Homegoing (4 page)

Soon, even James was too busy to worry about children. The Castle was expecting a visit from Dutch officers, and everything needed to run as smoothly as possible. James would wake up well before Effia to help the men with the imported store items and to see to the ships. Effia spent more and more time wandering around the villages surrounding the Castle, roaming the forests, and chatting with Adwoa.

The afternoon of the Dutch arrival, Effia met with Adwoa and some of the other wenches just outside the Castle. They stopped beneath the shade of a patch of trees in order to eat yams with palm oil stew. There was Adwoa, then Sarah, the half-caste wench of Sam York. There was also the new wench, Eccoah. She was tall and slender, and she walked as though her limbs were made of thin twigs, as though wind could snap and collapse her.

This day, Eccoah was lying in the slim shade of a palm tree. Effia had helped her coil her hair the day before, and in the sun, it looked like a million tiny snakes rising from her head.

“My husband cannot pronounce my name well. He wants to call me Emily,” Eccoah said.

“If he wants to call you Emily, let him call you Emily,” Adwoa said. Out of the four of them, she had been a wench the longest, and she always spoke her opinions loudly and freely. Everyone knew that her husband practically worshipped at her feet. “Better that than to listen to him butcher your mother tongue over and over.”

Sarah dug her elbows into the dust. “My father was a soldier too. When he died, Mama moved us back to our village. I came to marry Sam, but he did not have to worry about my name. Do you know he knew my father? They were soldiers together in the Castle when I was just a small girl.”

Effia shook her head. She was lying on her belly. She loved days like this one, where she could speak Fante as fast as she wanted. No one asking her to slow down, no one telling her to speak English.

“My husband comes up from the dungeons stinking like a dying animal,” Eccoah said softly.

They all looked away. No one ever mentioned the dungeons.

“He comes to me smelling like feces and rot and looking at me like he has seen a million ghosts, and he cannot tell if I am one of them or not. I tell him he must wash before he touches me and sometimes he does, but sometimes he pushes me to the floor and pushes into me like he has been possessed.”

Effia sat up and rested a hand against her stomach. James had received another letter from his wife the day after he’d found the root underneath their bed. They had not slept together since.

The wind picked up. The snakes in Eccoah’s hair snapped this way and that, her twig arms lifted. “There are people down there, you know,” she said. “There are women down there who look like us, and our husbands must learn to tell the difference.”

They all fell silent. Eccoah leaned back against the tree, and Effia watched as a line of ants passed over a strand of her hair, the shape of it seeming, to them, to be just another part of the natural world.

After that first day in the Castle, James never spoke to Effia about the slaves they kept in the dungeon, but he spoke to her often about beasts. That was what the Asantes trafficked most here. Beasts. Monkeys and chimpanzees, even a few leopards. Birds like the king crowns and parrots that she and Fiifi used to try to catch when they were children, roaming the forests in search of the one odd bird, the bird that had feathers so beautiful it seemed to be set apart from the rest. They would spend hours on end looking for just one such bird, and most days they would find none.

She wondered what such a bird would be worth, because in the Castle all beasts were ascribed worth. She had seen James look at a king crown brought in by one of their Asante traders and declare that it was worth four pounds. What about the human beast? How much was he worth? Effia had known, of course, that there were people in the dungeons. People who spoke a different dialect than her, people who had been captured in tribal wars, even people who had been stolen, but she had never thought of where they went from there. She had never thought of what James must think every time he saw them. If he went into the dungeons and saw women who reminded him of her, who looked like her and smelled like her. If he came back to her haunted by what he saw.

Effia soon realized that she was pregnant. It was spring, and
the mango trees outside the Castle had started to drop down mangoes. Her stomach jutted out, soft and fleshy, its own kind of fruit. James was so happy when she told him that he picked her up and danced her around their quarters. She slapped his back and told him to set her down, lest they shake the baby to pieces, and he had complied before bending and planting a kiss on her barely bulged stomach.

But their joy was soon tempered by news from her village. Cobbe had fallen ill. So ill that it was unclear whether or not he would still be alive by the time Effia made the journey back to see him.

She was not sure who had sent the letter from her village, for it was addressed to her husband and written in broken English. She had been gone two years, and she had not heard from anyone in her family since then. She knew that this was Baaba’s doing, and indeed she was surprised that anyone had even thought to notify her of her father’s illness.

The journey back to the village took about three days. James did not want her to make the trip alone in her condition, but he could not accompany her, so he sent along a house girl. When they arrived, everything in the village looked different. The colors of the treetop canopies seemed to have dulled, their vibrant browns and greens now muted. The sounds seemed different too. Everything that once rustled now stood still. Abeeku had made the village into one so prosperous that they would forever be known as one of the leading slave markets in all of the Gold Coast. He had no time to see Effia, but he sent along gifts of sweet palm wine and gold to meet her once she arrived at her father’s compound.

Baaba stood in the entranceway. She looked to have aged a hundred years in the two that Effia had been gone. Her scowl was held in place by the hundreds of tiny wrinkles that pulled at her skin, and her nails had grown so long that they curled like talons. She didn’t speak a word, only led Effia to the room where her father lay dying.

No one knew what sickness had struck Cobbe. Apothecaries, witch doctors, even the Christian minister from the Castle, had been called upon to give their opinions and pray over the man, and yet no measure of healing thoughts or medicines could spit him out of the lips of death.

Fiifi stood beside him, wiping the sweat off his forehead carefully. Suddenly, Effia was crying and shaking. She reached out her hand to her father’s and began to stroke the sallow skin there.

“He cannot speak,” Fiifi whispered, glancing quickly at her bulging belly. “He is too weak.”

She nodded and continued to cry.

Fiifi dropped the drenched cloth and took Effia’s hand. “Big sister, I am the one who wrote you the letter. Mama did not want you to come, but I thought you should get to see our father before he enters Asamando.”

Cobbe closed his eyes, and a low murmur escaped his lips so that Effia could see that the Land of the Spirits was indeed calling him.

“Thank you,” she said to Fiifi, and he nodded.

He began walking out of the room, but before he reached the hut’s door, he turned. “She is not your mother, you know. Baaba. Our father had you by a house girl who ran away into the fire the night you were born. She is the one who left you that stone you wear around your neck.”

Fiifi stepped outside. And soon, Cobbe died, Effia still holding his hand. The villagers would say that Cobbe had been waiting for Effia to come home before he could die, but Effia knew that it was more complex than that. His unrest had kept him alive, and now that unrest belonged to Effia. It would feed her life and the life of her child.

After she had wiped her tears, Effia walked out of the compound and into the sun. Baaba sat on the stump of a felled tree, her shoulders squared as she held hands with Fiifi, who stood beside her, now as quiet as a field mouse. Effia wanted to say something to Baaba, to apologize perhaps for the burden her father had made Baaba carry all of those years, but before she could speak, Baaba hacked from her throat, spit on the ground before Effia’s feet, and said, “You are nothing from nowhere. No mother and now no father.” She looked at Effia’s stomach and smiled. “What can grow from nothing?”

THE SMELL WAS
UNBEARABLE.
In the corner, a woman was crying so hard that it seemed her bones would break from her convulsions. This was what they wanted. The baby had messed itself, and Afua, its mother, had no milk. She was naked, save the small scrap of fabric the traders had given her to wipe her nipples when they leaked, but they had miscalculated. No food for mother meant no food for baby. The baby would cry soon, but the sound would be absorbed by the mud walls, subsumed into the cries of the hundreds of women who surrounded it.

Esi had been in the women’s dungeon of the Cape Coast Castle for two weeks. She spent her fifteenth birthday there. On her fourteenth birthday, she was in the heart of Asanteland, in her father’s, Big Man’s, compound. He was the best warrior in the village, so everyone had come to pay their respects to the daughter who grew more beautiful with each passing day. Kwasi Nnuro brought sixty yams. More yams than any other suitor had ever brought before. Esi would have married him in the summer, when the sun stretched long and high, when the palm trees could be tapped for wine, climbed by the spriest children, their arms holding the trunk in a hug as they shinnied to the top to pluck the fruits that waited there.

When she wanted to forget the Castle, she thought of these things, but she did not expect joy. Hell was a place of remembering, each beautiful moment passed through the mind’s eye until it fell to the ground like a rotten mango, perfectly useless, uselessly perfect.

A soldier came into the dungeon and began to speak. He had to hold his nose to keep from vomiting. The women did not understand him. His voice didn’t seem angry, but they had learned to back away at the sight of that uniform, that skin the color of coconut meat.

The soldier repeated himself, louder this time, as though volume would coax understanding. Irritated, he ventured further into the room. He stepped in feces and cursed. He plucked the baby from Afua’s cradled arms, and Afua began to cry. He slapped her, and she stopped, a learned reflex.

Tansi sat next to Esi. The two had made the journey to the Castle together. Now that they weren’t walking constantly, or speaking in hushed tones, Esi had time to get to know her journey friend. Tansi was a hardy and ugly woman, barely turned sixteen. She was thick, her body built on a solid foundation. Esi hoped, and dared not hope, that they would be allowed to stay together even longer.

“Where are they taking the baby?” Esi asked.

Tansi spit onto the clay floor and swirled the spittle with her finger, creating a salve. “They will kill it, I’m sure,” she said. The baby was conceived before Afua’s marriage ceremony. As punishment, the village chief had sold her to the traders. Afua had told Esi this when she first came into the dungeon, when she was still certain that a mistake had been made, that her parents would return for her.

Now, hearing Tansi speak, Afua resumed her crying, but it was as though no one heard. These tears were a matter of routine. They came for all of the women. They dropped until the clay below them turned to mud. At night, Esi dreamed that if they all cried in unison, the mud would turn to river and they could be washed away into the Atlantic.

“Tansi, tell me a story, please,” Esi begged. But then they were interrupted again. The soldiers came in with the same mushy porridge that had been fed to them in the Fante village where Esi was held. Esi had learned to swallow it down without gagging. It was the only food they ever received, and their stomachs were empty more days than full. The porridge passed right through her, it seemed. The ground was littered with their waste, the unbearable smell.

“Ah! You’re too old for stories, my sister,” Tansi said once the soldiers left, but Esi knew she would give in soon. Tansi enjoyed the sound of her own voice. She pulled Esi’s head into her lap and began playing with her hair, pulling at the strands that had been caked with dust, so brittle that they could be broken, each one snapped like a twig.

“Do you know the story of the kente cloth?” Tansi asked. Esi had heard it numerous times before, twice from Tansi herself, but she shook her head. Asking if the story had been heard before was a part of the story itself.

Tansi began to tell her. “Two Asante men went out into the forest one day. They were weavers by trade, and they had gone out to hunt for meat. When they got to the forest to collect their traps, they were met by Anansi, the mischievous spider. He was spinning a magnificent web. They watched him, studied him, and soon realized that a spider’s web is a unique and beautiful thing, and that a spider’s technique is flawless. They went home and decided to weave cloth the way Anansi weaves his web. From that, kente was born.”

“You are a fine storyteller,” Esi said. Tansi laughed and smoothed the salve she had created onto her knees and elbows to soothe the cracked skin there. The last story she had told Esi was of how she had been captured by the northerners, plucked from her marriage bed while her husband was off fighting a war. She had been taken with a few other girls, but the rest had not survived.

By morning, Afua had died. Her skin was purple and blue, and Esi knew that she had held her breath until Nyame took her. They would all be punished for this. The soldiers came in, though Esi was no longer able to tell what time. The mud walls of the dungeon made all time equal. There was no sunlight. Darkness was day and night and everything in between. Sometimes there were so many bodies stacked into the women’s dungeon that they all had to lie, stomach down, so that women could be stacked on top of them.

It was one of those days. Esi was kicked to the ground by one of the soldiers, his foot at the base of her neck so that she couldn’t turn her head to breathe anything but the dust and detritus from the ground. The new women were brought in, and some were wailing so hard that the soldiers smacked them unconscious. They were piled on top of the other women, their bodies deadweight. When the smacked ones came to, there were no more tears. Esi could feel the woman on top of her peeing. Urine traveled between both of their legs.

Esi learned to split her life into Before the Castle and
Now. Before the Castle, she was the daughter of Big Man and his third wife, Maame. Now she was dust. Before the Castle, she was the prettiest girl in the village. Now she was thin air.

Esi was born in a small village in the heart of the Asante nation. Big Man had thrown an outdooring feast that lasted four nights. Five goats were slaughtered and boiled until their tough skins turned tender. It was rumored that Maame did not stop crying or praising Nyame for the entire duration of the ceremony, nor would she set baby Esi down. “You never know what could happen,” she kept repeating.

At that time, Big Man was known only as Kwame Asare. Esi’s father was not a chief, but he commanded just as much respect, for he was the best warrior the Asante nation had ever seen, and at age twenty-five he already had five wives and ten children. Everyone in the village knew his seed was strong. His sons, still toddlers and young children, were already tough wrestlers and his daughters were beauties.

Esi grew up in bliss. The villagers called her ripe mango because she was just on the right side of spoiled, still sweet. There was nothing her parents would refuse her. Even her strong warrior of a father had been known to carry her through the village at night when she couldn’t sleep. Esi would hold the tip of his finger, to her as thick as a branch, as she toddled past the huts that made up each compound. Her village was small but growing steadily. In the first year of their walks, it wouldn’t take but twenty minutes to reach the forest edge that cut them off from the rest of Asanteland, but that forest had been pushed farther and farther back until by the fifth year the journey there took nearly an hour. Esi loved walking to the forest with her father. She would listen, enraptured, as he told her how the forest was so dense it was like a shield, impenetrable to their enemies. He would tell her how he and the other warriors knew the forest better than they knew the lines of their own palms. And this was good. Following the lines of a palm would lead nowhere, but the forest led the warriors to other villages that they could conquer to build up their strength.

“When you are old enough, Esi, you will learn how to climb these trees with nothing but your bare hands,” he said to her as they walked back to the village one day.

Esi looked up. The tops of the trees looked as though they were brushing the sky, and Esi wondered why leaves were green instead of blue.

When Esi was seven years old, her father won the battle that would earn him the name Big Man. There had been rumors that in a village just north of theirs, warriors had come back with splendors of gold and women. They had even raided the British storehouse, earning gunpowder and muskets in the process. Chief Nnuro, the leader of Esi’s village, called a meeting of all the able-bodied men.

“Have you heard the news?” he asked them, and they grunted, slammed their staffs against the hard earth, and cried out. “The swine of the northern village are walking about like kings. All around Asante people will say, it is the northerners who stole guns from the British. It is the northerners who are the most powerful warriors in all of the Gold Coast.” The men stomped their feet and shook their heads. “Will we allow this?” the chief asked.

“No!” they cried.

Kwaku Agyei, the most sensible among them, hushed their cries and said, “Listen to us! We may go to fight the northerners, but what have we? No guns, no gunpowder. And what will we gain? So many people will praise our enemies in the north, but will they not still praise us as well? We have been the strongest village for decades. No one has been able to break through the forest and challenge us.”

“So will you have us wait until the northern snake slithers its way into our fields and steals our women?” Esi’s father asked. The two men stood on opposite sides of the room, and all the other men stood between them, turning their heads from one to the other in order to see which gift would win: wisdom or strength.

“I only say, let us not be too hasty. Lest we appear weak in the process.”

“But who is weak?” Esi’s father asked. He pointed to Nana Addae, then Kojo Nyarko, then Kwabena Gyimah. “Who among us is weak? You? Or maybe you?”

The men shook their heads one by one, and soon they were all shaking their entire bodies into a rallying cry that could be heard throughout the village. From the compound where Esi stood helping her mother fry plantains, she heard them, and dropped two slices of plantains so quickly that oil jumped up and splashed her mother’s leg.

“Aiieee!” her mother cried out, wiping the oil away with her hands and blowing on the burn. “Stupid girl! When will you learn to be careful around fire?” Maame asked. Esi had heard her mother say this or something like it many times before. Maame was terrified of fire. “Be careful of fire. Know when to use it and when to stay cold,” she would often say.

“It was an accident,” Esi snapped. She wanted to be outside, catching more of the warriors’ discussion. Her mother reached over and yanked her ear.

“Who are you talking to that way?” she hissed. “Think before you act. Think before you speak.”

Esi apologized to her mother, and Maame, who had never been able to stay mad at Esi for longer than a few seconds, kissed the top of her head as the men’s cries grew louder and louder.

Everyone in the village knew the story. Esi had her father tell it to her every night for a whole month. She would lie with her head in his lap, listening as he spoke of how the men stole out for the northern village on the evening of the rallying cry. Their plan was thin: overtake the town and steal whatever had been stolen. Esi’s father told her of how he led the group through the forest until they came upon the circle of warriors protecting the newly acquired goods. Her father and his warriors hid in the trees. Their feet moved with the lightness of leaves on the forest ground. When they came upon the warriors of the northern village, they fought bravely, but it was of no use. Esi’s father and many others were captured and packed into huts that had been converted into a prison camp.

It was Kwaku Agyei and his few followers who had had the foresight to wait in the forest until after the eager warriors had rushed in. They found the guns that the northerners were hiding and loaded them quickly and quietly before moving in to where their fellow men were being held captive. Though there were only a few of them, Kwaku Agyei and his men were able to hold off the warriors with the stories they told of the many men they had waiting behind them. Kwaku Agyei said that if this mission failed, there would be one raid every night until the end of time. “If it isn’t the West, it will be the whites,” he reasoned, darkness glinting from the gap between his front teeth.

The northerners felt they had no choice but to give in. They released Esi’s father and the others, who parted with five of the stolen guns. The men returned to their village in silence, Esi’s father consumed by his embarrassment. When they reached the edge of their village, he stopped Kwaku Agyei, got down on both of his knees, and bowed his head before him. “I am sorry, my brother. I will never again rush into a fight when it is possible to reason.”

“It takes a big man to admit his folly,” Kwaku Agyei said, and they all continued into the village, the contrite and newly christened Big Man leading the way.

This was the Big Man who returned to Esi, the one she knew as she grew older. Slow to anger, rational, and still the strongest and bravest warrior of them all. By the time Esi turned twelve their small village had won more than fifty-five wars under Big Man’s leadership. The spoils of these wars could be seen as the warriors carried them back, shimmering gold and colorful textiles in large tan sacks, captives in iron cages.

It was the prisoners that fascinated Esi the most, for after each capture they would be put on display in the center of the village square. Anyone could walk by and stare at them, mostly young, virile warriors, though sometimes women and their children. Some of these prisoners would be taken by the villagers as slaves, house boys and house girls, cooks and cleaners, but soon there would be too many to keep and the overflow would have to be dealt with.