Homegoing(11)

“You are a fine storyteller,” Esi said. Tansi laughed and smoothed the salve she had created onto her knees and elbows to soothe the cracked skin there. The last story she had told Esi was of how she had been captured by the northerners, plucked from her marriage bed while her husband was off fighting a war. She had been taken with a few other girls, but the rest had not survived.

By morning, Afua had died. Her skin was purple and blue, and Esi knew that she had held her breath until Nyame took her. They would all be punished for this. The soldiers came in, though Esi was no longer able to tell what time. The mud walls of the dungeon made all time equal. There was no sunlight. Darkness was day and night and everything in between. Sometimes there were so many bodies stacked into the women’s dungeon that they all had to lie, stomach down, so that women could be stacked on top of them.

It was one of those days. 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. The new women were brought in, and some were wailing so hard that the soldiers smacked them unconscious. They were piled on top of the other women, their bodies deadweight. When the smacked ones came to, there were no more tears. Esi could feel the woman on top of her peeing. Urine traveled between both of their legs.

—



Esi learned to split her life into Before the Castle and Now. Before the Castle, she was the daughter of Big Man and his third wife, Maame. Now she was dust. Before the Castle, she was the prettiest girl in the village. Now she was thin air.

Esi was born in a small village in the heart of the Asante nation. Big Man had thrown an outdooring feast that lasted four nights. Five goats were slaughtered and boiled until their tough skins turned tender. It was rumored that Maame did not stop crying or praising Nyame for the entire duration of the ceremony, nor would she set baby Esi down. “You never know what could happen,” she kept repeating.

At that time, Big Man was known only as Kwame Asare. Esi’s father was not a chief, but he commanded just as much respect, for he was the best warrior the Asante nation had ever seen, and at age twenty-five he already had five wives and ten children. Everyone in the village knew his seed was strong. His sons, still toddlers and young children, were already tough wrestlers and his daughters were beauties.

Esi grew up in bliss. The villagers called her ripe mango because she was just on the right side of spoiled, still sweet. There was nothing her parents would refuse her. Even her strong warrior of a father had been known to carry her through the village at night when she couldn’t sleep. Esi would hold the tip of his finger, to her as thick as a branch, as she toddled past the huts that made up each compound. Her village was small but growing steadily. In the first year of their walks, it wouldn’t take but twenty minutes to reach the forest edge that cut them off from the rest of Asanteland, but that forest had been pushed farther and farther back until by the fifth year the journey there took nearly an hour. Esi loved walking to the forest with her father. She would listen, enraptured, as he told her how the forest was so dense it was like a shield, impenetrable to their enemies. He would tell her how he and the other warriors knew the forest better than they knew the lines of their own palms. And this was good. Following the lines of a palm would lead nowhere, but the forest led the warriors to other villages that they could conquer to build up their strength.



“When you are old enough, Esi, you will learn how to climb these trees with nothing but your bare hands,” he said to her as they walked back to the village one day.

Esi looked up. The tops of the trees looked as though they were brushing the sky, and Esi wondered why leaves were green instead of blue.

When Esi was seven years old, her father won the battle that would earn him the name Big Man. There had been rumors that in a village just north of theirs, warriors had come back with splendors of gold and women. They had even raided the British storehouse, earning gunpowder and muskets in the process. Chief Nnuro, the leader of Esi’s village, called a meeting of all the able-bodied men.

“Have you heard the news?” he asked them, and they grunted, slammed their staffs against the hard earth, and cried out. “The swine of the northern village are walking about like kings. All around Asante people will say, it is the northerners who stole guns from the British. It is the northerners who are the most powerful warriors in all of the Gold Coast.” The men stomped their feet and shook their heads. “Will we allow this?” the chief asked.

“No!” they cried.

Kwaku Agyei, the most sensible among them, hushed their cries and said, “Listen to us! We may go to fight the northerners, but what have we? No guns, no gunpowder. And what will we gain? So many people will praise our enemies in the north, but will they not still praise us as well? We have been the strongest village for decades. No one has been able to break through the forest and challenge us.”

“So will you have us wait until the northern snake slithers its way into our fields and steals our women?” Esi’s father asked. The two men stood on opposite sides of the room, and all the other men stood between them, turning their heads from one to the other in order to see which gift would win: wisdom or strength.

“I only say, let us not be too hasty. Lest we appear weak in the process.”



“But who is weak?” Esi’s father asked. He pointed to Nana Addae, then Kojo Nyarko, then Kwabena Gyimah. “Who among us is weak? You? Or maybe you?”