Read Eddie Signwriter for Free Online Page B

But he did not join in with other children.He had no friends. Friends did not interest him. And nor, after a while, was anyone interested in befriending him.
    Though undisturbed, he did not go unnoticed. His aloofness attracted the attention of his teachers, and eventually the head teacher, who took an interest in him, saw him as a challenge, and so invited him to visit him in his quarters after class.
    The head teacher’s quarters were on the school property, near the water tanks on the hill. His house had two stories, and large empty rooms, and only him to fill them, except for the old woman who was his cook and stayed until the evening. Inside, the house had a wooden staircase and smelled of tobacco. On the walls there were original artworks—paintings and drawings done by artists from around the area—which he had not seen before in a house, and thought of at the time as being very beautiful.
    The head teacher was a small man. But also he was very self-possessed and calm and thoughtful, and difficult to raise to anger. There was something impressive about that. He had a lot of authority and respect in the eyes of people because of it and the boy respected him too.
    If other children visited the head teacher in his quarters, or he was the only one, he did not know, and he never asked. Maybe seeing the teacher became another of the routines he fell into. But also the teacher had known his father once. They’d attended training college together in Cape Coast, before the boy was born. The teacher liked asking about his father and he liked answering the teacher’s questions. About how his father was. How it had been to live in Botswana.
    In some ways his father and the teacher were alike—in their seriousness, in the way that it was often difficult to guess what they were thinking. Also, like his father, the teacher had traveled. He read and had interests, judging by the books that he took out from the library at Legon. About history and painting, and the biographies of generals and politicians. Napoleon. Churchill. Martin Luther King.
    After a time he and the teacher established a friendship. He told the teacher about what he felt without it seeming like an effort. Hetold the teacher about the things that were important to him and the things that disappointed him. About returning to his mother’s home, and finding everything so much smaller and different from what he remembered, and how his homecoming didn’t feel like homecoming at all. The teacher listened to these things, and he offered advice. Although mostly the teacher just listened, which was all that the boy wanted.
    Also the teacher was kind. The teacher took an interest in him, encouraged him. Sometimes with books, or with ideas, or through conversations in which the teacher tried to challenge him to think, to draw him out.
    It was late one afternoon, as he was leaving the teacher’s house to go back to classes, that the teacher first mentioned his idea of chance. He was standing on the step of the teacher’s door, and outside the mists were beginning to draw in for the evening, and the lamps that had already been lit were surrounded by milky halos.
    “Do you think you’re lucky?” are the words the teacher used.
    The teacher had a way of slimming his eyes when he asked a question and was already anticipating the answer, which was how the teacher looked at him then.
    “Sometimes,” he said.
    “But what if there isn’t such a thing as chance?” the teacher said. “What if chance is a choice. What if you choose to be lucky?”
    The teacher was talking fast now. He was excited because of his idea and it was difficult not to be drawn into his excitement.
    What the teacher said was that people believe too easily in chance. They believe that chance has power over them. That chance explains why things turn out or don’t. But what if we choose not to believe in chance? What if we banish the idea of it? This, he said, is what great people in history have