Homegoing: List 1

The men of the village knew that first blood would soon follow, and they waited for the chance to ask Baaba and Cobbe for her hand. The gifts started. One man tapped palm wine better than anyone else in the village, but another’s fishing nets were never empty. Cobbe’s family feasted off Effia’s burgeoning womanhood.

He was fat all over and sweating huge droplets from his forehead and above his upper lip. Effia started to think of him as a rain cloud: sallow and wet and shapeless.

That morning, Baaba had plaited Effia’s hair. Two long braids on either side of her center part.

“We work with the British, Effia, not for them. That is the meaning of trade. When I am chief, we will continue as we have, facilitating trade with the Asantes and the British.”

He fed them for two days straight, got them drunk on palm wine until their boisterous laughing and impassioned shouting could be heard from every hut.

He held her gaze for what seemed like minutes, and Effia felt her skin grow even hotter as the look in his eyes turned into something more wanton.

The morning she left for the Castle, Cobbe had kissed the top of her head and waved her away, knowing that the premonition of the dissolution and destruction of the family lineage, the premonition that he had had the night of the fire, would begin here, with his daughter and the white man.

The corners of his lips twitched almost imperceptibly.

Effia’s father had twenty children. The old chief had had nearly a hundred. That a man could be happy with so few seemed unfathomable to her.

Thinking that perhaps she no longer courted death wherever she went, a boy who had known her when she was young offered to marry her as she was, destitute and without family.

He had always said that the joining of a man and a woman was also the joining of two families. Ancestors, whole histories, came with the act, but so did sins and curses. The children were the embodiment of that unity, and they bore the brunt of it all.

Baaba had said that Effia’s curse was one of a failed womanhood, but it was Cobbe who had prophesied about a sullied lineage.

Tonight, you must be like an animal when he comes into the room. A lioness. She mates with her lion and he thinks the moment is about him when it is really about her, her children, her posterity.

She wondered what such a bird would be worth, because in the Castle all beasts were ascribed worth.

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.

In the corner, a woman was crying so hard that it seemed her bones would break from her convulsions.

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 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.

Tansi spit onto the clay floor and swirled the spittle with her finger, creating a salve.

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.

She would listen, enraptured, as he told her how the forest was so dense it was like a shield, impenetrable to their enemies.

“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.

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.

The Dove let out a mirthless laugh.

Still, Esi tried to make amends.

Big Man and the other warriors would go into nearby villages, pillaging the land, sometimes setting the grass on fire so that people from three villages over could see the smoke and know the warriors had come.

There were large swaths of her spirit missing, and no matter how much she loved Esi, and no matter how much Esi loved her, they both knew in that moment that love could never return what Maame had lost.

The rope around her wrists held her palms out in supplication.

When she got there, the murmur had subsided.

James was powerful, but his power had come from his pedigree, the Collinses of Liverpool, who’d gained their wealth building slave ships.

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.

“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 became known far and wide for his wrestling prowess.

“Get Richard to wrestle you,” Quey said, and Cudjo let out his exuberant laugh.

Quey had not spoken to him since the week before, and he found himself inexplicably nervous, the feeling of Cudjo’s breath still present on his lips.

The ship ride there had been uncomfortable at best, harrowing at worst, with Quey alternating steadily between crying and vomiting.

This was what his father did to his problems. Put them on a boat, shipped them away. How had James felt every time he watched a ship push off? Was it the same mix of fear and shame and loathing that Quey felt for his own flesh, his mutinous desire?

And, though a part of Quey hated his father, another part still wanted ardently to please him.

Quey was so worried he didn’t dare ask how Cudjo had fared.

Since the night of the capture, every time Quey tried to broach the topic of the girl, to gauge Fiifi’s intentions, the man clutched his side and grew quiet or told one of his long-winded fables.