Drums at Dawn

Drums at dawn and the city starts wrong — I mean it starts the way it means to, which is loud, all at once, no prologue, no gentle waking. Accra comes at you like a sentence with no subject: just verb, verb, verb. The tro-tro honks. The woman selling kenkey has her pot on the coal since four. The mechanic on the corner already under a car, legs sticking out like the car is eating him slowly and he doesn't mind. My father drove this road to work for thirty-one years. Same road, same potholes — he'd call them by name. The deep one near the school: Kweku. The long one past the market: Elizabeth, after the woman who fell in it and threatened the council until they half-filled it, which is the Accra way of fixing things — half-measures held together with good humor and concrete. The drums I hear are from the shrine off Labadi Road. Not tourist drums, not hotel-lobby drums — these are the ones that mean something to someone who knows what they mean, and nothing to me except sound, except the shape of the morning, except the feeling of a city that has been awake longer than I have and is not waiting for me to catch up. I buy tea from the woman who has been selling tea on this corner since before I was born. She doesn't know my name. She knows my order. In a city this size, that's the same thing. The sun is fully up now. The drums have stopped or I've stopped hearing them — the city has swallowed them into its general noise, the way a river swallows rain. It was always raining. You just didn't notice until it stopped.