42 years ago, my mother walked out on my father with his best friend. The day she packed her things and walked out of our house, my father said, “You will not walk far, you won’t walk long.
” This weekend I oversaw my mother’s funeral.
She had been crippled for 41 years. When the constant quarrels started I was about 15 years old.
My father’s work took him away a lot and I thought Uncle Ofei was just being helpful to me and my mother in my father’s absence.
It wasn’t until the quarrels came to head, and my mother packed her things into uncle Ofei’s waiting car did I understand the man I called uncle had been lurking around to steal my mother.
If you haven’t figured it out yet, my mother had an affair my father’s best friend, who was an ‘uncle’ to me, while my father on the road, working to make a life for us. She eventually left us for him and on the day she walked out, my father cursed her; “You will not walk far, you won’t walk long.
” My grandmother moved in with my father and I to help raise me.
I hardly ever saw my mother. Barely a year after they rode into the sunset, my mother had a car accident, the story is that everyone in the bus came away unscathed, my mother broke both her legs in the knee joints.
She underwent surgery in both legs and spent months at the hospital.
While at the hospital, her lover, Uncle Ofei was her primary companion, and the story goes that he caught pneumonia from the hospital, suffered complications and passed away while my mother was still on admission at the hospital.
My mother was released from the hospital in September 1982, I remember because it was a day before my birthday and my father had permitted me to go with my aunt to take her home. She never walked again, up to this past weekend when we put her in a casket.
It was both sad and funny at the funeral, because as far as my maternal family is concerned my father is a grand wizard. He cursed their princess with his dark powers.
My aunt’s dirge at the funeral was, “Kwame Oware Wassani bayifuo eeei, enam no na ɛda hɔ no o bɛfa kɔwe.
Iiiihihihihihihi (blows her nose)“ (Translates: Kwame Oware wizard of Wassa tribe, there is meat in the coffin come eat.
) Kwame Oware is my father’s name. When my paternal aunts who accompanied me to the funeral had had enough, they started their own insinuations by indirectly calling my late mother an adulterer while pretending to cry: “Maame Oye ɔbaapa!
Ɔbaa a naware mpa so fitaaa, nante yie! Iiiiihihihihihihi.
(Blow their nose)” (Translation: Maame Oye virtuous woman, whose marital bed was unsullied, walk well.
)
We all knew unsullied did not begin to describe what was my mother’s marital bed with my father. It was sullied, literally and figuratively.
Uncle used to spend the night in my father’s absence sometimes. In the end I had to send my paternal aunts away from the funeral grounds.
It was about to get physical.
After the funeral I visited my aged father, he’s almost 80, still healthy, walks, drives and can see without eye glasses.
He is living well with his wife of about 30 years. I wanted to ask him one more time if he’d indeed done anything to my mother spiritually as her family claims.
We’d had that conversation before, my father and I. And he’s told me he never did anything apart from say the words he said the day she left.
But when you hear people say something with such conviction, it’s hard not to have doubt.
So I asked him again.
He looked me in the eye and said, “I would take my words back if I could. After that incident with what I said and what happened to your mother, I have guarded my words.
What I said worked because it came from a pure, pained heart. ”
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