Homegoing(53)

“Where are you going?” she asked, standing in the doorway.

“I’m going to Osu. They say someone there has brought over a new plant. They say it will grow well here.”

“And what will I do while you are in Osu? They’ll probably kick me out the second you’re gone,” Abena said.

Ohene Nyarko set down his things and lifted Abena into his arms so that their faces were level. “Then they will have to deal with me when I get back.”

He put her down again. Outside, his children were picking bark from the Tweapia trees so that they could make chewing sticks to take to Kumasi and sell for food. Abena knew this shamed Ohene Nyarko—not that his children had found something useful to do, but that they had done so because of his inability to feed them.

They made love quickly that day, and Ohene Nyarko set out shortly after. Abena went home to find her parents sitting in front of a fire, roasting groundnuts.

“Ohene Nyarko says there is a new plant in Osu that is growing very well. He has gone to get it and bring it back to us.”

Her mother nodded. Her father shrugged. Abena knew she had shamed them. When the pronouncement of her future exile was made, her parents had gone to the elders to try to reason with them, to make them reconsider. At that time, and still, Unlucky was the oldest man in the village. Deference was still owed, even if he wasn’t allowed to be an elder because he wasn’t originally from the village.

“We have only one child,” Old Man had said, but the elders just turned their heads.

“What have you done?” Abena’s mother asked her at dinner that night, crying into her hands before lifting them up to the heavens. “What have I done to deserve this child?”

But at that point, only two bad years had gone by, and Abena assured them that the plants would grow, and Ohene Nyarko would marry her. Now their only solace was the fact that it seemed Abena had inherited her mother’s supposed barrenness, or Old Man’s family’s curse, or whatever it was that kept her from conceiving a child.

“Nothing will grow here,” Old Man said. “This village is finished. No one can keep living like this. No one can take one more year eating nothing but nuts and tree bark. They think they are exiling just you, but really this land has condemned us all to exile. You watch. It’s only a matter of time.”

—



Ohene Nyarko came back a week later with the new seeds. The plant was called cocoa, and he said it would change everything. He said the Akuapem people in the Eastern Region were already reaping the benefits of the new plant, selling it to the white men overseas at a rate that was reminiscent of the old trade.

“You don’t know how much these little seeds cost me!” Ohene Nyarko said, holding them in his palm so that everyone around him could see and feel and smell them. “But it will be worth it for the village. Trust me. They will have to stop calling us the Gold Coast and start calling us the Cocoa Coast!”

And he was right. Within months Ohene Nyarko’s cocoa trees had sprouted, bearing their gold and green and orange fruit. The villagers had never seen anything like it, and they were so curious, so eager to touch and open the pods before they were ready, that Ohene Nyarko and his sons had taken to sleeping outside so that they could keep watch.

“But will this feed us?” the villagers wondered after they had been shooed away by the children or yelled at by Ohene Nyarko himself.

Abena saw less and less of Ohene Nyarko in those first few months of his cocoa farming, but the absence comforted her. The harder he worked on the farm, the sooner his harvest would be good; and the sooner the harvest was good, the sooner they could marry. On the days she did see him, he would speak of nothing other than the cocoa and what it had cost him. His hands smelled of that new smell, sweet and dark and earthy, and after she had left him, she would continue to smell it on the places he had touched, the full dark circles of her nipples or just behind her ears. The plant was affecting them all.

Finally, Ohene Nyarko said that it was time for the harvest, and all the men and women from the village came to do as he instructed, as he had been instructed by the farmers in the Eastern Region. They cracked open the cocoa fruit to find the sweet white pulp that surrounded the small purple beans, and placed the pulpy beans on a bed of banana leaves, then covered them with more leaves. After that, Ohene Nyarko sent them home.



“We can’t live off of this,” the villagers whispered as they walked back to their houses. Some of the families had already started packing up their huts, discouraged by what they had seen inside the cocoa pods. But the rest of them came back after five days to spread the fermented beans in the sun so that they would dry. The villagers had each donated their kente sacks, and once dry, the cocoa beans were packed into these sacks.

“Now what?” they asked each other, glancing around as Ohene Nyarko put the sacks into his hut.

“Now we rest,” he announced to the group waiting outside. “Tomorrow I will go to the trading market and sell what I can.”

He slept in Abena’s hut that night, as brazenly and openly as if they had been married for forty years or more, and this gave Abena hope that soon they would be. But the man beside her on the floor was not the confident man who had promised an entire village redemption. In her arms, the man she had known since before they wore cloth to cover their loins trembled.