Homegoing (29 page)

“Hello, my children,” Kofi Poku called, and all of the children stopped what they were doing and stood, so that they could greet their parents, but when they saw Yaw their voices hushed and their eyes widened.

The one who looked like the youngest girl, with two puffs of hair on either side of her head, pulled on her brother’s pants leg. “Crazy Woman’s son,” she whispered. Yet still, all could hear, and Yaw knew for certain now that his story had become legend in his hometown.

Everyone stood there, embarrassed for a minute, and then Esther with her large and muscular arms snatched the pestle from the older boy and quickly struck the
fufu
in the mortar before anyone had time to think or react. The ball of
fufu
flattened, and the
fufu
stick fell with a thud against the clay earth.

“Enough!” Esther shouted once they had all turned to stare at her. “Has this man not suffered enough that he should come home to this?” she asked.

“Please excuse my child,” Mrs. Poku said, using her voice to speak instead of her husband’s for the first time since they’d met her. “It’s just that they have heard the stories. They will not make the mistake again.” She turned, allowed her gaze to rest on each of the five children, even the toddler at her feet, and quickly, without any need for further explanation, they understood.

Kofi Poku cleared his throat, and motioned for the two of them to follow him to their seats. As they did, Yaw whispered, “Thank you,” and Esther shrugged. “Let them think that I am the crazy one,” Esther said.

They sat down to their meal. The kids served them, frightened but kind. Kofi Poku and his wife told them what to expect from Yaw’s mother.

“She lives with only a house girl in that place your father built for her on the edge of town. She rarely goes out anymore, though sometimes you can see her outside, tending to her garden. She has a lovely garden. My wife often goes there to admire the flowers that grow there.”

“Does she speak when you see her?” Yaw asked Mrs. Poku.

The woman shook her head. “No, but she has always been kind to me. She even gives me some flowers to take home. I put them in the girls’ hair before we go to church, and I think it will bring them good marriages.”

“Don’t worry,” Kofi Poku said. “I’m sure she will know you. Her heart will know you.” His wife and Esther both nodded, and Yaw looked away.

It was dark in the courtyard, but the heat had not lessened, only transformed, buzzing with mosquitoes and humming with gnats.

Yaw and Esther finished their food. They said thank you. They were taken to their room, where Esther insisted on the floor while Yaw got the mattress, a tough, springy thing that fought his back. Like that, and there, they slept.

They spent the morning preparing, walking around Edweso, and eat
ing many times. They had been told that Yaw’s mother rarely slept and seemed to prefer evenings to mornings. And so they bided their time. Esther had left Takoradi only once in her life, and Yaw loved seeing the wonder in her eyes as they took in the strangeness of this new town.

Everyone thought they were married. Yaw did not correct them, and, to his delight, Esther did not correct them either, though Yaw wondered if this was more a factor of her politeness than her desire. He was too afraid to ask.

Soon, the sky began to darken and with each new shade, Yaw’s stomach began to tighten. Esther kept glancing at him carefully, taking in his face as though it held instructions for how she herself should feel.

“Don’t be afraid,” she said.

Since they’d met five years before, Esther had been the one to encourage his homecoming. She said it had something to do with forgiveness, but Yaw wasn’t certain that he believed in forgiveness. He heard the word most on the few days he went to the white man’s church with Edward and Mrs. Boahen and sometimes with Esther, and so it had begun to seem to him like a word the white men brought with them when they first came to Africa. A trick their Christians had learned and spoke loudly and freely about to the people of the Gold Coast. Forgiveness, they shouted, all the while committing their wrongs. When he was younger, Yaw wondered why they did not preach that the people should avoid wrongdoing altogether. But the older he got, the better he understood. Forgiveness was an act done after the fact, a piece of the bad deed’s future. And if you point the people’s eye to the future, they might not see what is being done to hurt them in the present.

When it was finally evening, Kofi Poku led Yaw and Esther to Yaw’s mother’s house on the outskirts of town. Yaw knew it immediately from the lush things that grew in her garden. Colors that Yaw had never seen before bloomed off of long green stalks that rustled from the wind or the small creatures that moved beneath them.

“This is where I leave you,” Kofi Poku said. They had not even reached the door yet. For any other family, in this and many other towns, it would have been considered rude for a townsperson to be so close to a person’s house and not greet the master of the house, but Yaw could see the discomfort in the man’s face, and he waved to him and thanked him again while he made his way off.

The door to the house was open, but still Yaw knocked twice, Esther standing behind him.

“Hello?” a confused voice called. A woman who looked older than Yaw, carrying a clay bowl, rounded the corner. When she saw Yaw, saw his scar, she gasped, and the bowl fell to the ground, shattering, scattering pieces of red clay from the door all the way into the garden. Tiny pieces of clay that they would never find, that would be absorbed into that earth from which they came.

The woman was shouting. “We thank God for all of his mercies! We thank him that he is alive. Our God, he does not sleep-oh!” She danced around the room. “Old Lady, God has brought you your son! Old Lady, God has brought you your son so you do not have to go to Asamando without seeing him. Old Woman, come and see!” she yelled.

Behind him, Yaw could hear Esther clapping her hands together in her own mini praise. He didn’t turn, but he knew she was smiling brightly, and the warmth of that thought emboldened him to step a bit further into the room.

“Does she not hear me?” the woman mumbled to herself, turning sharply toward the bedroom.

Yaw kept moving, at first following the woman, but then continuing straight until he reached the living room. His mother sat in the corner.

“So you have returned home at last,” she said, smiling.

If he had not already known that the woman in this house was his mother, he would not have known by looking at her. Yaw was fifty-five, which meant she would be seventy-six, but she seemed younger. Her eyes had the unburdened look of the young, and her smile was generous, yet wise. When she stood up her back was straight, her bones not yet hunched from the weight of each year. When she walked toward him, her limbs were fluid, not stiff, the joints never halting. And when she touched him, when she took his hands in her own, her scarred and ruined hands, when she rubbed the backs of his hands with her crooked thumbs, he felt how soft her own burns were, how very, very soft.

“The son has come home at last. The dreams, they do not fail to come true. They do not fail.”

She continued to hold his hands. In the entryway, the servant woman cleared her throat. Yaw turned to find her and Esther standing there, grinning at them.

“Old Woman, we will make dinner!” the woman shouted. Yaw wondered if her voice was always this loud or if the volume was for him.

“Please, don’t go to any trouble,” he begged.

“Eh? The son comes home after all these years, does the mother not kill a goat?” She sucked her teeth on the way out of the door.

“And you?” Yaw asked Esther.

“Who will boil the yam while the woman kills the goat?” she asked, her voice mischievous.

Yaw watched them go, and for the first time he grew nervous. Suddenly, he felt something he had not felt in a long, long time.

“What are you doing?” he shouted, for his mother had put her hand on his scar, running her fingers along the ruined skin that he alone had touched for nearly half a century.

She continued, undeterred by the anger in his voice. She took her own burned fingers from the lost eyebrow to the raised cheek to the scarred chin. She touched all of it, and only once she had finished did Yaw begin to weep.

She pulled him down to the ground with her, pulled his head to her bosom, and began to chant, softly, “My son-o! My son! My son-o! My son!”

The two stayed like this for a long while, and after Yaw had cried more tears than he had ever cried before, after his mother had finished calling his name out into the world, he peeled himself away so that he could look at her.

“Tell me the story of how I got my scar,” he said.

She sighed. “How can I tell you the story of your scar without first telling you the story of my dreams? And how do I talk about my dreams without talking about my family? Our family?”

Yaw waited. His mother got off the ground and motioned for him to do the same. She pointed to a chair on one side of the room, and she took the chair on the other. She looked at the wall behind his head.

“Before you were born, I began to have bad dreams. The dreams started out the same—a woman made of fire would visit me. In her arms, she carried her two fire children, but then the children would disappear and the woman would turn her anger toward me.

“Even before the dreams began, I was not well. My mother died at the hands of the Missionary at the school in Kumasi. Do you know it?”

Yaw shook his head. He had never heard this before, and even if he had, he would have been too young to remember it.

“The Missionary raised me. My only friend was a fetish priest. I was always a sad girl because I did not know that there was any other way to be. When I married your father, I thought I could be happy, and when I had your sisters…”

Here, her voice caught, but she lifted her shoulders, began again.

“When I had your sisters, I thought I was happy, but then I saw a white man burn in the square in Edweso and the dreams began. Then the war began and the dreams grew worse. Your father came back without a leg, and the dreams grew worse. I had you, and the sadness did not stop. I tried to fight sleep, but I am human and sleep is not. We were not equally matched. In my sleep one night, I set the hut on fire. They say your father could only save one, you. But that is not entirely true. He also saved me from the townspeople. For many years I wished that he had not.

“They only let me see you so that I could feed you. Then they sent you away, and would not tell me where. I have lived here in this house with Kukua since that day.”

As if summoned, Kukua, the old servant, came in with wine. She served Yaw first and then his mother, but the woman refused. Kukua left as quietly as she had entered.

Yaw drank from the wine as though it were water. When the cup lay empty at his feet, he turned his attention back to his mother. She took a deep breath and began again.

“The dreams didn’t stop. Not after the fire, not even to this day. I started to get to know the firewoman. Sometimes, as on the night of the fire, she would take me to the ocean in Cape Coast. Sometimes she would take me to a cocoa farm. Sometimes to Kumasi. I didn’t know why. I wanted answers, so I went back to the missionary school to ask about my mother’s family. The Missionary told me that he had burned all of my mother’s belongings, but he lied. He had kept one thing for himself.”

His mother pulled Effia’s necklace from her neck then and held it out to Yaw. It glowed black in her hand. He touched it, felt the smoothness of it.

“I took the necklace to the fetish man’s son so that I could make offerings to our ancestors so that they might stop punishing me. Kukua was maybe fourteen at this time. When we did the ritual, the fetish man’s son stopped. He dropped the necklace very suddenly and said, ‘Do you know there is evil in your lineage?’ I thought he was talking about me, the things I had done, and so I nodded. But then he said, ‘This thing you are carrying, it does not belong to you.’ When I told him about my dreams, he said that the firewoman was an ancestor come back to visit me. He said that the black stone had belonged to her and that was why it grew hot in his hand. He said that if I listened to her, she would tell me where I came from. He said I should be glad that I was chosen.”

Yaw grew angry again. Why should she be glad she was chosen if she was now a ruined woman and he a ruined man? How could she be content with this life?

His mother must have sensed his anger. Old woman that she was, she went to him and knelt before him. Yaw knew she was crying by the wetness of his feet.

She looked up at him and said, “I can’t forgive myself for what I’ve done. I won’t. But when I listened to the firewoman’s stories I began to see that the fetish priest was right. There is evil in our lineage. There are people who have done wrong because they could not see the result of the wrong. They did not have these burned hands as warning.”

She held her hands out to him, and he looked at them carefully. He recognized her skin in his own.

“What I know now, my son: Evil begets evil. It grows. It transmutes, so that sometimes you cannot see that the evil in the world began as the evil in your own home. I’m sorry you have suffered. I’m sorry for the way your suffering casts a shadow over your life, over the woman you have yet to marry, the children you have yet to have.”

Yaw looked at her surprised, but she simply smiled. “When someone does wrong, whether it is you or me, whether it is mother or father, whether it is the Gold Coast man or the white man, it is like a fisherman casting a net into the water. He keeps only the one or two fish that he needs to feed himself and puts the rest in the water, thinking that their lives will go back to normal. No one forgets that they were once captive, even if they are now free. But still, Yaw, you have to let yourself be free.”

Yaw took his mother up from the ground and into his arms while she kept chanting, “Be free, Yaw. Be free.” He hugged her, surprised by how light she was.

Soon Esther and Kukua came in carrying pot after pot of food. They served Yaw and his mother well into the night. They ate until the sun came up.