Homegoing(25)

“I am the one who told your governor to give you this job, Quey, because you are the person I am supposed to leave all of this to. I loved Effia as a sister once, so even though you are not of my mother, you are the closest thing to a firstborn nephew that I have. I will give you all that I have. I will make up for my mother’s wrongdoings. Tomorrow night, you will marry Nana Yaa, so that even if the Asante king and all of his men come knocking on my door, they cannot deny you. They cannot kill you or anyone in this village, because it is now your village as it was once your mother’s. I will make sure you become a very powerful man, so that even after the white men have all gone from this Gold Coast—and believe me, they will go—you will still matter long after the Castle walls have crumbled.”



Fiifi began to pack a pipe. He blew out of it until white smoke formed little roofs above the pipe’s bowl. The rainy season was coming and soon the air would start to thicken, and the people of the Gold Coast would have to relearn how to move in a climate that was always hot and wet, as though it intended to cook its inhabitants for dinner.

This was how they lived there, in the bush: Eat or be eaten. Capture or be captured. Marry for protection. Quey would never go to Cudjo’s village. He would not be weak. He was in the business of slavery, and sacrifices had to be made.





Ness





THERE WAS NO DRINKING GOURD, no spiritual soothing enough to mend a broken spirit. Even the Northern Star was a hoax.

Every day, Ness picked cotton under the punishing eye of the southern sun. She had been at Thomas Allan Stockham’s Alabama plantation for three months. Two weeks before, she was in Mississippi. A year before that, she was in a place she would only ever describe as Hell.

Though she had tried, Ness couldn’t remember how old she was. Her best guess was twenty-five, but each year since the one when she was plucked from her mother’s arms had felt like ten years. Ness’s mother, Esi, had been a solemn, solid woman who was never known to tell a happy story. Even Ness’s bedtime stories had been ones about what Esi used to call “the Big Boat.” Ness would fall asleep to the images of men being thrown into the Atlantic Ocean like anchors attached to nothing: no land, no people, no worth. In the Big Boat, Esi said, they were stacked ten high, and when a man died on top of you, his weight would press the pile down like cooks pressing garlic. Ness’s mother, called Frownie by the other slaves because she never smiled, used to tell the story of how she’d been cursed by a Little Dove long, long ago, cursed and sisterless, she would mutter as she swept, left without her mother’s stone. When they sold Ness in 1796, Esi’s lips had stood in that same thin line. Ness could remember reaching out for her mother, flailing her arms and kicking her legs, fighting against the body of the man who’d come to take her away. And still Esi’s lips had not moved, her hands had not reached out. She stood there, solid and strong, the same as Ness had always known her to be. And though Ness had met warm slaves on other plantations, black people who smiled and hugged and told nice stories, she would always miss the gray rock of her mother’s heart. She would always associate real love with a hardness of spirit.



Thomas Allan Stockham was a good master, if such a thing existed. He gave them five-minute breaks every three hours, and the field slaves were allowed onto the porch to receive one mason jar full of water from the house slaves.

This day in late June, Ness waited in line for water beside TimTam. He was a gift to the Stockham family from their neighbors, the Whitmans, and Tom Allan often liked to say that TimTam was the best gift he’d ever received, better even than the gray-tailed cat his brother had given him for his fifth birthday or the red wagon he’d received for his second.

“How your day been?” TimTam asked.

Ness turned toward him just slightly. “Ain’t all days the same?”

TimTam laughed, a sound that rumbled like thunder built from the cloud of his gut and expelled through the sky of his mouth. “I s’pose you right,” he said.

Ness was not certain she would ever get used to hearing English spill out of the lips of black people. In Mississippi, Esi had spoken to her in Twi until their master caught her. He’d given Esi five lashes for every Twi word Ness spoke, and when Ness, seeing her battered mother, had become too scared to speak, he gave Esi five lashes for each minute of Ness’s silence. Before the lashes, her mother had called her Maame, after her own mother, but the master had whipped Esi for that too, whipped her until she cried out “My goodness!”—the words escaping her without thought, no doubt picked up from the cook, who used to say it to punctuate every sentence. And because those had been the only English words to escape Esi’s mouth without her struggling to find them, she believed that what she was saying must have been something divine, like the gift of her daughter, and so that goodness had turned into, simply, Ness.



“Where you comin’ from?” TimTam asked. He chewed the chaffy end of a wheat stalk and spit.

“You ask too many questions,” Ness said. She turned away. It was her turn to receive water from Margaret, the head house slave, but the woman poured only enough to fill a quarter of the glass.

“We ain’t got enough today,” she said, but Ness could see that the buckets of water on the porch behind her were enough to last a week.

Margaret looked at Ness, but Ness got the feeling that she was really looking through her, or rather, that she was looking five minutes into Ness’s past, trying to discern whether or not the conversation Ness had just had with TimTam meant that the man was interested in her.