Homegoing(35)

“Kwame, I need to find a girl,” James said.

“Eh, cousin, you have come to the right place,” Kwame said, laughing loudly. “I know every girl who walks this town. Describe her to me.”

So James did, and when he finished, his cousin told him who she was and where he could find her. James went out into the town he barely knew, looking for the girl he’d met but once. He knew his cousin would keep his secret for him.

When James found her, she was carrying water in a bucket on the top of her head, heading back toward her family’s hut.

She did not seem surprised to see him, and he was confident that whatever he’d felt during their brief time together, she had felt too.

“Can I help you with that?” James asked, pointing to the bucket.

She shook her head, horrified. “No, please. You shouldn’t be doing this kind of work.”

“Call me James.”

“James,” she repeated, rolling the strange name around in her mouth, tasting it as though it were bitter melon hitting the back of her tongue. “James.”

“And you are?”



“Akosua Mensah,” she said. The two kept walking. The few townspeople who recognized James stopped to bow or stare, but mostly people went about their daily lives, fetching water and carrying wood back for their fires.

It was a ten-mile walk from the stream to Akosua’s hut in the bush on the outskirts of town, and James was determined to learn everything there was to know about her.

“Why would you not shake my hand at the king’s funeral?” James asked.

“I told you. I will not shake the hand of a Fante slaver.”

“And am I a slaver?” James asked, trying to keep his anger from entering his voice. “If I am Fante, am I not also Asante? Was my grandfather not your king?”

She smiled at him. “I am one of thirteen children. Now there are only ten of us who remain. When I was a small girl, there was war between my village and another. They took three of my brothers.”

They walked in silence for a few minutes longer. James was sorry for her loss, but he knew too that all loss was just a part of life. Even his mother, important as she was, had once been captured, stolen from her family and planted in another’s. “If your village had won that war, would you not have taken three of someone else’s brothers?” James asked, unable to resist the question.



Akosua looked away. The bucket on her head was so steady, James wondered what it would take to knock it down. Maybe wind? Maybe an insect? “I know what you are thinking,” she finally said. “Everyone is a part of this. Asante, Fante, Ga. British, Dutch, and American. And you are not wrong to think like this. It is how we are all taught to think. But I do not want to think this way. When my brothers and the other people were taken, my village mourned them as we redoubled our military efforts. And what does that say? We avenge lost lives by taking more? It doesn’t make sense to me.”

They stopped walking so that she could adjust her wrapper. For the second time that day, James tried as hard as he could not to look at her breasts. She continued. “I love my people, James,” she said, and his name on her tongue was indescribably sweet. “I am proud to be Asante, as I am sure you are proud to be Fante, but after I lost my brothers, I decided that as for me, Akosua, I will be my own nation.”

As James listened to her speak, he felt something well up inside him as it had never done before. If he could, he would listen to her speak forever. If he could, he would join that nation she spoke of.

They walked farther. The sun was getting even lower in the sky, and James knew it would be impossible for him to make it home before nightfall. Still, they slowed down so that it seemed their feet were not even moving at all really, just coasting slowly, as though their bodies were being lifted and flown awkwardly by the mosquitoes they could feel buzzing around them.

“Are you promised to anyone?” James asked.

Akosua glanced shyly at him. “My father does not believe in promising a girl before her body has shown that she is ready, and I have not yet received my blood.”

James thought about his own wife-to-be back home in his village, selected for him because of her status. He would never be happy with her, and his marriage would be as loveless and biting as that of his parents. But he knew his parents would never approve of Akosua, not even as a third or fourth wife. She had nothing, and she came from nowhere.

Nothing from nowhere. It was something his grandmother Effia used to say on nights when she seemed most sad. James couldn’t remember a day when he hadn’t seen Effia in all black, nor a night when he hadn’t heard her faint crying.

When he was still just a small boy, he’d spent a weekend with her at her house near the Castle. In the middle of the night, he had woken up and heard her crying in her room. He’d gone to her, and wrapped her into a hug as tight as his little arms could muster.

“Why are you crying, Mama?” he’d asked, touching his fingers to her face, trying to catch some of the tears to blow and make a wish on as his mother sometimes did when he cried.

“Have you heard the story of Baaba, my own?” she asked, pulling him up onto her lap and rocking him back and forth.

That was the first night James heard it, but it wasn’t the last.



Now James grabbed Akosua’s hand, stopped her from moving. The bucket on her head began to sway, and she lifted her hands to steady it. “I want to marry you,” James said.