cables, baseball caps, and plastic shopping bags from high-end Western department stores. Wasik lowered the driver’s-side window and the Ghanaian heat rushed in, smothering the air-conditioned chill of the car. He summoned a girl barely older than Abeo, who was carrying a tray of one-man thousand—fingernail-sized fish—fried to a golden crisp.

      He purchased five bags and five bottles of water, which he distributed among his wife and the family.

      The drawbridge was lowered and the traffic ebbed forward.

      In no time, the scenery changed yet again. The roadside shanty shops, gargantuan anthills, and clusters of desiccated bush soon gave way to a sandy beach and a procession of coconut trees that were so tall, their palms seemed to brush the bottom of the sky. Beyond the trees were the cresting waves of the sapphire Atlantic Ocean.

      Wasik cut off the air conditioner and pressed the lever that magically lowered all four windows, instantly flooding the car with an aromatic mixture of banana and coconut.

      They’d reserved a modest four-bedroom, two-bath, split-level guesthouse a block from the beach. The structure had once been a gem, but was now slowly slipping into disrepair. The faucets leaked, the hardwood floors squeaked, and the mattresses were thin and stiff, but the location was beautiful—everywhere they turned offered a panoramic view of the sea.

      They had dinner at a small restaurant where the owner seated them at a table that looked out over the water. They enjoyed a sumptuous meal beneath an evening sky swimming with purple clouds.

      Serafine and Didi reminisced over bottles of wine, recounting their sordid adventures in New York.

      “Remember him? He was the one with the long . . .” Serafine raised her finger to her lips and nodded in Abeo’s direction.

      Didi winked. “A loooooong nose. He had a very, very long nose!” Serafine, Didi, and Ismae dissolved in girlish giggles.

      Wasik cleared his throat disapprovingly and lifted the sleeping Agwe from the high chair. “It’s getting late,” he grumbled, “I think we should head back to the house and put the children to bed.”

      Didi placed her hand over the check. “Let me take care of this.”

      “Oh no, we couldn’t,” Ismae wailed. “You are our guest and you’ve spent so much money on Abeo, taking her out and buying her gifts—”

      Didi raised her hand. “Please, you have been such gracious hosts. Opening your home to me, treating me like family. I am so very grateful. Please, let me do this one small thing.”

      Wasik’s shoulders slumped with relief. When Didi and Serafine first raised the idea of an overnight excursion to the coast, he had no clue Ismae would want to tag along. When she made her intentions known, Wasik didn’t feel he could ask her not to. Worse yet, he’d said: “Why don’t we make it a family affair? A minivacation of sorts. I could use a break from Port Masi.”

      Even as the words hung in the air, Wasik was regretting them. They were broke. Piss-poor, truth be told. Their savings account was empty and they were living off the kindness of his brother who was a successful gynecologist in London. But family or not, Wasik knew that this charity would soon come to an end.

      Ismae had no idea they were living on borrowed money, and Wasik would do everything he could to keep her in the dark.

      Ismae threw her arm over Didi’s shoulders. “How else are we supposed to treat you? Hospitality is the African way,” she laughed.

      “Thank you,” Wasik said, hoisting Agwe onto his shoulder. He gave Ismae an expectant look, but she diverted her eyes, so he turned his attention to Abeo. “Come on, young lady, I think it’s getting very close to your bedtime.”

      Abeo frowned, opened her mouth to protest, but closed it again when Wasik’s warm eyes turned to ice.

      “Well, we’re going to stay awhile. Maybe even have another bottle of wine,” Serafine chuckled as she turned over the empty bottle and watched a single scarlet droplet fall onto the green tablecloth.

      “I’m going to stay too,” Ismae announced in a small voice.

      Wasik rose from the table. “Okay, I’ll see you back at the house.”

      * * *

      The next day they got an early start. Wasik planned to drop the women at the castle and return for them later.

      “I’ll stay with the children, take them to the beach,” he said over breakfast.

      Abeo’s head bounced up. “I’m not going to the slave castle?”

      “No,” Wasik answered without looking up from his plate.

      Ismae wrinkled her nose. “But why, Wasik?”

      When he raised his head, all eyes were on him. He set his fork down. “I-I just think she’s too young for all of that . . . that . . .” He couldn’t seem to lasso the right word, so he repeated, “I just think she’s too young.”

      Abeo’s lower lip trembled with disappointment. Didi had told her so much about the Africans who were taken to America and turned into slaves, how important it was that she—that all of them—visit the place where it all began and ended for millions of men, women, and children.

      “Oh, Abeo,” Didi had sadly moaned, “you have no idea how many of your own ancestors, people who share your bloodline, were sold away from their lives.”

      Abeo hadn’t understood some of it—the bloodline and the idea that one person could own another—but even at her young age, Didi’s sentimentality