Homegoing (17 page)

The bartender, a man with an almost imperceptible limp, poured Jo his drink before Jo could even ask for it, and set it down. The man sitting next to him was whipping out that morning’s paper, now crumpled, wet from the damp of the bar or the few slung drops of the man’s drink.

“South Carolina seceded today,” the man said, to no one in particular. And, getting no particular response, he looked up from the paper and glanced around at the few people who were there. “War’s coming.”

The bartender started wiping down the bar with a rag that looked to Jo to be dirtier than the bar itself. “There won’t be a war,” he said calmly.

Jo had been hearing talk of war for years. It didn’t mean much to him, and he tried to veer away from the conversation whenever he could, leery of Southern sympathizers in the North or, worse, overly enthusiastic white Northerners who wanted him to be angrier and louder, to defend himself and his right to freedom.

But Jo wasn’t angry. Not anymore. He couldn’t really tell if what he had been before was angry. It was an emotion he had no use for, that accomplished nothing and meant even less than that. If anything, what Jo really felt was tired.

“I’m telling you, this is a bad sign. One Southern state secedes and the rest of them are gonna follow. Can’t call us the United States of America if half the states are gone. You mark my words, war’s coming.”

The bartender rolled his eyes. “I’m not marking a thing. And unless you got money for another drink, I think it’s time for you to stop marking and get going.”

The man huffed loudly as he rolled his paper in his hand. As he walked by, he tapped Jo on the shoulder with it, and when Jo turned to look at him, he winked as if he and Jo were in on some scheme together, as though they knew something the rest of the world didn’t, but Jo couldn’t figure out what that could possibly be.

AS ABENA MADE
THE JOURNEY
back to her village, new seeds in hand, she thought, yet again, about how old she was. An unmarried twenty-five-year-old woman was unheard of, in her village or any other on this continent or the next. But there were only a few men in her village, and none of them wanted to take a chance with Unlucky’s daughter. Abena’s father’s crops had never grown. Year after year, season after season, the earth spit up rotted plants or sometimes nothing at all. Who knew where this bad luck came from?

Abena felt the seeds in her hand—small, round, and hard. Who would suspect that they could turn into a whole field? She wondered if, this year, they would do so for her father. Abena was certain that she must have inherited the thing that had earned her father his nickname. They called him the man without a name. They called him Unlucky. And now his troubles had followed her. Even her childhood best friend, Ohene Nyarko, would not take her as his second wife. Though he would never say it, she knew what he was thinking: that she was not worth the loss of yams and wine a bride price would cost him. Sometimes, while sleeping in the private hut her father had built for her, she would wonder if she herself was a curse, not the untilled land that lay around them, but her own self.

“Old Man, I have brought you the seeds you were asking for,” Abena announced as she entered her parents’ hut. She had gone to the next village over because her father thought, yet again, that a change in seeds might bring about a change in luck.

“Thank you,” he said. Inside the hut, Abena’s mother was sweeping the floor, bent forward, one hand on the small of her back, the other gripped tightly around the palm bristles as she swayed to music that only she could hear.

Abena cleared her throat. “I would like to visit Kumasi,” she said. “I would like to see it just once before I die.”

Her father looked up sharply. He had been examining the seeds in his hands, turning them over, putting them to his ear as though he could hear them, putting them to his lips as though he could taste them. “No,” he said firmly.

Her mother didn’t stand up, but she stopped sweeping. Abena could no longer hear the bristles brushing the hard clay.

“It is time I make the journey,” Abena said, eyes level. “It is time I meet people from other villages. I will soon be an old lady with no children, and I will know nothing but this village and the next. I want to visit Kumasi. See what a large city is like, walk by the Asante king’s palace.”

Hearing the words “Asante king,” her father clenched his fists, crushing the seeds in his hands to a fine powder that slipped through the small spaces between his fingers. “See the Asante king’s palace for what?” he yelled.

“Am I not an Asante?” she asked, daring him to tell her the truth, to explain the Fante in his accent, the white in his skin. “Do my people not come from Kumasi? You have kept me here like a prisoner with your bad luck. Unlucky, they call you, but your name should be Shame, or Fearful, or Liar. Which is it, Old Man?”

With that, her father slapped her firmly across her left cheek, and the seeds in his hand powdered her face. She reached up to where the pain was. He had never hit her before. Every other child in their village had been beaten for something as small as dropping water from a bucket or as large as sleeping with someone before marriage. But her parents never hit her. Instead, they treated her as an equal, asking her opinion and discussing their plans with her. The only thing they had ever forbidden her from doing was going to Kumasi, land of the Asante king, or down into Fanteland. And while she had no use for the Coast, no respect for Fante people, her pride in the Asante was great. It was growing every day as word came of the Asante soldiers’ valiant battles against the British, their strength, their hope for a free kingdom.

For as long as she could remember her parents had made up one excuse after the other. She was too young. Her blood had not come. She was not married. She was never getting married. Abena had begun to believe that her parents had killed someone in Kumasi or were wanted by the king’s guards, maybe even by the king himself. She no longer cared.

Abena wiped the seed powder from her face and made her hand into a fist, but before she could use it, her mother came up behind her and snatched her arm.

“Enough,” she said.

Old Man had his head down as he walked out of their hut, and when the cool air from outside hit the exposed nape of her neck, Abena started to cry.

“Sit down,” her mother said, gesturing to the stool her father had just left. Abena did as she was told, and watched her mother, a woman of sixty-five, who looked no older than she herself did, still so beautiful that the village boys whispered and whistled when she bent down to lift water. “Your father and I are not welcome in Kumasi,” she said. She was speaking as one speaks to an old woman whose memories, those things that used to be hard-formed chrysalises, had turned into butterflies and flown away, never to return. “I am from Kumasi, and when I was young, I defied my parents to marry your father. He came to get me. He came all the way from Fanteland.”

Abena shook her head. “Why didn’t your parents want you to marry him?”

Akosua put one hand on top of hers and began stroking it. “Your father was a…” She stopped, searching for the right words. Abena knew her mother didn’t want to tell a secret that was not hers to tell. “He was the son of a Big Man, the grandson of two very Big Men, and he wanted to live a life for himself instead of a life that was chosen for him. He wanted his children to be able to do the same. That is all I can say. Go and visit Kumasi. Your father will not stop you.”

Her mother left the hut in search of her father, and Abena stared at the red clay walls around her. Her father should have been a Big Man, but he had chosen this: red clay formed in the shape of a circle, a packed straw roof, a hut so small it fit nothing more than a few tree stump stools. Outside, the ruined earth of a farm that had never earned its title as a farm. His decision had meant her shame, her unmarried, childless shame. She would go to Kumasi.

In the evening, once she was certain her parents had gone
to sleep, Abena slipped away to Ohene Nyarko’s compound. His first wife, Mefia, was boiling water outside her hut, the steam from the air and the pot making her sweat.

“Sister Mefia, is your husband in?” Abena asked, and Mefia rolled her eyes and pointed toward the door.

Ohene Nyarko’s farms were fruitful every year. Though their village was no more than two miles by two miles, though there was no one to even call Chief or Big Man, so small were their land and their status, Ohene was well respected. A man who could have done well elsewhere, had he not been born here.

“Your wife hates me,” Abena said.

“She thinks I am still sleeping with you,” Ohene Nyarko said, his eyes twinkling with mischief. It made Abena want to hit him.

She cringed when she thought of what had happened between them. They were only children then. Inseparable and mischievous. Ohene had discovered that the stick between his legs could perform tricks, and while Abena’s father and mother were out begging for a share of the elders’ food, as they did every week, Ohene had showed Abena those tricks.

“See?” he said as they watched it lift when she touched it. They had both seen their fathers’ this way, Ohene on those days his father went from one wife’s hut to the next, and Abena in the days before she got her own hut. But they had never known Ohene’s to do the same.

“What does it feel like?” she had asked.

He shrugged, smiled, and she knew what he felt was a good thing. She was born to parents who let her speak her mind, go after what she wanted, even if that thing was limited to boys. Now she wanted this.

“Lie on top of me!” she demanded, remembering what she’d seen her parents do so many times. Everyone in the village had always laughed at her parents, saying that Unlucky was too poor to get a second wife, but Abena knew the truth. That on those nights when she had slept on the far side of their small hut, pretending not to listen, she could hear her father whisper, “Akosua, you are my one and only.”

“We cannot do that until we have had our marriage ceremony!” Ohene said, mortified. All children had heard the fables about people who lay together before they had their marriage ceremonies: the far-fetched one about the men whose penises turned into trees while still inside the woman, growing branches into her stomach so that he could not exit her body; the simpler, truer ones about banishment, fines, and shame.

Finally that night, Abena had been able to convince Ohene, and he had fumbled around, thrusting at the entrance until he broke through and she hurt, thrusting inside: once, twice, then nothing. There was no loud moan or whimper as they had heard escape their fathers’ mouths. He simply left the same way he had arrived.

Back then, she had been the strong, unshakable one, the one who could talk him into anything. Now Abena stared at Ohene Nyarko as he stood broad-shouldered and smirking, waiting for the favor he knew was tugging at her lips.

“I need you to take me to Kumasi,” she said. It wasn’t wise for her to travel alone and unmarried, and she knew her father would not take her.

Ohene Nyarko laughed, a large and boisterous sound. “My darling, I cannot take you to Kumasi now. It is more than two weeks’ journey and the rains will soon be coming. I must tend to my farm.”

“Your sons do most of the work anyway,” she said. She hated when he called her his “darling,” always spoken in English, as she had taught him when they were children after she’d heard her father say it once and asked him what it meant. She hated that Ohene Nyarko should call her his beloved while his wife was outside cooking his evening meal and his sons were outside tending to his farm. It didn’t seem right that he should let her walk in shame as he had done all those years, not when she knew by looking at his fields that he would soon have enough wealth for a second wife.

“Eh, but who supervises my sons? A ghost? I cannot marry you if the yams don’t grow.”

“If you have not married me by now, you will never marry me,” Abena whispered, surprised at the hard lump that had so quickly formed in her throat. She hated when he joked about marrying her.

Ohene Nyarko clicked his tongue and pulled her to his chest. “Don’t cry now,” he said. “I will take you to see the Asante capital, all right? Don’t cry, my darling.”

Ohene Nyarko was a man of his word, and at the
end of that week, the two set out for Kumasi, the home of the Asantehene.

Everything felt new to Abena. Compounds were actually compounds, built from stone with five or six huts apiece, not one or two at most. These huts were so tall they resurrected the image of ten-foot-tall giants from the stories her mother used to tell. Giants who swooped down to pluck tiny children up from the clay earth when they were misbehaving. Abena imagined the families of giants who lived in the town, fetching water, building fires to boil the bad children in their soups.

Kumasi sprawled before them endlessly. Abena had never been to a place where she did not know everyone’s name. She had never been to a farm that she could not measure with her own eye, so small was each family’s plot. Here, the farmlands were large and luscious and filled with men to work them. People sold their wares in the middle of the town, things she had never seen before, relics from the old days of steady trade with the British and the Dutch.

In the afternoon they walked by the Asantehene’s palace. It stretched so long and wide she knew it could fit over a hundred people: wives, children, slaves, and more.

“Can we see the Golden Stool?” Abena asked, and Ohene Nyarko took her to the room where it was kept, locked away behind a glass wall so that no one could touch it.

It was the stool that contained the
sunsum,
the soul, of the entire Asante nation. Covered in pure gold, it had descended from the sky and landed in the lap of the first Asantehene, Osei Tutu. No one was allowed to sit on it, not even the king himself. Despite herself, Abena felt tears sting her eyes. She had heard about this stool her entire life from the elders of her village, but she had never seen it with her own eyes.

After she and Ohene Nyarko had finished touring the palace, they exited through the golden gates. Entering at the same time was a man not much older than Abena’s father, wrapped in kente and walking with a cane. He stopped, staring at Abena’s face intently.

“Are you a ghost?” he asked, almost shouting. “Is that you, James? They said you had died in the war, but I knew that could not be!” He reached out with his right hand and grazed Abena’s cheek, touching her so long and so familiarly that Ohene Nyarko finally had to remove his hand.

“Old Man, can you not see this is a woman? There is no James here.”

The man shook his head as if to clear his eyes, but when he looked at Abena again there was only confusion. “I’m sorry,” he said before hobbling away.

Once he had gone, Ohene Nyarko pushed Abena along, out of the gates, until they were firmly back in the bustle of the city. “That old man was probably half-blind,” he muttered, steering Abena by the elbow.

“Shhh,” Abena said, though there was no way the man could still hear them. “That man is probably a royal.”

And Ohene Nyarko snorted. “If he is a royal, then you are a royal too,” he said, laughing boisterously.

They kept walking. Ohene Nyarko wanted to buy new farming tools from some people in Kumasi before they headed back, but Abena couldn’t bear the thought of wasting time with people she didn’t know when she could be enjoying Kumasi, and so she and Ohene Nyarko parted ways, promising to meet again before nightfall.

She walked until the tough skin of her soles started to burn, and then she stopped for a moment, taking solace under the shade of a palm tree.

“Excuse me, Ma. I would like to talk to you about Christianity.”

Abena looked up. The man was dark and sinewy, his Twi broken or rusty, she couldn’t tell which. She took him in but could not place his face among any of the tribes she knew. “What is your name?” she asked. “Who are your people?”