Homegoing (28 page)

And so, Yaw got a house girl. He had been resistant to having other people in his house for as long as he could remember. He could cook a few dishes for himself competently enough. He could fetch his own water and wash his own clothes. He did not keep his house as neat as he had been forced to keep his room in school, but none of this bothered him. He preferred the clutter and the plain meals if it meant he would not have to have another person in his house, looking at him.

“That’s ridiculous!” Edward said. “You’re a teacher. People stare at you all day.”

But for Yaw that was different. At the front of the classroom he was not himself. He was a performer in the tradition of village dancers and storytellers. At home, he was who he really was. Shy and lonely, angry and embarrassed. He did not want anyone to see him there.

Edward examined all of the candidates himself, and in the end Yaw ended up with Esther, an Ahanta from right there in Takoradi.

Esther was a plain girl. Maybe even ugly. Her eyes were too large for her head and her head too large for her body. On the first day of work, Yaw showed her to her room at the back of the house and told her that he spent most of his time writing. He asked her not to disturb him and then went back out to sit at his desk.

The book was getting unruly. The Gold Coast independence movement’s political leaders, the Big Six, had all come back from school in America and England, and as far as Yaw could tell they were all like Edward, patient but forceful, confident that independence would indeed come. Yaw had been reading more and more about the black people of America’s movement toward freedom, and he was attracted to the rage that lit each sentence of their books on fire. He wanted that from his book. An academic rage. All he could seem to muster was a long-winded whine.

“Ess-cuse me, sah.”

Yaw looked up from his book. Esther was standing in front of him with the long handmade broom she had insisted on bringing with her, even though Yaw told her that his house had many brooms.

“You don’t have to speak in English,” Yaw said.

“Yes, sah, but my sis-tah say you ah teach-ah, so I must speak English.”

She looked terrified, her shoulders hunched and her hands gripping the broom so tightly that Yaw could see the area around her knuckles begin to stretch and redden. He wished he could cover his face, put the young woman at ease.

“You understand Twi?” Yaw said in his mother tongue, and Esther nodded. “Then speak freely. We hear enough English as it is.”

It was like he had opened a gate. Her body began to slip into an easy stance, and Yaw realized that it was not his scar that had terrified her, but rather the problem of language, a marker of her education, her class, compared with his. She had been terrified that for the teacher of the white book, she would have to speak the white tongue. Now, released from English, Esther smiled more brightly than Yaw had seen anyone smile in ages. He could see the large, proud gap that stood like a doorway between her two front teeth, and he found himself training his gaze through that door as though he could see all the way down into her throat, her gut, the home of her very soul.

“Sir, I have finished cleaning the bedroom. You have a lot of books in there. Did you know? Do you read all of those books? Can you read English? Sir, where do you keep the palm oil? I could not find it in the kitchen. It is a nice kitchen. What will you have for dinner? Should I go to market? What are you writing?”

Did she breathe? If she had, Yaw didn’t hear it. He shuffled the pages of his book and set it aside as he thought about what to say next.

“Make whatever you want for dinner. I don’t care what.”

She nodded, not dissatisfied, it seemed, with the fact that he had answered only one of her questions. “I’ll make goat pepper soup,” she said, her eyes cast downward, moving this way and that, as though searching the floor for any thoughts she might have dropped there. “I will go to market today.” She looked up at him. “Would you like to go to market with me?”

Suddenly Yaw was angry or nervous. He couldn’t quite tell which, and so he chose to respond with anger. “Why should I go to market with you? Don’t you work for me?” he shouted.

Her mouth closed, the portal to her soul hidden. She cocked her head to the side and stared at him as though it was just then occurring to her that he had a face, that his face had a scar. She studied it for one second more, and then smiled again. “I thought you might want a break from your writing. My sister said teachers are very serious because they do all their work in their minds and so sometimes they have to be reminded that they must use their bodies. Will you not use your body if you walk to the market?”

Now it was Yaw’s turn to smile. Esther laughed, her whole wide mouth open, and suddenly Yaw had the strange urge to reach in and pull something of that happiness out for himself so that he might keep it with him always.

They went to the market. Fat women with babies at their breasts sold soup, corn, yams, meat. Men and young boys stood bartering with each other. Some sold food, others sold carvings and wooden drums. Yaw stopped by the stand of a boy who looked to be about thirteen who was using a slim knife to carve symbols into a drum. The boy’s father stood careful watch beside him. Yaw recognized the man from last year’s Kundum. He was one of the best drummers Yaw had ever seen, and as the man stared at his son, Yaw could see that he wanted the boy to be even better.

“You like to drum?” Esther asked.

Yaw didn’t realize she had been watching him. It was so rare that he had to be concerned with other people. He hadn’t been angry after all. Just nervous.

“Me? No, no. I never learned how.”

She nodded. She led the freshly purchased, roped goat behind her, and at times while they walked, the animal grew obstinate, digging its hooves into the ground and nudging its head against the air, its horns reflecting light. She tugged it forcefully, and it bleated, perhaps at her, though perhaps it would have done so anyway.

Yaw realized that he should say something. He cleared his throat and looked at her, but his words stuck. She smiled at him.

“I make a very good goat pepper soup,” she said.

“Is that right?”

“Yes, so good you would think your mother made it. Where is your mother?” she asked in her breathless way.

The goat stood still, screamed. Esther wrapped the rope once more around her wrist and tugged. It occurred to Yaw that he should offer to walk the goat for her, but he didn’t.

“My mother lives in Edweso. I haven’t seen her since the day I turned six.” He paused. “She did this to me.” He pointed to the scar, angled his body so that she could see it more clearly.

Esther stopped walking and so Yaw stopped too. She looked at him, and for a second he worried that she would reach out and try to touch him, but she didn’t.

Instead she said, “You’re very angry.”

“Yes,” he said. It was something he rarely admitted to himself, let alone to anyone else. The longer he looked at himself in a mirror, the longer he lived alone, the longer the country he loved stayed under colonial rule, the angrier he became. And the nebulous, mysterious object of his anger was his mother, a woman whose face he could barely remember, but a face reflected in his own scar.

“Anger doesn’t suit you,” Esther said. She gave the goat one more good tug, and Yaw listened to it bleat as the two of them walked ahead of him.

He was in love with her. Five years passed before he
realized it, though perhaps he knew on that first day. It was summer, and the insistent fog of heat was upon them, so ever-present it felt like a low hum, a heat you could hear. Yaw didn’t have to teach summer term, and so he had hours, whole days, to sit and read and write. Instead, he watched Esther clean from his spot at the desk. He pretended to be annoyed when she rolled off her list of endless questions, but since that first day, he always answered them all, each and every one. When it was not raining, he would sit outside under the shade of a big, bushy mango tree while she drew water from the well. She carried it back to the house in two buckets, and the swollen muscles of her arms would flex, and the sheen of sweat would appear on them, and when she passed him she would smile, the gap so lovely it made him want to cry.

Everything made him want to cry. He could see the differences between them as long ravines, impossible to cross. He was old; she was young. He was educated; she was not. He was scarred; she was whole. Each difference split the ravine wider and wider still. There was no way.

And so, he didn’t speak. In the evenings, she would ask him what he wanted for dinner, what he was working on, whether he had heard any updates about the independence movement, whether he was still considering traveling for more education.

He said what needed to be said, nothing more.

“The
banku
is too sticky today,” she said while they ate one night. In the beginning, she had insisted on taking her meals separately from him, saying that it wouldn’t be proper for them to eat together, which was true enough. But the thought of her alone in her room with nowhere for all of her questions to go seemed to him to be the worse option. So now, this and every night, she ate across from him at his small wooden table.

“It’s good,” he said. He smiled. He wished he were a beautiful man, with skin as smooth as clay. But he was not the kind of man who could win a woman just with his presence. He would have to do something.

“No, I’ve made much better in the past. It’s okay. You don’t have to eat it if you don’t like it. I’ll make something else for you. Would you like soup?”

She was starting to pick up his plate, so he held it down.

“This is good,” he said again, more forcefully. He wondered what he should do to win her. For the past five years she had been drawing him more and more out of himself. Asking him questions about his schooling, about Edward, about the past.

“Would you like to go to Edweso with me?” Yaw asked. “To visit my mother?” As soon as he said it, he regretted it. For years, Esther had been nudging him to go, but he either deflected or ignored her. Now, his love had made him desperate. He didn’t even know if the Crazy Woman of Edweso was still alive.

Esther looked uncertain. “You want me to go?”

“In case I need someone to cook for me as I travel,” he said hurriedly, trying to cover his tracks.

She considered this for a moment, and then she nodded. For the first time since he had met her, she had no further questions.

There were 206 kilometers between Takoradi and Edweso. Yaw knew
because he could feel each kilometer as though it were a stone lodged in his throat. Two hundred and six stones collected in his mouth, so that he could not speak. Even when Esther asked him a question, like how much longer were they to travel, how would he explain her presence to the townspeople, what would he say to his mother when he saw her, the stones blocked his words from passing. Eventually, Esther too grew silent.

He remembered so little of Edweso, so he could not say if things had changed. When they reached the town, they were greeted first by a sweltering heat, the sun’s rays stretched out like a cat after a nap. There were only a few people standing about the square that day, but the ones who were there stared freely, shocked at the sight either of the car or of the strangers.

“What are they looking at?” Esther whispered miserably. She was worried about herself, that people would think it improper for them to be traveling together, unmarried. She had not said this to him yet, but he could see it in the way she lowered her eyes and walked behind him.

Before long, a little boy, no older than four, holding the long train of his mother’s wrapper, pointed at Yaw with his tiny index finger. “Look, Mama, his face! His face!”

The boy’s father, who stood on the other side of him, snatched his hand away. “Stop that nonsense!” he said, but then he looked more closely along the line the boy’s finger had drawn.

He approached Yaw and Esther where they stood, uncertain, holding one bag each. “Yaw?” he asked.

Yaw dropped his bag to the ground and walked closer to the man. “Yes?” he said. “I’m afraid I don’t remember you.” He held his hand above his brows to shield his eyes from the sun, but was soon extending it again to shake the man’s hand.

“They call me Kofi Poku,” the man said, shaking back. “I was about ten when you left. This is my wife, Gifty, and my son Henry.”

Yaw shook hands all around and then turned toward Esther. “This is my…This is Esther,” he said. And Esther too shook hands all around.

“You must be here to see Crazy Woman,” Kofi Poku said before realizing his mistake. He covered his mouth. “I’m so sorry. I mean Ma Akua.”

Yaw could tell from the way his eyes searched and his mouth slowed that Kofi Poku had not had to call his mother by her name in years. Perhaps ever. As far as Yaw knew, the Crazy Woman of Edweso could have earned her title well before his birth. “Please, don’t worry,” Yaw said. “We are here to see my mother, yes.”

Just then, Kofi Poku’s wife leaned in to his ear to whisper something, and the man’s eyebrows lifted, face brightening. When he spoke, it was as though the idea had been his all along.

“You and your wife must be very tired from your journey. Please, my wife and I would like you to stay with us. We will make you dinner.”

Yaw started to shake his head, but Kofi Poku waved his hand, as though trying to counteract Yaw’s shake with his own. “I insist. Besides, your mother keeps odd hours. It would not be good for you to go to her today. Wait until tomorrow evening. We will send someone to tell her you are coming.”

How could they refuse? Yaw and Esther had planned on going straight to Akua’s house to stay, but instead they walked the short mile’s distance from the town square to the Poku house. When they got there, Kofi Poku’s other children, three daughters and one son, were beginning dinner. One of the girls, the tallest and most slender, sat before a great big mortar. The boy held the pestle, which was nearly twice his height. He held it straight up and then would send it crashing down just as the girl’s hand finished turning the
fufu
in the mortar, barely escaping the impact.