Homegoing (14 page)

“You must run!” James shouted at the White Doctor. The old man had lit a palm oil lamp next to his cot and pulled out a leather-bound book, reading with his spectacles perched at the tip of his nose. “They will kill you when they see you. They will not care that you are old.”

The White Doctor turned the page. He didn’t look up at James as he waved goodbye.

James shook his head and left the hut. Mampanyin had told him that he would know what to do when the time came, and yet here he was, so panicked that he could hardly breathe. He could feel the warm liquid traveling down his legs as he ran. He could not think. He could not think quickly enough to devise a plan, and before he knew it, shots were being fired all around him. The birds took flight, a black and red and blue and green cloud of wings, ascending. James wanted to hide. He couldn’t remember what had been so bad about his old life. He could learn to love Amma. He’d spent so much time seeing the bad in his parents’ marriage that he’d assumed there had to be something better. What if there wasn’t? He had trusted a witch with his happiness. With his life. Now he would surely die.

James woke up in the bush of some unknown forest. His
arms and legs ached, and his head felt as though it had been beaten by a rock. He sat there, disoriented, for countless minutes. Then an Asante warrior was beside him, so quiet in his approach that James did not notice him until he was standing over him.

“You are not dead?” the warrior asked. “Are you hurt?”

How could James tell a warrior like this that he had a headache? He said no.

“You are Osei Bonsu’s grandson, are you not? I remember you from his funeral. I have never forgotten a face.”

James wished he would lower his voice, but he didn’t say anything.

“What were you doing in Efutu?” the warrior asked.

“Does anyone know I’m alive?” James asked, ignoring the man’s question.

“No, a warrior hit your head with a rock. You didn’t move, so they threw you in the dead pile. We aren’t supposed to touch the pile, but I recognized your face and took you out so that I could send your body back to your people. I hid you here so no one would know I touched the dead. I didn’t know you were still alive.”

“Listen to me. I died in this war,” James said.

The man’s eyes grew so wide they looked like echoes of the moon. “What?”

“You must tell everyone that I died in this war. Will you do that?”

The warrior shook his head. He said no over and over and over again, but ultimately he would do it. James knew he would do it. And when he did, it would be the last time James would ever use his power to make another do his bidding.

For the rest of the month, James traveled to Asanteland. He slept in caves and hid in trees. He asked for help when he saw people in the bushland, telling them he was a lowly farmer who had gotten lost. And when he finally got to Akosua, on the fortieth day of his travels, he found her waiting for him.

SOMEBODY HAD ROBBED
old
Alice,
which meant the police would come sniffing around the boat, asking all the ship workers if they knew anything about it. Jo’s reputation was spotless. He’d been working on the ships in Fell’s Point for nearly two years and had never given anybody any trouble. But still, whenever a boat was robbed, all the black dockworkers were rounded up and questioned. Jo was tired of it. He was always jumpy around police, or anyone in uniform. Even the appearance of the postman had once sent him running behind a lace curtain. Ma Aku said he’d been like this since their days in the woods, running from catchers, from town to town, until they’d hit the safe house in Maryland.

“Cover for me, would ya, Poot?” Jo asked his friend, but he knew the police wouldn’t miss him. They couldn’t tell one black face from another. Poot would answer when they called his own name and then answer when they called Jo’s too, and they wouldn’t know the difference.

Jo jumped off the boat and looked behind him at the beautiful Chesapeake Bay, at the large, imposing ships that lined the Fell’s Point shipyards. He loved the look of those boats, loved that his hands helped build and maintain them, but Ma Aku always said it was bad juju, him and all the other freed Negroes working on ships. She said there was something evil about them building up the things that had brought them to America in the first place, the very things that had tried to drag them under.

Jo walked down Market Street and bought some pigs’ feet from Jim at the corner store near the museum. As he was leaving, a horse broke free from its buggy and ran wild, nearly trampling an old white woman who had been lifting her skirt, just about to step into the street.

“You all right, ma’am?” Jo asked, running over to her and offering his arm.

She looked dazed for a second, but then she smiled at Jo. “Fine, thank you,” she said.

He continued on. Anna would still be cleaning house with Ma Aku. He knew he should go over there and help the two women, what with Anna being pregnant again and Ma Aku being so old the never-ending coughs and aches had set in, but it had been too long since he’d let himself enjoy Baltimore, the cool sea breeze, the Negroes, some slave but some free as can be, who worked and lived and played around him. Jo had been a slave once. He was only a baby then, and yet every time he saw a slave in Baltimore, he felt like he remembered. Every time Jo saw a slave in Baltimore, he saw himself, saw what his life would have been like had Ma Aku not taken him to freedom. His free papers named him Kojo Freeman. Free man. Half the ex-slaves in Baltimore had the name. Tell a lie long enough and it will turn to truth.

Jo only knew the South from the stories Ma Aku told him, same way he knew his mother and father, Ness and Sam. As stories and nothing more. He didn’t miss what he didn’t know, what he couldn’t feel in his hands or his heart. Baltimore was tangible. It wasn’t endless crops and whippings. It was the port, the ironworks, the railroads. It was the pigs’ feet Kojo was eating, the smiles of his seven children with number eight on the way. It was Anna, who’d married him when she was just sixteen and he nineteen, and had worked every day of the nineteen years since.

Thinking of Anna again, Jo decided to swing by the Mathison house, where she and Ma were cleaning that day. He bought a flower from Ol’ Bess on the corner of North and Sixteenth and, holding it, he felt like he could finally forget the thought of the police on his ship.

“Why, if it ain’t my husband, Jo, comin’ up the walk,” Anna said when she saw him. She was sweeping the porch with what looked like a new broom. The handle was a handsome brown, only a few shades darker than her own skin, and the bristles all stood at attention. Ma Aku always liked to tell them that in the Gold Coast brooms had no handles. The body was the handle, and it moved and bent much easier than a stick ever could.

“Brought you somethin’,” Jo said, handing her the flower. She took it and breathed it in and smiled. The stalk hit her stomach just where her belly started to strain against her dress. Jo put his hand there and rubbed.

“Where’s Ma?” he asked.

“Inside doin’ the kitchen.”

Jo kissed his wife and took the broom from her hands. “You go on and help her now,” he said, giving her butt a squeeze and a push as he sent her inside. It was the butt that had done it nineteen years ago, was still doing it now. He’d seen it coming around Strawberry Alley and had followed it four whole blocks. It was mesmerizing, the way it moved, independent of the rest of her body, as though operating under the influence of another brain entirely, one cheek knocking into the other cheek so that that cheek had to swing out before knocking back.

When he was seven years old, Jo had asked Ma Aku what a man was supposed to do when he liked a woman, and she had laughed. His ma had never been like the other mothers. She was a little strange, a little off, still dreaming of the country she’d been ripped from years and years before. She could often be found looking out at the water, looking as if she would jump in, try to find her way home.

“Why, Kojo, in the Gold Coast, they say if you like a woman you have to go to her father with an offering.” Back then, Jo had been in love with a girl named Mirabel, and in church the next Sunday, he’d brought her father a frog that he’d caught by the water the night before, and Ma Aku had laughed and laughed and laughed, until the pastor and the father said she was teaching Jo the ways of old African witchcraft and kicked them out of the congregation.

With Anna, Jo simply followed the sway of her butt, until it stopped still. He’d gone up to her and seen her face. Her sweet caramel skin and black, black hair, as dark and long as a horse tail, always worn in a single braid. He’d told her his name was Jo, and asked if he could walk with her a ways. She’d said yes, and they walked the whole length of Baltimore. It wasn’t until months later that Jo learned Anna had gotten in trouble with her mother that night, having skipped out on all the chores she had promised to do.

The Mathisons were an old white family. Mr. Mathison’s father’s house had once been a stop on the Underground Railroad, and he’d taught his son to always lend a helpful hand. Mrs. Mathison was the one with the family money, and when the two had gotten together they’d bought a large house and employed Anna, Ma Aku, and a host of other black folk from in and around Baltimore.

The house was two stories and ten rooms. It took hours to clean, and the Mathisons liked it spotless. Kojo took up some of the work that day, and while washing the windows in the drawing room he could hear Mathison and the other abolitionists talking.

“If California joins the Union as a free state, President Taylor will have his hands full with Southern secessionists,” Mathison said.

“And Maryland will be caught in the middle,” another voice said.

“That’s why we’ve got to do all we can to make sure more slaves are emancipated right here in Baltimore.”

They could go on for hours talking this way. In the beginning, Jo had liked to listen to them. It had given him hope, seeing all those powerful white people take up for him and his, but the more years went on, the more he knew that even kindhearted people like the ones in the Mathison house could only do so much.

When they finished cleaning the house, Jo, Anna, and Ma Aku headed back toward their little apartment on Twenty-Fourth Street.

“My back—oh, my back,” Ma said, clutching at the body part that had been paining her for years now. She turned to Jo and in Twi said, “Haven’t we grown tired?” It was an old, worn expression for an old and worn feeling. Jo nodded and gave the woman his hand to help her up the stairs.

Inside, the kids were playing. Agnes, Beulah, Cato, Daly, Eurias, Felicity, and Gracie. It seemed like he and Anna were going to have one child for every letter of the alphabet. They would teach their children to read those letters, grow them up to be the kind of people who could teach those letters to other people. Now everyone in the house called the new baby “H,” as a placeholder until it came out and brought its name along with it.

Being a good father felt like a debt Jo owed to his parents, who couldn’t get free. He used to spend many nights trying to conjure up an image of his own father. Was he brave? Tall? Kind? Smart? Was he a good and fair man? What kind of father would he have been if he’d ever gotten the chance to be a father, free?

Now Jo spent most nights with his ear against his wife’s barely there stomach, trying to get to know Baby H a little before it arrived. He had made a promise to Anna that he would be there for them, the way his own father had not been able to be there for him. And Anna, who had never wanted her own father to be there for her, knowing the kind of man he was and the kind of trouble his presence would have brought, had just smiled and patted his back.

But Jo meant what he had said. He studied his children, the few hours of every night that he got to see them before they went to bed or every morning before he went off to the docks. Agnes was the helper. He’d never known a kinder, gentler spirit. Not Anna and certainly not his world-weary mother. Beulah was a beauty, but she didn’t know it yet. Cato was soft for a boy, and Jo tried every day to put a little grit into him. Daly was a fighter and Eurias was too often his target. Felicity was so shy she wouldn’t tell you her own name if you asked her, and Gracie was a round ball of love. His life with them, with Anna and Ma and the kids, was all that he had ever wanted on those days he’d spent as a lonely child, going from safe house to safe house, job to job, trying to help the woman he called mother do the mothering work she hadn’t asked for but never complained about.

Ma Aku started coughing, and Agnes came over right away to help her into the bed. The apartment had two rooms: one for Jo and Anna, separated by a curtain, and one for everyone and everything else. Ma Aku went down onto the mattress with a heavy sigh, and within minutes she was coughing and snoring in equal measure.

Gracie, the baby, was pawing at the leg of Jo’s trousers. “Daddy, Daddy!”

Jo swooped down and picked her up in one arm as easily as if she were the toolbox he’d left on the boat. Pretty soon, she’d be too big for babying. Probably just in time for the new baby to come.

Soon, Agnes and Anna had gotten all the little kids to sleep, and Agnes was finally sleeping herself. Jo was sitting in the bedroom with the curtain drawn when Anna came in, rubbing the belly that was so small it was little more than a feeling.

“Police came by the boat today. Said somebody had robbed her,” Jo said. Anna was taking off her clothes and folding them, then placing them on the chair that sat beside their mattress. She would wear the same ones tomorrow. She hadn’t had time to do the wash that week, and she hadn’t had the money to do it the week before. All she could do was hope that the children didn’t smell when they went off to the Christian school.

“Did it scare you?” she asked, and Jo stood, quick as a flash, and grabbed her into his arms, pulling her down onto the mattress with him.

“Ain’t nothing scare me, woman,” he said while she laughed and thrashed, pretending to fight him off.

They kissed, and whatever clothes Anna hadn’t gotten to, Jo made quick work of removing. He tasted her and could feel more than hear the pleasure it sent through her body like a current, the way she stifled her moans so the kids wouldn’t wake up, an expert at this after many nights and seven children. They worked quickly and quietly together, hoping the dark would mask their motions if one of the children happened to be peering through the curtain, unable to sleep. Jo grabbed onto Anna’s butt with both of his hungry hands. As long as he lived, it would always be a pleasure and a gift to fill his hands with the weight of her flesh.

The next morning, Jo went back to work on
Alice.
Poot
came by to split his breakfast with Jo: a little cornbread and some fish.

“Did they come around?” Jo asked. Earlier that morning he had gotten the oakum ready for the deck, soaking the hemp in pine tar. He’d twisted it like rope, laying it down in the seams between the planks. Jo had been working with the same tools since he first started caulking. His very own iron and mallet. He loved the sound those two tools made together when he laid the oakum into the seams, tapping the iron gently to coerce the oakum to stay, the seam to fill, the boat to keep from leaking.

“Yeah, they came. Just asked the usual questions, though. Wasn’t bad. I hear they found the man that done it.” Poot was born free, lived in Baltimore his whole life. He’d worked on
Alice
for about a year, and before that he’d worked on just about every other ship in the port. He was one of the best caulkers around. People said he could just put his ear to a ship and it would tell him where it needed work. Jo had come up under him, and because of that he knew just about everything there was to know about ships.

He payed the hull, spreading hot pitch over the whole thing and then covering it with copper plates. When he was first starting out, Jo had almost died heating the pitch. The fire had been magnificent, and so hot it was like the Devil’s breath, and before Jo knew it, it had started to chase the wood of the deck. He’d looked down at all that water floating in the bay, and then back up at the fire that was threatening to take the whole boat down with it, and he’d asked for a miracle. That miracle was Poot. Quick as can be, Poot had put out the fire and calmed the boss down by telling him that if Jo couldn’t stay, he wouldn’t either. Now whenever Jo lit a fire on the boat, he knew how to tend it.

Jo had just finished the hull and was wiping the sweat out of his eyes when he saw Anna standing and waving from the dock. It was rare for her to meet him after a workday because he usually finished before she did, but he was pleased to see her.

As he grabbed his tools and started walking toward her, he realized something was wrong.

“Mr. Mathison says for you to come to the house quick as you can,” she said. She was wringing her handkerchief in her hands, a nervous habit he detested, for seeing it always had the effect of making him nervous too.