I remember, as a boy growing up in Accra, how the sky always seemed just within reach. It wasn't the prideful sunset or the stars that drew me; it was the way the world whispered secrets in the small things. I was only eight when I first felt the gravity shift. It happened one hot afternoon in Teshie, on a street lined with tall palm trees and the fragrance of roasting corn.
Mama had sent me to fetch water from the standpipe near our compound. On my way back, balancing the calabash on my head, I felt the ground tilt underfoot. The spoon in my pocket weighed ten times its size. The cockroach I stepped on lifted off the ground, legs flailing for purchase. Children playing soccer nearby watched in confusion as the ball, kicked hard, hung suspended in midair for a breath, then fell. I blinked and the world snapped back as if nothing had happened. No thunder. No flash of light. Just the pounding of my heart as if it were trying to take flight.
I steadied myself against a leaning kiosk painted with Adinkra symbols. In Twi, the stall-keeper's greeting sounded distant, like echoes through fog. He smiled as if nothing was amiss, but in that moment I understood something: the earth had obeyed strange rules, and I had felt a crack in their surface. My heart thundered; I could not tell if it was fear or excitement.
Later that evening, at our family compound on the outskirts of Accra, I told my grandmother, Nana Adwoa, about the floating ball and the flying cockroach. She did not scream or call me mad. Instead, she placed a wizened hand on my shoulder and said in our old tongue, "Gyidi w'ayƐ mu, Obasi." She reminded me that even a child knows of the sky's supreme Maker without being taught. "Obi nkyerɛ akwadaa Nyame," she said — no one needs to teach a child about God. Her words were gentle, but I sensed their weight. She saw more than the floating spoon, more than the shaken ground.
In the flickering lamplight, I traced the pattern on the Adinkra cloth draped across her knees. There was Sankofa, the bird looking back, cradling an egg beneath it. Se wo were fi na wo san kɔfa a, yɛnkyiri — if you forget and then go back to get it, there is no shame. Nana was telling me that I might not understand this today, but my heritage would help me remember. The earth's secret had found me, and I was a Mensah who would go back and gather what was mine.
Days later, I felt the odd pull again. It happened during a nighttime storm at Labadi Beach, where waves crashed like drums under lightning. I stood ankle-deep in the surf with friends, relishing the thunder. I suddenly lunged to avoid a rogue breaker, but I fell differently — as though the sand itself had shifted away beneath me. For a moment, I hovered above the ground, utterly weightless. I felt light, like a freed balloon. Then gravity pulled me down gently as the wave receded.
Mother shook her head with a knowing smile. "Oba panin," she said — "a grown child." My father, adjusting the loose glasses he always wore at night, gave a soft chuckle. "Okoto nwo anomaa," he murmured — a crab does not give birth to a bird. Every trait we carry is born of ancestry, he meant. If oddities run in the family, then perhaps I too had inherited something from the sky. My fall was soft enough not to hurt, but I could still feel the memory of that weightlessness in my bones, as if the universe had touched me.
That night under the Ghanaian sky, with indigo sea spray on my face, I understood that the world was not entirely as I had been taught. In the physics textbooks at Achimota School I would one day read Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation, but even then I knew it was incomplete. Our people had a wisdom that the pages could not capture. As my grandfather liked to say, "Woforo dua pa a, na yɛpia wo" — when you climb a good tree, we push you. Perhaps, in its own strange way, life had chosen to push me onward.