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Chapter 19

William Carter Jr.

Ghana, September 1968

The very first time William boarded a plane, he was going to London. Well, he was going to Ghana, but the trip required a stop in London first. He was traveling separately from Kofi, set to meet up and stay in Accra, the country’s capital and largest city. Kofi had already been there for some time, and William swallowed his anxiety over the impending reunion. Kofi’s meltdown over his D grade the previous year had nearly derailed his chances of finishing the architecture program, prompting William to turn to the only person on campus that he trusted, Professor Hill, to intervene.

Professor Hill, upon coming to their shared apartment, stopped to stare at the remainder of the smashed model on their poker table and stepped over the destroyed pieces on his way into Kofi’s bedroom. He shut the door when he entered Kofi’s room, and on the other side, William heard their muffled voices. Almost two hours later, Professor Hill and Kofi emerged from the room and shook hands in the living room, the older man clapping Kofi on the shoulder with the parting message of, “I’ll check on you in a week.”

With a nod to William, who sat on their fraying secondhand futon pretending to read, he left. William took in his roommate’s appearance, which was, if he was being truthful, derelict. But what he did notice, once he was able to get past the unkempt Afro and facial hair, was a familiar light in Kofi’s eyes, one that had been almost extinguished by the burden of failure. William waited for Kofi to speak first.

“Professor Hill thinks that it could work,” he said.

William already knew this because he was the one who’d disclosed to Professor Hill that he thought he found something worth investing in. William nodded. “I think it could as well. You just needed to get in front of someone with vision,” he said.

Kofi looked up at the ceiling and scratched the hairy underside of his neck. “Why didn’t you think I should meet him before? You didn’t tell him you had a roommate from Ghana? Am I not also a Black man at Harvard?” he asked.

William had hoped to avoid this subject. “Look,” he began, trying his best to sound honest and forthright. “I messed up. I thought that I could just have something for me. I didn’t think about you, not because I wanted to exclude you, but because I thought that it might feel weird for you to be with all these American guys and our American issues. But after what happened with your final, I realized that we’re all going through the same shit, that we have to stick together.” He emphatically dragged his pointer finger back and forth between their chests.

William’s intentions were far from altruistic. He’d only just realized that Kofi’s idea had enormous potential to be a functional business. While Kofi was sulking in his room, William was running numbers, and with his findings, he approached Professor Hill to get his feedback. First and foremost, they needed to convince Kofi that his idea was a viable business, regardless of what his professors decreed.

A year later, William was in the clouds on the way to Ghana to see if his instincts would prove correct. Additionally, William was attending business school so that he could stay in Cambridge working alongside Professor Hill and Kofi on this project and also so that he could learn more about how to make and manage money. It was one thing to have a great idea, but it was another thing to give that idea longevity and power.

When he touched down in London, he hated the dryness in his mouth. His teeth felt coated because he skipped his nightly brushing to be on the flight. It was a strange thing to wake up in a totally new place. His next flight was a few hours away, so he had time to waste in Heathrow. He spent a small fortune acquiring hygiene products at the airport shops and used the bathroom to freshen up. The rest of the time he spent at the gate, observing the other travelers in the airport. What he noticed most was that his next plane to Accra had the highest concentration of Black people of any other flight in the terminal. He smiled in amusement, looking at women wearing kente cloth in various shades of the rainbow, his eyes pleasantly taking in colors and textures that he was unaccustomed to seeing. He was self-conscious about how closely he had adhered to Western dress, wearing a tweed sport coat that he got two years prior from another one of Professor Hill’s protégés. When he landed in Accra after nearly eight hours in the sky, he was knocked out by the air, thick with humidity.

He retrieved his bags, carefully navigating around taxi drivers who immediately identified him as an outsider based on the lost expression on his face and the stress sweat emitting from under his clothes. They hounded him with offers to chauffeur him into the city center. He confidently walked through the crowds until he spotted Kofi, standing among large families waiting to greet arriving cousins like the Prodigal Son.

“Brother!” Kofi exclaimed, bringing William Carter Jr. in for a hug and clapping his back roughly.

William, thinking about how his sweaty, unwashed body must smell, extricated himself in a dignified way and said, “Hi.”

“Let me help you with your bags,” Kofi said, reaching down to grab the handle of William’s suitcase, a lender from a classmate. Kofi, the habitual traveler, was adept at navigating through the crowds with bags, much better than William, who was now carrying nothing and still one step behind. When they reached the car that would take them to the hotel where they were staying, generously provided by Kofi’s parents, who were currently away on business, William was surprised to find it to be a luxury vehicle while all the other cars in the lot seemed to be about seven to ten years old. Sitting in the black Mercedes with the Ghanaian flags violently flapping in the wind as they moved, William Carter Jr. felt special. It was clear that many eyes were on them, wondering who these two young and important men were, and he pocketed that memory, wanting to retain that feeling for as long as possible.

They arrived after forty minutes in a quieter, primarily residential neighborhood of the city where the hotel was. More like an estate, it was one of the most beautiful buildings William Carter Jr. had ever seen. Well, at least from the inside. From the outside, it had the stark and clinical appearance of an ordinary public school, but the inside, stunning. Stately and impeccably decorated, he was shocked to see that the entryway led to a courtyard with an ornate fountain and a walkway lined with palm trees. The residences, as Kofi referred to them, were in the back and slightly detached from the main building.

William was eager to settle in and freshen up. After Kofi showed him to his room, he collapsed on the double bed, which was a lot firmer than he expected, and closed his eyes briefly. No one had mentioned to him how exhausting travel would be.

He didn’t realize he had fallen asleep until a knock on his door was followed by an older woman poking her head in to find him fully clothed and only half on the bed. He shot up and tried to look alert. “So sorry, Mr. Carter,” she said in accented English. “I just wanted to let you know dinner will be served in thirty minutes.”

William blinked rapidly to get his bearings and then remembered that he had flown here over the last day and was overdue for a meal. “Yes, of course, thank you, Miss ...” His voice trailed off because he realized he had no idea who this woman was.

“Gifty,” she said with a smile.

“Gifty,” William repeated back.

“Yes, sir,” she said.

William Carter Jr. hurried to freshen up and got lost on the way to the dining room. When he arrived flushed and out of breath, the meal was already underway. It was a relatively small group composed of Professor Hill, who’d arrived two days before, Kofi, and two other men that William did not recognize—white men—and he looked at them with a bewildered smile. Both men, closer to Professor Hill’s age than his own, were also sweating a lot and looked worse for wear because of it. One had a comb-over haircut that was pathetically drooping due to the heat. The other’s face was flushed a deep pink, bordering on red.

“Nice of you to join us,” said Professor Hill, who was big on punctuality.

William Carter Jr. tried to slow his breathing while Kofi jumped in on his behalf. “It’s a big place, and I didn’t get to give him a tour, so he probably got a little lost,” Kofi offered.

William nodded.

“Well, now that you’re here, I’d like you to meet our partners on this from Ross Financial, Mr. David Ross and Mr. Charles Werner.”

William shook hands with each of the men, noting that Werner was the one with the comb-over and Ross was the one with the hot flashes. William had not known that there would be other men present, but he was able to recover from his shock fairly quickly. The dinner was all business. The two men, William gathered, were interested in helping finance the homes that Kofi had envisioned for his project. They were here on a scouting mission. They wanted to see what the potential opportunities were in the market and to observe the current issues in the hopes that they might be able to help facilitate a solution. Over the next few days, they would be traveling with the group to existing building sites, eager to learn the ways Kofi planned to revolutionize the current real estate landscape.

Each of these interactions would unfold like an elaborate job interview, but at that first dinner, William observed the men, evaluating their responses and endeavoring to impress them, but mostly he was ready to learn. The white men, for what they lacked in adaptability, made up for in expertise. David Ross introduced their business by telling William and Kofi, “Ross Financial oversees $100 million in assets a year. Our primary holdings are in industries that have traditional resource markets: lumber, steel, oil, et cetera. But we’ve recently had a lot of success with real estate and are looking for a chance to expand into a new global market. That’s where you young men come in.”

As if rehearsed, Charles Werner took his turn to speak. “Originally, we were testing the Caribbean, but weather problems deterred the research team from really thinking anything there could have sustainable potential. So when Professor Hill reached out and said we had the opportunity to get in on the ground floor on something big in Africa, well, we just had to get on the plane. And as you can see, we really want to be here,” he said with a laugh, dabbing a napkin at the few hairs plastered across his head.

“You’ve really impressed us, Kofi, with your ingenuity and ideas. There’s huge potential here for expansion beyond residential to commercial or retail spaces. We can really modernize Accra,” Ross said.

William Carter Jr. watched Kofi bristle and braced himself for how he might respond. “Well, it’s already a modern place,” he said.

“Oh sure, sure,” Werner said, waving his hand dismissively. “I think what he meant to say is that the future of the city is potentially in your hands. This idea could be revolutionary. It could make a lot of Western people actually want to live here, show them the possibilities.”

Kofi gave the men a tight-lipped smile, a vein bulging in his neck.

Kofi did the majority of the talking about his vision for what he wanted to accomplish in Accra and why. “My primary goal,” Kofi said, “is preservation of the landscape while also making housing that’s functional and beautiful. It’s ambitious, I know, but throughout my time in school, I’ve studied how this exact kind of thing has been done across the world. It really takes someone with a brave vision and also uncompromising values to make it happen. I think it’s easy to get distracted with profit margins and projections, but this is really about people for me. Homes are sacred. This is my homeland. I’ve been gone for a long time, but what was that all for if I can’t make a difference here?” Kofi then made pointed eye contact with everyone at the table. William Carter Jr. hated when Kofi did this, merging business with his personal philosophies. While William tuned this out, he tried to discern how the Ross Financial men were responding to the pitch. They seemed engaged and interested, even as they also seemed physically very uncomfortable.

Professor Hill interjected. “And of course there’s no reason we can’t do all of that and make a little profit,” he said with a laugh. The Ross Financial men joined in before expertly maneuvering the conversation to looking into government contracts that might help to subsidize some of the work.

Kofi shook his head at this. “Too much corruption. You have to grease the palms of a lot of men in order to get them to do what you want,” he said.

David Ross chuckled. “Is that something unique to Ghana?”

Charles Werner joined in. “The entire world has some greasy palms.”

Kofi didn’t appear to like the joke but let out a strained, cordial laugh anyway.

When the food arrived, William and the men chased the spices burning their way down their esophagi with copious amounts of water. Gifty had made several trips to fill up their glasses, and by the second course, William had to excuse himself to relieve his bladder. When he returned to the table, the conversation was still centered around the unnamed potential real estate development. Tomorrow, they would all embark on a research trip to see what was already in place and where Accra’s strengths and weaknesses were. It was the first meal that William Carter Jr. had ever had where eating was the secondary activity and not the central one. He would later come to understand that this was what was known as a business dinner.

When David Ross and Charles Werner announced their retirement for the evening, Professor Hill stood up as they did before they exited the table. A beat too late, Kofi and William did the same. When they were all alone, Kofi slouched back in his chair, his body limp with exhaustion.

Professor Hill clapped his hands together. “Well, that’s off to a great start!”

Kofi let his neck rest against the back of his chair and hung his head, letting gravity pull it down though his gaze remained up. He didn’t reply.

“Do you think,” Kofi began, a cautious edge to his voice, “that these men are the best partners for what we’re trying to do?”

William allowed himself a sideways glance at Professor Hill, who seemed like he was expecting this question. The older man rested his elbows on the table and tented his fingers. “What are we trying to do?” he asked.

Kofi sat himself upright. “Well, we’re trying to make a difference in Ghana, for housing, for people who need safe places to live that aren’t going to be so expensive that they can never afford them.”

Professor Hill was quiet for a moment. “Isn’t it funny that we need money to do that?” he asked.

“What is that saying, ‘Not all money is good money’?” Kofi asked.

“What do you need it to be good for?” Professor Hill replied, a slight hint of irritation creeping into his voice.

William cleared his throat to jump in. “I think what Professor Hill is trying to say is that maybe we don’t need to be hyperfocused on the source. If your intention is to do this, then the reality is that we need capital, and these men have capital and are willing to share it. You don’t have to be friends with them, just partners.”

“I just think there might be another way,” Kofi said.

“What’s that?” William said, playing his role of friend and confidant well.

“Perhaps it’s self-funded at the onset, and then we try to bring in some money later,” Kofi offered.

Professor Hill’s features rearranged into a confused frown. “You think that you have the means to self-fund a building project in Africa ... as a twenty-three-year-old?”

“Well, no, not me exactly and not right now, but William is in business school, and he’s going to make a ton of money one day, and I think that maybe that’s the answer,” Kofi said, looking at William intently.

William’s eyebrows raised. The idea that they would try to embark on a business venture with money they didn’t currently have wasn’t very good business. He made a mental note to keep Kofi far away from the financials.

“Kofi, let me be frank with you,” Professor Hill said. “This isn’t really something you want to wait on. People are going to hear about Ross Financial being here, and that is going to cause them to talk, and talking leads to investigations, and investigations lead to someone else stealing this opportunity right out from under you. Something I always try to impress upon my students is that no one is going to hand you anything; you have to take it. You have to seize every opportunity and every moment, and that is how you win. You can worry about the way that it feels later.”

William caught Gifty’s eyes as she emerged from who even knew where (the shadows, he supposed) to clear the remainder of the table while the three remained locked in silent debate.

Kofi and William found themselves in quiet reflection, and Professor Hill took that as his own cue to go to bed. “Gentlemen,” he said with a nod as he slid his chair back, “to be continued tomorrow.”

Both William and Kofi mumbled good night and sat with each other for a few more minutes while Kofi tried again to plead his case for eliminating the influence of Ross Financial from this project and William Carter Jr. just grew weary. He, too, opted to go to bed instead of talking in circles about the moral equivocation in exposing Ghanaian real estate to white American business partners. It was clear by the end of their conversation where Kofi’s position was, but what frustrated William was that that position almost assured that they wouldn’t have a company at all. An imperfect company was better than nothing. What in all the world was perfect anyway? William dragged himself to his room, exhausted, and it took every last ounce of his energy not to fall asleep again on top of his bed with his clothes on.

The next morning, the crew convened for breakfast at seven and set off via chartered van to look at various locations for building sites in, around, and outside of the city. The men were also interested in visiting potential factories that would be overseeing the production and manufacturing of Kofi’s modules, which would be proprietary to this company. Most factories didn’t seem equipped to handle the load for the size and scale of the potential project, which seemed like another problem that only money could solve. By the end of the day, they all returned back to the hotel, the two Ross partners sunburnt and spent and the Harvard crew in silent disharmony. Still, they agreed to meet up for another dinner.

That night it was more of the same, the men pitching themselves to Kofi, but with some incentives to sweeten the deal this time. It seemed like Professor Hill had coached them on what to say to entice him to sign on, which included founding an architecture program at a local school to inspire the next generation of Ghanaian architects and engineers. Kofi seemed to soften but not bend. William felt he would have to be the one to take the deal over the finish line.

Professor Hill had already promised to place William Carter Jr. at Ross Financial, where he could oversee the funding from the inside. Kofi would be the one on the ground in Ghana, returned home as was his desire. The proposal had appeal, but the idea that Ross Financial would own 51 percent of the still unnamed company was a nonstarter for Kofi. He only wanted to agree if there was a clear exit plan from Ross Financial, who also had to pledge to be hands-off with any and all creative decisions. These demands placed everything at a standstill. Eventually, after Gifty brought out dessert, they were talked out enough that everyone agreed to go straight to bed.

But sometime in the middle of the night, William heard his doorknob jiggle, followed by a knock. “Hello?” he whispered urgently, thinking he might be about to get kidnapped.

“It’s me. Let me in,” Kofi whispered back. William threw off the thin blanket that had been covering him and opened up his mosquito net to get out of bed and go to the door. On the other side, he found Kofi, fully dressed. William blinked rapidly, not trusting his senses.

“What time is it?” he groaned as he stepped aside to let Kofi enter his room.

“I don’t know. It’s late. Look, I wanna show you something. But we have to go now, and I don’t want anyone else to know, so get dressed and hurry up,” Kofi whispered.

William, too jet-lagged to protest, did as he was told and put on the same clothes that he wore to dinner earlier and his sneakers.

“Okay, now be quiet,” Kofi emphasized in a whisper as they snuck through William’s door, and he shut it behind them slowly, making sure not to slam it.

They tiptoed down the hallway in silence. Kofi was leading William through the kitchen on their way out the back door when William jumped to find Gifty sitting at a table with a magazine.

“Can’t sleep?” Gifty asked pleasantly, not thinking twice about why these two were sneaking around the hotel at one in the morning.

“Just need some fresh air,” Kofi said with a smile. “We’re good!”

Gifty nodded and waved them off.

When they got outside of the hotel, William was surprised to see how quiet the city was at this hour. He and Kofi walked side by side for several blocks until his curiosity got the better of him.

“Where are we going?” William demanded, stopping to face Kofi and pulling on his arm.

“You’ll see. It’s not much farther,” Kofi replied.

In another fifteen minutes, they arrived at what William could only describe as corporate ruins. The building they stood in front of rose at least one hundred feet in the air but had no windows, the night wind ripping through empty crevices. It was an eerie, concrete, haunted tower. There was a makeshift fence surrounding the area, erected haphazardly as if someone quit on the job halfway through. Kofi walked toward an area where the fence had collapsed and motioned for William to follow him.

“What is this place?” William Carter Jr. asked, looking around to check that they were truly alone.

“This,” Kofi began as he marched through overgrown weeds toward the entrance of the building, “is a project started by an American real estate company that promised to build office spaces here in Ghana and then decided not to finish.”

“Why does it look like this?” William asked.

“Insurance,” Kofi said, as if that was the only explanation needed.

William trailed Kofi into the building and up into the stairwell as they climbed higher. “Insurance. What does that mean?” he asked.

“It means that they still own the land and can collect money on a project that’s incomplete because they insured it, but as you can see, this project is not getting done. This has been here since I was a kid. I came here last night to see if I wanted to bring you here as well so you can see what happens when people say they want to work within Ghana, but all they really want is money.”

William was quiet as they reached the eleventh floor. “Break,” he huffed out, and Kofi mercifully made an exit through a sheet of plastic blowing in the wind to reveal a large empty floor space containing nothing but cement and a few stray tools.

“Everyone who was contracted to work on this project was stiffed,” Kofi said. “Just discarded.”

“That’s not going to happen with our project. I can see where you’re going,” William countered.

“How do you know that? Do you know David and Charles? Do you think they care about if our work ends up like this?” Kofi said, his eyes flashing with accusation.

William raised his hands in surrender. He didn’t realize just how personally Kofi was taking all this.

“Okay, so what are you saying?” he asked.

Kofi led William to the vacant rectangle where a window should have been and he sat, legs dangling over the edge.

“I’m saying we need to do this. You and me. Just us. I can’t let this go and be controlled by people who don’t care. You think David and Charles have ever visited Ghana before? You think they’re coming back?” Kofi said.

William was quiet. Who cared? He’d never been to Ghana before. He didn’t know if or when he was coming back. That shouldn’t affect whether or not they could do business.

“We can’t do this alone, though. I know you know that,” William answered.

“We can try,” Kofi said.

They could try, and they would likely fail, which William wasn’t terribly excited to do. William and Kofi had a plan, or at least the semblance of one, that would allow each of them to get what he wanted. With Kofi’s plan, neither of them would get anything. They would have nothing, be nothing. All their efforts would be for nothing.

William looked out into the night while he relished the coolness of the wind that blew through the opening where they sat, this nighttime meeting stirring up his anxiety. William stood and leaned against the decaying brick frame. “I think we should take their deal,” he said.

Kofi groaned. “No,” he said firmly, standing to indicate his resolve.

“No?” William asked incredulously.

“No,” Kofi repeated. “It’s my project. It’s my idea, and this isn’t how I want to do this.”

William felt his blood go hot, anger coursing through him. “Your project?” he spat at Kofi. “You mean the thing you threw away and I saved?”

Kofi hung his head and shook it. “There’s no company without my plans. I’m sorry, but this isn’t the way that this should be done.”

“Bullshit,” William murmured. Having this argument in the middle of the night was pointless. He began to walk away.

William turned to shoot another venomous look at his roommate and noticed the brick he was standing on was wobbling violently. Kofi’s right foot slipped from beneath him in the place that he stood. Kofi’s eyes widened with fear, and he reached his left hand out to William, using his right to grab on to the wall. William reflexively stepped back, a decision that he would think about every day for the rest of his life. Kofi’s right hand missed the wall and found nothing but air. For a split second, he was suspended, quite beautifully, regally, in the frame of the ruins before the bricks gave way and he hurled toward the ground. William watched in abject horror as his roommate plummeted several dozen feet down and landed with his limbs in a grotesque, unnatural contortion on a dusty wasteland. William stood motionless for several minutes, listening to nothing but the chilling silence of his own racing thoughts.

As the initial shock subsided, panic set in, and he began to hyperventilate, frantically looking around him. The sandy floor showed two sets of footprints, and he quickly removed his sweatshirt to use as a broom to sweep his away. He walked backward, erasing his own presence as he retraced his steps the exact same way that he and Kofi entered. When he got to the stairwell, he looked around to see if he’d touched anything that might contain his fingerprints. There were no doors, the building so unfinished and haphazard that it was just a shell.

He raced down the stairs to the ground level and rounded the building to check on Kofi’s body. Kofi’s eyes and mouth were still open, a reminder that death had grabbed him by surprise. William felt bile rising up in his throat but refrained from vomiting, aware that he shouldn’t leave any evidence of his presence behind. He took one last glance at Kofi’s broken body, and then he ran. He, who was almost always picked last for every sport or game or activity, sprinted down the streets of Accra, having no real idea as to the way back to the hotel but letting his intuition and pure adrenaline guide him.

When he returned to the hotel, sweating, panting, and crying, he headed straight for Professor Hill’s room and knocked frantically on the door. His sweatshirt dangled limply in his hand, covered in dust and dirt.

Professor Hill’s alarmed and confused face greeted him from the other side of the door as he swung it open. “What in the ...,” he asked upon viewing William’s ragged appearance.

In response, William choked out a sob and fell into the room, a trail of dirt and sweat following him. As the door closed, he looked behind him and saw Gifty’s questioning face staring right back.