But instead what I heard was my mother’s name. And my embarrassment at my aunt’s loud gesture had as much to do with my understanding as it did with the man who had passed us by. I didn’t understand what my mother needed healing from. I was 11, and I could see that my mother wasn’t sick, not in the ways that I was used to.

Or maybe she was thinking about my mother, about the real reason I was stuck in Ghana that summer, sweating in a stall with an aunt I hardly knew while my mother healed at home in Alabama. Maybe she thought there were no crazy people in America, that I had never seen one before. In my three months there, we sold only four bags.Įven now, I don’t completely understand why my aunt singled the man out to me. My aunt nodded, satisfied, and we kept walking through the hordes of people gathered in the market until we reached the stall where we would spend the rest of the morning attempting to sell knockoff handbags. The man continued past us, mumbling to himself as he waved his hands about in gestures that only he could understand. “I see, I see,” I answered in a low hiss. My aunt was speaking loudly, and the man, tall with dust caked into his dreadlocks, was within earshot. “Look, a crazy person,” my aunt said in Twi. While there, I was walking through Kejetia Market with my aunt when she grabbed my arm and pointed. The first time, I was sent to Ghana to wait her out. For months on end, she colonized that bed like a virus, the first time when I was a child and then again when I was a graduate student. Whenever I think of my mother, I picture a queen-size bed with her lying in it, a practiced stillness filling the room. Editor’s Note: Read an interview with Yaa Gyasi about her writing process.

Yaagyasi