Hail To The Chief.(The Talk of the Town)(Stephen Yeboah)

Not long ago, Stephen Yeboah, who has been a doorman for the past twenty-seven years at Chatham Towers, two adjacent high-rises in Chinatown, was holding the door when a new tenant paused on his way into the building. "He looked at me and said, 'You're different,' " Yeboah recalled the other day. "I said, 'What do you mean?' and he said, 'I don't know, but the other doormen aren't like you.' "

As it happened, Yeboah had recently received a distinction that set him apart from other doormen: he had been appointed chief of Yabi, a suburb of Kumasi, Ghana's second-largest city. It's not unusual for retiring Ghanaians in the United States to assume chieftaincies (Yeboah's royal lineage comes from his great-great-grandmother; he was recruited to the position by his older brother, the head of the Agona family clan and a former Manhattan hospital admittance officer), but when Yeboah told some tenants in his building about it they organized a celebration in his honor. The party was held in the lobby. Yeboah sat in a chair that someone had decorated with colored cloths and cushions to make it look thronelike. Several members of the board of overseers showed up, and Yeboah and his family, dressed in traditional Ghanaian kente cloth, posed for pictures and accepted gifts: cash, toys, wine. When it was over, "I went back home to Flatbush and cried all day," he said. "I never knew how much these people loved me."

Yeboah was telling this story in the Meytex cafe, a Ghanaian hangout near his apartment. The walls were decorated with portraits of people who are admired in West Africa: Dr. Kofi Busia, Ghana's prime minister in the late sixties and the seventies; the soccer star Michael Essien; Bob Marley; Oprah; and Bill Clinton. Yeboah was wearing not his gray doorman's uniform, or his chief's outfit (multicolored kente cloth, gold-studded sandals), but his weekend clothes: a brown sweatshirt, a shearling vest, and a leather motorcycle cap. He talked about his childhood in Kumasi: his father was a truck driver, his mother a fishmonger with ties to the royal family in Yabi. When she went on trips north to collect smoked fish, he and his eight siblings stayed with their extended family. "We were one of those big, old African families," he said. He went to two years of law school in England--paying his way ...