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Chapter 25

Ernest Morris

Accra, February 2014

Ernest Morris was itching with anticipation to start his life when he graduated from Princeton. It was difficult for him to determine if the experience was “worth it” given the tens of thousands in debt he took on after he returned the Carter Foundation Scholarship following his junior year. (This was coupled with the thousands that he already owed before college from when his mother put several bills in his name when he was in elementary school.) But he had his degree. He had heard that public service work could help wipe out student loan burden, and so he set out to find an opportunity that might mitigate some of his financial stress. A teaching-abroad program that was advertised within the Black Student Union on campus landed him in Accra, which was how he found himself living abroad for the last two years.

He wasn’t any closer to the kind of future that he thought he was promised when he’d decided to make his way to New Jersey from Atlanta, but at least he didn’t have to deal with cold weather anymore. He had no teaching certifications, but this would be achieved in tandem with his actually doing the job. The only thing he minded about Accra was the roads; the daring drivers on speeding dirt bikes made him dizzy. Aside from that, his life was good. At the school, his role was to teach math and English to nine-year-olds, and as much as this wasn’t in his grand plan, it was something that he enjoyed.

He needed an escape from the last four years of his life, and he didn’t know how much he craved an experience away from America, somewhere in a majority Black place. Living abroad hadn’t seemed like an option for someone of his circumstances at first, but now as he enjoyed cold after-work beers with his colleagues from the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Guam, he felt inspired. He was pleased at the community that he was able to form and how much he felt fulfilled by the work that he was doing. He was thinking that he would like to extend his stay another year, but in a matter of months, his program was coming to an end, and he would have to figure out how he was going to deal with what was waiting for him at home.

In the meantime, he was trying to manage the needs of his students, discovering that his role as an educator wasn’t limited to the classroom. One of his favorite students was a bright girl named Esi. She was well above average height for her age, so much so that her knees knocked against the standard desk often. She was responsive and agreeable in class, and though he knew he was not supposed to have favorites, her energy in the classroom was helpful and dependable.

Ernest grew concerned when Esi stopped coming to school one day. After twenty-one days of missed classes, he traveled to Esi’s home to find out the reason for her extended absence. Esi answered the door and was visibly surprised to see Ernest. He quickly second-guessed his presence there, wondering if he’d crossed a line.

“Mr. Earn?” she asked, slightly skeptical.

“Hi, Esi,” Ernest replied, now self-conscious about his motivation for being there. He hoped he didn’t look as creepy as he’d started to feel. “I just wanted to come by and check on you because you’ve been absent from school. Is everything all right?”

“Oh,” Esi said as she looked down at the floor before stepping aside so that he could enter the house. Ernest hesitated in the doorway for a second before looking over his shoulder but decided that since he’d come all this way already, he might as well see what’s going on. “I know I’ve been absent, but I can’t come to school anymore,” she said to him when he was finally inside.

Ernest stood uncomfortably in the hallway that led into a small living room. The home was an aluminum-sided, two-bedroom dwelling in a community called Bibu Estates. There were high walls enveloping each property, clearly delineating individualized small parcels of land. There was a gate to get inside, but no one had been guarding it, so he just walked in. Inside, the furniture seemed to be a mix of purchased and inherited items, the decor not really coalescing.

“Why’s that, Esi?” he asked, hoping to coax her into sharing.

“My brother, I have to take care of him now,” Esi said, looking down at the floor and pointing to an area in a bedroom partitioned off with a curtain.

“But you didn’t have to take care of him before?”

Esi shook her head slowly. “He’s older than me, but he was working on a construction site and—” She motioned again toward the curtain.

Ernest heard a faint whimpering sound coming from behind it. Esi beckoned him forward and put a finger to her lips. Ernest tiptoed behind her. She vented the fabric slightly to the side to reveal a boy who was unmistakably related to Esi, lying on a bed, twitching and groaning in his sleep. Ernest frowned and took in the surroundings. The boy couldn’t be more than sixteen years old, and Ernest would not have thought anything was amiss until he noticed a bloody stump suspended by a makeshift sling where his right hand should have been. His intake of breath was sharp. Esi began to back away from her brother, and Ernest followed.

“Esi, what happened?” Ernest asked.

“My brother, he had a good job working for the CC. A few weeks ago, someone dropped something on his forearm, and it was injured so badly, it had to be amputated. He can’t really do anything for himself now, and he has nightmares every time he sleeps. He’s sleeping now, which is good, but I have to be here to take care of him because there’s no one else to help,” she said.

“What’s the CC?” Ernest asked.

“The Carter Corporation, I think it’s called. They do all the building around here,” Esi replied.

Ernest felt his blood run cold at the mention of the Carter Corporation. He hadn’t heard the name Carter since he’d left Princeton, since he himself had been bedridden and battered with no compassion. Since he had rejected the remaining last year of his scholarship and plunged himself into debt to pay for school. He couldn’t believe these people had reached him all the way in Africa.

He’d known, of course, that the Carter Corporation had its roots in Ghana. This was a famous fact, a good bit of trivia that played well for identity politics. For his entire life, he had been aware of these American Black billionaires who’d made their fortune elsewhere. It was also just as known that whatever they did to make their money was always at the expense of other people. He just didn’t expect for them to be children, or for him to be so close to one of their victims. He felt sick as he looked into Esi’s eyes and saw her distress.

Briefly, he was lost in his memory of his own experience with Asher Carter. He wouldn’t say he was obsessed, but for a time, a short one, he was certainly fixated on getting Asher to be involved with his on-campus initiatives, hoping his popularity and money could potentially do some good for other Black students at Princeton. But Asher had thwarted every attempt at connection, even after they’d met on good terms at Ernest’s scholarship ceremony. Ernest eventually understood that Asher had no interest in connecting, and in fact avoided Ernest as much as he could. Ernest found himself watching Asher closely in their shared class, waiting for him to reveal anything interesting about himself, but Asher was an astoundingly typical jock. He was handsome, tall, light skinned, and incredibly dull. Worse than that, he was dumb as a brick.

This guy, Ernest felt himself thinking, is the son of a billionaire? Ernest had spent the first few weeks of the semester surveying his new environment and classmates. He’d chosen Princeton because he wanted the best, and yet he found himself stunned that this population was what constituted the best. Most of the people he met seemed to be chosen by physical archetype from some sort of catalog and dropped in New Jersey with matching monogrammed everything.

Their sophomore year, instead of joining ranks with the Black student organizations that Ernest had beseeched Asher to be a part of, Asher had bickered for the eating club Ivy, which wasn’t surprising, but irritating to Ernest all the same. Ernest declined to bicker for any eating clubs, knowing already that he was of a status so lowly and undesirable, he would retain more dignity in abstaining. Still, he had to admit that he wanted to be in the Ivy mix every now and again. Their parties were legendary but not advertised. For nonmembers to be granted admission, they required a pass. Passes were indiscriminately handed out to hot girls and very discriminately handed out to everyone else. Having the right look was sometimes half the battle, like getting access to an exclusive nightclub.

One person who very much didn’t have the right look was Ernest Morris. On a particularly frigid night his junior year, he’d made the bold choice that he was going to accompany a friend to an Ivy party. “Come on, Ernest,” his friend Madison Sanderson had all but begged. “I know you don’t love it, but there’s nothing else going on tonight. There’ll be a DJ and drinks, and I’ll be there,” she said, shaking his shoulders affectionately. Ernest rolled his eyes dramatically, and the corners of his mouth downturned when he thought about rolling up to the Ivy house, but she was right: there was nothing else going on that night. He was six shots deep and just getting started, letting off some steam. He walked arm in arm with Madison across the campus to Ivy, where she’d been invited to the party and he would be attending as her plus-one.

Madison fell outside of the demographics of whom he might choose to typically befriend. She was a moneyed and slender white girl, but as a socialist bisexual from Vermont, she had won him over in their shared political science class by absolutely eviscerating a gun-loving good ole boy over his stance on American interference in developing nations. She wasn’t perfect, but neither was he, and he figured that college was for making new relationships, so why not?

Ernest felt the tension the moment they walked up to Ivy’s building. The two had zigzagged their way to the door, still linked at the elbows, laughing to keep the biting January cold at bay. The two underclassmen manning the door eyed Ernest when Madison gave her name and followed it up with “plus-one” before flashing her brilliant white smile, a feat of modern orthodontia and money. “Hmm,” the chubbier kid closer to the left said, scanning the paper printout list. “You’re here but ...” He paused ceremoniously. “It doesn’t say plus-one.”

His comrade looked over at the paper to confirm and then at Ernest. “Yeah, sorry, only her,” he said with a shrug and a slight air of malice.

“Oh no, I definitely have a plus-one,” Madison said. “Hold on, let me text.” She swayed in place as she pulled her phone from her pocket and slid her glove off with those perfect teeth. She held the glove there in place, and Ernest watched the two guys watching her mouth. He stood on his tiptoes and craned his neck to see if he could confirm that the paper said that Madison did not have a plus-one.

The bigger of the two saw what Ernest was doing and snatched the paper close to his chest. “I think you should leave,” he said, eyes narrowed.

Ernest took an unsteady step forward, closer to the door, and stood his ground. “Fine,” he growled and reached for Madison to tell her that it was time to go. Ernest had a fuzzy memory of what occurred next due to the alcohol and the fact that he got a concussion.

According to eyewitness reports, Ernest made a move to take Madison’s hand so that they could walk away, but she hesitated, thinking that she might be able to talk Ernest into the party if he just gave her a second. She was texting and said, “Hold on,” glove still in her mouth so that her words muffled together, thus sounding more like a groan of protest to some.

Becoming increasingly irritated and cold, Ernest pulled a bit more forcefully on Madison’s hand, which was when all hell broke loose.

Before Ernest knew what was happening, he was on the ground. From beneath these two beasts, he kicked his legs up and threw his arms in the direction that felt best. With his glasses knocked off, he could see nothing. The two Ivy members, both white, were seen beating the shit out of Ernest Morris, the dusting of snow almost permanently underfoot from January to March momentarily speckled with Ernest’s blood. His two assailants were screaming profanities, and he couldn’t be sure if he heard the N-word, but a report of the incident would say that it was dropped.

No one stepped forward to come to his rescue as he heard Madison’s voice screaming in panic. He felt the heat of the lights from the campus police car before his limp body was lifted onto an orange spine board stretcher and carted away. The last thing that Ernest remembered seeing before he lost consciousness was a figure that he thought was Asher retreating along with the other party attendees as they shuffled inside. For years, he couldn’t figure out why this image stuck with him even after everything else went dark, but it did.

The stories that emerged from that night might as well have been from a college fantasy fable. And in a matter of days, all conversations on campus had become centered around Ernest Morris.

“Oh my God, he totally tried to kidnap that girl. She wasn’t safe, and it’s so good they stepped in.”

“Princeton is so fuckin’ racist. Of course he got jumped.”

“I heard he hates all eating clubs too. He’s got, like, a vendetta.”

“He wasn’t even invited. Why was he here?”

“He wasn’t doing anything, and they jumped him.”

“They didn’t jump him! It was self-defense.”

Ernest felt bile rising in his throat remembering waking up in the hospital with bruises and fractured bones and an even more destroyed sense of pride. The boys who jumped him had never been charged for what they did, even after Madison explained that she was in no danger. Their families were responsible for major endowments to the school. It was all an unfortunate misunderstanding that they prayed Ernest would put behind him.

He turned back to Esi.

“I’m going to write a note to your parents, and if they could get in touch with me, that would be great. I would love to talk to them about what happened and see if I can help,” he said.

When he left, he was seething with anger, his emotions from college that he thought that he had abandoned rushing to the surface. He knew what it felt like to be hurt physically and feel powerless for recourse, and it was seeming like these people, the Richie Riches of the world, were responsible for the maiming of more than one innocent body, and he was sick of them getting away with it.

The next week, Esi’s mother came down to the school to speak with him. He was surprised to hear her voice when he was cleaning the classroom at the end of the day and nearly dropped the books he was holding when she walked into the room. Esi’s mother was only a few years older than him but looked like she could have been his mother. He stood leaning against a wood table that doubled as his teaching desk while she took an uncomfortable seat across from him in one of the children’s desks.

“Mr. Ernest,” she began, “my daughter gave me your note and asked me to come see you. I want you to know that we want her to go to school, but my son cannot be alone right now. I work. My husband is not here.” She paused to take in a breath. Ernest blinked rapidly. He didn’t feel equipped to handle the weight of these problems. He wasn’t even a real teacher.

“If I may,” he said, briefly interjecting, “Esi said that her brother was injured in an accident. There might be a way to get his employer to help subsidize his care.”

Esi’s mother shook her head. “Ah, no. That’s not possible.”

“Why not?” Ernest asked.

“The contract is pretty strict on the company’s responsibilities, and workplace injury just is not covered. Things happen a lot. These buildings are going up so fast that there’s not any time for safety checks. That’s why so many young people work them.”

Ernest nodded. “And this is the Carter Corporation, correct? Based out of America?”

“Yes. They’ve been here for many years. They do a lot in Ghana, all over. They built this school.”

Ernest couldn’t disguise his shock. He felt disconnected from his body and immediately immobilized. He was under the impression that this school was the result of donations from various entities and individuals. They did commercials regularly, having the kids pose with their new water filters or books. There was nothing anywhere to indicate that this school was founded or funded by the Carter Corporation. He would have never worked here if that was the case. Where else could they possibly control?

He pressed his fingernails into his fists as hard as he could in a fight to keep himself present.

“Mr. Ernest?” Esi’s mother’s firm voice brought him back to the room, but his thoughts were still reeling.

“I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I didn’t know that.”

Esi’s mother nodded. “They do a lot here, but I don’t think they’ll be able to help. As I said, this kind of situation, it’s very common.”

Ernest considered what she said. While he didn’t know how deep the Carter Corporation ties went, his suggestion was more so to have the company take more responsibility, but now he was sure that something more drastic needed to happen. Not only was this corporation unethical, immoral, and secretive but also damaging to a population of people that they actively pretended to be helping. It was diabolical.

He thought about his own time stuck in a hospital bed with no recourse and was filled with rage. He couldn’t let this happen to more people. He had to tell someone about this, anyone.

When Esi’s mother departed and he was left alone with his thoughts, he immediately went home and accessed a message board, where he posted asking for personal accounts and stories from other people nearby who’d been injured by Carter Corporation construction sites. By the time he went to bed that night, he had no responses, but when he woke up in the morning, a dozen accounts had replied with their own stories that covered everything from permanent disabilities to death. Of course, all the accounts were anonymous, so Ernest didn’t know who they were. When he fired off private messages, the trails went cold. No one was willing to come forward on the record, which was going to be a major problem for him if he was ever going to be able to tell someone else about the depravity of the Carters.

From then on, Ernest spent his nights and weekends working within the community to gather intelligence. It gave him a chance to better work on his Twi, which was admittedly weak. When conversing with older people who had been around to understand life before the invasion of the Carter Corporation, this was especially important. Most conversations were a hybrid of the languages, Ernest trying to clumsily translate while someone detailed their observations. Eventually people began to divulge to him because they thought that they were unloading to a friend.

One man asked Ernest to meet him at a café four villages away from where he lived and spoke to him while wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses, eager to protect his identity and safety. He was a middle-class father who spent much of his education abroad before returning to Accra. “The Corporation does a lot of things that are all technically legal but exploitative,” he told Ernest. “They make people pay rent sometimes years in advance, two to five years sometimes. They also make you pay an additional fee to renew your lease, and they get away with that because buying a home is so expensive. When the Carter Corporation bought the lands that they own, they could get entire plots for around two hundred and fifty dollars, and now that same plot might be worth thirty thousand dollars.”

“So the whole setup is that they bought land for cheap and now it’s very expensive?” Ernest asked.

The man lowered and shook his head. “I wish it were that simple. Homeownership is very difficult here but also very important. Most people are renters, so whoever controls the rental market controls everything. These private developers have made life impossible, and they always come out on top. They have the backing of the government, of law enforcement, and the press. They pretty much do whatever they like because how’s anyone going to stop them? Carter Corporation was just the first, but they aren’t the only ones. And because housing is already so hard to find, people just pay so they don’t have to move and start all over again.”

“What about private houses?” Ernest asked him, wondering about the tiny bungalow that Esi and her family lived in.

“Developers do those too, but if you make enough money, you can purchase a plot of land and self-build. The problem is a lot of the building materials also come from the Carter Corporation, and so they set the prices on those too, and they’re very high. They bought factories years ago that do all of the production for building materials, so that market also belongs to them.”

By the end of this conversation, Ernest had had four cups of very strong coffee, and his hand was shaking over his notepad. He wasn’t sure if that was the caffeine or his disgust. Ernest was sick at how far and wide the reach of the Carter Corporation went. When his teaching contract was up at the end of the term, he had spoken with seventeen families whose lives were permanently damaged by working for or because of the Carter Corporation.

He opted not to renew his teaching contract and took a chance to return to America, to New York this time, so that he could get one step closer to amassing evidence to expose the Carter Corporation for its crimes.