Family Secret: It Is An Open Secret That A Priest Fathered My Brother

It is no secret at all that my mother is the heart and hands of our family. That woman works so hard. She has traded in every grain, fruit and vegetable I know of. She is the breadwinner, the midwife, the therapist and the musician. Since I’ve been a remembering person, my Mama has worn the pants under her skirts and kept quiet about it. It is an open secret that my father cannot survive without my mom. I doubt anyone else will have time to care for him as much as she has.

In the early eighties when I was about ten years old, she got a job cleaning and cooking in the homes of those men and women who claim to have pledged celibacy to Christ. Misskorang, I will not mention their titles because to me they are nothing but a bunch of liars, hypocrites and parasites. They had a school attached to their church too, so I was transferred there, it was a much better school than my previous one.

I think that job was good for her, she brought home lots of food, it was less tedious and she got a better pay. She seemed happy, she told me things were going to be better. All seemed to be going fine, but a short time after she got the gig, I noticed she didn’t seem as happy anymore. Anytime she picked me from school, I sensed her sadness before seeing her bloodshot eyes. A few times I heard her sobbing behind the partition which separated my parents bed from my mat in our one bedroom home.

The Chief hypocrite of this supposed holy place was a brute, and now that I’m old enough to recognize it, he probably was a narcissist or maybe a sociopath? He had a bushy black beard, which he kept well groomed, he was beard gang before beard gang was thing. His eyes were always bloodshot, rumor had it that he secretly smoked marijuana. He was heavyset, and a sizable belly preceded him. And he took pleasure in terrorizing school children. On Mondays he would pop in at random times and demand anyone who did not attend church the previous day make themselves known. Then he would lash the crap out of those sinners. I think he did it because he was bored, he didn’t give a flying duck about our little poor souls. It is an open secret that, that man was mean and in no way near mock-holy.

One day, when my Mama thought I was asleep, I heard her complaining to my father amid sobs that the hypocrite-in-chief had made her keel down and screamed in her face because, she burned his lunch, and the lunch had burned because he insisted she did something for him while she was cooking. That night I felt an emotion I was very unfamiliar with course through my veins, who dares abuse my Mama? I cried myself to sleep.

My father suggested she quit, but she was concerned we might go hungry, so she went back to work the next day, and the day after, and the next. Just work as usual. And then suddenly, I realized she wasn’t going anymore. She quit! I was so proud of her. But guess what? We didn’t go hungry, on the contrary we had a lot of food; canned foods; meat, fish, milk and many more. My Mama opened a little shop and sold foodstuff. And then before long, she had my brother!

My brother, a dark lanky kid, I loved him to bits. Even though I was a decade and some older than him, we played together all the time. He was like my shadow, wherever you saw me, he was there.

It never occurred to me to ask how, but our lives got better. We didn’t live in the cramped one bedroom anymore. We had us a nice three bedroom house that my parents had built. Life got better. Maybe that was another open secret I should have caught on.

After secondary school, I had the chance to go to a Canadian University, I was twenty-two and my brother was twelve. It took me eight years to finish the course and get the requisite documentations to come back to Ghana. Now remember cell phones and video calls weren’t accessible to the ordinary Ghanaian as it is today, so we wrote letters and had the occasional phone call on our neighbor’s home phone.

My folks met me at the airport. I saw my parents first, and then I saw him. My little brother wasn’t a lanky young boy anymore, he was a tall, dark, well built young man and he had a beard to boot. Misskorang, my jaw dropped when I took a good look at him and the Hypocrite-in-chief stared back. My stomach dropped too.

I looked at my father, he hung his head. I turned to give my mother a questioning stare, she shook her head, in her unique signature way of saying, “Don’t you dare.” Don’t you dare spoil this happy occasion, she seemed to be saying to me. It was my little brother who spoke up, “Bro I know I look like him, now let’s go home.”

He didn’t seem to mind, so I let it go too.

Turns out even my little brother was in on the open secret. My parents made the decision to tell him in his teenage years when his uncanny resemblance to Hypocrite-in-chief had become undeniable.

I know he financed us somehow, which is why we stopped struggling, but my parents won’t talk about that. I am curious to know, did they blackmail him or he paid them off on his own? Not knowing is killing me!

Misskorang, in this little village/town in Greater Accra Region, a so-called holy man, pledged in marriage to Christ fathered not only my brother but many bastards, until the Vatican whisked him away. And from what I hear and my mother’s own account, most of the relations were not consensual.