Abruptly, Sheila signaled to the others it was time to go, and Nii had a bad feeling she wanted to get the other two away from him. Why? He put it down to prejudice. When they left him with an empty, “Nice meeting you,” he felt rejected and then angry. Reese gave him a glance back as they left, and he prayed she would text him when she had a moment alone.

He got home relatively early—just after midnight—and went to bed feeling annoyed and anxious. What was the next step to getting to sleep with a white girl and getting a snippet of her hair? To no avail, he checked his phone again for a text from Reese.

He slept until past ten in the morning, waking up to a phone alert. His heart leapt at the thought it might be Reese, but it wasn’t. Even better, it was Susan Hadley who was in town at the Golden Tulip Hotel and wanted to see him.

SIX

When Susan Hadley, PhD, had first visited Ghana, she had been a tenured physicist at Boston University. At the time, she was fifty-two, recently divorced, and disillusioned. The divorce had been brutal.

Susan needed a change of pace and environment—a radical one. So, she signed up for a two-year visiting professorship at the University of Ghana. She’d never stepped foot on the continent of Africa, so it was a culture shock—the kind of jolt she needed. Something as dissimilar to Boston as possible. She wanted to do a “mind cleanse,” the mental equivalent of juicing.

Among the things she learned to get used to in Ghana was being called “Mama”—even in public—by young Ghanaians she didn’t even know. It wasn’t an insult. It was a term of deference and often affection. True, it reminded her she wasn’t a spring chicken anymore, but she learned to roll with it. For one thing, her age commanded a lot more respect than it ever had at home, where “Ma’am” was sometimes used as a slight.

Susan was ready and willing for new experiences. The heat and humidity and all that black skin around her woke up something inside and the number of men she slept with surprised even her. But Nii Kwei was her prince. They met at one of those staff-student mixes. He was in his last year of poli sci and he was bright, eloquent, and funny. Sarcasm is not used as much in Ghanaian humor as it is in American, but Nii Kwei knew how to do it.

Susan was decades past romantic cat-and-mouse games and playing hard to get. The very night of the mixer, she cut to the chase and invited Nii Kwei to her on-campus bungalow where they had sex half the night. My God, he was good. Her multiple climaxes with him left her as limp as a dishrag. Her lectures the following day were a little uneven, but someone commented on how well she looked.

At first, she wasn’t wildly excited about Nii calling her “Mummy.” She felt weird about it and rolled her eyes. But for all his quirks, Nii was loyal and affectionate. He didn’t have much money, but he always brought her little gifts from the market or the mall. It was his smell that got her—earthy, yet fresh and essential.