Homegoing(47)

“She’s gone?” Ma asked, and Jo nodded. She sighed. “You will make it through this, Jo. Nyame did not make weak Asantes, and that is what you are, no matter what man here, white or black, wishes to erase that part of you. Your mother came from strong, powerful people. People who do not break.”

“You’re my mother,” Jo said, and Ma Aku, with great effort, turned her whole body toward him and opened her arms. Jo crawled into bed with her and cried as he rested his head on her bosom, as he had not done since he was a young child. Back then, he used to cry for Sam and Ness. The only thing that would pacify him was stories about them, even if the stories were unpleasant. So Ma Aku would tell him that Sam hardly spoke, but when he did it was loving and wise, and that Ness had some of the most gruesome whip scars she had ever seen. Jo used to worry that his family line had been cut off, lost forever. He would never truly know who his people were, and who their people were before them, and if there were stories to be heard about where he had come from, he would never hear them. When he felt this way, Ma Aku would hold him against her, and instead of stories about family she would tell him stories about nations. The Fantes of the Coast, the Asantes of the Inland, the Akans.

When he lay against this woman now, he knew that he belonged to someone, and that had once been enough for him.

—



Ten years passed. Ma Aku passed with them. Agnes had three children, Beulah was pregnant, and Cato and Felicity were married. Eurias and Gracie, the youngest of the bunch, both found live-in work as soon as they could. They said it was to help take off some of the burden, but Jo knew the truth. His children could not stand to be around him anymore, and, though he hated to admit it, he could not stand to be around them.

The problem was Anna. The fact that he saw her everywhere in Baltimore, at every shop, on every road. He would sometimes see ample buttocks coming around a corner and follow them for blocks on end. He’d gotten slapped once doing this. It was winter, and the woman, so light her skin looked like cream with just a drop of coffee, had turned a corner and waited for him there. Slapped him so quick, he didn’t even notice who had done it until she turned back around and he’d seen that generous swish of her hips.

He went to New York. It didn’t matter that he had become one of the best ship caulkers the Chesapeake Bay area had ever seen; he couldn’t look at a boat again. He couldn’t pick up a chisel or smell oakum or hemp or tar without thinking about the life he had once had, the woman and the children he had once had, and the thought was too much.

In New York he did whatever work he could do. Mostly carpentry, plumbing when he could get it, though he was often underpaid. He rented a bedroom from an elderly Negro woman who cooked his meals and did his laundry, unbidden. Most nights he spent at the all-black bar.

He came in one blustery December day and sat down in his usual spot, running his hand over the smooth wood of the bar. The workmanship was impeccable, and he’d always suspected that some Negro had done it, perhaps during his first days of freedom in New York, so happy that he was able to do something for himself rather than for someone else that he put his whole heart into it.

The bartender, a man with an almost imperceptible limp, poured Jo his drink before Jo could even ask for it, and set it down. The man sitting next to him was whipping out that morning’s paper, now crumpled, wet from the damp of the bar or the few slung drops of the man’s drink.



“South Carolina seceded today,” the man said, to no one in particular. And, getting no particular response, he looked up from the paper and glanced around at the few people who were there. “War’s coming.”

The bartender started wiping down the bar with a rag that looked to Jo to be dirtier than the bar itself. “There won’t be a war,” he said calmly.

Jo had been hearing talk of war for years. It didn’t mean much to him, and he tried to veer away from the conversation whenever he could, leery of Southern sympathizers in the North or, worse, overly enthusiastic white Northerners who wanted him to be angrier and louder, to defend himself and his right to freedom.

But Jo wasn’t angry. Not anymore. He couldn’t really tell if what he had been before was angry. It was an emotion he had no use for, that accomplished nothing and meant even less than that. If anything, what Jo really felt was tired.

“I’m telling you, this is a bad sign. One Southern state secedes and the rest of them are gonna follow. Can’t call us the United States of America if half the states are gone. You mark my words, war’s coming.”

The bartender rolled his eyes. “I’m not marking a thing. And unless you got money for another drink, I think it’s time for you to stop marking and get going.”

The man huffed loudly as he rolled his paper in his hand. As he walked by, he tapped Jo on the shoulder with it, and when Jo turned to look at him, he winked as if he and Jo were in on some scheme together, as though they knew something the rest of the world didn’t, but Jo couldn’t figure out what that could possibly be.





Abena





AS ABENA MADE THE JOURNEY back to her village, new seeds in hand, she thought, yet again, about how old she was. An unmarried twenty-five-year-old woman was unheard of, in her village or any other on this continent or the next. But there were only a few men in her village, and none of them wanted to take a chance with Unlucky’s daughter. Abena’s father’s crops had never grown. Year after year, season after season, the earth spit up rotted plants or sometimes nothing at all. Who knew where this bad luck came from?