I AM NOT YVONNE NELSON

I deserved to have what Eugene had—the love and the care and the material possessions. His appearance showed that he was better taken care of than I was. He changed school uniforms more regularly

d have lavished me with gifts and love as he did to Eugene. Beyond the early flood of bad testimonies, what he did when I tried to get close to him confirmed what my mother told me. On one of our school vacations, I told my mother that I wanted to visit my father and she allowed me to go. Mr. Nelson Okoe was a popular man around Lartebiokoshie in Accra. He was a businessman who loved to have fun. He was the type who threw parties at will and was seen in the company of those who did not subscribe to sacrificing the pleasures of this world for the afterworld. He was successful, and the means to fund that lifestyle was the least of his worries. That lifestyle came with intended and unintended consequences that transcended his personal behaviour. And it showed when I got to his house. He lived in a big family house, one of the biggest in the area at the time. It was a large family house with two one-storey buildings on the compound. (I remember his twin sister lived in one of the storey buildings.) A number of his children had visited him for the holidays and I was one of them. We were children from different mothers. I felt different from the rest of the children. They resembled one another and some of them resembled Mr. Nelson. But I looked different. I was tall and the rest were short. The only child taller than me was Eugene’s elder brother, Nii Aruna. Nothing showed that the other children and I were of the same father. I did not feel any bond between Mr. Nelson and me. Nothing drew me to him. There was no fondness. Nothing. If I were to live with this man as my father, then I had to create that bond. I had to psyche myself up and accept that he was my father, despite the things my mother had told me about him. It was going to be difficult, but it was worth a try. Your father, they say, is your father. You can’t trade him for someone else’s father even if you don’t like his looks or character. I, however, abandoned every effort I was making to create that bond when he clearly told me, without saying it, that I did not belong to his household. It happened in the course of my visit. I was in the living room with the other children when he called all of them to his bedroom. Their laughter and giggling filtered into the living room, where loneliness and neglect were my only companions. I wondered why he did not call me. Eugene was there. He had also been called into my father’s room. When I went home that day, I told my mother that that was my last visit to my father’s house. And I kept my word until decades later when circumstances compelled me to go back there. I remember one day, my father was driving past our house and stopped when he saw me sitting at the spot Miranda and I used to sit at. He rolled down and called me, but I refused to go. I remained seated and refused to utter a word, and, after some time, he drove off. I had asked him for a pair of shoes, and he had promised to buy me three. And that was it. It remained a promise, unfulfilled to date. I was more emotionally attached to shoes than I was to the man I called my father. People close to me know that I am infatuated with footwear. I have about a hundred pairs of them. That love for shoes began very early, perhaps, as part of the American hip-hop influen