Homegoing(32)

“Your mother wants to go to the funeral,” Quey said. James unclenched the fist he hadn’t realized he’d made.

“It’s too dangerous, Quey,” the white man said. “Even Nana Yaa’s royal status might not protect you. They know your village has been allied to us for years. It’s just too dangerous.”

James’s father looked down, and suddenly James could hear his mother’s voice in his ear again, telling him that his father was a weak man with no respect for the land he walked on.

“We will go,” James said, and Quey looked up. “Not attending the Asante king’s funeral is a sin the ancestors would never forgive.”

Slowly, Quey nodded. He turned to the white man. “It is the least we can do,” he said.

The white man shook hands with the two of them, and the next day, James, his mother, and his father headed north for Kumasi. His grandmother Effia would stay home with the younger children.

—

James held the gun in his lap as they rode through the forest. The last time he’d held one was five years before, in 1819, for his twelfth birthday. His father had taken him out into the woods to shoot at swaths of fabric he had tied to various trees in the distance. He told James that a man should learn to hold a gun the same way he held a woman, carefully, tenderly.



Now, looking at his parents as they rode through the bush, James wondered if his father had ever held his mother that way, carefully or tenderly. If war had been the way of the world of the Gold Coast, it had also defined the world inside his compound.

Nana Yaa wept as they rode inside the carriage. “If it weren’t for my son, would we even be going?” she asked.

James had made the mistake of telling her what his father and the white man had talked about the day before.

“If it weren’t for me, would you even have this son?” his father muttered.

“What?” his mother said. “I could not understand that ugly Fante you speak.”

James rolled his eyes. They would go on like this for the rest of the trip. He could still remember the fights they had when he was a small boy. His mother screaming loudly about his name.

“James Richard Collins?” his mother would shout. “James Richard Collins! What kind of Akan are you that you give your son three white names?”

“And so what?” his father would reply. “Will he not still be a prince to our people and to the whites too? I have given him a powerful name.”

James knew now, as he knew then, that his parents had never loved each other. It was a political marriage; duty held them together, though even that seemed to be barely enough. By the time they passed the town of Edumfa, his mother was going on about how Quey wouldn’t even be a man were it not for James’s late great-uncle Fiifi. So many of their arguments led to Fiifi and the decisions he had made for Quey and their family.

After days of travel, they stopped to spend the night in Dunkwa with David, a friend from Quey’s time in England who had moved back to the Gold Coast years before with his British wife. Days, even weeks, would pass before they reached the interior where James’s grandfather’s body was being held so that all could celebrate his life.

“Quey, old friend,” David said as James’s family approached. He had a round belly like an oversized coconut. For a second, remembering the way he had grown up slicing the fruit and drinking what awaited inside, James wondered what a man like David would spill if punctured.



His father and David shook hands and began talking. James always noticed that the longer it had been since the two men saw each other, the louder and more impassioned their voices got, as though the volume was trying to make up for distance, or reach back in time.

Nana Yaa nodded at David’s wife, Katherine, and then loudly cleared her throat.

“My wife is very tired,” Quey said, and the servants came to show her to her room. James began to walk with them, hoping that he too could get some rest, but David stopped him.

“Eh, James, you are a big man now. Sit. Talk.”

The handful of times James had seen David, David had called him a big man. He could remember back to when he was just four years old and had tripped on something invisible, an ant maybe, and had fallen to the ground, tearing the flesh of his upper lip. He had immediately begun crying, a violent cry that began somewhere inside his chest. David picked him up with one hand, dusted off his butt with the other, and stood him on a table in front of him so that the two were staring eye to eye. “You are a big man now, James. You can’t cry at every little thing that comes your way.”

The three men sat around a fire the servants had built, sipping palm wine. James’s father looked older to him, but only slightly, as though the three-day journey had added three years. If the trip took thirty days, Quey would look almost as old as James’s grandfather had before he died.

“So she is still giving you trouble, eh? Even though you are taking her to Osei Bonsu’s funeral?” David asked.

“Nothing is ever enough for this wife of mine,” Quey said.

“That is what happens when you marry for power instead of marrying for love. The Bible says—”

“I don’t need to know what the Bible says. I studied the Bible too, remember? In fact, I recall going to religion class more often than you did,” Quey said with a short laugh. “I have no use for that religion. I chose this land, these people, these customs over those of the British.”