Homegoing (19 page)

He put her down again. Outside, his children were picking bark from the Tweapia trees so that they could make chewing sticks to take to Kumasi and sell for food. Abena knew this shamed Ohene Nyarko—not that his children had found something useful to do, but that they had done so because of his inability to feed them.

They made love quickly that day, and Ohene Nyarko set out shortly after. Abena went home to find her parents sitting in front of a fire, roasting groundnuts.

“Ohene Nyarko says there is a new plant in Osu that is growing very well. He has gone to get it and bring it back to us.”

Her mother nodded. Her father shrugged. Abena knew she had shamed them. When the pronouncement of her future exile was made, her parents had gone to the elders to try to reason with them, to make them reconsider. At that time, and still, Unlucky was the oldest man in the village. Deference was still owed, even if he wasn’t allowed to be an elder because he wasn’t originally from the village.

“We have only one child,” Old Man had said, but the elders just turned their heads.

“What have you done?” Abena’s mother asked her at dinner that night, crying into her hands before lifting them up to the heavens. “What have I done to deserve this child?”

But at that point, only two bad years had gone by, and Abena assured them that the plants would grow, and Ohene Nyarko would marry her. Now their only solace was the fact that it seemed Abena had inherited her mother’s supposed barrenness, or Old Man’s family’s curse, or whatever it was that kept her from conceiving a child.

“Nothing will grow here,” Old Man said. “This village is finished. No one can keep living like this. No one can take one more year eating nothing but nuts and tree bark. They think they are exiling just you, but really this land has condemned us all to exile. You watch. It’s only a matter of time.”

Ohene Nyarko came back a week later with the new seeds.
The plant was called cocoa, and he said it would change everything. He said the Akuapem people in the Eastern Region were already reaping the benefits of the new plant, selling it to the white men overseas at a rate that was reminiscent of the old trade.

“You don’t know how much these little seeds cost me!” Ohene Nyarko said, holding them in his palm so that everyone around him could see and feel and smell them. “But it will be worth it for the village. Trust me. They will have to stop calling us the Gold Coast and start calling us the Cocoa Coast!”

And he was right. Within months Ohene Nyarko’s cocoa trees had sprouted, bearing their gold and green and orange fruit. The villagers had never seen anything like it, and they were so curious, so eager to touch and open the pods before they were ready, that Ohene Nyarko and his sons had taken to sleeping outside so that they could keep watch.

“But will this feed us?” the villagers wondered after they had been shooed away by the children or yelled at by Ohene Nyarko himself.

Abena saw less and less of Ohene Nyarko in those first few months of his cocoa farming, but the absence comforted her. The harder he worked on the farm, the sooner his harvest would be good; and the sooner the harvest was good, the sooner they could marry. On the days she did see him, he would speak of nothing other than the cocoa and what it had cost him. His hands smelled of that new smell, sweet and dark and earthy, and after she had left him, she would continue to smell it on the places he had touched, the full dark circles of her nipples or just behind her ears. The plant was affecting them all.

Finally, Ohene Nyarko said that it was time for the harvest, and all the men and women from the village came to do as he instructed, as he had been instructed by the farmers in the Eastern Region. They cracked open the cocoa fruit to find the sweet white pulp that surrounded the small purple beans, and placed the pulpy beans on a bed of banana leaves, then covered them with more leaves. After that, Ohene Nyarko sent them home.

“We can’t live off of this,” the villagers whispered as they walked back to their houses. Some of the families had already started packing up their huts, discouraged by what they had seen inside the cocoa pods. But the rest of them came back after five days to spread the fermented beans in the sun so that they would dry. The villagers had each donated their kente sacks, and once dry, the cocoa beans were packed into these sacks.

“Now what?” they asked each other, glancing around as Ohene Nyarko put the sacks into his hut.

“Now we rest,” he announced to the group waiting outside. “Tomorrow I will go to the trading market and sell what I can.”

He slept in Abena’s hut that night, as brazenly and openly as if they had been married for forty years or more, and this gave Abena hope that soon they would be. But the man beside her on the floor was not the confident man who had promised an entire village redemption. In her arms, the man she had known since before they wore cloth to cover their loins trembled.

“What if this doesn’t work? What if I can’t sell them?” he asked, his head buried in her bosom.

“Shh! Stop that talk,” she said. “They will sell. They have to sell.”

But he kept crying and shaking so that she could not hear him when he said, “I’m afraid of that too,” and she would not have understood even if she had.

He was gone by the time she woke up the next morning. The villagers had found and killed a scrawny young goat in preparation for his return, cooking the tough meat for days as best they could in the hope that it would turn tender. The younger children, thinking they were fast and clever, would try to snatch small pieces of partially cooked meat from the animal when their mothers weren’t looking, but the women, born with a sixth sense for children’s mischief, would swat their hands, then clutch them at the wrists, holding them over the fire until the children cried out and swore to behave.

Ohene Nyarko did not come back that night or the next. He came back in the afternoon of the third day. Behind him, being led by rope, were four fat and obstinate goats, bleating as though they could smell the iron of the slaughter knife. The sacks he had carried out, full of cocoa beans, had come back to them filled with yams and kola nuts, some fresh palm oil, and plenty of palm wine.

The villagers threw a celebration the likes of which they had not thrown in years, with dancing and shouting and bare, jiggling breasts. The old men and women danced the Adowa, lightly swaying their hips and bringing their hands up and over, as though ready to receive from the Earth and then give back to her.

Their stomachs had grown smaller, it seemed, and so the food they ate filled them quickly, and they filled the crevices that were left between the food with sweet palm wine.

Unlucky and Akosua were so happy the bad years had finally ended that they held each other close, watching the others dance, watching the children drum against their full bellies in time with the music.

In the middle of all the celebration, Abena looked over at Ohene Nyarko as he surveyed the people of the village they all loved so fiercely, his face full of pride and something she couldn’t quite place.

“You’ve done well,” she said, approaching him. He had kept his distance all night, and she thought it was because he didn’t want to draw attention to the two of them in the middle of the celebration, didn’t want the villagers to start wondering what this meant for Abena’s exile. But the meaning was all Abena was able to think about. She had not told anyone yet, but she was four days late. And though she had been four days late before in her life, and imagined that she would be four days late again before she died, she wondered if this time was
the
time.

What she wanted was for Ohene Nyarko to shout his love for her from the rooftops. To say, now that the whole village has been fed and feted, I will marry you. And not tomorrow, but today. This very day. This celebration will be for us.

Instead, he said, “Hello, Abena. Did you get enough to eat?”

“Yes, thank you.”

He nodded and drank from a calabash of palm wine.

“You have done well, Ohene Nyarko,” Abena said, reaching out to touch his shoulder, but her hand grazed nothing but air. He wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Why did you move?” she asked, stepping away from him.

“What?”

“Don’t say ‘what’ like I am crazy. I tried to touch you and you moved.”

“Quiet, Abena. Don’t make a scene.”

She didn’t make a scene. Instead, she turned and began walking, walking past the people dancing, past her parents crying, walking until she found the floor of her hut and lay down upon it, one hand clutching her heart and the other clutching her stomach.

This was how the elders found her the next day when
they came to announce that she could remain in the village. The bad years had ended before her seventh year of adultery and she had not yet conceived a child. And, they said, Ohene Nyarko’s harvest had been so profitable that now he could finally fulfill his promise.

“He will not marry me,” Abena said from her spot on the floor, rolling this way and that, one hand on her stomach, the other on her heart, holding the two places that hurt.

The elders scratched their heads and looked at each other. Had she finally gone mad from all the years of waiting?

“What is the meaning of this?” one of the elders asked.

“He will not marry me,” she repeated, and then she rolled away, giving them nothing more than her back.

The elders rushed over to Ohene Nyarko’s hut. He was already preparing for the next season, preparing and separating the seeds so that he could pass out a share to all of the other village farmers.

“So she has told you,” he said. He didn’t look up at the elders, just continued to work on the seeds. One pile for the Sarpongs, one for the Gyasis, one for the Asares, another for the Kankams.

“What is this about, Ohene Nyarko?”

He had made all of the piles, and in the afternoon, the head of each family would come to collect them, spread them onto their own small plots of land, and wait for the strange new trees to grow and flourish so that soon the village would be restored to what it once was, or surpass it.

“To get the cocoa plants, I had to promise a man in Osu that I would marry his daughter. I will have to use all of the leftover goods from my cocoa trade to pay her bride price. I cannot marry Abena this season. She will have to wait.”

From her hut, where Abena had finally risen off of the hard ground and dusted off her knees and back, she knew she would not wait.

“I’m leaving, Old Man,” Abena said. “I can’t stay here and
be made a fool of. I have suffered enough.”

Her father blocked the exit of the hut with his body. He was so old, so frail, that Abena knew she had only to touch him and he would fall, the path would clear, and she could make her way on.

“You can’t leave yet,” he said. “Not yet.”

He slowly backed out of the doorway, watching to see if she would stay. When she didn’t move, he picked up his shovel, went out to a spot on the edge of their land, and started digging.

“What are you doing?” Abena asked. Unlucky was sweating. He moved so slowly, Abena took pity on him. She took the shovel and began to dig for him. “What are you looking for?” she asked.

Her father got down on his knees and started raking away the dirt with both of his hands, holding it awhile, then letting it sift through his fingers. When he stopped, all that was left in his palms was a black stone necklace.

Abena sank down beside him and looked at the necklace. It shimmered gold and was cool to the touch.

Her father huffed loudly, trying to catch his breath. “This belonged to my grandmother, your great-grandmother Effia. It was given to her by her own mother.”

“Effia,” Abena repeated. It was the first time she had heard the name of one of her ancestors, and she savored the taste of the name on her tongue. She wanted to say it again and again. Effia. Effia.

“My father was a slaver, a very wealthy man. When I decided to leave Fanteland, it was because I did not want to take part in the work my family had done. I wanted to work for myself. I see how these townspeople call me Unlucky, but every season I feel lucky to have this land, to do this honorable work, not the shameful work of my family. When the villagers here gave me this small bit of land, I was so happy that I buried this stone here to give thanks.

“I won’t stop you if you want to go, but please take this with you. May it serve you as well as it has served me.”

Abena put on the necklace and hugged her father. Her mother was in the doorframe, watching them out in the dirt. Abena got up and hugged her mother too.

The next morning Abena set out for Kumasi, and when she arrived at the missionary church there, she touched the stone at her neck and said thank you to her ancestors.

IT TOOK THREE
POLICEMEN
to knock H down, four to put him in chains.

“I ain’t done nothing!” he shouted once they got him to the jail cell, but he was speaking only to the air they had left behind. He’d never seen people walk away so quickly, and he knew he had scared them.

H rattled the bars, certain that he could bend or break them if only he tried.

“Stop that ’fore they kill you,” his cellmate said.

H recognized the man from around town. Maybe he’d even sharecropped with him once on one of the county farms.

“Can’t nobody kill me,” H said. He was still pressing on the bars, and he could hear the metal start to give between his fingers. Then he could feel his cellmate’s hands on his shoulder. H turned around so quick, the other man didn’t have time to move or think before H had him lifted by the throat. H was over six feet tall, and he had the man so high up, his head brushed the top of the ceiling. If H lifted him any higher, he would have broken through. “Don’t you touch me again,” H said.

“You think dem white folks won’t kill you?” the man said, his words coming out small and slow.

“What I done?” H said. He lowered the man to the ground, and he fell to his knees, gasping up long sips of breath.

“Say you was studyin’ a white woman.”

“Who say?”

“The police. Heard ’em talkin’ ’bout what to say ’fore they went out to get you.”

H sat down next to the man. “Who they say I was talkin’ to?”

“Cora Hobbs.”

“I wasn’t studyin’ no Hobbs girl,” H said, his rage lit anew. If there were rumors about him and a white woman, he would have hoped it would be someone prettier than his old sharecropping boss’s daughter.

“Boy, look atcha,” his cellmate said, his gaze so spiteful now that H grew suddenly, inexplicably afraid of the smaller, older man. “Don’t matter if you was or wasn’t. All they gotta do is say you was. That’s all they gotta do. You think cuz you all big and muscled up, you safe? Naw, dem white folks can’t stand the sight of you. Walkin’ round free as can be. Don’t nobody want to see a black man look like you walkin’ proud as a peacock. Like you ain’t got a lick of fear in you.” He rested his head against the cell wall and closed his eyes for a second. “How old you was when the war ended?”

H tried to count back, but he’d never been very good at numbers, and the Civil War was so long ago that the numbers climbed higher than H could reach. “Not sure. ’Bout thirteen, I reckon,” he said.

“Mm-hmm. See, that’s what I thought. You was young. Slavery ain’t nothin’ but a dot in your eye, huh? If nobody tell you, I’ma tell you. War may be over but it ain’t ended.”

The man closed his eyes again. He let his head roll against the wall, this way, then that. He looked tired, and H wondered how long he’d been sitting in that cell.

“My name’s H,” he finally said, a peace offering.

“H ain’t no kind of name,” his cellmate said, never opening his eyes.

“It’s the only one I got,” H said.

Soon the man fell asleep. H listened to him snore, watched the rise and fall of his chest. The day the war ended, H had left his old master’s plantation and began to walk from Georgia to Alabama. He’d wanted new sights and sounds to go with his newfound freedom. He was so happy to be free. Everyone he knew was just happy to be free. But it didn’t last long.

H spent the next four days in the county jail. On the second day, the guards took his cellmate away. He didn’t know where. When they finally came for H, the guards wouldn’t tell him what the charge was, only that he had to pay the ten-dollar fine by the end of the night.

“I only got five dollars saved,” H said. It had taken him nearly ten years of sharecropping to put away that much.

“Maybe your family can help,” the chief deputy said, but he was already walking away, on to the next person.

“Ain’t got no family,” H said to no one. He had made the walk from Georgia to Alabama by himself. He was used to being alone, but Alabama had turned H’s loneliness into something like a physical presence. He could hold it when he went to bed at night. It was in the handle of his hoe, in the puffs of cotton that floated away.

He was eighteen when he met his woman, Ethe. By then he’d gotten so big that no one ever crossed him. He could walk into a room and watch it clear as men and women made way for him. But Ethe always stood her ground. She was the most solid woman he’d ever met, and his relationship with her was the longest he’d had a relationship with anyone at all. He would have asked her for her help now, but she hadn’t talked to him since the day he called her by another woman’s name. He had been wrong to cheat on her, wronger still to lie. He couldn’t call Ethe now, not with this shame hanging over him. He’d heard of black women coming to the jailhouse to look for their sons or husbands and being taken into a back room by the policemen, told that there were other ways to pay a fine. No, H thought, Ethe would be better off without him.

By sunrise the next morning, on a sweltering July day in 1880, H was chained to ten other men and sold by the state of Alabama to work the coal mines just outside of Birmingham.

“Next,” the pit boss shouted, and the chief deputy shoved H
in front of him. H had been watching them check each of the ten men who’d been chained to him on the train ride there. H wasn’t even sure he could call some of them men. He saw a boy no older than twelve, shivering in the corner of the train. When they’d pushed that boy in front of the pit boss, he’d peed himself, tears running down his face all the while, until he looked like he himself would melt down into the puddle of wet at his feet. The boy was so young, he’d probably never seen a whip like the one the pit boss had laid out on his desk, only heard about them in the nightmarish stories his parents told.

“He’s a big one, ain’t he?” the chief deputy said, squeezing H’s shoulders so that the pit boss could see how firm they were. H was the tallest, strongest man in the room. He’d spent the whole train ride trying to figure out a way to break his chains.

The pit boss whistled. He got out of his chair and circled H. He grabbed H’s arm, and H lunged at him before his shackles stopped him. He hadn’t been able to break the chains, but he knew if his hands could only reach, it wouldn’t take him but a second to snap the pit boss’s neck.

“Hoo, hoo!” the pit boss said. “Looks like we’ll have to teach this one some manners. How much you want for him?”

“Twenty dollars a month,” the deputy said.

“Now, you know we don’t pay more than eighteen, even for a first-class man.”

“You said yourself he’s a big one. This one will last you awhile, I bet. Won’t die in the mines like the others.”

“Y’all can’t do this!” H shouted. “I’m free!” he said. “I’m a free man!”

“Naw,” the pit boss said. He looked at H carefully and pulled out a knife from the inside of his coat. He began to sharpen the knife against an ironstone he kept on his desk. “No such thing as a free nigger.” He walked slowly up to H, held the sharpened knife against his neck so that H could feel the cold, ridged edge of it, begging to break skin.

The pit boss turned to the chief deputy. “We’ll give you nineteen for this one,” he said. Then he ran the tip of the knife slowly across H’s neck. A thin line of blood appeared, neat and straight, as if to underline the pit boss’s words. “He may be big, but he’ll bleed just like the rest of them.”

It had never occurred to H, during those many years that
he worked on plantations, that there was anything more than dirt and water, bugs and roots, under the earth. Now he saw that there was an entire city underground. Larger, more sprawling, than any county that H had ever lived or worked in, and this city was occupied almost entirely by black men and boys. This city had shafts for streets, and rooms for houses. And in every room, everywhere, there was coal.

The first thousand pounds of coal were the hardest to shovel. H spent hours, whole days, on his knees. By the end of the first month, the shovel felt like an extension of his arm, and indeed, his back had begun to ripple around the shoulder blades, growing, it seemed, to accommodate the new weight.

With his shovel arm, H and the other men were lowered some 650 feet down the shaft, into the mine. Once in the underground city, they traveled three, five, seven miles to the coal face where they were to work that day. H was large but nimble. He could lie on his flank and shinny himself into nooks and crannies. He could crawl on his hands and knees through tunnels of exploded rock until he got to the right room.

Once he reached the room, H shoveled some fourteen thousand pounds of coal, all while stooped down low, on his knees, stomach, sides. And when he and the other prisoners left the mines, they would always be coated in a layer of black dust, their arms burning, just burning. Sometimes H thought that burning pain would set the coal on fire, and they would all die there, from the pain of it. But, he knew, it wasn’t just pain that could kill a man in the mine. More than once, a prison warden had whipped a miner for not reaching the ten-ton quota. H had seen a third-class man shovel 11,829 pounds of coal, weighed at the end of the workday by the pit boss. And when the pit boss had seen the missing 171 pounds, he’d made the man put his hands up against the cave wall, and then he’d whipped him until he died, and the white wardens did not move him that night or the rest of the next day, leaving the dust to blanket his body, a warning to the other convicts. Other times, mine stopes had collapsed, burying the prisoners alive. Too many times, dust explosions would wipe out men and children by the hundreds. One day, H would be working beside a man he had been chained to the night before; the next day, that man would have died of God only knew what.

H used to fantasize about moving to Birmingham. He’d been a sharecropper since the war ended, and he’d heard that Birmingham was the place a black man could make a life for himself. He’d wanted to move there and finally start living. But what kind of life was this? At least when he was a slave, his master had needed to keep him alive if he wanted to get his money’s worth. Now, if H died, they would just lease the next man. A mule was worth more than he was.

H could hardly remember being free, and he could not tell if what he missed was the freedom itself or the capacity for memory. Sometimes when he made it back to the bunk he shared with fifty-something men, all shackled together on long wooden beds so that they couldn’t move while they slept unless they moved together, he would try to remember remembering. He would force himself to think of all the things his mind could still call up: Ethe mostly. Her thick body, the look in her eyes when he’d called her by another name, how scared he was to lose her, how sorry. Sometimes as he slept the chains would rub against his ankles in such a way that he would remember the feeling of Ethe’s hands there, which always surprised him, since metal was nothing like skin.

The convicts working the mines were almost all like him. Black, once slave, once free, now slave again. Timothy, a man on H’s chain link, had been arrested outside the house he had built after the war. A dog had been howling in a nearby field the whole night long, and Timothy had stepped out to tell the dog to hush up. The next morning the police had arrested him for causing a disturbance. There was also Solomon, a convict who had been arrested for stealing a nickel. His sentence was twenty years.

Occasionally one of the wardens would bring in a white third-class man. The new prisoner would be chained to a black man, and for the first few minutes all that white prisoner would do was complain. He’d say that he was better than the niggers. He’d beg his white brothers, the wardens, to have mercy on him, spare him from the shame of it all. He’d curse and cry and carry on. And then they would have to go down into the mine, and that white convict would soon learn that if he wanted to live, he would have to put his faith in a black man.

H had once been partnered with a white third-class man named Thomas whose arms had started shaking so badly, he couldn’t lift the shovel. It was Thomas’s first week, but he’d already heard that if you didn’t make your quota, you and your buddy would be whipped, sometimes to death. H had watched Thomas’s trembling arms lift the few pounds of coal before giving way, and then Thomas had collapsed to the ground crying, stammering that he didn’t want to die down there with nothing but niggers to bear witness.

Wordlessly, H had taken up Thomas’s shovel. With his own shovel in one hand and Thomas’s shovel in another, H had filled both men’s quotas, the pit boss watching all the while.

“Ain’t no man ever shoveled double-handed before,” the boss had said after it was over, respect lacing his voice, and H had simply nodded. The pit boss had then kicked Thomas on the ground where he still sat, sniveling. “That nigger just saved your life,” he said. Thomas looked up at H, but H said nothing.

That night, in a bunk with two men chained on either side of him, a bunk two feet above him, H realized that he couldn’t move his arms.

“What’s wrong?” Joecy asked, noticing H’s awkward stillness.

“Can’t feel my arms,” H whispered, scared.

Joecy nodded.

“I don’t want to die, Joecy. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.” H could not stop himself from repeating the words, and soon he realized that he was crying too, and he couldn’t stop that either. The coal dust under his eyes started to run down his face, and silently H continued on. “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.”

“Hush, now,” Joecy said, hugging H to his body as best he could with the chains clanking and clacking as he moved. “Ain’t nobody dying tonight. Not tonight.” The two men looked around them to see if others had woken up from the noise. Everyone had heard about how H had saved the white third-class man, but they all knew, too, that this didn’t mean the pit boss would show mercy. The next day, H would have to do his share all over again.

The next day H was assigned the morning shift, partnered again with Thomas. He and the other morning shift men woke up while the moon was still bright in the sky, sliced thin and arched upward as though it were the crooked, white-toothed smile of the dark-skinned night. They went over to the mess hall to get a cup of coffee and a slab of meat. They got a sack lunch to take with them, and then they were lowered some two hundred feet down below the Earth’s surface until they hit the belly of the mine. From there, H and Thomas continued two miles in and further down, stopping finally in the room of the mine where they were to work that day. Usually, there were only two men to a room, but this one was particularly difficult, and the pit boss had paired H and Thomas with Joecy and his third-class man, a convict called Bull who had gotten his name not because of his frame, stocky and squat and commanding, but because Klansmen had burned his face one night—branded him, they said—so that everyone would know he was no good.