By Shirlene Obuobi

The drive up to my childhood home was mercifully smooth for a Thursday morning in Chicago. It was as if all the city’s rowdiest drivers had decided to cut me a break and sleep in; I got cut off only once merging onto the expressway and swerved out of the way of only two souped-up Dodge Chargers going 90 down I-55. I turned on my favorite true crime podcast, careful to avoid any cases involving jilted lovers or angry exes, and when I tired of murder, switched to a playlist conveniently devoid of Girl Power songs and breakup anthems that could get me all up in my emotions. Today was about my baby sister. Whatever feelings I had about Frederick would have to be bottled up, boxed, and left in a cellar to ferment.

Too soon, I pulled into the driveway of my childhood home. With its brownish-red brick, charcoal roof, and well-manicured lawn, my parents’ house looked like a clone of all the others on our cul-de-sac. Still, I could make out the small additions they had made in anticipation of the Knocking: two large ceramic pots brimming with petunias in the entryway, a row of solar-powered lanterns that lined the walkway to the front door, a thin but gloriously blooming crepe myrtle my parents had probably fought the homeowner’s association to plant. I thought about stealing one of the petunias to tuck behind my ear but thought better of it and rang the doorbell instead.

My mother was at the door in a flash, her magenta maxi dress floating around her like the petals of an orchid. She was still strikingly beautiful. She hated when I said that—“Still! Am I abrewa already?”—but it was true. Dealing with my, Tabatha’s, and Daddy’s bullshit for a quarter century plus somehow hadn’t put a crack in that silky smooth skin of hers.

“Where’s Frederick?” she asked.
 Probably, I thought, because she’s preserved in brine.
“Nice to see you too, Momma, you look lovely,” I said. I stepped around her and gave Auntie Abena, who had come to Chicago for a short trip that, so far, had lasted four months, a nod. “Auntie.”

“Yes, where is that fine boy you said you were bringing?” Auntie Abena said.

“He’s not coming,” I said, toeing off my shoes by the door. Saying it out loud stung more than I’d anticipated, and I took a deep, settling breath to recalibrate. “It smells amazing in here, Auntie. Did you make nkatenkwan?”

“How did you know I didn’t make it?” Momma said.

I shot my mother a disbelieving look. Despite being the picture of the perfect Ghanaian woman, my mother’s skills in the kitchen were notoriously lacking. She could crank out a reasonable kontomire, throw together an ampesi that Grandma wouldn’t side-eye, but anything more complex was a wash. If it weren’t for our omnipresent crashing aunties, I probably would’ve grown up on takeout.

“Where’s Daddy?” I shouted, walking down the hall to drop off my bag in my room.

“Looking at himself,” Momma shouted back. “Tell him he has to hurry up. Christopher and Gregory will be here any minute.”

When I circled back into the kitchen, she grabbed a hold of my arm, turning me around to face her. “So why isn’t Frederick here? It would have been good for him to watch, for when he knocks.”

Frederick, knocking, for me? When we first started dating, I’d seen it. Frederick standing at my door, bolstered by the parents I had never met, a bottle of ostentatiously expensive gin tucked under his arm. The image seemed preposterous now. Still, at its resurgence, my body ached with yearning.

“We broke up,” I admitted in a small voice.

Momma’s eyes widened. Then she released me, smoothing her hands down her dress with a huff.

“Ah, well, lawyers don’t make that much money these days anyway.” She narrowed her eyes critically at my hair, reaching up to fluff the crop of tight curls. “You know, I don’t think this hairstyle is helping you. You know how these men are; they like their women with hair down their backs. Before you leave, you should try on one of my wigs. And we can take you around church; a few nice young men joined the congregation recently, and Sister Lisa has said some of them are looking—”

“I’m going to check on Daddy,” I said with finality.

But before I could step toward my parents’ bedroom, the doorbell rang.

It was Chris, right on time at ten thirty. Chris was the most punctual Black person I had ever met, a peculiar match for the perpetually late Tabatha. Thankfully, his patience was about as infinite as his love for my sister. At least from the outside, their relationship was by the book. Chris and Tabatha dated for the appropriate amount of time— three years, long enough to prove that Chris was serious, not so long that his intentions could be questioned. He was respectful, tall (which Daddy liked), African American (which Daddy liked a little less), and had recently landed a six-figure job as a mechanical engineer three months after walking the stage at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. When Tabatha insisted on moving to Evanston to pursue her MBA after graduation, Chris left his beloved college town behind and followed her north, spending hours in our living room chatting with our father and sipping Muscatella. We all knew it was only a matter of time before he knocked, but when?

And then, last week, I got the phone call. Chris cleared his throat and asked me to please find a way to get Tabatha out of the house, and within minutes, the entire Appiah family, both domestic and international, knew that when was today.

“Hi, Angie,” Chris said, his smile a little shaky. He had spritzed on too much cologne, but otherwise looked smart in his blue button-down and dark wash jeans. He clasped a thin box that I knew contained the ceremonial liquor he would use to make his request. Behind him stood a heavyset middle-aged man. Chris’s father, Gregory Holmes, I remembered, just before clapping his large hand in mine. Chris had done his research. You can’t come alone to ask to marry a Ghanaian girl. My parents would have laughed him all the way back to Urbana.

“It’s nice to see you again, Angela,” Mr. Holmes said. “How’s medical school going?”

“Well,” I said, dismissing the many sleepless nights and the tearful breakdowns alone in a corner of the campus library in one woefully inadequate word. “Hard, but I’m enjoying myself.”

Mr. Holmes inhaled deeply, as though my admission had shifted something deep and old inside him back into alignment. He was sixty-something years old, of the generation that remembered scorched churches and sundown towns, and every young Black person’s success seemed to loosen the scars left by the state-sanctioned violence he had endured in his youth. He placed a heavy hand on my shoulder and squeezed, peering down at me over his bifocals.

“Good,” he said. “Good. We’re proud of you, you know.”

I smiled. Old Black people were always proud of me. It felt undeserved.

“Thanks, Mr. Holmes.”

I led them into the living room, where my father now sat, arranging himself like an Ashanti chief on our blood-red couch as if he hadn’t been preening in the bathroom seconds before. I’d disliked the decor in my childhood home for some years now, with its garish gold curtains, lavish green throw rugs, and custom coffee table with Gye-Nyame† engraved into the sides. It seemed desperate, a too-transparent proclamation of our family’s Ghanaian-ness. It was as if my parents—who’d been born in Ghana, educated in Ghana, then shipped off to England in their twenties for jobs that didn’t exist at home—had grown insecure in their heritage. When we first moved to the States, their habits and mannerisms had still been distinctly Other. Growing up, Tabatha and I had taken off our shoes before entering the house, folded our hands behind our backs when scolded, and were careful never to hand things to our elders from our left hands. But those habits were extinguished within a quarter of the time that it took for them to be ingrained in our parents in the first place. Even my parents’ accents had become something oddly inimitable, no longer the thundering brogue I used when describing to my friends what a Ghanaian accent sounded like, but something slightly English, slightly American, with a touch of a vague African something mostly audible in the r’s and t’s. The last time Momma went back to Tema and tried to haggle in Twi in the market, the seller accused her of being a foreigner and tried to charge her double. After that, our house was suddenly shrouded in red, gold, and greens, in adrinka symbols and carved ebony elephants. I was a bit surprised that Daddy hadn’t broken out the kente cloth for the occasion.

Daddy didn’t stand until Chris and Mr. Holmes stopped in the center of the living room. He regarded them with a cool smugness for a half second before languorously getting to his feet, moving with the syrupy slowness of a man who considered himself a great benefactor.

“Chris, good to see you!” he said, clapping him on the back with one hand. With the other, he reached for Mr. Holmes’s hand. “Oh, Greg, Chris was telling me you were coming into town. How was the trip?”

The niceties continued. Daddy asked after Chris’s mother, who unfortunately could not make it, and oohed and aahed over pictures of Mr. Holmes’s new BMW. When they settled into their chairs, Daddy shot me a look, reminding me to execute my duties as eldest daughter and serve our nice guests. I put on my most serene smile and asked them whether they would like anything to drink (orange juice for Mr. Holmes and water for Daddy and Chris), any biscuits—We have some good shortbread, you really have to try some—and shuffled to the kitchen to help prepare the arrangement. The presentation had to be perfect—biscuits arranged so that not a crumb fell out of place, glasses filled to three quarters height with just two cubes of ice in Daddy’s water, napkins folded into neat triangles, all balanced on a large silver serving tray. The first time Chris came over and my father sent me to the kitchen to prepare the tray, he had seemed uncomfortable being served. Now he barely acknowledged me before plucking a biscuit from the plate.

“How’s Dorothy doing?” Mr. Holmes asked. I sighed internally; gathering my parents was like herding cats.

“Oh, she’s doing well. She’ll be out in a minute.”

Daddy gave me another look, this one saying, Go check on your mother, and I obliged with a nod and slipped out of the living room and into my parents’ bedroom.

I found Momma in front of her vanity wearing a gray sheath dress, her magenta maxi dress discarded at her feet. She gave me a chagrined smile, as shy as Dorothy Appiah could look.

“I looked out of place,” she explained. “All of you are in muted colors, and I thought we should match, you know, for the pictures . . .” She was nervous. Of course she was; the Appiahs were among the first crop of Ghanaians to immigrate to Naperville, and Tabatha the first of the children to have a Knocking. All eyes would be on our family, taking notes on how successfully we translated the marriage traditions through a Western lens. Any photographs we took would likely be circulated through WhatsApp groups across the country, and Dorothy Appiah was not about to give any cause for salty aunties to cluck about the mother of the bride trying to “steal the spotlight.”

“You looked great before,” I said truthfully, “and you look great now.” I turned my body toward the door. “Come on, Ma. Hurry out before you miss the whole thing.”


Excerpt from “On Rotation” copyright © 2022 by Shirlene Obuobi. Published by Quercus Books (UK)

About the book: Ghanaian-American Angela Appiah has checked off all the boxes for the ‘Perfect Immigrant Daughter’: enroll in an elite medical school; snag a suitable lawyer/doctor/engineer boyfriend, and surround herself with a gaggle of successful and/or loyal friends… But when her boyfriend dumps her, her best friend pulls away, and she bombs the most important exam of her medical career, Angie finds herself in the middle of a quarter life crisis of epic proportions. To make matters worse, her parents are suddenly a lot less proud of their daughter, now that she’s not following through with the path they chose for her. Just when things couldn’t get any more complicated, enter Ricky Gutierrez – brilliant, thoughtful, sexy, and most importantly, seems to see Angie for who she is instead of what she can represent. Unfortunately, he’s also got ‘wasteman’ practically tattooed across his forehead, and Angie’s done chasing mirages of men. Or so she thinks…

For fans of Grey’s Anatomy and Seven Days in June, this dazzling debut novel by Shirlene Obuobi explores that time in your life when you must decide what you want, how to get it, and who you are, all while navigating love, friendship, and the realization that the path you’re traveling is going to be a bumpy ride.

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Shirlene Obuobi is a Ghanaian-American physician, cartoonist, and author who grew up in Chicago, Illinois, Hot Springs, Arkansas and The Woodlands, Texas. When she’s not in the hospital (and let’s be honest, even when she is in it), she can be found drawing comics, writing stories on her phone, and obsessing over her three cats. She currently lives in Chicago, where she’s completing her cardiology fellowship.

- All rights to this story remain with the author. Please do not repost or reproduce this material without permission.