Homegoing(49)

—

In the evening, once she was certain her parents had gone to sleep, Abena slipped away to Ohene Nyarko’s compound. His first wife, Mefia, was boiling water outside her hut, the steam from the air and the pot making her sweat.

“Sister Mefia, is your husband in?” Abena asked, and Mefia rolled her eyes and pointed toward the door.

Ohene Nyarko’s farms were fruitful every year. Though their village was no more than two miles by two miles, though there was no one to even call Chief or Big Man, so small were their land and their status, Ohene was well respected. A man who could have done well elsewhere, had he not been born here.

“Your wife hates me,” Abena said.

“She thinks I am still sleeping with you,” Ohene Nyarko said, his eyes twinkling with mischief. It made Abena want to hit him.

She cringed when she thought of what had happened between them. They were only children then. Inseparable and mischievous. Ohene had discovered that the stick between his legs could perform tricks, and while Abena’s father and mother were out begging for a share of the elders’ food, as they did every week, Ohene had showed Abena those tricks.

“See?” he said as they watched it lift when she touched it. They had both seen their fathers’ this way, Ohene on those days his father went from one wife’s hut to the next, and Abena in the days before she got her own hut. But they had never known Ohene’s to do the same.



“What does it feel like?” she had asked.

He shrugged, smiled, and she knew what he felt was a good thing. She was born to parents who let her speak her mind, go after what she wanted, even if that thing was limited to boys. Now she wanted this.

“Lie on top of me!” she demanded, remembering what she’d seen her parents do so many times. Everyone in the village had always laughed at her parents, saying that Unlucky was too poor to get a second wife, but Abena knew the truth. That on those nights when she had slept on the far side of their small hut, pretending not to listen, she could hear her father whisper, “Akosua, you are my one and only.”

“We cannot do that until we have had our marriage ceremony!” Ohene said, mortified. All children had heard the fables about people who lay together before they had their marriage ceremonies: the far-fetched one about the men whose penises turned into trees while still inside the woman, growing branches into her stomach so that he could not exit her body; the simpler, truer ones about banishment, fines, and shame.

Finally that night, Abena had been able to convince Ohene, and he had fumbled around, thrusting at the entrance until he broke through and she hurt, thrusting inside: once, twice, then nothing. There was no loud moan or whimper as they had heard escape their fathers’ mouths. He simply left the same way he had arrived.

Back then, she had been the strong, unshakable one, the one who could talk him into anything. Now Abena stared at Ohene Nyarko as he stood broad-shouldered and smirking, waiting for the favor he knew was tugging at her lips.

“I need you to take me to Kumasi,” she said. It wasn’t wise for her to travel alone and unmarried, and she knew her father would not take her.

Ohene Nyarko laughed, a large and boisterous sound. “My darling, I cannot take you to Kumasi now. It is more than two weeks’ journey and the rains will soon be coming. I must tend to my farm.”

“Your sons do most of the work anyway,” she said. She hated when he called her his “darling,” always spoken in English, as she had taught him when they were children after she’d heard her father say it once and asked him what it meant. She hated that Ohene Nyarko should call her his beloved while his wife was outside cooking his evening meal and his sons were outside tending to his farm. It didn’t seem right that he should let her walk in shame as he had done all those years, not when she knew by looking at his fields that he would soon have enough wealth for a second wife.



“Eh, but who supervises my sons? A ghost? I cannot marry you if the yams don’t grow.”

“If you have not married me by now, you will never marry me,” Abena whispered, surprised at the hard lump that had so quickly formed in her throat. She hated when he joked about marrying her.

Ohene Nyarko clicked his tongue and pulled her to his chest. “Don’t cry now,” he said. “I will take you to see the Asante capital, all right? Don’t cry, my darling.”

—

Ohene Nyarko was a man of his word, and at the end of that week, the two set out for Kumasi, the home of the Asantehene.

Everything felt new to Abena. Compounds were actually compounds, built from stone with five or six huts apiece, not one or two at most. These huts were so tall they resurrected the image of ten-foot-tall giants from the stories her mother used to tell. Giants who swooped down to pluck tiny children up from the clay earth when they were misbehaving. Abena imagined the families of giants who lived in the town, fetching water, building fires to boil the bad children in their soups.

Kumasi sprawled before them endlessly. Abena had never been to a place where she did not know everyone’s name. She had never been to a farm that she could not measure with her own eye, so small was each family’s plot. Here, the farmlands were large and luscious and filled with men to work them. People sold their wares in the middle of the town, things she had never seen before, relics from the old days of steady trade with the British and the Dutch.