Homegoing(20)

“I’m home!” Quey announced, perhaps a bit too noisily, not wanting to hear what his father would say next. By the end of the day, he’d forgotten all about it, but weeks later, when Cudjo Sackee came with his father to visit the Castle, Quey remembered his parents’ conversation.

Cudjo’s father was the chief of a prominent Fante village. He was Abeeku Badu’s biggest competitor, and he had begun meeting with James Collins to discuss increasing trade when the governor asked him if he might bring his eldest son to one of their meetings.

“Quey, this is Cudjo,” James said, giving Quey a small push toward the boy. “You two play while we talk.”

Quey and Cudjo watched their fathers walk off to a different side of the Castle. Once they could hardly make them out anymore, Cudjo turned his attention to Quey.

“Are you white?” Cudjo had asked him, touching his hair.

Quey recoiled at Cudjo’s touch, though many others had done the same thing, asked him the same question. “I’m not white,” he said softly.

“What? Speak up!” Cudjo said, and so Quey had repeated himself, nearly shouting. From the distance, the boys’ fathers turned to observe the commotion.

“Not so loud, Quey,” James said.

Quey could feel color flood into his cheeks, but Cudjo had just looked on, clearly amused.

“So you’re not white. What are you?”

“I’m like you,” Quey said.

Cudjo held his hand out and demanded that Quey do the same, until they were standing arm to arm, skin touching skin. “Not like me,” Cudjo said.



Quey had wanted to cry, but that desire embarrassed him. He knew that he was one of the half-caste children of the Castle, and, like the other half-caste children, he could not fully claim either half of himself, neither his father’s whiteness nor his mother’s blackness. Neither England nor the Gold Coast.

Cudjo must have seen the tears fighting to escape Quey’s eyes.

“Come now,” he said, grabbing Quey’s hand. “My father says they keep big guns here. Show me where!”

Though he’d asked Quey to show him, Cudjo was the one who began to lead the way, running until the two boys had zipped past their fathers, toward the cannons.

—

It was in this way that Quey and Cudjo became friends. Two weeks after the day they first met, Quey had received a message from Cudjo asking if he would like to visit his village.

“Can I go?” Quey asked his mother, but Effia was already pushing him out the door, overjoyed at the prospect of a friend.

Cudjo’s was the first village that Quey had ever spent a lot of time in, and he was amazed at how different it was from the Castle and from Cape Coast. There was not even one white person there, no soldiers to say what one could or could not do. Though the children were no strangers to beatings, they were still rowdy, loud and free. Cudjo, who was eleven like Quey, was already the oldest of ten children, and he ordered his siblings about as though they were his tiny army.

“Go and fetch my friend something to eat!” he shouted at his youngest sister when he saw Quey approaching. The girl was but a toddler, thumb still inseparable from mouth, but she always did as Cudjo said as soon as he said it.

“Hey, Quey, look what I’ve found,” Cudjo said, hardly waiting for Quey to reach him before opening his palm.

Two small snails were in his hands, their tiny, slimy bodies wriggling between Cudjo’s fingers.

“This one is yours, and this one is mine,” Cudjo said, pointing them out. “Let’s race them!”



Cudjo closed his palm again and started to run. He was faster, and Quey had a hard time keeping up. When they got to a clearing in the forest, Cudjo got down on his stomach and motioned for Quey to do the same.

He gave Quey his snail, then marked a line in the dirt as the starting point. The two boys put their snails behind the line, then released them.

At first, neither snail moved.

“Are they stupid?” Cudjo asked, prodding his snail with his index finger. “You’re free, stupid snails. Go! Go!”

“Maybe they’re just shocked,” Quey said, and Cudjo looked at him like he was the one who was stupid.

But then Quey’s snail started to move past the line, followed, seconds later, by Cudjo’s snail. Quey’s snail didn’t move like a snail usually did, slowly and deliberately. It was as though he knew he was racing, as though he knew he was free. It didn’t take long for the boys to lose sight of him, while Cudjo’s snail ambled along, even turning in a circle several times.

Suddenly, Quey was nervous. Maybe Cudjo would be angry at his loss and tell him to leave the village and never come back. Quey had only just met Cudjo, but already he knew that he didn’t want to lose him. He did the only thing he could think to do. He stuck out his hand as he’d often seen his father do after business deals, and, to his surprise, Cudjo took it. The boys shook.

“My snail was very stupid, but yours did well,” Cudjo said.

“Yes, mine did very well,” Quey agreed, relieved.

“We should name them. We’ll call mine Richard because it’s a British name and he was bad like the British are bad. Yours can be named Kwame.”

Quey laughed. “Yes, Richard is bad like the British,” he said. He forgot in that second that his own father was British, and when he remembered later, he realized that he didn’t care. He felt only that he belonged, fully and completely.