Somebody's Heart Is Burning by Tanya Shaffer Page A

go back to him?”
    “Maybe. I don’t know.”
    She lifted an eyebrow.
    “I don’t know, Santana, I’m not sure.” I felt suddenly defensive.
    “Does he beat you?”
    “No,” I laughed. “No, he doesn’t beat me.”
    “He goes with other women, then?”
    “No. No. I mean, now, maybe, because I said we should leave things open, but when we were together, no.” The thought that he might be seeing other women now brought a painful tightness to my throat.
    “So why, then? What is wrong? You think African men are more costly because you must go far to find them?”
    “No! I just . . . I don’t know. I love him but . . . it’s complicated.”
    “It is not complicated. He is natural resource. He needs to grow rare.”
    “Stop it, Santana, I—” I stopped midsentence. How did she always manage to drive me nuts? My mind formed the words I might use to explain the situation to a friend back home:
I love
him, but I’m not sure I’m in love with him. I’m not sure he’s the one.
The words seemed unbearably childish, mere semantic diddling. I could never say them to Santana, not with that knowing smile on her face. Not in the wake of what she’d just told me.
    “
Anyway,
” I continued. “We were talking about
you.
Where can we find
you
a better man?”
    She shook her head. “No more man for me. My heart, it has closed.” She smiled. “Now I only torture men. I may be Ghana woman, everywhere resource, but I am more strong than they. I have no need of them, and this makes them crazy. All this they want,” she turned around slowly, swaying her hips, “but they can never have.”

    “The woman is the p-property of her husband,” said Santana’s cousin Ema, short for Emanuel. He was laughing, but he was angry. I was angrier. I’d heard enough of this kind of talk during my time here to build up a reservoir of frustration. We were sitting on the weathered wooden floor around a low table, over the remains of
kenke
and pepper sauce. Santana sat beside me, silent for a change. We had all washed our fingers in a bowl of water and wiped our mouths with our wet hands. My tongue burned from the chili.
    “A woman is a human being,” I said, fighting to keep my voice even. “An equal human being. Not property.”
    Ema laughed again. “A woman is not equal to a m-man. See this m-muscle?”
    “Physically, women and men are different,” I said. “Different strengths and different capabilities. Intellectually, they are equals.”
    “But if the m-man is stronger, then the m-man must d-dominate,” Ema insisted. “That is how it is in nature.”
    The topic under discussion was whether or not men had the right to beat their wives. Looking at small, slender Ema, with his gentle hands and slight stutter, it was hard to imagine him dominating anyone.
    “Then does a strong man have a right to dominate a weaker man?” I asked. “Should a strong man make a weaker man his slave?”
    “We are t-talking about the way things are, not the way they should be.”
    “No, we’re talking about our opinions. You didn’t say, ‘Many men in Ghana treat their wives as property.’ You said, ‘The woman is the property of her husband,’ implying that you felt that was just fine.”
    How we’d segued onto this topic from Christianity, I wasn’t sure. Ema had spent the entire afternoon trying to save me, a phenomenon I’d grown accustomed to during my time in Ghana. The country was brimming with fanatical Christians of every imaginable stripe. The missionaries had done their work thoroughly, and every vehicle had a religious slogan painted on the side; every business had a name like “God Is Love Beauty Saloon” (
sic
) or “Blood of Jesus Carpentry Shop.” I enjoyed flaunting my agnosticism, driving the faithful to increasingly heroic measures in their efforts to convert me. Throughout the day, I’d maintained a faintly ironic tone while Ema begged, pleaded, cajoled, and railed. Now, with the wife-beating discussion,