In the weeks since her new novel, Sankofa, was announced as an October Reese’s Book Club pick, author Chibundu Onuzo could have resigned herself to let the celebration around her book fade. But Onuzo is the kind of author—the kind of person, really—who believes both the recent and ancient past are living beings. Like the titular creature who adorns Sankofa‘s cover, we are all flying forward with our heads facing backward, moving forward while gazing behind us, reflecting what has come before. So no matter what readers’s reactions to Sankofa look like in the coming months and years, Onuzo will always have October 2021, and it will forever alter her present.

“There was a billboard [of the book] in Times Square,” Onuzo says. “I’m in London, so when they sent me the photograph, I just remember shouting out loud. I live alone, and I remember shouting out, ‘I need a party!’”

Onuzo picked the mythical creature, found in the Akan culture, as her emblem while crafting Sankofa, which follows Londoner Anna Graham (notice the play on words), a biracial woman, as she searches for the African father she never met. Separated from her husband and confused by the emotions surrounding her mother’s death, Anna discovers a clue to her father’s identity, and it reveals a man—and a story—unlike anything she imagined. As it turns out, her father was a president—or, perhaps, a dictator—in a West African country. Also, he’s still alive.

Onuzo, herself born in Lagos, Nigeria, spoke to a number of mixed-race women to understand the questions of identity that Anna would face. She found a consistent pattern amongst many of them: If they had a white parent, that parent would often attempt to diminish their child’s biracial status. “The result of this was quite damaging, because it meant that they didn’t have any identity to be proud of,” Onuzo says. “It’s all very well and good for your mother, in a well-meaning way, to say, ‘You’re just the same as me.’ But once you step outside your house, no one agrees. So, then who are you? What are you?”

In an early scene from the book, excerpted below, Anna discovers a trunk beneath her mother’s bed that unlocks the truth about her father. “Once she finds the diary, she steps off on sort of this detective quest,” Onuzo says. “I played with different points to start the novel. Should I start it just before her mother dies? When she finds out that her husband has just cheated on her? And then I thought, ‘No. [Let’s] get straight into the action.’”

From Sankofa, by Chibundu Onuzo:

My mother was six months dead when I opened the trunk I found under her bed. I opened the trunk on the same day her headstone was erected. Rose, my daughter, accompanied me to the cemetery. I wore black, like it was a second funeral. Grass had grown over her grave, the earth erasing all memory of its disturbance. The headstone was marble, paid for by my mother’s funeral insurance. Rose chose the gold-lettered inscription.

Bronwen Elizabeth Bain
1951–2018
Beloved Mother, Grandmother, Daughter and Sister
Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land.

The Rossetti quote was a touch melancholic, but so was my mother and, for that matter, so was Rose. We laid flowers, fresh white chrysanthemums. Rose said a few words, addressing my mother as if she were present. When she finished, she turned to me. I shook my head. The practice felt too foreign and fanciful.

Afterwards, we had lunch near Rose’s office, in what my mother would have called a smart restaurant, a maître d’ by the door, thick cloth napkins on the tables. Rose went back to work, and I returned home to retrieve my mother’s trunk from the storage cupboard. The day’s ritual had left me wanting to touch something that belonged to her.

The trunk looked old. Brass fastenings and studs. Rose would have called it vintage. I avoided it for a long time. I had not enjoyed my previous experience of sorting through my mother’s things. There had been no catharsis, only a strange fatigue after holding the clothes she had worn and the books she had read. It became clear I did not know her very well. Madame Bovary was on her bedside table. In the recesses of a wardrobe, I found a pair of sequined gloves.

The trunk fastenings were stiff and took some force to spring open. I lifted the lid and took out what appeared to be a scrapbook. There was a copy of my birth certificate stuck to the first page; on the next, a photograph of me by the seaside. My skin was as brown as the sand. There was a clump of my hair glued in place. My mother had written under the cutting: From little Anna’s head. She cries when I brush it.

The book was a sort of monument to my childhood, a small shrine of memories. In a picture from my confirmation aged thirteen, I wore a puff-sleeved dress. Plaits sprouted from my head like twigs and ribbons streamed from their ends, prayers knotted to branches. She had kept my letters from university, a swatch of red fabric, and a white rose, pressed yellow with age.

There were some loose pictures of my mother and her sister when they were girls. Aunt Caryl was tall, almost scrawny, with her red hair disguised by sepia. My mother was smaller and sleeker with shiny black curls. My mother looked like a Bain, dark hair and blue eyes, a winning combination that obscured the plainer family features of thin lips and a weak chin. Aunt Caryl was an alien, or adopted, or ask the milkman.

In the months I avoided the trunk, it occurred to me that information about my father might be inside. I was very curious about him in my childhood. I knew his name, Francis Aggrey. I knew that he had arrived in England in the late sixties to go to university. I knew he had lodged in the spare attic room of my grandfather’s house, and that he and my mother had some sort of affair. When he returned to his country, Bamana, she didn’t know she was pregnant with me. They never saw each other again.

Why didn’t she write? She didn’t have an address. Why didn’t he write? How would she know? Why didn’t she go to Bamana?

“I couldn’t afford it,” she would say. “We can barely afford to go to Blackpool.

What was he like?

“I don’t know, Anna. It was so long ago. He was only here for a few months.”

Her answers never changed. There was nothing more to tell. I didn’t even know what he looked like.

By the time I was eighteen, I’d stopped trying to find out about him. Although, once in a while, I would daydream about traveling to Bamana, stopping strangers in the street and asking if they knew a Francis Aggrey. I don’t remember when that dream died.

I’d gone through all the photographs. The box looked empty. I shook it and heard sliding, objects rubbing against each other. I turned the trunk upside down and banged it. A false cardboard bottom came loose. Two notebooks fell out along with a black-and-white photograph the size of a playing card.

The man in the picture was the darkest tint in the human spectrum. Clean-shaven, smooth-skinned, almost oiled. I had his jaw, that straight square jaw that no other Bain had. His suit was pale, either grey or light blue. A metal pin held his tie in place, a silk pocket square bloomed from his breast pocket. His hair was cropped close, freshly clipped, shining with hair oil. I turned the picture over. To my white rose, with love, F.K.A., 1969. The ink was faded, the letters cramped to fit into the small space, except his initials, which took up half the inscription. It could be my father. Francis K. Aggrey. What did the K stand for?

I opened the first notebook, cheaply bound and filled with the same tight script.

London is afraid of me. Black man cannibal. Black man rapist. Hide your fat wives and your dumpy virgin daughters. Shut your door in my face. Look out. Tollund Man is coming.

The author’s voice was strong and alive, as if he had walked into the room and begun speaking. An intelligent black man, angry, humorous. Surely not my father, hidden away in this box by a woman who told me there was little to know but his name.

I do not know how to write in a book like this. I am not used to talking to myself, but where else will I keep my confidences? A student drowned himself last week. Ghanaian boy with mother and family back home in Accra, and he threw himself off a bridge because someone called him a nigger. One time is nothing. Nigger, coon, darkie—you hear it like a mosquito flying past your ear. But a year of traveling in a crowded bus with an empty seat next to you, of old landladies opening their doors and quivering at the sight of you, “Francis Aggrey? I thought you were a Scotsman,” “Francis Aggrey, I thought you were white,” and the bottom of the Thames might begin to look like home.

It was my father, Francis Aggrey, trapped between these pages for decades. I was suddenly cautious. What if this diary revealed something discreditable? Some crime he had committed, some fraudulent stain from which my mother thought it best to shield me.

I read on slowly. The next few entries were sketches of places I recognized. He was an accurate draftsman. On a double leaf he had drawn the façade of the British Museum with this caption:

I go to the Africa Section to sit in the warmth. Masks, stolen from my ancestors, surround me. These masks are made grotesque by their setting, the sacred turned ridiculous under the gaze of the uninitiated. The British public glance at me often, eyes darting from fertility goddesses to my black face. One of these days, I’ll climb into a glass case to oblige them.

I had enacted this scene several times in my youth. Young Anna walking into an affluent space, a jewelry store, for example, or a gallery. Cue side glances tracking my movement, nervous and on edge. I tried to explain it to my mother once. “Don’t be so sensitive,” she said.

There is something unseemly in running home to tell tales in these blank pages instead of speaking my mind like a man. Just on the corner today, I was running late for a lecture and I asked a man for the time. “Twenty minutes to noon,” he said, before adding, “You talk nice for a nigger, don’t you?” In Fanti, my response would have been out before he finished speaking. “You talk nice for a fool.” But in English, this language I learned from missionaries, linguistically trained to turn the other cheek, all I could manage was, “I wish you good day, sir.”

Years from now, when I am back in the Diamond Coast, among my own people where I am most confident, to open these pages would be to release the sharp stink of unaired retorts.

I shut the diary. I did not want to meet my father in one sitting. I put the scrapbook and loose photos back in the box. I kept the books and Francis Aggrey’s photograph. I double-locked my front door and checked the kitchen window was shut. I left the stair lights on to show I was awake and in lunging distance of a panic button. Next year, perhaps, I would sell the house and move to a flat with other families stacked like crates above and below me.

I went upstairs to my bedroom. I changed into my sexless pajamas and turned off the lights. I still slept on one side of the bed, pinned to my half of the sheets, facing the space my husband once occupied. In the mornings, one side was always ruffled, the other smooth as an egg: portrait of a single woman’s bed.

I woke up thinking about Francis Aggrey. I looked again at his picture, dated 1969. It was taken just after Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech, the worst of times for my father and my mother to fall in love. Or perhaps they were never in love. I was merely the result of a hapless fling, conceived hastily in 1969 and born nine months later, in January 1970.

Surely my grandfather had been foolish to take on such a handsome lodger with a teenage daughter in the house. My mother was nineteen when she had me, which meant she was eighteen when they met. How had she dared look at Francis Aggrey, let alone sleep with him, creeping past Grandpa Owen’s door and up to his bedroom?

I would never know. Her death was swift and unexpected. Light headaches had surged into blinding migraines, brought on by a brain tumor that was metastasizing. I sat by her while she lay under the standard-issue NHS blanket, shrouded to her neck, hiding the tangle of tubes that fed into her arms.

When she was in pain, her lips puckered like a purse drawn tight. Her wrinkles became more pronounced, dark lines in pale skin, etching on porcelain. I often looked out the window on a view of a bare tree, roots buried under the asphalt of the parking lot.

While she was ill, I asked about Francis Aggrey only once. She grew agitated when I said his name.

“I was all the family you needed. Didn’t I feed you and clothe you and love you? What else did you want?”

She tried to sit up and I eased her back down.

“I was just trying to make conversation,” I said.

The doctor said my mother’s personality might change as the tumor grew. I wondered whether her character had changed or merely revealed itself.

Towards the end, I moved her from the hospital to my guest bedroom.

“Where’s Robert?” she would ask most mornings. I told her but she always forgot.

I learned how to sponge her clean and check for bedsores, to feed her and wipe her chin, to ask before I did any of these things because she was an adult. She died on a May morning, Rose and I by the headboard, my husband, Robert, briefly reinstated at the foot.

Perhaps there would be something in Francis Aggrey’s diary about how he met my mother. She was often timid, unsure, almost fearful. From what I’d read so far, they didn’t seem an obvious match. I opened to where I had stopped.

Excerpted from Sankofa by Chibundu Onuzo. Published by Catapult. Copyright © 2021 by Chibundu Onuzo. All rights reserved.

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