Introduction
If there is a continuous thread to my life, it runs deep below the surface in places I have found hard to reach. I have lived in many different places. There have been many discontinuities. I have paused—sometimes—to wonder about the common humanity that underlies lives very different from my own. As I grow older, I have paused more often. Sometimes I have sought a deeper connection. Sometimes I have turned away because of fear or ignorance or hubris. I have too often been a prisoner of my own blindness.
Each of us sees the world through the lens of our own culture, education, and belief systems. Each of us lives within a bubble, big or small, be it the life of an African villager whose horizons are limited to a day’s walk away from home or the life of an East Coast liberal who has traveled the world yet filters all their experiences through the lens of a seldom-examined American exceptionalism.
I count myself fortunate to have touched different worlds. But each of them, in its own way, has been bounded by its own proclivities and prejudices—some privileged, others much less so. Many times, I have been on the inside, unaware of my own entrapment until I broke out or looked back. More often I have lived on the edge looking in: observing, judging, valuing. Never quite belonging. Once, I jumped right in and had to fight to survive. Over time, my lens has broadened, I hope, but it is still a lens forged in the particular circumstances of my birth and education.
I am a pragmatist. I don’t have the eye or ear of a novelist. My skill has been to adapt, to cope, to find a way through each day and each circumstance, not to uncover deep meaning as I went. Nor to really acknowledge why my accent has always set me apart in the U.S. or to accept the incomprehension my marriage to a Ghanaian seems to provoke.
In this memoir I set out initially to tell stories of my encounters with different worlds, my relationship to each, and my struggles along the way. But as I look back, the search for meaning, for a unifying thread, becomes imperative. I need to see the quilt that emerges when all the pieces are stitched together, when boundaries become places of connection rather than division. The picture is emerging slowly.
My story starts with the sheltered world of my childhood. I grew up on a farm in Surrey, England. Social class and religion defined the world in which we lived. Racial divisions didn’t exist; we were simply unaware of different races. People of different skin color, as seen in the pages of picture books or represented by “Golliwog” dolls, might as well have been gnomes or elves.
My parents, our nanny, my three siblings, and I lived in an ancient Tudor farmhouse. The farmworkers lived in cottages across the road from us. The boundaries seemed immutable. From the age of seven I attended a convent boarding school. There, our sense of apartness—not to say superiority—was reinforced by the versions of history and geography we learned in the classroom. We had brief glimpses of other worlds. But these glimpses did little to affect my sense of who I was or where I belonged. My early identity has marked me indelibly, even though I have traveled far.
My story ends—or nearly so—in Ghana. An image is woven into the patchwork of my life. We’re sitting in the air-conditioned living room of our house in Accra. The curtains are drawn. CNN is blasting news into the room, thanks to the satellite dish on our roof. The news connects us to the U.S., where we moved when we left Ghana in 1980. Adongo lives with his family in the staff quarters behind our house. The wall that separates our lives from theirs is not dissimilar from the one that separated my family growing up from the workers on my father’s farm all those years ago. Now, viewed through a wiser lens, I like to think that the boundaries are less rigid, more porous—places where lives are joined with empathy and understanding. They are boundaries, nonetheless.
No one has the capacity to live in an unboundaried world. The scale is too vast, our need for security too great. But we can live with more awareness of our blinders and with compassion for those in other worlds. We can stretch the fissures in our own containers to learn what lies outside and rejoice at what we find. We can persevere in the search for connection. Maybe it is in the search itself that the pattern underlying the disparate details of my life is to be found.
