Homegoing(36)

They were only steps away from the girl’s hut. He could see it through the bushes. Young children were wrestling with each other in the mud, coming up with their faces caked in brown. A man stood chopping the tall grass with his machete. Each time the blade hit the ground it shook the earth. James thought he could feel it move under his feet.

“How can you marry me, James?” the girl said. She looked worried now, her eyes stealing over to where her family waited. If she was too late with the water, her mother would beat her, then yell at her until dawn. No one would believe that she had been with the Asante king’s grandson, and if they did believe it, they would only smell trouble.

“When your blood comes, you must tell no one. You must hide it. I am leaving tomorrow, but I will come back for you, and we will leave this town together. Start a new life in a small village where no one knows us.”

Akosua was still looking at her family, and he knew how crazy he sounded, and he knew how much he was asking her to give up. The Asante puberty rites were a serious matter. There was a weeklong ceremony to bless the girls’ fresh womanhood. The rules thereafter were strict. Women in menses could not visit the stool houses, could not cross certain rivers. They lived in separate houses and painted their wrists with white clay on the days they bled. If anyone found out a woman had bled but not told, the punishment would be great.

“Do you trust me?” James asked, knowing it was a question he had no right to ask.

“No,” Akosua answered finally. “Trust is a thing to be earned. I don’t trust you. I have seen what power can do to men, and you are from one of the most powerful families.”

James’s head grew light. He felt faint, like he would soon fall.

“But,” Akosua continued, “if you come back for me, then you will earn my trust.”

James nodded slowly, understanding. He would be back in his village by the end of the month, at his own wedding by the end of the year. The war would continue, and nothing, not his life nor his heart, was guaranteed. But listening to Akosua speak, he knew he would make a way.

*

James could not explain to Amma why he did not want to sleep in her hut. They had been married for three months and his excuses were wearing thin. On their wedding night, he had told her he was ill. For the entire week after, his body had taken over the excuse-making for him, his penis lying limp between his legs each time he went to her, even on the nights she braided her hair the way he liked it and rubbed coconut oil on her breasts and between her thighs. After that week, he had spent another two pretending to be too embarrassed to go to her, but soon, that too had failed him.

“You must go to see the apothecary. There are herbs you can take to help with this. If I do not get pregnant soon, people will start to believe there is something wrong with me,” Amma said.

He felt bad for her. It was true. Failure to conceive was always believed to be the woman’s fault, a punishment for infidelity or loose morals. But, in these few short months, James had gotten to know his wife well. She would soon tell everyone in the village that there was something wrong with him, and word would get back to his father and mother that he had not fulfilled his husbandly duties. He could hear his mother now. “Oh, Nyame, what have I done to deserve this? First a weak husband and now a weak son!” James knew he would have to figure something out soon if he wanted to remain faithful to the memory of Akosua.

It was a memory he gripped tightly. It had been nearly a year since James had promised Akosua that he would come back for her, and he had come no closer to creating a plan to fulfill that promise. The Asantes were winning battle after battle against the British and the people of his village had begun to murmur that maybe the Asantes would win against the white men. And then what? Would more white men come to replace the ones who had died? Who would protect them if the Asantes came to meet them, to finally exact revenge for Abeeku Badu and Fiifi’s grievances toward them? They had made an alliance with the British so long ago, maybe the white men had already forgotten.



James had not forgotten Akosua. He could see her every night when he slept, her lips and eyes and legs and buttocks moving across the field of his closed eyes. In his own hut on the outer edge of the compound, which he had built for himself and Amma and the other wives who were supposed to follow. He had not forgotten how much he had loved being in his grandfather’s town, among the Asantes, the warmth he’d felt from his mother’s people. The longer he stayed in Fanteland, the sooner he wished to get away. To lead a simpler life, as a farmer like Akosua’s father, not as a politician like his own father, whose work for the British and the Fantes so many years before had left him with money and power, but little else.

“James, are you listening to me?” Amma said. She was stirring a pot of pepper soup, a wrapper slung across her waist, her back leaning forward so that it seemed her bare breasts would dip into the broth.

“Yes, darling, you are right,” James said. “Tomorrow, I will go to see Mampanyin.”

Amma nodded her head, satisfied. Mampanyin was the premier apothecary for hundreds of miles around. Junior wives went to her when they wished to quietly kill the senior wives. Younger brothers went when they wanted to be chosen as successor over their elder brothers. From the ocean’s edge to the inland forests, people went to her when they had a problem that prayers alone could not fix.

James saw her on a Thursday. His father and many others had always called the woman a witch doctor, and she seemed to physically embody that role. She was missing all but her four front teeth, evenly spaced, as though they had chased all of the other teeth out of her mouth and then joined together in the middle, triumphant. Her back was perpetually hunched forward, and she walked with a cane made out of a rich black wood, carved to look like a snake was coiled around it. One of her eyes always looked away, and try as hard as he might, moving his head this way and that, James could not convince that eye to greet him.