Homegoing (27 page)

Then, when Josephine was four and Carson ten, Willie joined the choir at church. She had been wanting to do it since the first day she heard them sing, but stages, even those that were altars, made her remember the Jazzing. Then she’d met Eli and stopped going to church. Then Eli would leave and she’d start going again. Finally, she went to a rehearsal, but she would stand in the back, quietly, moving her lips but letting nothing escape them.

Willie and Carson were nearing the limits of Harlem. Carson crunched
on his cone and looked up at her skeptically, and she just smiled back reassuringly, but she knew, and he knew, that they would have to turn soon. When the colors started changing, they would have to turn.

But they didn’t. Now there were so many white people around them that Willie started to feel scared. She took Carson’s hand in hers. The days of Pratt City mixing were so far behind her, she almost felt as though she had dreamed them. Here, now, she tried to keep her body small, squaring her shoulders in, keeping her head down. She could feel Carson doing the same thing. They walked two blocks like this, past the place where the black sea of Harlem turned into the white rush of the rest of the world, and then they stopped at an intersection.

There were so many people walking around them that Willie was surprised she noticed at all, but she did.

It was Robert. He was bent down on one knee, tying the shoe of a little boy of maybe three or four. A woman was holding the little boy’s hand on the other side of him. The woman had finger-curled blond hair cut short so that the longest strands just barely licked the tip of her chin. Robert stood back up. He kissed the woman, the little boy smushed between them for only a moment. Then Robert looked up and across the intersection. Willie’s eyes met his.

The cars passed, and Carson tugged on the end of Willie’s shirt. “We gon’ cross, Mama?” he asked. “The cars are gone. We can pass,” he said.

Across the street, the blond woman’s lips were moving. She touched Robert’s shoulder.

Willie smiled at Robert, and it wasn’t until that smile that she realized she forgave him. She felt like the smile had opened a valve, like the pressure of anger and sadness and confusion and loss was shooting out of her, into the sky and away. Away.

Robert smiled back at her, but soon he turned to talk to the blond woman, and the three of them continued on in a different direction.

Carson followed Willie’s gaze to where Robert had been. “Mama?” he said again.

Willie shook her head. “No, Carson. We can’t go any further. I think it’s time we go back.”

That Sunday, the church was packed. Eli’s book of poems was
set to be published in the spring, and he was so happy that he had stayed put longer than Willie could remember him ever staying before. He sat in a middle pew with Josephine in his lap and Carson at his side. The pastor went up to the pulpit and said, “Church, ain’t God great?”

And the church said, “Amen.”

He said, “Church, ain’t God great?”

And the church said, “Amen.”

He said, “Church, I tell you God done brought me to the other side today. Church, I put down my cross and I ain’t never gon’ pick it back up.”

“Glory, hallelujah,” came the shout.

Willie was standing in the back of the choir holding the songbook when her hands began to tremble. She thought about H coming home every night from the mines with his pickax and his shovel. He would set them down on the porch and take his boots off before he came in because Ethe would give him an earful if he tracked coal dust into the house she kept so clean. He used to say the best part of his day was when he could put that shovel down and walk inside to see his girls waiting for him.

Willie looked into the pews. Eli was bouncing Josephine on his knees and the little girl was smiling her gummy smile. Willie’s hands trembled still, and in a moment of complete quiet, she dropped the songbook down on the stage with a great thud. And everyone in the sanctuary, the congregants and pastor, Sisters Dora and Bertha and the whole choir, turned to look at her. She stepped forward, trembling still, and she sang.

THE HARMATTAN WAS
COMING IN
. Yaw could see dust sweeping up from the hard clay and being carried all the way to his classroom window on the second floor of the school in Takoradi where he had been teaching for the last ten years. He wondered how bad the winds would be this year. When he was five, still living in Edweso, the winds were so strong that they snapped tree trunks. The dust was so thick that when he held out his fingers, they disappeared before him.

Yaw shuffled his papers. He had come to his classroom on the weekend before the start of the second term to think, perhaps write. He stared at the title of his book,
Let the Africans Own Africa.
He had written two hundred pages and thrown out nearly as many. Now even the title offended him. He put it away, knowing that if he didn’t he would do something rash. Open his window, maybe, let the winds carry the pages away.

“What you need is a wife, Mr. Agyekum. Not that silly book.”

Yaw was eating dinner at Edward Boahen’s house for the sixth night that week. On Sunday, he would eat there for the seventh. Edward’s wife liked to complain that she was married to two men, but Yaw complimented her cooking so often that he knew she would continue to welcome him.

“Why do I need a wife when I have you?” Yaw asked.

“Eh, careful now,” Edward said, pausing his steady food-shoveling for the first time since his wife put his bowl in front of him.

Edward was the maths teacher at the same Roman Catholic school in Takoradi where Yaw taught history. The two had met at Achimota School in Accra, and Yaw cherished their friendship more than he cherished most things.

“Independence is coming,” Yaw said, and Mrs. Boahen sighed one of her deep-chested sighs.

“If it’s coming, let it come. I am tired of hearing you talk about it,” she said. “What good is independence to you if you don’t have someone to cook your dinner!” She rushed off into the small stone house to collect more water for them, and Yaw laughed. He could picture the caption they would put under her name in the revolutionist papers: “Typical Gold Coast woman, more concerned with dinner than with freedom.”

“What you should be doing is saving your money to go to England or America for more schooling. You can’t lead a revolution from behind your teacher’s desk,” Edward said.

“I’m too old to go to America now. Too old for revolution, too. Besides, if we go to the white man for school, we will just learn the way the white man wants us to learn. We will come back and build the country the white man wants us to build. One that continues to serve them. We will never be free.”

Edward shook his head. “You are too rigid, Yaw. We have to start somewhere.”

“So let us start with ourselves.” This was what his book was about, but he didn’t say anything more, for he already knew the argument that would come from it. Both men had been born around the time the Asante were absorbed into the British Colony. Both had fathers who had fought in the various wars for freedom. They wanted the same things, but had different ideas of how to get them. The truth was, Yaw didn’t think he could lead a revolution from anywhere. No one would read his book, even if he did finish it.

Mrs. Boahen came back with a large bowl of water, and the two men began to rinse their hands in it.

“Mr. Agyekum, I know a nice girl. She is still in her childbearing years so there is no need to worry—”

“I should be going,” Yaw said, cutting her off. He knew it was rude. After all, Mrs. Boahen was not wrong. It was not her place to cook for him, but he didn’t feel that it was her place to lecture him either. He shook hands with Edward, and with Mrs. Boahen too, then made his way back to his own small house on the school grounds.

As he walked the mile length of the school grounds, he saw the young boys playing football. They were agile boys, in full control of their bodies. They had a boldness to their movements that Yaw had never possessed when he was their age. He stood and watched them for a moment, and soon the ball came flying toward him. He caught it, and was grateful for that small bit of athleticism.

They waved at him, and sent a new student over to fetch the ball. The boy walked up, smiling at first, but as he got closer, the smile fell from his face and a look of fear replaced it. He stood in front of Yaw, saying nothing.

“Do you want your ball?” Yaw asked, and the boy nodded quickly, staring still.

Yaw threw the ball at him, more forcefully than he meant to, and the young boy caught it and ran.

“What’s wrong with his face?” Yaw heard him ask as he approached the others, but before they could answer, Yaw was already walking away.

It was Yaw’s tenth year of teaching at the school. Every
year was the same. The new crop of schoolboys would begin to flower the school grounds, their hair freshly cut, their school uniforms freshly pressed. They would bring with them their timetables, their books, what little money their parents or villages had been able to collect for them. They would ask each other whom they had for this or that subject, and when one said Mr. Agyekum, another would tell the story that his elder brother or cousin had heard about the history teacher.

On the first day of the second term, Yaw watched the new students amble in. They were always well-behaved children, these boys, having been handpicked for their brightness or their wealth in order to attend school, learn the white man’s book. In the walkways, on the way to his classroom, they would be so boisterous that it was possible to imagine them as they must have been in their villages, wrestling and singing and dancing before they knew what a book was, before their families knew that a book was a thing a child could want—need, even. Then, once they reached the classroom, once the textbooks were placed on their small wooden desks, they would grow quiet, spellbound. They were so quiet on that first day that Yaw could hear the baby birds on his window ledge, begging to be fed.

“What does the board say?” Yaw asked. He taught Form 1 students, fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds mostly, who had already learned to read and write in English in their lower-level classes. When Yaw had first gotten the post, he had argued with the headmaster that he should be able to teach in the boys’ regional tongues, but the headmaster had laughed at him. Yaw knew it was a foolish hope. There were too many languages to even try.

Yaw watched them. He could always tell which boy would raise his hand first by the way he pushed forward in his seat and moved his eyes from left to right to see if anyone else would challenge his desire to speak first. This time, a very small boy named Peter raised his hand.

“It says, ‘History is Storytelling,’ ” Peter answered. He smiled, the pent-up excitement releasing.

“ ‘History is Storytelling,’ ” Yaw repeated. He walked down the aisles between the rows of seats, making sure to look each boy in the eye. Once he finished walking and stood in the back of the room, where the boys would have to crane their necks in order to see him, he asked, “Who would like to tell the story of how I got my scar?”

The students began to squirm, their limbs growing limp and wobbly. They looked at each other, coughed, looked away.

“Don’t be shy,” Yaw said, smiling now, nodding encouragingly. “Peter?” he asked. The boy, who only seconds before had been so happy to speak, began to plead with his eyes. The first day with a new class was always Yaw’s favorite.

“Mr. Agyekum, sah?” Peter said.

“What story have you heard? About my scar?” Yaw asked, smiling still, hoping, now, to ease some of the child’s growing fear.

Peter cleared his throat and looked at the ground. “They say you were born of fire,” he started. “That this is why you are so smart. Because you were lit by fire.”

“Anyone else?”

Timidly, a boy named Edem raised his hand. “They say your mother was fighting evil spirits from Asamando.”

Then William: “I heard your father was so sad by the Asante loss that he cursed the gods, and the gods took vengeance.”

Another, named Thomas: “I heard you did it to yourself, so that you would have something to talk about on the first day of class.”

All of the boys laughed, and Yaw had to stifle his own amusement. Word of his lesson had gotten around, he knew. The older boys told some of the younger ones what to expect from him.

Still he continued, making his way back to the front of the room to look at his students, the bright boys of the uncertain Gold Coast, learning the white book from a scarred man.

“Whose story is correct?” Yaw asked them. They looked around at the boys who had spoken, as though trying to establish their allegiance by holding a gaze, casting a vote by sending a glance.

Finally, once the murmuring subsided, Peter raised his hand. “Mr. Agyekum, we cannot know which story is correct.” He looked at the rest of the class, slowly understanding. “We cannot know which story is correct because we were not there.”

Yaw nodded. He sat in his chair at the front of the room and looked at all the young men. “This is the problem of history. We cannot know that which we were not there to see and hear and experience for ourselves. We must rely upon the words of others. Those who were there in the olden days, they told stories to the children so that the children would know, so that the children could tell stories to their children. And so on, and so on. But now we come upon the problem of conflicting stories. Kojo Nyarko says that when the warriors came to his village their coats were red, but Kwame Adu says that they were blue. Whose story do we believe, then?”

The boys were silent. They stared at him, waiting.

“We believe the one who has the power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must always ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too. From there, you begin to get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture.”

The room was still. The birds on the ledge were still waiting for their food to come, still crying for their mother. Yaw gave the boys some time to think about what he had said, to respond, but when no one did, he continued. “Let us open our textbooks to page—”

One of the students was coughing. Yaw looked up to see William with his hand raised. He nodded at the boy to speak.

“But, Mr. Agyekum, sah, you still have not told us the story of how you got your scar.”

Yaw could feel all the boys directing their gazes toward him, but kept his head down. He resisted the urge to put his hand up to the left side of his face, feel the raised and leathery skin there with its many ripples and lines that, when he was still just a child, reminded Yaw of a map. He had wanted that map to lead him out of Edweso, and in some ways it had. His village could hardly look at him and had collected money to send him to school so he could learn, but also, Yaw suspected, so they would not have to be reminded of their shame. In other ways, the map of Yaw’s scarred skin had led him nowhere. He had not married. He would not lead. Edweso had come with him.

Yaw did not touch his scar. Instead, he set his book down carefully and reminded himself to smile. He said, “I was only a baby. All I know is what I’ve heard.”

What he’d heard: That the Crazy Woman of Edweso, the wanderer,
his mother, Akua, had set the hut on fire while he, still a baby, and his sisters slept. That his father, Asamoah, the Crippled Man, had only been able to save one, the son. That Crippled Man had kept Crazy Woman from burning. That Crazy Woman and Crippled Man had been exiled to the outskirts of town. That the town had collected money to send the scarred son to school, when he was still so young he had yet to forget the taste of his mother’s breast. That Crippled Man had died while the scarred son was still in school. That Crazy Woman lived on.

Yaw had not been to Edweso since the day he left for school. For many years, his mother sent letters, each written in the hand of whomever she’d convinced to write for her that day. The letters begged Yaw to come see her, but he never responded, and so, eventually, she stopped. When he was still in school, Yaw spent his leaves with Edward’s family in Oseim. They took him in as though he were one of their own, and Yaw loved them as though he belonged to them. An unapologetic, unquestioning love like that of the stray dog that follows the man home from work every evening, happy, simply, to be allowed to walk nearby. It was in Oseim that Yaw had met the first girl he would ever be interested in. In school, he had loved the Romantic poets best, and he had spent nights in Oseim copying Wordsworth and Blake onto tree leaves that he scattered around the spot near the river where she went to fetch water.

He spent a whole week doing this, knowing that the words of white Englishmen would mean nothing to her, that she could not read them. Knowing that she would have to come to him to find out what the leaves said. He would think about it every night. The girl bringing her bundle of leaves to him so that he might recite “A Dream” or “A Night Thought” to her.

Instead, she went to Edward. It was Edward who read the lines to her, and afterward, it was Edward who told her that the leaves were Yaw’s doing.

“He likes you, you know,” Edward said. “Maybe he will one day ask you to marry him.”

But the girl shook her head, clucked her tongue in distaste. “If I marry him, my children will be ugly,” she declared.

That night, lying next to Edward in his room, Yaw listened as his best friend told him that he had explained to the girl that you could not inherit a scar.

Now, nearing his fiftieth birthday, Yaw no longer knew if he believed this was true.

The semester passed. In June, Kwame Nkrumah, a political leader from
Nkroful, started the Convention People’s Party and Edward joined soon thereafter. “Independence is coming, my brother,” he was fond of saying to Yaw on the nights when Yaw still joined him and his wife for dinner. This happened less and less. Mrs. Boahen was expecting her fifth child and the pregnancy was difficult. So difficult that the Boahens stopped entertaining. First just the other teachers and town friends that they had acquired, but then Yaw, too, noticed that even his welcome began to wear.