Homegoing(85)

The door to the house was open, but still Yaw knocked twice, Esther standing behind him.

“Hello?” a confused voice called. A woman who looked older than Yaw, carrying a clay bowl, rounded the corner. When she saw Yaw, saw his scar, she gasped, and the bowl fell to the ground, shattering, scattering pieces of red clay from the door all the way into the garden. Tiny pieces of clay that they would never find, that would be absorbed into that earth from which they came.

The woman was shouting. “We thank God for all of his mercies! We thank him that he is alive. Our God, he does not sleep-oh!” She danced around the room. “Old Lady, God has brought you your son! Old Lady, God has brought you your son so you do not have to go to Asamando without seeing him. Old Woman, come and see!” she yelled.

Behind him, Yaw could hear Esther clapping her hands together in her own mini praise. He didn’t turn, but he knew she was smiling brightly, and the warmth of that thought emboldened him to step a bit further into the room.

“Does she not hear me?” the woman mumbled to herself, turning sharply toward the bedroom.

Yaw kept moving, at first following the woman, but then continuing straight until he reached the living room. His mother sat in the corner.



“So you have returned home at last,” she said, smiling.

If he had not already known that the woman in this house was his mother, he would not have known by looking at her. Yaw was fifty-five, which meant she would be seventy-six, but she seemed younger. Her eyes had the unburdened look of the young, and her smile was generous, yet wise. When she stood up her back was straight, her bones not yet hunched from the weight of each year. When she walked toward him, her limbs were fluid, not stiff, the joints never halting. And when she touched him, when she took his hands in her own, her scarred and ruined hands, when she rubbed the backs of his hands with her crooked thumbs, he felt how soft her own burns were, how very, very soft.

“The son has come home at last. The dreams, they do not fail to come true. They do not fail.”

She continued to hold his hands. In the entryway, the servant woman cleared her throat. Yaw turned to find her and Esther standing there, grinning at them.

“Old Woman, we will make dinner!” the woman shouted. Yaw wondered if her voice was always this loud or if the volume was for him.

“Please, don’t go to any trouble,” he begged.

“Eh? The son comes home after all these years, does the mother not kill a goat?” She sucked her teeth on the way out of the door.

“And you?” Yaw asked Esther.

“Who will boil the yam while the woman kills the goat?” she asked, her voice mischievous.

Yaw watched them go, and for the first time he grew nervous. Suddenly, he felt something he had not felt in a long, long time.

“What are you doing?” he shouted, for his mother had put her hand on his scar, running her fingers along the ruined skin that he alone had touched for nearly half a century.

She continued, undeterred by the anger in his voice. She took her own burned fingers from the lost eyebrow to the raised cheek to the scarred chin. She touched all of it, and only once she had finished did Yaw begin to weep.

She pulled him down to the ground with her, pulled his head to her bosom, and began to chant, softly, “My son-o! My son! My son-o! My son!”



The two stayed like this for a long while, and after Yaw had cried more tears than he had ever cried before, after his mother had finished calling his name out into the world, he peeled himself away so that he could look at her.

“Tell me the story of how I got my scar,” he said.

She sighed. “How can I tell you the story of your scar without first telling you the story of my dreams? And how do I talk about my dreams without talking about my family? Our family?”

Yaw waited. His mother got off the ground and motioned for him to do the same. She pointed to a chair on one side of the room, and she took the chair on the other. She looked at the wall behind his head.

“Before you were born, I began to have bad dreams. The dreams started out the same—a woman made of fire would visit me. In her arms, she carried her two fire children, but then the children would disappear and the woman would turn her anger toward me.

“Even before the dreams began, I was not well. My mother died at the hands of the Missionary at the school in Kumasi. Do you know it?”

Yaw shook his head. He had never heard this before, and even if he had, he would have been too young to remember it.

“The Missionary raised me. My only friend was a fetish priest. I was always a sad girl because I did not know that there was any other way to be. When I married your father, I thought I could be happy, and when I had your sisters…”

Here, her voice caught, but she lifted her shoulders, began again.

“When I had your sisters, I thought I was happy, but then I saw a white man burn in the square in Edweso and the dreams began. Then the war began and the dreams grew worse. Your father came back without a leg, and the dreams grew worse. I had you, and the sadness did not stop. I tried to fight sleep, but I am human and sleep is not. We were not equally matched. In my sleep one night, I set the hut on fire. They say your father could only save one, you. But that is not entirely true. He also saved me from the townspeople. For many years I wished that he had not.

“They only let me see you so that I could feed you. Then they sent you away, and would not tell me where. I have lived here in this house with Kukua since that day.”