Homegoing(13)

“She’s useless,” Maame said to Big Man. “We have to take her back.”

They were all outside, basking under the warm midday sun. Big Man tilted his head back and let out a laugh that rumbled like thunder in the rainy season. “Take her back where? Odo, there’s only one way to train a slave.” He turned to Esi, who was trying to climb a palm tree the way she’d seen the other kids do it, but her arms were too small to reach around. “Esi, go and get me my switch.”

The switch in question was made from two reeds tied together. It was older than Esi’s paternal grandfather, having been passed down from generation to generation. Big Man had never beaten Esi with it, but she had seen him beat his sons. She’d heard the way it whistled when it snapped back off of flesh. Esi moved to enter the compound, but Maame stopped her.



“No!” she said.

Big Man raised his hand to his wife, anger flashing quickly through his eyes like steam from cold water hitting a hot pan. “No?”

Maame stammered, “I—I just think that I should be the one to do it.”

Big Man lowered his hand. He stared at her carefully for a while longer, and Esi tried to read the look that passed between them. “So be it,” Big Man said. “But tomorrow I will bring her out here. She will carry water from this yard to that tree there, and if even so much as a drop falls, then I will take care of it. Do you hear me?”

Maame nodded and Big Man shook his head. He had always told anyone who would listen that he had spoiled his third wife, seduced by her beautiful face and softened by her sad eyes.

Maame and Esi went into their hut and found Abronoma, curled up on a bamboo cot, living up to her name of a little bird. Maame woke her and had her stand before them. She pulled out a switch that Big Man had given her, a switch she had never used. She then looked at Esi with tears in her eyes. “Please, leave us.”

Esi left the hut and for minutes after could hear the sound of the switch and the harmonizing pitch of two separate cries.

The next day Big Man called everyone in his compound out to see if Abronoma could carry a bucket of water on her head from the yard to the tree without spilling a drop. Esi and her whole family, her four stepmothers and nine half siblings, scattered around their large yard, waiting for the girl to first fetch water from the stream into a large black bucket. From there, Big Man had her stand before all of them and bow before starting the journey to the tree. He would walk beside her to be certain there was no error.

Esi could see Little Dove shaking as she lifted the bucket onto her head. Maame clutched Esi against her chest and smiled at the girl when she bowed at them, but the look Abronoma returned was fearful and then vacant. When the bucket touched her head, the family began to jeer.



“She’ll never make it!” Amma, Big Man’s first wife, said.

“Watch, she will spill it all and drown herself in the process,” Kojo, the eldest son, said.

Little Dove took her first step and Esi let out the breath she had been holding. She herself had never been able to carry so much as a single plank of wood on her head, but she had watched her mother carry a perfectly round coconut without it ever rolling off, steady as a second head. “Where did you learn to do that?” Esi had asked Maame then, and the woman replied, “You can learn anything when you have to learn it. You could learn to fly if it meant you would live another day.”

Abronoma steadied her legs and kept walking, her head facing forward. Big Man walked beside her, whispering insults in her ear. She reached the tree at the forest’s edge and pivoted, making her way back to the audience that awaited her. By the time she got close enough that Esi could make out her features again, there was sweat dripping off the ledge of her nose and her eyes were brimming with tears. Even the bucket on her head seemed to be crying, condensation working its way down the outside of it. As she lifted the bucket off of her head, she started to smile triumphantly. Maybe it was a small gust of wind, maybe an insect looking for a bath, or maybe the Dove’s hand slipped, but before the bucket reached the ground, two drops sloshed out.

Esi looked at Maame, who had turned her sad, pleading eyes to Big Man, but by that point, the rest of the family was already shouting for punishment.

Kojo began to lead them into a song:

The Dove has failed. Oh, what to do? Make her to suffer or you’ll fail too!

Big Man reached for his switch, and soon the song gained its accompaniment: the percussion of reed to flesh, the woodwind of reed to air. This time, Abronoma did not cry.

—

“If he didn’t beat her, everyone would think he was weak,” Esi said. After the event, Maame had been inconsolable, crying to Esi that Big Man should not have beaten Little Dove for so small a mistake. Esi was licking soup off of her fingers, her lips stained orange. Her mother had taken Abronoma into their hut and made a salve for her wounds, and now the girl lay on a cot sleeping.



“Weak, eh?” Maame said. She glared at her daughter with malice that Esi had never before seen.

“Yes,” Esi whispered.

“That I should live to hear my own daughter speak like this. You want to know what weakness is? Weakness is treating someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves.”

Esi was hurt. She had only said what anyone else in her village would have said, and for this Maame yelled at her. Esi wanted to cry, to hug her mother, something, but Maame left the room then to finish the chores that Abronoma could not perform that night.