Homegoing(30)

She looked at Tom Allan, not more than a speck on the porch from where she stood in the field, and wondered how long it would take for him to act, if he would call her up this very morning or spend days letting it pass, making her wait. It was waiting that bothered her, that had always bothered her. She and Sam had spent so much time waiting, waiting, waiting.

Ness had made Sam wait outside when she was in labor. She gave birth to Kojo during a strange southern winter. An unheard-of snow had blanketed the plantations for a full week, threatening the crops, angering the landowners, making the slaves’ hands idle.

Ness was holed up in the birthing room the night of the heaviest snowfall, and when the midwife finally arrived and opened the door, a cold wind moved through the room, bringing with it a flurry of snowflakes that melted on the tables and chairs and on Ness’s stomach.

Throughout the pregnancy, Kojo was the kind of baby who fought the walls of his mother’s womb, and the journey out had been no different. Ness had screamed her throat raw, remembering with each push the stories the other slaves told about her own birth. They said Esi hadn’t told anyone that Ness was coming; she’d just gone out behind a tree and squatted. They said a strange sound had preceded Ness’s newborn wail, and for years after, Ness had listened to them argue about what that sound was. One slave thought it was the flutter of birds’ wings. Another that it was a spirit, come to help Ness out and then gone with a rumble. Yet another said that the sound had come from Esi herself. That she had gone out to be alone, to have her own private moment of joy with her baby before anyone came to snatch both joy and baby away. The sound, that slave had said, was of Esi laughing, which was why they hadn’t recognized it.



Ness couldn’t imagine anyone laughing through a birth until the midwife finally pulled Kojo out into the world and her baby boy had wailed, louder than little lungs should have allowed him to wail, and Sam, who had been pacing outside in the snow, thanked his ancestors in Yoruba and waited for the chance to hold him. Then Ness understood.

Following the birth of their son, Sam had come to be all that the Devil had wanted him to be. Tame, a good, hard worker who rarely fought or caused trouble. He would remember the way the Devil had beaten Ness for his folly, and when he held Kojo, called Jo, for the first time, he’d promised himself that no harm would come to the boy on his account.

Then Ness found Aku and told Sam that he would be able to keep that promise. Ness had been sitting in the back of the church on Easter Sunday, the only Sunday the Devil allowed his slaves to walk the fifteen miles to the black Baptist church on the edge of town, waiting for the sermon to start. Without thinking, she began singing a little Twi tune her mother used to sing sorrowfully on nights when the work of slavery was particularly grueling, when she had been beaten for supposed insolence or laziness or failure.

The Dove has failed. Oh, what to do? Make her to suffer, or you’ll fail too.

Ness didn’t know what she was singing, for Esi had never taught her what the words of the song meant, but in the pew in front of her, a woman turned and whispered something.

“I’m sorry. I don’t understand,” Ness said. The words the woman spoke had been in her mother’s tongue.

“So you are an Asante, and you don’t even know,” the woman said. Her accent was still thick, like Esi’s had been, gleaming with the lightness of the Gold Coast.



She introduced herself as Aku, and she explained that she was from Asanteland and had been kept in the Castle just like Ness’s mother had, before being shipped to the Caribbean and then to America.

“I know the way back out,” Aku said. The sermon was about to begin and Ness knew she wouldn’t have much time. Easter Sunday would not come again for another year, and by that time she or Aku or both could be sold; dead, even. Theirs was the kind of life that did not guarantee living. They had to act fast.

Aku talked softly, told Ness about how she had taken Akan people north to freedom many times, so many times that she had earned the Twi nickname Nyame nsa, hand of God, of help. Ness knew that no one had ever escaped the Devil’s plantation, but listening to this woman, who sounded like her mother had, who praised the god her mother had praised, Ness knew that she wanted her family to be the first.

Jo was one year old when Ness began planning her family’s freedom. The woman had assured her that she had taken children north before, babies who were still screaming and whining for their mothers’ tits. Jo would be no problem.

Ness and Sam talked about it every night they were together. “You can’t raise a baby in Hell,” Ness repeated over and over again, thinking about the way she’d been stolen from her own mother. Who knew how long she’d have with her perfect child before he forgot the sound of her voice, the details of her face, the way she had forgotten Esi’s. And when Sam finally agreed, they sent word to Aku, telling her that they were ready, that they would wait for her signal, an old Twi song, sung softly in the woods as though carried by windswept leaves.

And so they waited. Ness and Sam and Kojo, working longer and harder in the fields than any of the other slaves so that even the Devil began to smile at the mention of their names. They waited out fall and then winter, listening for the sound that would tell them it was time, praying that they wouldn’t be sold and separated before their chance came.

They weren’t, but Ness often wondered if it wouldn’t have been better if they had been. The song came in the spring, so light Ness thought that perhaps she had imagined it, but soon Sam was grabbing Jo in one arm and Ness in the other, and the three of them were out beyond the Devil’s land for the first time that they could remember.