Homegoing(33)

“You chose it, or it was chosen for you?” David said quietly. Quey stole a glance at James, and then looked away. It was as his mother always yelled at Quey when she was truly angry: “You are so soft, you break apart. Weak man.”

“And you, James? You are almost old enough for the marriage festivities to start. Should we begin looking for a bride for you, or have you got a woman in mind?” David winked at him and then, as though the wink were the pulling of a switch that led to his throat, began to laugh so hard he choked on his own spittle.

“Nana Yaa and I have chosen a nice wife for him to marry when the time comes,” Quey said,.

David nodded carefully and tipped the calabash of wine back, his Adam’s apple bobbing against the stream of liquid that ran down it. Watching him, James cringed. Before his great-uncle Fiifi had died, when James was still just a small boy, Fiifi had conspired with Quey to choose the woman whom James would marry. She was called Amma Atta, the daughter of Chief Abeeku Badu’s successor to the stool. Their joining would be the last thing on the list of rectifications that Fiifi had promised himself he would fulfill for Quey. It would be the realization of a promise that Cobbe Otcher had made to Effia Otcher Collins years ago: that her blood would be joined with the blood of Fante royals. James would marry her on the eve of his eighteenth birthday. She would be his first, his most important, wife.

Because Amma had also grown up in the village, James had known her all his life, and when they were young, he used to play with her outside Chief Abeeku’s compound. But the older they got, the more Amma started to annoy him. Little things, like the way she always laughed just a second too long after he told a joke, just long enough for him to know she didn’t find him funny at all, or the way she put so much coconut oil in her hair that if the strands brushed against his shoulder while they were together, his shoulder would continue to smell of oil when they were apart. He was only fifteen when he knew that he could never truly love a woman like that, but it didn’t matter what he thought.



The men continued sipping the wine in silence for a while. In the trees, the birds were calling each other to sleep. A spider crawled over James’s bare foot, and he thought of the Anansi stories his mother used to tell him, and still told his younger brothers and sisters. “Have you heard the story of Anansi and the sleeping bird?” she would ask them, mischief dancing behind her eyes, and they would all shout “No!” and giggle into their hands, thrilled by the lie they were telling, for they had all heard it many times before, learning then that a story was nothing more than a lie you got away with.

David tipped the calabash back again, his head tipping back with it so that he could completely empty the contents. He belched, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Is it true?” he asked. “The rumors about the British abolishing slavery soon?”

Quey shrugged his shoulders. “The year James was born, they told everyone in the Castle that the slave trade was abolished and that we could not sell our slaves to America anymore, but did that stop the tribes from selling? Did that make the British leave? Don’t you see this war the Asantes and the British are fighting now and will continue to fight for far longer than you or I or even James can live to see? There’s more at stake here than just slavery, my brother. It’s a question of who will own the land, the people, the power. You cannot stick a knife in a goat and then say, Now I will remove my knife slowly, so let things be easy and clean, let there be no mess. There will always be blood.”

James had heard this speech or something like it many times before. The British were no longer selling slaves to America, but slavery had not ended, and his father did not seem to think that it would end. They would just trade one type of shackles for another, trade physical ones that wrapped around wrists and ankles for the invisible ones that wrapped around the mind. James hadn’t understood this when he was younger, when the legal slave exportation had ended and the illegal one had begun, but he understood now. The British had no intention of leaving Africa, even once the slave trade ended. They owned the Castle, and, though they had yet to speak it aloud, they intended to own the land as well.

—



They set out again the next morning. James thought his mother looked as though the night’s rest had lifted her spirits. She even hummed while they traveled. They passed small towns and villages that were built of little more than mud and sticks. They relied upon the kindness of people whom Quey had once worked with, or cousins of cousins whom Nana Yaa had never met, people who offered their floors and a bit of palm wine. The further into the country they moved, the more James noticed how his father’s skin attracted attention among the bush people. “Are you a white man?” one little girl had asked, reaching out with her index finger and swiping Quey’s light brown skin as though she could capture a little bit of the color on it.

“What do you think?” Quey had asked, his Twi rusty but passable.

The little girl giggled, then shook her head slowly before running away to report back to the other children who were gathered around the fire staring, too intimidated to ask him themselves.

They reached Kumasi at dusk and were greeted by Nana Yaa’s eldest brother, Kofi, and his guards.

“Akwaaba,” he said. “You are welcome here.”

They were taken to the new king’s large palace, where the servants had prepared a room at the corner of the structure. Kofi sat with them while they ate the welcome food and updated them on what had passed in the town since they had left their own village.