What started as an annual means of escaping winter may have morphed into a permanent escape from racist America.
On the morning I drove my mother to the airport for the last time, I woke up frustrated at the fact that she was repacking. Hadn’t she spent a good part of the past week packing? Wasn’t this the same four-month visit to Ghana she had made just about every winter since my father passed away? What could possibly be so urgent and unexpected that it caused her to repack her large suitcase just hours before we were set to leave? Tea. It was mostly tea.
I knew Mom liked to get to places early. I also anticipated a busy airport, since it was the start of the Thanksgiving holiday week in the United States. I was therefore surprised when she suggested we stop by my brother’s house to say goodbye. Ten minutes out of our way, the detour—getting there, saying goodbye to everyone, and getting back to the highway—would likely cost us an hour. Mom wasn’t really sentimental like that. Seeing her middle child wasn’t a big deal. She’d be back. Or so I thought.
But we went. She got to say goodbye to three of her five grandchildren. I rushed her out a little bit, expecting a crowded airport. Back on the road.
“These recent, demonstrated rises in U.S. nativism, populism, and patriotic vitriol, place anyone marked as ‘other’ in potential danger. But how different is this from the Massachusetts my mother immigrated to in the 1970s, when, following our visit to my aunt’s house in the predominantly white suburbs of Boston, my cousins were hassled by other kids at the bus stop?”
At the airport, things were surprisingly quiet. The woman at the check-in counter made a comment about how light Mom’s suitcase was. “It’s mostly tea,” I explained, as we started for the security line where I hugged her and said goodbye.
Sixteen weeks later, my mother would call me on a Sunday afternoon, stating plainly and unemotionally that she was not returning to the United States. This surprised me, at least a bit. I knew her plan was to eventually move back to Ghana—specifically Kumasi, where, after years of tirelessly working in the U.S., she had finally purchased a house. I knew that traveling back and forth for her annual escapes from the New England winter was getting harder. But any permanent move was still a few years off—or so I thought.
By the time she told me, I had already purchased a plane ticket to fly from my home in Virginia to her (former) home in Massachusetts, where my plan included opening up the house, greeting her at the airport, driving her home, and staying around for an extra day or two while she got resettled.
Would I be reimbursed for the unused part of her roundtrip ticket? And what about the house, phone-lines, bank accounts, mail, and her car? So many loose threads of a life, left for her children to handle. In retrospect, we should have been more prepared. We knew this day was coming. Looking back on it three years later, her decision to stay was almost inevitable.
* * *
When my mother first arrived in Western Massachusetts, with two kids in tow and a third left behind in Ghana, my father expected her to take one look at his mountaintop home and go back to Kumasi. She stayed because, as she often explained, “it looked like a good place to raise children.” This simple statement helped her evade more complicated discussions of the challenges involved with making a life for herself and her children in the United States.
Mom was born and raised in the small town of Duayaw Nkwanta, in what was then the Asante region of the Gold Coast colony of Britain. By her teenage years, Ghana had achieved independence (1957), and she had moved to the nation’s second largest city. Nevertheless, Mom always took pride in saying she was from “a village,” referencing both the place in Ghana where she drew her first breath and the place in the U.S. where she reunited with her white American husband after he lost his position working in Ghana’s National Cultural Centre.
During those first few years in Massachusetts, Mom was almost completely dependent on my father. Our family home was two miles outside the village of Shelburne Falls. Initially, Mom didn’t drive. Thus, from an early age, she regularly led my brother and me on the four-mile walk to and from town. We knew every stretch of the road intimately—where the nice dogs lived, as well as the ones that were prone to biting.
The process of getting her license, for me, remains a series of snapshot childhood memories. My father taking us to Greenfield (the county seat) on Friday nights, so she could attend driving school. A kind neighbor giving her personal driving lessons, which resulted in multiple head-on collisions with trees and telephone poles. By the third crash, my brother and I could see these collisions coming from the back seat, and learned to brace ourselves. Her first car: a green Volkswagen Beetle that barely lasted a week. She made the mistake of buying a standard instead of an automatic.
Mom never grew comfortable driving. She typically drove about ten miles below the speed limit—something she was periodically pulled over for. The farthest she ever drove from our home was thirty-five miles to Amherst. In those final years, she mostly drove to the village and back. Still, it would have been impossible for her to live alone on a mountain top without a vehicle.
This almost happened once, when a state police officer, during a periodic slow-driving traffic stop, questioned her vision and raised concerns about her ability to drive. Local doctors rallied to testify in support of Mom’s eye sight, and my brother, who lived an hour away, took her to several appointments and court appearances. Another time, the town chief of police approached me at a holiday party inquiring about how long she should continue driving. A few years later, he apologized, explaining “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
* * *
When my father and mother first met, she was a nutritionist working for the Ghanaian government. In the U.S., she would work primarily as a Certified Nurse’s Assistant (CNA) in local nursing homes. This career in entry-level healthcare was essentially a demotion for someone who had skipped a grade in elementary school and who, as a schoolgirl, had figured out a means of funding her younger brother’s education. Still, I take great pride in knowing that my mother had taken care of many of our town’s people in their final years. When local doctors, lawyers, and town officials went to visit their aging parents, Mom was usually there to greet them. It was hard and often dirty working on the frontlines of death. She also had to endure racist-laden verbal abuse from some of the residents she cared for. Still, in its own way, the position made her a pillar of the community.
Mom worked every holiday. I cannot tell you how many times I drove her to work at 6:00AM on Christmas morning, New Years morning, Thanksgiving morning, or the Fourth of July. She was almost always willing to take on an extra shift when one of her co-workers called in sick. On several occasions—back when she was still spending winters in the U.S.—the owner of the nursing home would drive his truck through a snowstorm, up the mountain, to pick her up and take her in for her shift.
In the early 1990s, Mom decided to go back to school, pursuing her associate’s degree at the local community college. While working fulltime, she attended classes, made cassette recordings of every lecture, and studied profusely. “I have never seen anyone work so hard for anything in my life,” my father once said to me. She got her degree. We had a nice celebration. But when a position for a director of recreation opened up in the nursing home where she worked—a position her degree had qualified her for—they opted for someone else.
Mom’s greatest community by far was in the Catholic Church. Just about any day she wasn’t working, she was in church. In later years, while visiting, I would often drop her off at morning mass and go to the local coffee shop to check my email (we don’t have internet on the mountain). Sometimes she would report as few as three to five people attending the weekday service. Now that she’s in Ghana, I assume it’s two to four.
For many years, the church wouldn’t allow Mom to take Communion—something about her not having gone through the proper channels. In the years before she decided not to return from Ghana, she not only took Communion, but also assisted the Priest in giving it. My computer tells me that this position is referred to as an Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion (or EMHC). To me, that sounds more impressive than a CNA.
* * *
There’s a letter posted on my office door, from U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy to my mother expressing his “sincere congratulations on the occasion of [her] naturalization as a United States Citizen.” The letter is dated October 16th, 1978. This also happens to be the day the Roman Catholic Church elected Pope John Paul II.
A few weeks prior, a story appeared in our local newspaper discussing the process through which citizens became naturalized: “applicants must read, write, speak and understand simple words and phrases in the English language, demonstrate the acquisition of good moral character, be attached to the principles of the Constitution and be disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States.”[1] There’s a photo accompanying the article of my mother, my brother, and me, “studying” the list of U.S. presidents for her naturalization test. To this day, I can still recite the presidents.
As a child, learning the presidents was a game; throughout my life, it’s been an interesting party trick. For my mother, it was never a game. I sometimes wonder how many of my fellow U.S. citizens can name all the presidents, and why this (or several of the other expressed stipulations) was even part of the naturalization process.
Within a few years of earning her citizenship, Mom would arrange for my (half-)sister, who had remained in Ghana, to join us in the U.S. It would be several years before I made the connection between these two events. What did it mean to leave your six-year-old child behind in Ghana? Of course, norms surrounding family structure are not nearly as nuclearized in Asante as they are in middle America. It was not so uncommon for children to stay with grandparents, aunts, or others. Still, it couldn’t have been an easy decision. For complicated reasons, which I doubt I will ever fully understand, my father forced my mother to make it. I am grateful that my father and sister grew close as adults and, eventually, he apologized to her. I don’t know if he ever apologized to his wife.
* * *
About a year after my mother decided to extend her trip to Ghana indefinitely, a police officer pulled me over while driving on the road to our family home. “How’s your mom?” he asked as he approached the car window. It was a familiar refrain. I’d heard it at the bank, at the post office, at local stores Mom frequented, and of course, from her friends. But the police officer—commanding my attention and having stopped me specifically to inquire about her—said more than any of the others. He spoke thoughtfully and compassionately about people missing her. When my father passed away in 2002, many locals expected her to leave. But she didn’t. He went on to explain that having her as part of the community made local people feel good about themselves.
“When I was young, everyone wanted to be my friend,” Mom once told me quite matter-of-factly and without the slightest bit of pretension. As a twenty-something African woman arriving in the hilltowns of Western Massachusetts, she was embraced by many neighbors—at least these were the relationships I knew of. There was the aforementioned neighbor who sacrificed her car for driving lessons, the farmer up the road who offered her a plot to garden on, the owner of the local orchard who always welcomed us to gather our fill of apples, and countless others. My earliest playdates were with the granddaughter of Franny and Marion Bray, who bear the same surname as the road we lived on. To this day, their family continues to plow our driveway while my mom is away each winter.
There’s a sentence in senator Kennedy’s letter that reads, “Our democracy is stronger today because America is made up of men and women from many different countries, religions, races and creeds.” For many Americans, John F. Kennedy’s accession to the presidency marked the full assimilation of Irish Catholics into the national mainstream. Whereas in the U.S., the specter of race is altogether different from ethnicity and religion, there is still a lot to be said about the complex ways in which inter-racial relationships get refracted through bonds of personalism and intimacy in small towns.[2]
Four years before his letter to my mother, Ted Kennedy had been publicly humiliated, and visibly shaken, while addressing a crowd at a rally in front of City Hall in Boston. At issue was interracial busing. In summer 1974, when federal judge Arthur Garrity mandated busing as a means of desegregating Boston schools, a decision Kennedy backed, the city’s longstanding anti-busing movement pivoted from lobbying efforts to violent protests. By the start of the school year, an estimated ten-thousand white Bostonian’s had gathered in opposition to forced busing—particularly, sending their kids to school with children of a different race. When the senator approached the platform to address the crowd that day, he was immediately met with insults and jeers, soon followed by a small barrage of tomatoes and eggs.[3] Although he escaped his pursuers, taking refuge in a Federal Building, once inside, the crowd pounded on the tinted glass to the point where a large pane gave way, shattering on the marble floor. The scene that day, which included mass wavings-of-American-flags and recitings-of patriotic-oaths like the Pledge of Allegiance and God Bless America, calls to mind another national disgrace occurring almost a half-century later.
The COVID-19 pandemic prevented my mother from going to Ghana for the winter of 2021. This means she was on the mountain—undoubtedly watching television by herself—on January 6th when citizens attacked the U.S. Capitol. These recent, demonstrated rises in U.S. nativism, populism, and patriotic vitriol place anyone marked as ‘other’ in potential danger. But how different is this from the Massachusetts my mother immigrated to in the 1970s, when, following our visit to my aunt’s house in the predominantly white suburbs of Boston, my cousins were hassled by other kids at the bus stop?
At least a few times since my father’s death, I heard Mom express concern about living alone on the mountain. She didn’t like it when a presumably good-natured neighbor called her out in public as living “in the only house on Old Bray Road.”[4] But I cannot imagine there was anyone in a village of less than two-thousand people who didn’t know where she lived or couldn’t easily find out. That’s how things are in small towns. She was that visible.
Sometime after my father passed away, I found a sheet of paper where he had written instructions on what to do when anonymous, racist, harassing phone calls came. Dad often said that having a Black wife and children was an excellent social filter. Anyone who had a problem with his interracial family was, quite simply, someone he wanted nothing to do with. As logical as this statement seems, to me at least, there’s an underlying naivety to it that could only come from someone who never had to bear the brunt of racism’s illogical viciousness. In the end, despite being loved by local police officers, clergymen, and neighbors, I wonder how much of Mom’s decision was about escaping winter and how much of it was about escaping the United States.
Anthony Kwame Harrison is Alumni Distinguished Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Sociology at Virginia Tech. A dual citizen of the United States and Ghana, he studied Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts and Syracuse University. Kwame’s hometowns include: Kumasi, Ghana (where he was born); Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts (where he was raised); and Blacksburg, Virginia (where he currently lives).
Notes
[1] Laramie, Bob. 1978. “Paving the way for Citizenship.” Greenfield (Mass.) Recorder, August 21, B2.
[2] See Schultz, Mark. 2007. The Rural Face of White Supremacy: Beyond Jim Crow. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
[3] Lukas, J. Anthony. 1986, Common Ground. New York: Vintage Books.
[4] Our looped driveway, off of Bray Road, is an official town road with the designation “Old Bray Road.”
