Homegoing (21 page)

Suddenly H felt like he couldn’t breathe, like that decade’s worth of dust was climbing up his lungs and into his throat and choking him. He hunched over and started to cough and cough and cough, and when he’d finished coughing, he stumbled his way to Joecy’s house and knocked on the door.

Lil Joe answered with sleep in his eyes. “My daddy ain’t back from the meeting yet, Uncle H,” he said.

“I ain’t here to see your daddy, son. I—I need you to write me a letter. Can you do that?”

Lil Joe nodded. He went into the house and came back out with the supplies he needed. He wrote as H dictated:

Deer Ethe. This is H. I am now free an livin in Prat City.

H mailed the letter the very next morning.

“What we need to do is call a strike,” a white
union member said.

H was sitting in the front row of the church house where the union meetings were held. There was an endless list of problems and the strike was the first solution. H listened carefully as a murmur of agreement began to rush through the room, as hushed as a hum.

“Who gon’ pay attention to our strike?” H asked. He was becoming more vocal at the meetings.

“Well, we tell ’em we won’t work until they raise our pay or make it safer. They gotta listen,” the white man said.

H snorted. “When a white man ever listened to a black man?”

“I’m here now, ain’t I? I’m listening,” the white man said.

“You a con.”

“You’re a con, too.”

H looked around the room. There were about fifty men there, over half of them black.

“Whatchu done wrong?” H asked, returning his gaze to the white man.

At first, the man wouldn’t speak. He kept his head lowered, and cleared his throat so many times, H wondered if there was anything left in his mouth at all. Finally the words came out. “I killed a man.”

“Killed a man, huh? You know what they got my friend Joecy over there for? He ain’t cross the street when a white woman walk by. For that they gave him nine years. For killin’ a man they give you the same. We ain’t cons like you.”

“We gotta work together now,” the white man said. “Same as in the mine. We can’t be one way down there and another way up here.”

No one spoke. They all just turned to watch H, see what he would say or do. Everyone had heard the story of the time he’d picked up that second shovel.

Finally he nodded, and the next day the strike began.

Only fifty people showed up on that first day. They gave their bosses a list of their demands: better pay, better care for the sick, and fewer hours. The white union members had written up the list, and Joecy’s boy, Lil Joe, had read it aloud to all the black members to make sure it said what they thought it said. The bosses had answered back that free miners could easily be replaced by convicts, and one week later a carriage full of black cons appeared, all under the age of sixteen, and looking so scared it made H want to quit the strike if only it meant more people wouldn’t be arrested to fill in the gap. By the end of the week, the only thing both sides had agreed to was that there would be no killing.

And still, more convicts were rounded up and brought in. H wondered if there was a black man left in the South who hadn’t been put in prison at one point or another, so many of them came to fill the mines. Even free laborers who weren’t striking were being replaced, so soon more of them joined in the fight. H spent hours at Joecy and Jane’s house, making signs with Lil Joe.

“What that say?” H asked, pointing to the tar-painted wood at Lil Joe’s side.

“It say, more pay,” the boy answered.

“And what that say?”

“It say, no more tuberculosis.”

“Where you learn to read like that?” H asked. He had grown so fond of Lil Joe, but the sight of his friend’s son only made him ache for a child of his own.

The smell of the tar Lil Joe was using to write clung to the hairs in H’s nostrils. He coughed a little and a black string of mucus trailed from his mouth.

“I had a little school in Huntsville ’fore they took my daddy. When they arrested him, they said he and my whole family was gettin’ too uppity. They said that was why Daddy didn’t cross the street when the white woman passed by.”

“And what you think?” H asked.

Lil Joe shrugged.

The next day, Joecy and H took the signs out with them to the strike. There were about 150 men standing out in the cold. They all watched while the new crop of cons walked by, waiting to be lowered down into the mines.

“Let them kids go!” H shouted loudly. A boy had peed himself waiting for the shaft, and H suddenly remembered the one who had been chained to him as they rode the train over, who had wet himself and cried endlessly when they stood before the pit boss. “They ain’t but kids. Let ’em go!”

“Are you gonna stop this foolishness and get back to work?” came the reply.

Then, suddenly, the boy who had wet himself started to run. He was nothing but a blur in the corner of H’s eye before the gunshot went off.

And the people on strike broke the line, swarming the few white bosses who were standing guard. They broke the shafts and dumped the coal from the tramcars before breaking those too. H grabbed a white man by the throat and held him over the vast pit.

“One day the world gon’ know what you done here,” he said to the man, whose fear was written plainly across his blue eyes, bulging now that H’s grip had tightened.

H wanted to throw the man down, down to meet the city underneath the earth, but he stopped himself. He was not the con they had told him he was.

It took six more months of striking for the bosses to
give in. They would all be paid fifty cents more. The running boy was the only one to die in the struggle. The pay increase was a small victory, but one that they would all take. After the day the running boy died, the strikers helped clean up the mess the fight had made. They picked up their shovels, found the boy who’d been gunned down, and buried him in the potter’s field. H wasn’t sure what the others were thinking when they finally laid the boy to rest among the hundreds of other cons who had died there, nameless, but he knew that he was thankful.

After the union meeting where the raise was announced, H walked home with Joecy. He saw his friend off to his house, and then he went next door to his own. When he got there, he saw that his front door was swinging open, and a strange smell was coming from inside. He still had his pick on him, caked with the dirt and coal from the mine. He lifted the pick over his head, certain that a pit boss had come to meet him. He crept in lightly, ready for whatever came next.

It was Ethe. Apron tied around her waist and handkerchief wrapped around her head. She turned from the stove, where she was cooking greens, and faced him.

“You might as well set that thing down,” she said.

H looked at his hands. The pick was raised, just slightly, above his head, and he lowered it to his side and then to the floor.

“I got your letter,” Ethe said, and H nodded and the two of them just stood there and stared at each other for a moment before Ethe found her voice again.

“Had to get Miz Benton from up the street to read it fo’ me. First, I just let it sit there on my table. Every day, I would pass it, and I’d think ’bout what I was gon’ do. I let two months go by that way.”

The fatback at the bottom of the pot started to crackle. H didn’t know if Ethe could hear it because she had not looked away from him, nor he from her.

“You have to understand, H. The day you called me that woman’s name, I thought,
Ain’t I been through enough?
Ain’t just about everything I ever had been taken away from me? My freedom. My family. My body. And now I can’t even own my name? Ain’t I deserve to be Ethe, to you at least, if nobody else? My mama gave me that name herself. I spent six good years with her before they sold me out to Louisiana to work them sugarcanes. All I had of her then was my name. That was all I had of myself too. And you wouldn’t even give me that.”

Smoke began to form above the pot. It rose higher and higher, until a cloud of it was dancing around Ethe’s head, kissing her lips.

“I wasn’t ready to forgive you that for a long time, and by the time I was, the white folks was already payin’ you back for somethin’ I know you ain’t done, but nobody would tell me how I could get you out. And what was I s’posed to do then, H? You tell me. What was I s’posed to do then?”

Ethe turned away from him and went to the pot. She began scraping the bottom of it, and the stuff she lifted up with the spoon was about as black as anything H had ever seen.

He went to her, took her body in his arms, let himself feel the full weight of her. It was not the same weight as coal, that mountain of black rock that he’d spent nearly a third of his life lifting. Ethe did not submit so easily. She did not lean back into him until the pot had been scraped clean.

EVERY TIME AKUA
DROPPED
a quartered yam into sizzling palm oil, the sound made her jump. It was a hungry sound, the sound of oil swallowing whatever it was given.

Akua’s ear was growing. She had learned to distinguish sounds she had never before heard. She had grown up in the missionary school, where they were taught to go to God with all their worries and problems and fears, but when she came to Edweso and saw and heard a white man being swallowed alive by fire, she dusted off her knees, knelt down, and gave this image and sound to God, but God had refused to keep them. He returned her fear to her every night in horrible nightmares where fire consumed everything, where it ran from the coast of Fanteland all the way into Asante. In her dreams the fire was shaped like a woman holding two babies to her heart. The firewoman would carry these two little girls with her all the way to the woods of the Inland and then the babies would vanish, and the firewoman’s sadness would send orange and red and hints of blue swarming every tree and every bush in sight.

Akua couldn’t remember the first time she’d seen fire, but she could remember the first time she’d dreamed of it. It was in 1895, sixteen years after her mother, Abena, had carried her Akua-swollen belly to the missionaries in Kumasi, fifteen years after Abena had died. Then the fire in Akua’s dream had been nothing more than a quick flash of ochre. Now the firewoman raged.

Akua’s ear was growing, so at night she now slept flat on her back or stomach, never on her side, afraid of crushing the new weight. She was certain that the dreams entered through her growing ear, that they latched onto the sizzling sounds of fried things in the daytime and lodged themselves in her mind at night, and so she slept flat-backed to let them through. Because even though she feared the new sounds, she knew she needed to hear them too.

Akua knew she’d had the dream again that night when she woke up screaming. The sound escaped her mouth like breath, like pipe smoke. Her husband, Asamoah, woke up next to her and swiftly reached for the machete he kept beside him, looking at the ground to check for the children, then at the door to check for an intruder, and ending by looking at his wife.

“What is the meaning of this?” he asked.

Akua shivered, suddenly cold. “It was the dream,” she said. She didn’t realize she was crying until Asamoah pulled her into his arms. “You and the rest of the leaders should not have burned that white man,” she said into her husband’s chest, and he pushed her away.

“You speak for the white man?” he asked.

She shook her head quickly. She’d known since she picked him for marriage that her husband feared her time among the white missionaries had made her weaker, less of an Asante somehow. “It’s not that,” she said. “It’s the fire. I keep dreaming about fire.”

Asamoah clicked his tongue. He had lived in Edweso his whole life. On his cheek he bore the mark of the Asante, and the nation was his pride. “What do I care of fire when they have exiled the Asantehene?”

Akua could not respond. For years, King Prempeh I had been refusing to allow the British to take over the Kingdom of Asante, insisting that the Asante people would remain sovereign. For this, he was arrested and exiled, and the anger that had been brewing all over the Asante nation grew sharper. Akua knew her dreams would not stop this anger from brewing in her husband’s heart. And so she decided to keep them to herself, to sleep on her stomach or back, to never again let Asamoah hear her scream.

Akua spent her days in the compound with her mother-in-law, Nana
Serwah, and her children, Abee and Ama Serwah. She started each morning by sweeping, a task she had always enjoyed for its repetitiveness, its calm. It had been her job in the missionary school too, but there, the Missionary used to laugh as he watched her, marveling at the fact that the school floor was made of clay. “Who ever heard of sweeping dust from dust?” he would say, and Akua would wonder what the floors looked like where he came from.

After she swept, Akua would help the other women cook. Abee was only four years old, but she liked to hold the giant pestle and pretend that she was helping. “Mama, look!” she would say, hugging the tall stick to her tiny body. It towered above her, and the weight of it threatened to throw her off-balance. Akua’s toddler, Ama Serwah, had big, bright eyes that would glance from the top of the
fufu
stick to the trembling sister before sending her gaze to her mother.

“You are so strong!” Akua would say, and Nana Serwah would cluck her tongue.

“She’ll fall and hurt herself,” her mother-in-law would say, snatching the
fufu
stick from Abee’s hands and shaking her head. Akua knew that Nana Serwah did not approve of her, often saying that a woman whose mother had left her to be taught by white men would never know how to raise children herself. It was usually around this time that Nana Serwah would send Akua out to the market to pick up more ingredients for the food they would make later for Asamoah and the other men who spent their days outside, meeting, planning.

Akua liked walking to the market. She could finally think, without the scrutinizing gaze of the women and elderly men, who stayed around the compound, making fun of her for all the time she spent staring at the same spot on a hut’s wall. “She’s not correct,” they would say aloud, no doubt wondering why Asamoah would choose to marry her. But she wasn’t just staring into space; she was listening to all the sounds the world had to offer, to all the people who inhabited those spaces the others could not see. She was wandering.

On her walk to the market, she would often stop at the spot where the townsmen had burned the white man. A nameless man, a wanderer himself, who had found himself in the wrong town at the wrong time. At first he was safe, lying under a tree, shielding his face from the sun with a book, but then Kofi Poku, a child of only three, stumbled in front of Akua, who had been very close to asking the man if he was lost or needed help, pointed with his tiny index finger, and shouted,
“Obroni!”

Akua’s ears prickled at the word. She had been in Kumasi the first time she heard it. A child who didn’t go to the missionary school had called the Missionary
“obroni,”
and the man turned as red as a burning sun and walked away. Akua was only six years old then. To her, the word had only ever meant “white man.” She hadn’t understood why the Missionary had gotten upset, and in times like those she wished she could remember her mother. Maybe she would have had the answers. Instead, Akua stole out that evening to the hut of a fetish priest on the edge of town who was said to have been around since the white man first came to the Gold Coast.

“Think about it,” the man said, after she told him what happened. In the missionary school they called white people Teacher or Reverend or Miss. When Abena died, Akua had been left to be raised by the Missionary. He was the only one who would take her. “It did not begin as
obroni.
It began as two words.
Abro ni.
”

“Wicked man?” Akua said.

The fetish man nodded. “Among the Akan he is wicked man, the one who harms. Among the Ewe of the Southeast his name is Cunning Dog, the one who feigns niceness and then bites you.”

“The Missionary is not wicked,” Akua said.

The fetish man kept nuts in his pocket. This was how Akua had first met him. After her mother died, she had been wailing for her in the street. She hadn’t yet understood loss. Crying was what she did every time her mother left her, to go to market, to go to sea. Wailing for the loss of her was commonplace, but this time it had lasted the entire morning, and her mother had not reappeared to shush her, hold her, kiss her face. The fetish man saw her crying that day and had given her a kola nut. Chewing it had pacified her, for a time.

Now he gave one to her again and said, “Why is the Missionary not wicked?”

“He is God’s man.”

“And God’s men are not wicked?” he asked.

Akua nodded.

“Am I wicked?” the fetish man asked, and Akua didn’t know how to answer. That first day she had met him, when he had given her the kola nut, the Missionary had come out and seen her with him. He had snatched her hand and pulled her away and told her not to talk to fetish men. They called him a fetish man because he was, because he had not given up praying to the ancestors or dancing or collecting plants and rocks and bones and blood with which to make his fetish offerings. He had not been baptized. She knew he was supposed to be wicked, that she would be in a sea of trouble if the missionaries knew that she still went to see him, and yet she recognized that his kindness, his love, was different from the people’s at the school. Warmer and truer somehow.

“No, you’re not wicked,” she said.

“You can only decide a wicked man by what he does, Akua. The white man has earned his name here. Remember that.”

She did remember. She remembered it even as Kofi Poku pointed at the white man sleeping under the tree and shouted
“Obroni!”
She remembered as the crowd formed and as the rage that had been building in the village for months came to a head. The men awoke the white man by tying him to the tree. They built a fire, and then they burned him. All the while he was screaming in English, “Please, if anyone here can understand me, let me go! I am only a traveler. I am not from the government! I am not from the government!”

Akua was not the only person in the crowd who understood English. She was not the only person in the crowd who did nothing to help.

When Akua returned to the compound, everyone was in an uproar.
She could sense the chaos in the air that seemed to get thicker, heavier, with noise and fear, the smoke from sizzling food and the buzzing of flies. Nana Serwah was covered in a film of sweat, her wrinkled hands rolling
fufu
by the second to plate up for the large crowd of men who had come. The woman looked up and spotted Akua.

“Akua, what’s wrong with you? Why are you just standing there? Come and help. These men need to be fed before the next meeting.”

Akua shook herself out of the daze she had been in and sat beside her mother-in-law, rolling the mashed cassava into neat little circles and passing them along to the next woman, who filled the bowls with soup.

The men were shouting loudly, so loudly that it was nearly impossible to distinguish what one was saying from what the others were saying. The sound of it was all the same. Outrage. Rage. Akua could see her husband, but she did not dare look at him. She knew her place was with her mother-in-law, the other women, the old men, not begging questions of him with her eyes.

“What is going on?” Akua whispered to Nana Serwah. The woman was rinsing her hands in the calabash of water that sat beside her, then drying them on her wrapper.

She spoke in a hushed tone, her lips barely moving. “The British governor, Frederick Hodgson, was in Kumasi today. He says they will not return King Prempeh I from exile.”

Akua sucked her teeth. This was what they had all been fearing.

“It’s worse than that,” her mother-in-law continued. “He said we must give him the Golden Stool so that he can sit on it or give it as a gift to his queen.”

Akua’s hands started to tremble in the pot, making a low rattling noise and marring the shape of the
fufu.
So it was worse than what they had all been fearing, worse than another war, worse than a few hundred more dead. They were a warrior people, and war was what they knew. But if a white man took the Golden Stool, the spirit of the Asante would surely die, and that they could not bear.

Nana Serwah reached out and touched her hand. It was one of the few gestures of kindness Asamoah’s mother had shown her since the days of Asamoah and her courtship, then marriage. They both knew what was coming and what it meant.

By the next week there had already been a meeting among the Asante leaders in Kumasi. The stories that followed told of the men of the meeting being too timid, disagreeing about what to say to the British, what to do. It was Yaa Asantewaa, Edweso’s own Queen Mother, who stood up and demanded that they fight, saying that if the men would not do it, the women would.

Most of the men were gone by morning. Asamoah kissed his daughters, and then he kissed her too, held her for just a moment. Akua watched him as he dressed. She watched as he left. Twenty other townsmen went with him. A few men stayed, sat in the compound waiting to be fed.

Nana Serwah’s husband, Akua’s father-in-law, had kept a machete with a golden handle beside him every night of his life, and after he died Nana Serwah had kept it in the place where he used to sleep. A machete in exchange for a body. After the Queen Mother’s call to arms reached Edweso, she had pulled that machete out from the bed and taken it with her into the compound. And all the men who had not already gone to fight for the Asante took one look at the old woman holding the large weapon and left. And so began the war.

The Missionary kept a long, thin switch on his desk.

“You will no longer go to class with the other children,” he told her. Only a few days had passed since a child had called the Missionary
obroni,
but Akua hardly remembered that. She had just learned to write her English name, Deborah, that very morning. It was the longest name of any of the children in the class, and Akua had worked very hard to write it. “From now on,” the Missionary said, “you will take lessons from me. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she answered. Word must have gotten to him that she had mastered her name. She was getting special treatment.

“Sit down,” the Missionary said.

She sat.

The Missionary took the switch from his desk and pointed it at her. The tip of it was just inches from her nose. When she crossed her eyes she could see it clearly, and it wasn’t until then that the fear hit her.

“You are a sinner and a heathen,” he said. Akua nodded. The teachers had told them this before. “Your mother had no husband when she came here to me, pregnant, begging for help. I helped her because that is what God would have wanted me to do. But she was a sinner and a heathen, like you.”