Transcendent Kingdom

by Yaa Gyasi

I didn’t understand, but I did.

The funny thing about the phrases that my mom picked up is that she always got them a little wrong.

She had a little southern accent that tinted her Ghanaian one.

this woman who had always found skinny people offensive, as though a kind of laziness or failure of character kept them from appreciating the pure joy that is a good meal.

I’d bought a Ghanaian cookbook online to make up for the years I’d spent avoiding my mother’s kitchen,

Every time she visited me over the years she’d sweep her finger along things it never occurred to me to clean, the backs of the

“The truth is we don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t even know the questions we need to ask in order to find out, but when we learn one tiny little thing, a dim light comes on in a dark hallway, and suddenly a new question appears. We spend decades, centuries, millennia, trying to answer that one question so that another dim light will come on. That’s science, but that’s also everything else, isn’t it? Try. Experiment. Ask a ton of questions.”

It’s remarkable how cool you can seem when you are the only black person in a room, even when you’ve done nothing cool at all.

But the memory lingered, the lesson I have never quite been able to shake: that I would always have something to prove and that nothing but blazing brilliance would be enough to prove it.

Like an apple tree among the trees of the forest is my beloved among the young men. I delight to sit in his shade, and his fruit is sweet to my taste.

If I’ve thought of my mother as callous, and many times I have, then it is important to remind myself what a callus is: the hardened tissue that forms over a wound.

It was her I cannot beat you in front of all these white people, but just you wait look. I didn’t care.

I didn’t want to be thought of as a woman in science, a black woman in science. I wanted to be thought of as a scientist, full stop,

I was protective of her right to find comfort in whatever ways she saw fit. Didn’t she deserve at least that much? We have to get through this life somehow.

I already understood the spectacle of poverty, the competing impulses to help and to look away that such images spurred, but I understood, too, that poverty was not a black and brown phenomenon.

“Don’t let our car break down in this dirty village,” my mother would pray in Twi whenever we passed through one of these towns. She used the word akuraase, the same word she would use for a village in Ghana, but I had already been conditioned to see America as somehow elevated in relation to the rest of the world, and so I was convinced that an Alabama village couldn’t be an akuraase in the same way that a Ghanaian village could.