Homegoing(24)
Quey stood up and went to the door. Fiifi’s men handed him a lamp and then moved aside so that he could enter. When he did, the darkness echoed around him, reverberating against him as though he had stepped inside a hollowed drum. He lifted the lamp higher and saw the slaves.
He didn’t expect to see many, for the next shipment was not set to arrive until early the following week. He knew immediately that these were not slaves the Asantes brought in. These were people Fiifi had stolen. There were two men tied together in the corner, big warriors, bleeding from minor flesh wounds. When they saw Quey, they began to jeer in Twi, thrashing against their chains so that they broke fresh flesh, bleeding anew.
On the opposite wall sat a young girl who made no noise. She looked up at Quey with large moon eyes, and he knelt down beside her to study her face. On her cheek was a large oval-shaped scar, a medical mark James had taught Quey years before, before he’d shipped him off to England, a mark of the Asantes.
Quey got up, looking at the girl still. Slowly, he backed away, realizing who the girl must be. Outside, his uncle had passed out from the pain, and the soldiers had loosened their grips on their weapons, content that no one had followed them.
Quey looked at the one closest to the door, grabbed his shoulder, shook him. “What in God’s name are you doing with the Asante king’s daughter?”
The soldier lowered his eyes, shook his head, and did not speak. Whatever Fiifi had planned, it could not fail, or the entire village would pay with their lives.
—
Every night after that night, Quey sat with Fiifi as he healed. He heard the story of the capture, how Fiifi and his men had stolen into Asante in the dead of night, informed by one of their contacts as to when the girl would have the fewest guards around her, how Fiifi had been slit around like a coconut by the tip of her guard’s machete when he reached for her, how they had dragged their captives south, through the forest, until they reached the Coast.
Her name was Nana Yaa and she was the eldest daughter of Osei Bonsu, the highest power in the Asante Kingdom, a man who commanded respect from the queen of England herself for his sway over the Gold Coast’s role in the slave trade. Nana Yaa was an important political bargaining tool, and people had been trying to capture her since her infancy. Wars had been started over her: to get her, to free her, to marry her.
Quey was so worried he didn’t dare ask how Cudjo had fared. Soon, Quey knew, Fiifi’s informant would be caught and tortured until he told who had taken her. It was only a matter of time until the consequences came to meet them.
“Uncle, the Asantes will not forgive this. They will—”
Fiifi cut him off. Since the night of the capture, every time Quey tried to broach the topic of the girl, to gauge Fiifi’s intentions, the man clutched his side and grew quiet or told one of his long-winded fables.
“The Asantes have been angry with us for years,” Fiifi said. “Ever since the time they found out we traded other Asantes brought to us by some northerners Badu found. Badu told me then that we trade with the ones who pay more. It is the same thing I told the Asantes when they found out, the same thing I told you. Asante anger is to be expected, Quey, and you are right that it is not to be underestimated. But trust me, they are wise where we are cunning. They will forgive.”
Fiifi stopped talking and Quey watched as his uncle’s youngest daughter, a girl of only two, played in the yard. After a while, a house girl came by with a snack of groundnuts and bananas. She approached Fiifi first, but he stopped her. With a level voice and leveled gaze, he said, “You must serve my son first.”
The woman did as she was told, bowing before Quey, and reaching out with her right hand. After they had both received their fill, the girl left while Quey watched the measured sway of her ample hips.
“Why do you always say that?” Quey asked once he was sure she had gone.
“Why do I say what?”
“That I’m your son.” Quey looked down, spoke so softly that he hoped the ground would swallow his sound. “You never claimed me before.”
Fiifi split the shell of a groundnut with his teeth, separating it from the nut itself and spitting it onto the ground before them. He looked toward the thin dirt road that led away from his compound and toward the village square. He looked as though he were expecting someone.
“You were in England too long, Quey. Maybe you have forgotten that here, mothers, sisters, and their sons are most important. If you are chief, your sister’s son is your successor because your sister was born of your mother but your wife was not. Your sister’s son is more important to you than even your own son. But, Quey, your mother is not my sister. She is not the daughter of my mother, and when she married a white man from the Castle, I began to lose her, and because my mother had always hated her, I began to hate her too.
“And this hate was good, at first. It made me work harder. I would think about her and all of the white people in the Castle, and I would say, My people here in this village, we will be stronger than the white men. We will be richer too. And when Badu became too greedy and too fat to fight, I began to fight for him, and even then I hated your mother and your father. And I hated my own mother and I hated my own father too for the kind of people I knew that they were. I suppose I even began to hate myself.
“The last time your mother came to this village I was fifteen years old. It was for my father’s funeral, and after Effia had gone, Baaba told me that because she was not truly my sister, I owed her nothing. And for many years I believed that, but I am an old man now, wiser, but weaker. In my youth, no man could have touched me with his machete, but now…” Fiifi’s voice trailed off as he gestured to his wound. He cleared his throat and continued. “Soon, all that I have helped to build in this village will no longer belong to me. I have sons but I have no sisters, and so all that I have helped to build will blow away like dust in a breeze.