Homegoing (7 page)

Governor James. He walked through the room, his boots pressing against hands, thighs, hair, his fingers pinching his nose. Following behind him was a younger soldier. The big white man pointed to twenty women, then to Esi.

The soldier shouted something, but they didn’t understand. He grabbed them by their wrists, dragged them from atop or underneath the bodies of other women so that they were standing upright. He stood them next to each other in a row, and the governor checked them. He ran his hands over their breasts and between their thighs. The first girl he checked began to cry, and he slapped her swiftly, knocking her body back to the ground.

Finally, Governor James came to Esi. He looked at her carefully, then blinked his eyes and shook his head. He looked at her again, and then began checking her body as he had the others. When he ran his hands between her legs, his fingers came back red.

He gave her a pitying look, as though he understood, but Esi wondered if he could. He motioned, and before she could think, the other soldier was herding them out of the dungeon.

“No, my stone!” Esi shouted, remembering the golden-black stone her mother had given her. She flung herself to the ground and started to dig and dig and dig, but then the soldier was lifting her body, and soon all that she could feel instead of dirt in her steadily moving hands was air and more air.

They took them out into the light. The scent of ocean water hit her nose. The taste of salt clung to her throat. The soldiers marched them down to an open door that led to sand and water, and they all began to walk out onto it.

Before Esi left, the one called Governor looked at her and smiled. It was a kind smile, pitying, yet true. But for the rest of her life Esi would see a smile on a white face and remember the one the soldier gave her before taking her to his quarters, how white men smiling just meant more evil was coming with the next wave.

QUEY HAD RECEIVED
A MESSAGE
from his old friend Cudjo and didn’t know how he would answer it. That night, he pretended the heat was keeping him awake, an easy lie for he was drenched in sweat, but then, when wasn’t he sweating? It was so hot and humid in the bush that he felt like he was being slowly roasted for supper. He missed the Castle, the breeze from the beach. Here, in the village of his mother, Effia, sweat pooled in his ears, in his belly button. His skin itched, and he imagined mosquitoes crawling up his feet to his legs to his stomach, to rest at the watering hole of his navel. Did mosquitoes drink sweat, or was it only blood?

Blood. He pictured the prisoners being brought into the cellars by the tens and twenties, their hands and feet bound and bleeding. He wasn’t made for this. He was supposed to have an easier life, away from the workings of slavery. He was raised among the whites in Cape Coast, educated in England. He should still be in his office in the Castle, working as a writer, the junior officer rank that his father, James Collins, had secured for him before his death, logging numbers that he could pretend didn’t represent people bought and sold. Instead, the Castle’s new governor had summoned him, sent him here, to the bush.

“As you know by now, Quey, we’ve had a long-standing working relationship with Abeeku Badu and the other Negroes of his village, but of late, we’ve heard that they have begun trading with a few private companies. We would like to set up an outpost in the village that would act as a residence for a few of our employees, as a way of, say, gently reminding our friends there that they have certain trade obligations to our company. You’ve been specially requested for the position, and given your parents’ history with the village and given your comfort and familiarity with the language and local customs, we thought that you might be a particular asset to our company while there.”

Quey had nodded and accepted the position, because what else could he do? But inside he resisted. His comfort and familiarity with the local customs? His parents’ history with the village? Quey was still in Effia’s womb the last time he or his mother had been there, so scared was she of Baaba. That was in 1779, nearly twenty years ago. Baaba had died in those years, and yet, still, they had stayed away. Quey felt his new job was a kind of punishment, and hadn’t he been punished enough?

The sun finally came up, and Quey went to see his
uncle Fiifi. When they’d met for the first time, only a month before, Quey could hardly believe that a man like Fiifi was related to him. It wasn’t that he was handsome. Effia had been called the Beauty her whole life, and so Quey was accustomed to beauty. It was that Fiifi looked powerful, his body a graceful alliance of muscles. Quey had taken after his father, skinny and tall, but not particularly strong. James was powerful, but his power had come from his pedigree, the Collinses of Liverpool, who’d gained their wealth building slave ships. His mother’s power came from her beauty, but Fiifi’s power came from his body, from the fact that he looked like he could take anything he wanted. Quey had known only one other person like that.

“Ah, my son. You are welcome here,” Fiifi said when he saw Quey approaching. “Sit. Eat!”

Summoned, the house girl came out with two bowls. She started to set one bowl in front of Fiifi, but he stopped her with only a glance. “You must serve my son first.”

“Sorry,” she mumbled, setting the bowl in front of Quey instead.

Quey thanked her and looked down at the porridge.

“Uncle, we’ve been here a month already and yet, still, you haven’t discussed our trade agreements. The company has the money to buy more. Much more. But you have to let us. You have to stop trading with any other company.”

Quey had given this very speech or one like it many times before, but his uncle Fiifi always ignored him. The first night they were there, Quey had wanted to talk to Badu about the trade agreements straightaway. He thought the sooner he could get the chief to agree, the sooner he could leave. That night, Badu had invited all the men to drink at his compound. He brought them enough wine and
akpeteshie
to drown in. Timothy Hightower, an officer eager to impress the chief, drank half a caskful of the home brew before he passed out underneath a palm tree, shaking and vomiting and claiming to see spirits. Soon, the rest of the men also littered the forest of Badu’s front yard, vomiting or sleeping or searching for a local woman to sleep with. Quey waited for his chance to speak to Badu, sipping his drink all the while.

He had had only two cups of wine before Fiifi approached him. “Careful, Quey,” Fiifi said, pointing at the scene of men before them. “Stronger men than these have been brought down by too much drink.”

Quey looked at the cup in Fiifi’s hand, his eyebrow raised.

“Water,” Fiifi said. “One of us must be ready for anything.” He motioned to Badu, who had fallen asleep in his gold throne, his chin nestled down into the round flesh of his belly.

Quey laughed, and Fiifi cracked a smile, the first that Quey had seen since meeting him.

Quey never talked to Badu that night, but as the weeks went on he learned that it was not Badu he needed to please. While Abeeku Badu was the figurehead, the Omanhin who received gifts from the political leaders of London and Holland alike for his role in their trade, Fiifi was the authority. When he shook his head, the whole village stopped.

Now Fiifi was as silent as he was every other time Quey had brought up trade with the British. He looked out into the forest in front of them, and Quey followed his gaze. In the trees, two vibrant birds sang loudly, a discordant song.

“Uncle, the agreement Badu made with my father—”

“Do you hear that?” Fiifi asked, pointing to the birds.

Frustrated, Quey nodded.

“When one bird stops, the other one starts. Each time their song gets louder, shriller. Why do you think that is?”

“Uncle, trade is the only reason we’re here. If you want the British out of your village, you have to—”

“What you cannot hear, Quey, is the third bird. She is quiet, quiet, listening to the male birds get louder and louder and louder still. And when they have sung their voices out, then and only then will she speak up. Then and only then will she choose the man whose song she liked better. For now, she sits, and lets them argue: who will be the better partner, who will give her better seed, who will fight for her when times are difficult.

“Quey, this village must conduct its business like that female bird. You want to pay more for slaves, pay more, but know that the Dutch will also pay more, and the Portuguese and even the pirates will pay more too. And while you are all shouting about how much better you are than the others, I will be sitting quietly in my compound, eating my
fufu
and waiting for the price I think is right. Now, let us not speak of business anymore.”

Quey sighed. So he would be here forever. The birds had stopped singing. Perhaps they sensed his exasperation. He looked at them, their blue, yellow, orange wings, their hooked beaks.

“There were no birds like this in London,” Quey said softly. “There was no color. Everything was gray. The sky, the buildings, even the people looked gray.”

Fiifi shook his head. “I don’t know why Effia let James send you to that nonsense country.”

Quey nodded absently and returned to the porridge in his bowl.

Quey had been a lonely child. When he was born, his
father built a hut close to the Castle so that he, Effia, and Quey could live more comfortably. In those days trade had been prosperous. Quey never saw the dungeons, and he had only the faintest idea of what went on in the lower levels of the Castle, but he knew that business was good because he rarely saw his father.

Every day was for him and Effia. She was the most patient mother in all of Cape Coast, in all of the Gold Coast. She spoke softly yet assuredly. She never hit him, even when the other mothers taunted her, telling her that she would spoil him and that he would never learn.

“Learn what?” Effia would answer. “What did I ever learn from Baaba?”

And yet Quey did learn. He sat in Effia’s lap as she taught him to speak, repeating a word in both Fante and English until Quey could hear in one language and answer in the other. She had only learned how to read and write herself in the first year of Quey’s life and yet she taught him with vigor, holding his small, fat fist in hers as they traced lines and lines and lines together.

“How smart you are!” she exclaimed when Quey learned to spell his name without her help.

In 1784, on Quey’s fifth birthday, Effia first told him about her own childhood in Badu’s village. He learned all of the names—Cobbe, Baaba, Fiifi. He learned there was another mother whose name they would never know, that the shimmering black stone Effia always wore about her neck had belonged to this woman, his true grandmother. Telling this story, Effia’s face darkened, but the storm passed when Quey reached up and touched her cheek.

“You are my own child,” she said. “Mine.”

And she was his. When he was young that had been enough, but as he grew older, he began to lament the fact that his family was so small, unlike all of the other families in the Gold Coast, where siblings piled on top of siblings in the steady stream of marriages each powerful man consummated. He wished that he could meet his father’s other children, those white Collinses who lived across the Atlantic, but he knew that it would never be. Quey had only himself, his books, the beach, the Castle, his mother.

“I’m worried because he has no friends,” Effia said to James one day. “He doesn’t play with the other Castle children.”

Quey had almost stepped in the door after a day of building sand castle replicas of the Cape Coast Castle when he heard Effia mention his name, and so he had remained outside to listen.

“What are we supposed to do about that? You’ve coddled him, Effia. He’s got to learn to do some things on his own.”

“He should be playing with other Fante children, village children, so that he can get away from here from time to time. Don’t you know anyone?”

“I’m home!” Quey announced, perhaps a bit too noisily, not wanting to hear what his father would say next. By the end of the day, he’d forgotten all about it, but weeks later, when Cudjo Sackee came with his father to visit the Castle, Quey remembered his parents’ conversation.

Cudjo’s father was the chief of a prominent Fante village. He was Abeeku Badu’s biggest competitor, and he had begun meeting with James Collins to discuss increasing trade when the governor asked him if he might bring his eldest son to one of their meetings.

“Quey, this is Cudjo,” James said, giving Quey a small push toward the boy. “You two play while we talk.”

Quey and Cudjo watched their fathers walk off to a different side of the Castle. Once they could hardly make them out anymore, Cudjo turned his attention to Quey.

“Are you white?” Cudjo had asked him, touching his hair.

Quey recoiled at Cudjo’s touch, though many others had done the same thing, asked him the same question. “I’m not white,” he said softly.

“What? Speak up!” Cudjo said, and so Quey had repeated himself, nearly shouting. From the distance, the boys’ fathers turned to observe the commotion.

“Not so loud, Quey,” James said.

Quey could feel color flood into his cheeks, but Cudjo had just looked on, clearly amused.

“So you’re not white. What are you?”

“I’m like you,” Quey said.

Cudjo held his hand out and demanded that Quey do the same, until they were standing arm to arm, skin touching skin. “Not like me,” Cudjo said.

Quey had wanted to cry, but that desire embarrassed him. He knew that he was one of the half-caste children of the Castle, and, like the other half-caste children, he could not fully claim either half of himself, neither his father’s whiteness nor his mother’s blackness. Neither England nor the Gold Coast.

Cudjo must have seen the tears fighting to escape Quey’s eyes.

“Come now,” he said, grabbing Quey’s hand. “My father says they keep big guns here. Show me where!”

Though he’d asked Quey to show him, Cudjo was the one who began to lead the way, running until the two boys had zipped past their fathers, toward the cannons.

It was in this way that Quey and Cudjo became friends.
Two weeks after the day they first met, Quey had received a message from Cudjo asking if he would like to visit his village.

“Can I go?” Quey asked his mother, but Effia was already pushing him out the door, overjoyed at the prospect of a friend.

Cudjo’s was the first village that Quey had ever spent a lot of time in, and he was amazed at how different it was from the Castle and from Cape Coast. There was not even one white person there, no soldiers to say what one could or could not do. Though the children were no strangers to beatings, they were still rowdy, loud and free. Cudjo, who was eleven like Quey, was already the oldest of ten children, and he ordered his siblings about as though they were his tiny army.

“Go and fetch my friend something to eat!” he shouted at his youngest sister when he saw Quey approaching. The girl was but a toddler, thumb still inseparable from mouth, but she always did as Cudjo said as soon as he said it.

“Hey, Quey, look what I’ve found,” Cudjo said, hardly waiting for Quey to reach him before opening his palm.

Two small snails were in his hands, their tiny, slimy bodies wriggling between Cudjo’s fingers.

“This one is yours, and this one is mine,” Cudjo said, pointing them out. “Let’s race them!”

Cudjo closed his palm again and started to run. He was faster, and Quey had a hard time keeping up. When they got to a clearing in the forest, Cudjo got down on his stomach and motioned for Quey to do the same.

He gave Quey his snail, then marked a line in the dirt as the starting point. The two boys put their snails behind the line, then released them.

At first, neither snail moved.

“Are they stupid?” Cudjo asked, prodding his snail with his index finger. “You’re free, stupid snails. Go! Go!”