Christopher Faulkner

Here I am (in the photo with my back towards the camera) three years old, freshly relocated from New York and adjusting to my new life in Accra, Ghana. My beloved mom was standing next to my dad when he took this photo. She frequently recalled how crushed she felt that day. I remember her saying, “It was your first day of preschool, and as I watched you walk away down the driveway, you never looked back!”

She had once owned a wholesale brownie business in the Bronx, but my dad’s overseas job at a nonprofit adult-education and job-training organization brought our family to West Africa on two occasions. First we lived in Ghana for two years, and then in Togo for three. Dad often took us to the British Virgin Islands in the Caribbean. His parents had emigrated from there to New York in the 1920s.