“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.
