Homegoing(38)

“People think they are coming to me for advice,” Mampanyin said, “but really, they come to me for permission. If you want to do something, do it. The Asantes will be in Efutu soon, this I know.”

She was no longer looking at him. Instead, she focused on the contents of the pot. There was no way this woman could know what the plans of the Asantes were. Theirs was the most powerful army in all of Africa. It was said that when the white men first came upon the Asante warriors with their bare chests and their loose cloth wraps, they had laughed, saying, “Are these not the cloths our women would wear?” They had prided themselves on their guns and their uniforms: the button-down jackets and trousers. Then the Asantes had slaughtered them by the hundreds, cut out the hearts of their military leaders and eaten them for strength. After that, at least one British soldier could be seen wetting those trousers they once praised as he retreated from the men they once underestimated.



If all that they said about the Asante army was true, it was impossible that they would be poorly organized enough to let a Fante fetish woman know of their plans. James knew that her roving eye had found itself in Efutu, in the future, and had seen him there, just as it had seen his heart’s desire just then.

—

But still James did not go to Efutu. Amma was waiting for him when he went back home.

“What did Mampanyin say?” his wife asked.

“She said you must be patient with me,” he said, and his wife huffed, dissatisfied. James knew she would spend the rest of the day gossiping with her girlfriends about him.

For a week James was miserable. He started to have doubts about Akosua, about his wish to live a small life. Was his life now so bad? He could stay in the village. He could continue the work of his father.

James had all but decided to do this when his grandmother came over to eat one night.

Effia was an old lady, and yet it was still possible to see the youth that once was somewhere beneath the many lines of her face. She had insisted on living in Cape Coast, in the house her husband had built, even after Quey had grown prominent in her village. She said she would never again live in the village that evil had built.

As they all ate outside in Quey’s compound, James could feel his grandmother watching him, and after the house girls and boys had all come to collect their dishes, and James’s father and mother had retired for the evening, he could feel his grandmother watching him still.

“What’s wrong, my own child?” she asked when the two of them were finally alone.

James didn’t speak. The fufu they had eaten sat like a rock at the bottom of his belly, and he thought it would make him sick. He looked at his grandmother. They said she was once so beautiful that the Castle governor would have burned their whole village down just to get to her.

She touched the black stone necklace she wore at her neck and then reached for James’s hand. “You are not content?” she asked.



And James could feel the pressure build behind his eyes as tears threatened to break through. He squeezed his grandmother’s hand. “I’ve heard my mother call my father weak my whole life, but what if I’m just like him?” James said. He expected his grandmother to react, but she remained silent. “I want to be my own nation.” He knew she wouldn’t be able to understand what he said, and yet it seemed that she had heard him. Even though he spoke in a whisper, she heard him.

His grandmother didn’t speak at first, just watched him. “We are all weak most of the time,” she said finally. “Look at the baby. Born to his mother, he learns how to eat from her, how to walk, talk, hunt, run. He does not invent new ways. He just continues with the old. This is how we all come to the world, James. Weak and needy, desperate to learn how to be a person.” She smiled at him. “But if we do not like the person we have learned to be, should we just sit in front of our fufu, doing nothing? I think, James, that maybe it is possible to make a new way.”

She kept smiling. The sun was setting behind them, and James finally let himself cry in front of his grandmother.

And so, the next day, James told his family that he was going back to Cape Coast with Effia, but instead he went to Efutu. He found work with a doctor whom his grandmother knew, who had worked for the British when she lived in the Castle. All James had to do was tell him that he was James Collins’s grandson, and he immediately received work and a place to stay.

The doctor was Scottish and so old he could hardly walk upright, let alone heal illnesses without catching them. He had moved to Efutu after working for the company for only one year. He spoke fluent Fante, had built his compound himself from the ground up, and had remained unmarried, even though many of the local women had brought their young daughters to him as offerings. To the townspeople he was a mystery, but they had grown fond of him, affectionately calling him the White Doctor.

It was James’s job to help keep the medicine room clean. The White Doctor’s medical hut was next door to his living quarters, and it was small enough so that he didn’t really need James’s help at all. James swept, organized the medicines, washed the rags. Sometimes, in the evenings, he would cook a simple meal for the two of them, and they would sit in the yard, facing the dirt stretch of road, while the White Doctor told stories about his time in the Castle.



“You look just like your grandmother. What was that the locals used to call her?” He scratched his fine white hair. “The Beauty. Effia the Beauty, right?”