Homegoing (23 page)

Asamoah stood and turned to his mother. “Where are the girls?” he asked, and Nana Serwah, who had started crying anew, this time at the sight of Akua trapped on the ground, ran to fetch them.

Ama Serwah and Abee came in. To Akua they looked unchanged. Both girls still sucked their thumbs, despite the fact that Nana Serwah put hot pepper on the tips of them every morning, noon, and night to warn them away. The girls were developing a taste for heat. They looked from Asamoah to Akua, holding hands with their grandmother, thumbs in mouths. Then, wordlessly, Abee wrapped her entire little body around her father’s leg as though it were a trunk, as though it were the
fufu
stick she was so fond of holding, stronger than she was, sturdier. The toddler, Ama Serwah, moved closer to Akua, and she could see that she had been crying; a thick line of snot trailed from her nose to lick her upper lip, her mouth gaping wide open. It looked like a slug exiting a cave in order to enter a cavern. She touched her father’s knee, but kept moving to rest where Akua was. Then she lay down beside her. Akua could feel her little heart beating in time with her own broken one. She reached out to touch her daughter, to pull her into her arms, and then she stood and surveyed the room.

The war ended in September, and the earth around them began
to register the Asante loss. Long fissures in the red clay formed about Akua’s compound, so dry was the season. Crops died, and food was limited, for they had given all they had to the men who were fighting. They had given all they had, assured that it would come back to them in the abundance of freedom. Yaa Asantewaa, Edweso’s warrior Queen Mother, was exiled to the Seychelles, never to be seen again by those who lived in the village. Sometimes Akua would walk by her palace in her wanderings and wonder: What if?

The day she had gotten up from the ground, she had not wanted to speak, nor would she let her children or Asamoah leave her sight. And so the broken family nestled into one another, each hoping the others’ presences would fill the wound their personal war had left behind.

In the beginning, Asamoah did not want to touch her and she did not want to be touched. The space where his leg had been taunted her. She could not figure out how to situate her body next to his while they lay in bed at night. In the past, she would curl into him, one of her legs intertwined between his two, but now she could not get comfortable, and her restlessness fed his restlessness. Akua no longer slept through the night, but Asamoah hated to see her awake and tortured and so she pretended to sleep, allowing the waves of her breasts to rise and fall to the current of breaths. Sometimes Asamoah would turn and stare at her. She could feel him considering her while she pretended to sleep, and if she slipped, opened her eyes or lost her breathing rhythm, his big booming voice would command her to sleep. If she convinced him, she would wait for his real breathing to match her contrived one, and then she would lie there, wishing the firewoman away. If she slept, she would do so only lightly, dipping the ladle of sleep into the shallow pool of dreamland, hoping she would not see the firewoman there before she beckoned herself awake.

Then, one day, Asamoah no longer wanted to sleep. He nuzzled Akua’s neck.

“I know you’re awake,” he said. “I know you do not sleep these days, Akua.”

And still she tried to pretend, ignoring his hot breath against her skin, breathing still and the same.

“Akua,” he said. He had turned his body so that his mouth now met her ear, and the sound of her name was a strong stick hitting a hollow drum.

She did not answer as he continued to speak her name. The first day she’d left the house after her week of exile, the townspeople had looked away as she passed, embarrassed and ashamed of how they had let Nana Serwah treat her. Her mother-in-law too could not see her without bursting into tears, her pleas for forgiveness muffled by the sound. It was only Kofi Poku, the child who had pointed out the white man, the evil one, and so consigned him to burn, who saw the silent Akua and whispered “Crazy Woman.” Crazy Woman. Wife of Crippled Man.

That night, Crippled Man turned Crazy Woman onto her back and entered her, forcefully at first, and then more timidly. She opened her eyes to see him working more slowly than he used to, using his arms to push off, push in, his sweat dripping slowly off the bridge of his nose to land on her forehead and trickle down to meet the floor.

When he finished, Asamoah turned away from her and wept. Their daughters were asleep across from them, thumbs in mouths. Akua turned too. Exhausted, she slept. And in the morning, when she realized that she had not dreamed of fire, she felt that she would be all right. And weeks later, when Nana Serwah snatched baby Yaw from between Akua’s legs with one hand and sliced the cord with the other, when Akua heard his loud and mewling cry, she knew that her son would be all right too.

Slowly Akua began to speak more. She slept rarely, but when
she did, she would wander. Some days she woke up at the door, other days curled up between her daughters. The sleep time was short, quick, so that as soon as she had moved she was awake again. She would return to her place beside Asamoah, stare at the straw and mud of the roof above them until the sun began to peek through the cracks. Rarely, Asamoah would catch her in her night wanderings while he himself was in midsleep. He’d reach for his machete, then remember his missing leg and give up. Defeated, Akua thought, by his wife and his own misery.

Akua was wary of the villagers, and the only people who brought her any joy were her children. Ama Serwah was speaking real words now, leaving behind the fast and frantic nonsense speech of her early twos. Now no one questioned Akua when she wanted to take long walks with her children. They didn’t question her when she thought a stick was a snake or when she left the food in the fire to burn. When they whispered “Crazy Woman,” they had to do it behind Nana Serwah’s back, because if the woman heard them, she would give them a tongue-lashing that would sting almost as much as the real thing.

Akua would start each walk by asking her daughters where they wanted to go. She would sling baby Yaw in a wrapper around her back and wait for the girls to direct her. Often, they would say the same things. They wanted to walk by Yaa Asantewaa’s palace. The place had been preserved in her honor, and the girls liked to stand outside the gate, singing the postwar songs. Their favorite one was:

Koo koo hin koo

Yaa Asantewaa ee!

Obaa basia

Ogyina apremo ano ee!

Waye be egyae

Na Wabo Mmoden

Sometimes Akua would sing along softly, rocking Yaw back and forth in time with the music as she praised the woman who fought before cannons.

The girls would need to rest often, and their favorite spot to do it was underneath trees. Akua would spend long afternoons with them, napping in the small slices of shade provided by impossibly large trees.

“I want to be like Yaa Asantewaa when I am an Old Lady!” Ama Serwah declared on one such day. The girls had grown too tired to keep walking, and the only tree nearby was the one where the white man had burned. The blackness of the charred bark seemed to crawl up from the roots and toward the lowest branches. Akua resisted stopping there at first, but the baby’s weight made her feel like she was carrying ten handfuls of yam. Finally she stopped, lying flat on her back, the small mountain of her not-yet-deflated belly hiding her girls from sight as they lay at her feet, Yaw at her side.

“Will they sing songs about you, my dear?” Akua asked, and Ama Serwah burst into giggles.

“Yes!” she said. “They’ll say, Look at the Old Lady, Ama Serwah. Isn’t she strong, and pretty too?”

“And what about you, Abee?” Akua asked, shielding her eyes from the mighty midday sun.

“Yaa Asantewaa was Queen Mother, daughter of a Big Man,” Abee said. “That is why she gets a song. Ama Serwah and I are only the daughters of a Crazy Woman raised by white men.”

Akua could not move as readily as she once used to. She didn’t know if this was because of the baby that had grown in her stomach, demanding her food and energy, or if it was a result of her week spent in exile on the floor of her hut. She wanted to spring to her feet, to look her daughter in the eye, but all she could manage was a gentle torque of her lower back, first to the left and then to the right, until she had gathered enough force to sit up, and see Abee, who was playing with the peeling bark.

“Who told you I am crazy?” she asked, and the child, who could not yet tell if she was on the verge of getting in trouble, shrugged. Akua wanted to be angrier, but she couldn’t find the energy anywhere in her body. She needed to sleep. Really sleep. Two days before, she had forgotten the yams she dropped into the oil, forgotten them as her eyes slept. By the time Nana Serwah shook her awake, the yams had burned to black. Her mother-in-law had said nothing.

“Everyone says you are crazy,” she said. “Sometimes Nana yells at them when they say it, but they still do.”

Akua rested her head against a rock, and did not speak until she heard the girls’ soft and sleepy breaths floating about her like tiny butterflies.

That night Akua took the children home. Asamoah was eating in
the middle of the compound when they walked in.

“How are my girls?” he asked as his daughters rushed toward him to receive their hugs. Akua hung back, her eyes following her daughters as they made their way into the hut. It had been a hot day, and Ama Serwah was already peeling off her wrapper as she ran inside. It waved behind her like a flag.

“And how is my son?” Asamoah asked Akua’s back, where Yaw hung cradled in fabric. Akua walked toward her husband so that he could touch the baby.

“Nyame willing, he is good,” she said, and Asamoah grunted his assent.

“Come get food to eat,” he said. He called for his mother and she appeared within seconds. Her old age had not diminished her swiftness, nor had it diminished her ear’s ability to distinguish the needy cry of her oldest son. She came out and nodded at Akua. She had stopped weeping at the sight of her only days before.

“You must eat so that your milk is rich,” she said, dipping her hands into the washing bowl so that she could begin the
fufu.

Akua ate until her stomach grew. It looked like it could be punctured, like sweet milk would flow from her belly button, and that was all that she could picture as she cleaned her hands. Milk flowing below her feet like a river. She thanked Nana Serwah, and twisted herself up off the stool that she had been sitting on. She reached out her hands to Asamoah so that he too could hop up, grabbed the baby, and then went into their hut.

The girls were already sleeping. Akua envied them. The ease with which they entered the dream world. They sucked their thumbs still, unfazed by the pepper their grandmother applied every morning.

Beside her, Asamoah rolled once, twice. He too had been sleeping better than he had in the early days of his return. Sometimes he would reach for the ghost of his leg in the middle of the night, and then, finding his hands empty, he would cry softly. Akua never mentioned this to him when he awoke.

Now, flat-backed in their hut, Akua allowed herself to close her
eyes. She imagined that she was lying on the sand of the beaches of Cape Coast. Sleep came for her like waves. First licking her curling toes, her swollen feet, her aching ankles. By the time it hit her mouth, nose, eyes, she was no longer afraid of it.

When she entered the dreamland she was on the same beach. She had been there only once, with the missionaries from the school. They had wanted to start a new school in a nearby village but found the townspeople unwelcoming. Akua had been mesmerized by the color of the water. It was a color she had never had a word for because nothing like it appeared in her world. No tree green, no sky blue, no stone or yam or clay could capture it. In dreamland, Akua walked to the edge of the rolling ocean. She dipped her toe into water so cool she felt she could taste it, like a breeze hitting the back of the throat. Then the breeze turned hot as the ocean caught fire. The breeze from the back of Akua’s throat began to swirl, round and round, gathering speed until it could no longer be contained within Akua’s mouth, and so she shot it out. And the spit-out breeze began to move the fiery ocean, dipping down into the depths to collect itself until spiraling wind and fiery ocean became the woman that Akua now felt she knew so well.

This time, the firewoman was not angry. She beckoned Akua out onto the ocean, and, though afraid, Akua took her first step. Her feet burned. When she lifted one up she could smell her own flesh wafting from the bottom. Still, she moved, following the firewoman until she led her to a place that looked like Akua’s own hut. Now in the firewoman’s arms were the two fire children that she had held the first time Akua dreamed of her. They were locked into either arm, head resting on either breast. Their cries were soundless, but Akua could see the sound, floating out of their mouths like puffs of smoke from the fetish man’s favored pipe. Akua had the urge to hold them, and she reached out her hands to them. Her hands caught fire, but she touched them still. Soon she cradled them with her own burning hands, playing with the braided ropes of fire that made up their hair, their coal-black lips. She felt calm, happy even, that the firewoman had found her children again at last. And as she held them, the firewoman did not protest. She did not try to snatch them away. Instead, she watched, crying from joy. And her tears were the color of the ocean water in Fanteland, that not-green, not-blue color that Akua remembered from her youth. The color began to gather. Blue and more blue. Green and more green. Until the torrent of tears began to put out the fire in Akua’s hands. Until the children began to disappear.

“Akua, the Crazy Woman! Akua, the Crazy Woman!”

She felt the sound of her name in the growing pit of her stomach, the weight like worry. Her eyes began to open, and she saw Edweso around her. She was being carried. Ten men at least, lifting her above their heads. She registered all of this before she registered the pain she was in, looked down to see her burned hands and feet.