Homegoing(21)

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The boys grew older. Quey grew four inches in one summer, while Cudjo grew muscle. His legs and arms rippled, so that sweat flowing down them looked like cresting waves. He became known far and wide for his wrestling prowess. Older boys from neighboring villages were brought to challenge him, and still he won every match.

“Eh, Quey, when will you wrestle me?” Cudjo asked.

Quey had never challenged him. He was nervous, not of losing, for he knew he would lose, but because he’d spent the last three years carefully watching, and knew better than anyone what Cudjo’s body was capable of. The elegance of Cudjo’s movements as he circled around his opponents, the mathematics of the violence, how an arm plus a neck could equal breathlessness, or an elbow plus a nose meant blood. Cudjo never missed a step in this dance, and his body, both forceful and controlled, awed Quey. Lately, Quey had been thinking about Cudjo’s strong arms encircling him, dragging him down to the ground, Cudjo’s body on top of his.

“Get Richard to wrestle you,” Quey said, and Cudjo let out his exuberant laugh.

After the snail race, the boys had started to name everything, good or bad, Richard. When they got in trouble with their mothers for saying something crude, they blamed Richard. When they ran the fastest or won a wrestling match, it was thanks to Richard. Richard was there the day Cudjo had swum too far out and his strokes had started to fail him. It was Richard who had wanted him to drown and Richard who had saved him, helping him to regain his rhythm.

“Poor Richard! I would destroy him-oh,” Cudjo said, flexing his muscles.

Quey reached over to squeeze Cudjo’s arm. Though the muscle did not give way, he said, “Why? Because of this small thing?”

“Enh?” Cudjo said.

“I said this arm is small. It feels soft in my hand, brother.”

Without warning, quick as a stroke of heat lightning, Cudjo locked Quey’s neck into his arms. “Soft?” he asked. His voice was hardly more than a whisper, a wind in Quey’s ear. “Careful, friend. There is nothing soft here.”



Though Quey was losing his breath, he could feel his cheeks flushing. Cudjo’s body was pressed so close to him that he felt, for a moment, that they were one body. Each hair on Quey’s arms stood at attention, waiting for what would happen next. Finally, Cudjo let him go.

Quey took in deep gulps of air as Cudjo looked on, a smile playing on his lips.

“Were you scared, Quey?” Cudjo asked.

“No.”

“No? Don’t you know every man in Fanteland is scared of me now?”

“You wouldn’t hurt me,” Quey said. He looked straight into Cudjo’s eyes and could feel something in them falter.

Quickly, Cudjo regained his composure. “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” Quey said.

“Challenge me, then. Challenge me to wrestle.”

“I won’t.”

Cudjo walked up to Quey until he was standing only inches from his face. “Challenge me,” he said, and his breath danced on Quey’s own lips.

—

The next week Cudjo had an important match. While drunk, a soldier in the Castle had boasted that Cudjo would never be able to beat him.

“Negroes fighting other Negroes is not a challenge. Put a savage against a white man, then you’ll see.”

One of the servants, a man from Cudjo’s own village, had heard the white soldier’s boast and reported it back to Cudjo’s father. The next day, the chief arrived to deliver his message personally.

“Any white man who thinks he can beat my son, let him try. In three days’ time we will see who is better.”

Quey’s father had tried to forbid the match, saying that it was uncivilized, but the soldiers were bored and restless. Uncivilized fun was exactly what they craved.

Cudjo came at the end of that week. He brought with him his father and his seven brothers, no one else. Quey had not spoken to him since the week before, and he found himself inexplicably nervous, the feeling of Cudjo’s breath still present on his lips.



The soldier who had made the boast was also nervous. He paced, and his hand shook, as all the men of the Castle looked on.

Cudjo stood across from his challenger. He looked him up and down, assessing him. Then his eyes found Quey’s in the audience. Quey nodded at him, and Cudjo smiled, a smile that Quey knew to mean “I will win this.”

And he did. Only a minute after the match started, Cudjo had his arms wrapped around the soldier’s fat belly, flipping him over and pinning him down.

The crowd roared with excitement. More challengers stepped in, soldiers whom Cudjo defeated with varying degrees of ease until, finally, all the men were drunk and spent, and Cudjo alone was unruffled.

The soldiers started to leave. After congratulating Cudjo loudly and raucously, his own brothers and father also left. Cudjo was to spend the night in Cape Coast with Quey.

“I’ll wrestle you,” Quey said when it looked like everyone had gone. The night air was starting to move into the Castle, cooling it, but only a bit.

“Now that I’m too tired to win?” Cudjo asked.

“You’ve never been too tired to win.”

“Okay. You want to wrestle me? Come catch me first!” And with that Cudjo broke into a run. Quey was faster than he was in the early years of their friendship. He caught up to Cudjo at the cannons and dove toward him, locking his legs and pulling him down to the ground.