The Door We Painted Blue

The morning we sold my mother’s house, I closed the blue door for the last time and discovered it did not want to close. This was not sentiment. The bottom had swollen during the rains and dragged against the cement floor with the stubbornness of an old woman being asked to leave church before the announcements. I put my shoulder against it. The door groaned. My brother Daniel, who had spent most of the morning explaining how everything should be done while personally doing nothing, told me to lift as I pushed. “I know how to close a door,” I said. “Clearly,” he replied. I gave it another shove. The door surrendered with a bang that sent two chickens running across the compound.

Daniel nodded as though he had personally engineered the door. “You see?” I opened it again. He stared at me. “What are you doing?” I told him I had forgotten something. “You have been forgetting something every fifteen minutes since eight.” This was true. By noon, I had forgotten Mother’s Bible, the photographs from the sitting room, three saucepans Auntie Rose insisted were too good to leave behind, and a plastic basin with a crack so large it could no longer hold water. Each forgotten object gave me an excuse to enter the house again.

The buyers were coming at three. At three-thirty, according to Daniel, because Ugandans who say three mean they will begin considering departure at three. But the papers had been signed. The money had been divided. By sunset, the house would belong to a family from Kampala who planned to knock down the kitchen, add indoor bathrooms and replace the roof. They had also mentioned changing the door. That was the only part I disliked.

Mother had painted it blue every January for as long as I could remember. Not a dignified blue either. It was the loud blue of plastic buckets and school uniforms, a colour that announced itself from halfway down the road. Nobody knew why she had chosen it. Auntie Rose said the paint had once been left over from the primary school. Daniel said Mother believed blue frightened snakes. I remembered her telling me it kept mosquitoes away. None of these explanations made sense, which had never prevented our family from repeating them. The door had become a landmark. Taxi drivers knew it. Children knew it. Even people who had never met Mother would say, “Ah, the house with the blue door,” and somehow arrive exactly where they were going.

Mother repainted it six months before she died. She was already thin by then, though we had all become skilled at pretending not to notice. Daniel held the tin while she painted. I sat beneath the mango tree telling her there were people we could pay to do such things. “There are also people we can pay to chew our food,” she said. “Should we hire them?” That was Mother. After she died, I found myself remembering things she had said that I barely noticed when she was alive.

“Grace!” Daniel was calling from outside. I shouted back, and he told me the buyers were there. I looked around the sitting room. Without the sofa, cabinet and crocheted covers Mother put on absolutely everything, the room seemed larger and less certain of itself. Pale rectangles marked the walls where photographs had hung. A nail remained above the place where Mother kept the Sacred Heart of Jesus, though Jesus himself was already wrapped in newspaper in Auntie Rose’s car. I touched the blue door on my way out, and something rough caught my finger.

Near the bottom, where years of paint had thickened along the edge, a piece had peeled away. Underneath the blue was green. Under the green, white. I scratched at it with my thumbnail until Daniel shouted my name again. Outside, the new owners were inspecting the mango tree as though considering whether it had been included in the purchase price.

There were introductions, handshakes, papers, questions about the borehole and the boundary behind the cassava garden. Auntie Rose produced tea despite the fact that the kettle, cups and sugar had already been packed. African women can manufacture tea after a house has technically ceased to contain a kitchen. I answered questions when necessary, but I kept looking at the door. Eventually Auntie Rose noticed and asked what was wrong. “Was that door always blue?” I asked. She laughed. “You have travelled too long. Now you have forgotten colours?” I asked what colour it had been before blue. Her smile disappeared so quickly I almost thought I had imagined it.

“Grace, these people are waiting,” she said. I asked again. Auntie Rose rearranged the cups on her tray. “Green, maybe.” Daniel looked over. “No. It was white.” Auntie Rose gave him a look. That was when I knew they were hiding something. I knew that look. In our family, one person only looked at another like that when somebody had already said too much.

I waited until the buyers left to fetch their remaining documents, then went to the kitchen and found a knife. Daniel followed me and asked what I was doing now. I knelt beside the door and slid the blade beneath the loose paint. A strip of blue curled away. Green appeared underneath, then white, then another blue. Layer after layer, Mother had painted this door. “What was she covering?” I asked. “Paint.” I looked at Daniel. “It is a door,” he said. “People paint doors.”

I scraped harder. The knife caught in a groove. I thought it was a crack at first, but it was too straight. I removed more paint and found another line beside it, then another. Four scratches cut deeply into the wood. Beneath them were letters. I stopped scraping. N A K A. The rest disappeared beneath the paint.

Behind me, Auntie Rose said, “Leave it.” Neither Daniel nor I had heard her approach. I turned and asked who Naka was. Auntie Rose sat down, not on a chair because we had packed those, but directly on the veranda step. For the first time that day, she looked old. “Your mother’s name was Nakanwagi,” she said. I told her I knew Mother’s name. “Then why are you asking?” I pointed at the scratches. “They’re on the outside.”

Nobody answered. Auntie Rose stared at the ground, and Daniel suddenly became very interested in the knife in my hand. I knew then that whatever had happened to Mother had happened in front of that door. Auntie Rose finally looked up. “She was seventeen.”

Mother had told us she grew up in this house. That was true. She told us Grandfather was strict. Also true. She told us she left school because there was no money. That part, apparently, was not. Mother had become pregnant. The father denied it. Grandfather discovered the pregnancy and told her she had brought shame into his house. One evening, he put her clothes in a sack and pushed her outside. Then he closed the door.

I looked at the wood beneath my hand. “This door?” Auntie Rose nodded. Mother had knocked until her knuckles bled. She called for Grandmother. She begged. At some point begging became anger. She found a stone and scratched her name into the door. Nakanwagi. So nobody could say she had never belonged there.

“Where did she go?” I asked. “To my aunt in Masaka.” I hesitated before asking about the baby. Auntie Rose looked toward the road. “Died,” she said quietly.

Mother returned almost four years later. Grandfather had suffered a stroke. Grandmother sent for her because there was nobody else willing to care for him. I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “She came back to take care of the man who threw her out?” Auntie Rose looked at me. “You know your mother.” Yes. I did. Or I had believed I did. She bathed him. Fed him. Changed his bedding. Sat beside him when speech abandoned him. When he died, he left the house to her.

The first thing Mother did was paint the door white. Then green. Then blue. Again and again and again. “Why didn’t she replace it?” I asked. Auntie Rose shrugged. “Maybe replacing it would have been easier.” That sounded like Mother too. Daniel crouched beside me. For once, he had no instructions.

I scraped away another strip. More letters emerged. N A K A N W A G I. Below the name were four words. The first two appeared quickly: I WAS. The third took longer. My hands had begun shaking. Auntie Rose whispered, “Grace, enough.” I kept scraping.

I WAS BORN HERE TOO.

For a while, none of us spoke. All my life, I had thought Mother painted the door because she liked blue. Then because of mosquitoes. Then snakes. Then leftover school paint. We had turned the habit into one of those harmless family peculiarities people laugh about after funerals: Mother and her blue door. Mother and her stubbornness. Mother and her January paint. I wondered how many times a person could cover a wound before covering became another way of touching it.

The buyers returned at four-ten. They brought a carpenter. “We thought we could measure for the new door today,” the husband explained. I stood between him and the entrance and told him no. Daniel said my name quietly. The buyer frowned. “Sorry?” I told him the door wasn’t included. He laughed because he thought I was joking. I wasn’t.

What followed was twenty minutes of argument involving the sales agreement, fixtures, hinges, common sense and eventually Auntie Rose, who informed everyone that if a woman sells you a house and asks to keep one old door, only a person raised without manners would continue arguing. This proved more effective than contract law. The carpenter removed the hinges, and Daniel and I carried the door into the compound and laid it beneath the mango tree.

Without it, the house looked strange. Open. Almost embarrassed. The buyer’s wife stood in the doorway and asked what I planned to do with it. “I don’t know yet,” I said. That was true. Maybe I would take it to Kampala. Maybe Daniel would keep it. Maybe we would cut out the piece bearing Mother’s words and hang it somewhere our children could see. For once, I did not need to decide.

The new owners went inside while Auntie Rose carried the last box to the car. Daniel tied the boot with a piece of rope because it would not close, then insisted this was because I had packed badly. I stood alone beneath the mango tree. With the knife, I removed one final patch of blue from the wood. Mother’s seventeen-year-old handwriting stared back at me: I WAS BORN HERE TOO.

For most of her life, she had painted over those words. She had never sanded them away. Every January, she simply covered them with another coat of blue. I had spent the afternoon thinking we were selling Mother’s house. I wondered if Mother had ever thought of it as hers at all.

Behind me, someone closed the new house’s temporary door. The sound was smaller than I expected. Daniel called that we were leaving. I picked up Mother’s blue door and carried it to the car.