Homegoing (22 page)

Again Akua nodded. The fear was starting to settle somewhere in her stomach, making her feel nauseated.

“All people on the black continent must give up their heathenism and turn to God. Be thankful that the British are here to show you how to live a good and moral life.”

This time, Akua did not nod. She looked at the Missionary, but she didn’t know how to describe the look he returned to her. After he told her to stand up and bend over, after he lashed her five times and commanded her to repent her sins and repeat “God bless the queen,” after she was permitted to leave, after she finally threw the fear up, the only word that popped into her head was “hungry.” The Missionary looked hungry, like if he could, he would devour her.

Every day Akua woke her daughters up while the sun was
still sleeping. She wrapped her wrapper, and then walked with her girls out into the dirt roads where Nana Serwah, Akos, Mambee, and all of the other women of Edweso had already begun to assemble. Akua’s voice was the strongest, and so she led them in song:

Awurade Nyame kum dom

Oboo adee Nyame kum dom

Ennee yerekokum dom afa adee

Oboo adee Nyame kum dom

Soso be hunu, megyede be hunu.

Up and down the streets they sang. Akua’s toddler, Ama Serwah, sang the loudest and most off-key, her words a slew of gibberish until the song reached her favorite part, at which point she screamed more than sang, “CREATOR GOD, DEFEAT THE TROOPS!” Sometimes the women put her in the very front, and her little legs would stomp about valiantly until Akua picked her up to carry her the rest of the way.

After the singing, Akua went back to wash herself and the children, put white clay on her body as a symbol of her support for the war efforts, eat, then sing again. They cooked for the men in shifts so that there was always something to send away. At night, Akua would sleep alone, dreaming of the fire still. Screaming again, now that Asamoah was gone.

Akua and Asamoah had been married for five years. He was
a tradesman, and he had business in Kumasi. He had seen her one day at the missionary school and had stopped to talk to her. And from then on he stopped to talk to her every single day. Two weeks later he was back to ask if she would marry him and come to live in Edweso, for he knew she was an orphan with no other place to live.

Akua found nothing particularly remarkable about Asamoah. He was not handsome like the man called Akwasi who came to church every Sunday, standing timidly in the back and pretending not to notice as the mothers threw their daughters at him. Asamoah also seemed to possess little mental intelligence, for his whole life had been about the intelligence of the body: what he could catch or build or lift to take with him to market. She had once seen him sell two kente for the price of one because he could not count the money correctly. Asamoah was not the best choice, but he was the sure one, and Akua was happy to accept his proposal. Up until then, she had thought she would have to stay with the Missionary forever, playing his strange game of student/teacher, heathen/savior, but with Asamoah she saw that maybe her life could be something different from what she had always imagined it would be.

“I forbid it,” the Missionary said when she told him.

“You can’t forbid it,” Akua said. Now that she had a plan, a hope for a way out, she felt emboldened.

“You…you are a sinner,” the Missionary whispered, his head in his hands. “You are a heathen,” he said, louder now. “You must ask God to forgive your sins.”

Akua didn’t respond. For nearly ten years, she had filled the Missionary’s hunger. Now she wanted to attend to her own.

“Ask God to forgive your sins!” the Missionary yelled, throwing his switch at her.

The switch hit Akua on the left shoulder. She watched it drop to the floor, and then, calmly, she walked out. Behind her she could hear the Missionary saying, “He’s not a man of God. He’s not a man of God.” But Akua cared nothing for God. She was sixteen, and the fetish priest had died only a year before. She used to go to him whenever she could get away from the Missionary. She used to tell him that the more she learned about God from the Missionary, the more questions she had. Big questions like, if God was so big, so powerful, why did he need the white man to bring him to them? Why could he not tell them himself, make his presence known as he had in the days written about in the Book, with bush fires and dead men walking? Why had her mother run to these missionaries, these white people, out of all people? Why did she have no family? No friends? Whenever she asked the Missionary these questions, he refused to answer her. The fetish man told her that maybe the Christian God
was
a question, a great and swirling circle of whys. This answer never satisfied Akua, and by the time the fetish man died, God no longer satisfied her either. Asamoah was real. Tangible. His arms were as thick as yams, and his skin as brown. If God was why, then Asamoah was yes and yes again.

Now that war had come for them, Akua noticed that Nana Serwah was nicer to her than she had ever before been. Word of this man and that man dying came in every day, and they were both holding their breath, certain that it was only a matter of time before the name out of the messenger’s mouth was Asamoah.

Edweso was empty. The absence of the men felt like its
own presence. Sometimes Akua would think that not much at all had changed, but then she would see the empty fields, the rotting yams, the wailing women. Akua’s dreams were getting worse too. In them, the firewoman raged against the loss of her children. Sometimes she spoke to Akua, calling her, it seemed. She looked familiar, and Akua wanted to ask her questions. She wanted to know if the firewoman knew the white man who had been burned. If everyone touched by fire was a part of the same world. If she was being called. Instead, she didn’t speak. She woke up screaming. In the midst of all this turmoil, Akua was pregnant. At least six months now, she figured by the shape and firm weight of her belly.

One day, more than halfway through the war, Akua was boiling yams to send to the soldiers, and she could not lift her eyes from the fire.

“This again?” Nana Serwah said. “I thought we had finished with your idleness. Are our people out fighting so that you can stare into the fire and scream at night for your children to hear?”

“No, Ma,” Akua said, shaking herself out of her stupor. But the next day she did it again. And again her mother-in-law scolded her. The same thing happened the day after that, and then the one after that, until Nana Serwah decided that Akua was sick and that she must stay in her hut until the sickness had left her body. Her daughters would stay with Nana Serwah until Akua had fully healed.

The first day of her hut exile, Akua was thankful for the break. She had not had rest since the men left for war, always marching through town singing the war songs or standing on her feet sweating into a large pot. Her plan was to not sleep until night had fallen. To lie on the side of the hut where Asamoah usually lay, trying to conjure up the smell of him to keep her company until night fell over the hut, casting its awful darkness into the room. But within hours Akua was asleep, and the firewoman had reappeared.

She was growing, her hair a wild bush of ochre and blue. She was growing bolder. No longer simply burning the things that were around her, but now acknowledging Akua. Seeing her.

“Where are your children?” she asked. Akua was too afraid to answer her. She could feel that her body was in the cot. She could feel that she was dreaming, and yet she could not exert control over that feeling. She could not tell that feeling to grow hands, nudge her body into waking. She could not tell that feeling to throw water on the firewoman, put her out of her dreams.

“You must always know where your children are,” the firewoman continued, and Akua shuddered.

The next day she tried to leave the hut, but Nana Serwah had the Fat Man sit at her door. His body, too fat to fight in the war that his peers were in, was just the right size for locking Akua in.

“Please!” Akua shouted. “Just let me see my children!”

But the Fat Man would not budge. Nana Serwah, standing next to him, shouted back, “You can see them once you are no longer sick!”

Akua fought for the rest of the day. She pushed but the Fat Man did not move. She screamed but he did not speak. She banged on the door but his ears would not hear.

Periodically, Akua could hear Nana Serwah coming to him, bringing him food to eat and water to drink. He said thank you, but nothing else. It was as though he felt like he had found his way to serve. The war had come to Akua’s door.

By nightfall, Akua was afraid to speak. She crouched in the corner of the hut, praying to every god she had ever known. The Christian God whom the missionaries had always described in terms both angry and loving. Nyame, the Akan God, all-knowing and all-seeing. She prayed too to Asase Yaa and her children Bia and Tano. She even prayed to Anansi, though he was nothing more than the trickster people put in their stories to amuse themselves. She prayed aloud and feverishly so that she would not sleep, and by morning she was too weak to fight the Fat Man, too weak to know if he was even still there.

For a week she stayed like this. She had never understood the missionaries when they said they could sometimes spend a whole day in prayer, but now she did. Prayer was not a sacred or holy thing. It was not spoken plainly, in Twi or English. It need not be performed on the knees or with folded palms. For Akua, prayer was a frenzied chant, a language for those desires of the heart that even the mind did not recognize were there. It was the scraping up of the clay floor into her dark palms. It was the crouching in the shadow of the room. It was the one-syllable word that escaped her lips over and over and over again.

Fire. Fire. Fire.

The Missionary would not let Akua leave the orphanage to marry
Asamoah. Since the day she told him of Asamoah’s proposal, he had stopped his lessons, stopped telling her that she was a heathen or asking her to repent her sins, to repeat “God bless the queen.” He only watched her.

“You can’t keep me here,” Akua said. She was gathering the last of her things out of her quarters. Asamoah would be back before nightfall to get her. Edweso was waiting.

The Missionary stood in the doorframe, his switch in his hand.

“What? Will you beat me until I stay?” she asked. “You’d have to kill me to keep me here.”

“I’ll tell you about your mother,” the Missionary finally said. He dropped the switch to the floor and walked toward Akua until he was standing so close she could smell the faint stench of fish on his breath. For ten years, he had come no closer to her than the length of that switch. For ten years he had refused to answer her questions about her family. “I’ll tell you about your mother. Anything you want to know.”

Akua took a step back from him, and he did the same. He looked down.

“Your mother, Abena, she wouldn’t repent,” the Missionary said. “She came to us pregnant—you, her sin—but still she wouldn’t repent. She spit at the British. She was argumentative and angry. I believe she was glad of her sins. I believe she did not regret you or your father, even though he did not care for her as a man should.”

The Missionary was speaking softly, so softly that Akua couldn’t be certain that she was hearing him at all.

“After you were born, I took her to the water to be baptized. She didn’t want to go, but I—I forced her. She thrashed as I carried her through the forest, to the river. She thrashed as I lowered her down into the water. She thrashed and thrashed and thrashed, and then she was still.” The Missionary lifted his head and looked at her finally. “I only wanted her to repent. I—I only wanted her to repent…”

The Missionary started crying. It was not the sight of tears that caught Akua’s attention so much as the sound. The terrible sound, the heaving sound, like something wrenched from the throat.

“Where is her body?” Akua asked. “What did you do with her body?”

The sound stopped. The Missionary spoke. “I burned it in the forest. I burned it with all of her things. God forgive me! God forgive me!”

The sound returned. This time, shuddering came with it, a shaking so violent that soon the Missionary fell down to the ground.

Akua had to walk over his body to leave.

Asamoah returned at the end of the week. Akua could hear
him with her growing ear, though she could not yet see him. She felt weighted to the ground, her limbs heavy logs on the floor of some dark forest.

At the door, Nana Serwah was sobbing and screaming. “My son-o! My son! My son-o! My son!” Then Akua’s growing ear heard a new sound. Loud step. Space. Loud step. Space.

“What is the Fat Man doing here?” Asamoah asked. His voice was loud enough that Akua considered moving, but it was as though she were in the dream space again, unable to make her body do what her mind wanted it to.

Nana Serwah could not answer her son, so busy was she in her wailing. The Fat Man moved, his enormous girth a boulder rolling to reveal the door. Asamoah entered the room, but still Akua could not get up.

“What is the meaning of this?” Asamoah roared, and Nana Serwah was shaken from her wailing.

“She was sick. She was sick, so we…”

Her voice trailed. Akua could hear the sound again. Loud step. Space. Loud step. Space. Loud step. Space. Then Asamoah was standing in front of her, but instead of two legs, she only saw one.

He crouched down carefully so that their eyes could better meet, balancing so well that Akua wondered how long it had been since he’d last seen the missing leg. He seemed so well acquainted with the space.

He noticed her swollen belly and shuddered. He reached out his hand. Akua looked at it. She had not slept in a week. Ants had begun to pass over her fingers and she wanted to shake them off, or give them to Asamoah, lace her small fingers between his large ones.