Homegoing(22)

Within seconds, Cudjo was on top of him, panting heavily while Quey struggled to turn him over.

Quey knew he should tap the ground three times, the signal to end the match, but he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to. He didn’t want Cudjo to get up. He didn’t want to miss the weight of him.

Slowly, Quey relaxed his body, and he felt Cudjo do the same. The boys drank in each other’s gazes; their breathing slowed; the feeling on Quey’s lips grew stronger, a tingling that threatened to draw his face up toward Cudjo’s.



“Get up right now,” James said.

Quey didn’t know how long his father had been standing there watching them, but he recognized a new tone in his father’s voice. It was the same measured control he used when he spoke to servants and, Quey knew though he’d never seen, to slaves before he struck them, but now there was fear mixed in.

“Go home, Cudjo,” James said.

Quey watched his friend leave. Cudjo didn’t even look back.

The next month, just before Quey’s fourteenth birthday, while Effia cried and fought and fought some more, going so far, once, as to strike James across the face, Quey boarded a ship bound for England.

*

“I heard you’re back from London. Can I see you, old friend?”

Quey couldn’t stop thinking about the message he’d received from Cudjo. He stared into his bowl and saw that he’d hardly eaten any of the porridge. Fiifi had already finished one bowl and asked for another.

“Maybe I should have stayed in London,” Quey said.

His uncle looked up from his meal and gave him a funny look. “Stayed in London for what?”

“It was safer there,” Quey said softly.

“Safer? Why? Because the British don’t tramp through bushland finding slaves? Because they keep their hands clean while we work? Let me tell you, the work they do is the most dangerous of all.”

Quey nodded, though it wasn’t what he’d meant. In England he’d gotten to see the way black people lived in white countries, Indians and Africans who were packed twenty or more to a room, who ate the slop the pigs left behind, who coughed and coughed and coughed endlessly, all together, a symphony of sickness. He knew the dangers that waited across the Atlantic, but he knew too the danger in himself.

“Don’t be weak, Quey,” Fiifi said, staring at him intently, and for just a second Quey wondered if his uncle had understood him after all. But then Fiifi returned to his porridge and said. “Isn’t there work for you to do?”



Quey shook his head, trying to collect himself. He smiled at his uncle and thanked him for the meal and then he set off.

The work wasn’t difficult. Quey and his fellow company men’s official duties included meeting Badu and his men weekly to go over the inventory, overseeing the bomboys who loaded the canoes with cargo, and updating the Castle’s governor with news of Badu’s other trade partners.

Today it was Quey’s turn to oversee the bomboys. He walked the several miles to the edge of the village and greeted the young Fante boys who worked for the British, shuttling slaves from the coastal villages to the Castle. On this day there were only five slaves, bound and waiting. The youngest, a small girl, had messed herself, but everyone ignored it. Quey had grown accustomed to the smell of shit, but fear was one smell that would stand out forever. It curled his nose and brought tears to his eyes, but he had learned long ago how to keep himself from crying.

Every time he saw the bomboys set off with a canoe full of slaves, he thought of his father standing on the shores of the Cape Coast Castle, ready to receive them. On this shore, watching the canoe push off, Quey brimmed with the same shame that accompanied each slave departure. What had his father felt on his shore? James had died soon after Quey arrived in London. The ship ride there had been uncomfortable at best, harrowing at worst, with Quey alternating steadily between crying and vomiting. On the ship, all Quey could think about was how this was what his father did to the slaves. This was what his father did to his problems. Put them on a boat, shipped them away. How had James felt every time he watched a ship push off? Was it the same mix of fear and shame and loathing that Quey felt for his own flesh, his mutinous desire?

Back in the village, Badu was already drunk. Quey said hello, and then tried to move quickly past him.

He wasn’t fast enough. Badu grabbed him by the shoulder and asked, “How’s your mother? Tell her to come and see me, enh?”

Quey pursed his lips into what he hoped looked like a smile. He tried to swallow his disgust. When he’d accepted his assignment here, Effia had cried out, begging him to refuse, begging him to run away, all the way into Asante as his never-known grandmother before him had done if that was what he needed to do in order to escape the obligation.



She’d fingered the stone pendant on her neck as she spoke to him. “There is evil in that village, Quey. Baaba—”

“Baaba is long dead,” Quey said, “and you and I are both too old to still believe in ghosts.”

His mother had spit on the ground at his feet, and shook her head so quickly he thought it might spin off. “You think you know, but you don’t know,” she said. “Evil is like a shadow. It follows you.”

“Perhaps my mother will come visit soon,” Quey said now, knowing that she would never want to see Badu. Though his parents had fought, mostly about him, it was obvious to all that they had cared for each other. And, though a part of Quey hated his father, another part still wanted ardently to please him.