Homegoing (6 page)

“I can’t do it again,” she whispered.

“Do what again?” Esi asked, but she was hardly listening. Adrenaline was coursing through her so urgently that her hands trembled. Was this because of the message she had sent?

“I can’t do it again,” her mother whispered. “No more woods. No more fire.” She was rocking back and forth and cradling the fat flap of her stomach in her arms as though it were a child.

Abronoma came in from the slave quarters, her laugh echoing through the hut. “My father is here!” she said, dancing this way and that. “I told you he would come to find me, and he has come!”

The girl scurried away, and Esi didn’t know what would become of her. Outside, people were screaming and running. Children were crying.

Esi’s mother grabbed Esi’s hand and dropped something into it. It was a black stone, glimmering with gold. Smooth, as if it had been scrubbed carefully for years to preserve its perfect surface.

“I have been keeping this for you,” Maame said. “I wanted to give it to you on your wedding day. I—I left one like this for your sister. I left it with Baaba after I set the fire.”

“My sister?” Esi asked. So what Abronoma said was true.

Maame babbled nonsense words, words she had never spoken before. Sister, Baaba, fire. Sister, Baaba, fire. Esi wanted to ask more questions, but the noise outside was growing louder, and her mother’s eyes were growing blank, emptying somehow of something.

Esi stared at her mother then, and it was as though she were seeing her for the first time. Maame was not a whole woman. There were large swaths of her spirit missing, and no matter how much she loved Esi, and no matter how much Esi loved her, they both knew in that moment that love could never return what Maame had lost. And Esi knew, too, that her mother would die rather than run into the woods ever again, die before capture, die even if it meant that in her dying, Esi would inherit that unspeakable sense of loss, learn what it meant to be un-whole.

“You go,” Maame said as Esi tugged at her arms, tried to move her legs. “Go!” she repeated.

Esi stopped and tucked the black stone into her wrapper. She hugged her mother, took the knife from her skirt, put it in her mother’s hand, and ran.

She reached the woods quickly and found a palm tree that her arms could manage. She had been practicing, not knowing that it was for this. She wrapped her arms around the trunk, hugging it while using her legs to push her up, up, as far as she could go. The moon was full, as large as the rock of terror that was sitting in Esi’s gut. What had she ever known of terror?

Time passed and passed. Esi felt like her arms were encircling fire instead of the tree, so badly were they burning. The dark shadows of the leaves on the ground had started to look menacing. Soon, the sound of screaming people falling from the trees like plucked fruit could be heard all around her, and then a warrior was at the bottom of her tree. His language was unfamiliar, but she knew enough to know what came next. He threw a rock at her, then another, then another. The fourth rock slammed into her side, but still she held on. The fifth hit the lattice of her clasped fingers; her arms came undone, and she fell to the ground.

She was tied to others; how many, she didn’t know. She
didn’t see anyone from her compound. Not her stepmothers or half siblings. Not her mother. The rope around her wrists held her palms out in supplication. Esi studied the lines on those palms. They led nowhere. She had never felt so hopeless in her life.

Everyone walked. Esi had walked for miles with her father before and so she thought that she could take it. And indeed the first few days were not so bad, but by the tenth the calluses on Esi’s feet split open and blood seeped out, painting the leaves she left behind. Ahead of her, the bloody leaves of others. So many were crying that it was difficult to hear when the warriors spoke, but she wouldn’t have understood them anyway. When she could, she checked to see if the stone her mother had given her was still safely tucked in her wrapper. She didn’t know how long they would be allowed to keep their clothes. The leaves on the forest ground were so damp with blood and sweat and dew that a child in front of Esi slipped on them. One of the warriors caught him, helped him to stand up, and the little boy thanked him.

“Why should he thank him? They are going to eat us all,” the woman behind Esi said. Esi had to strain to hear through the haze of tears and buzz of insects that surrounded them.

“Who will eat us?” Esi asked.

“The white men. That is what my sister says. She says the white men buy us from these soldiers and then they cook us up like goats in soup.”

“No!” Esi cried, and one of the soldiers was quick to run up to her and poke her side with a stick. Once he left, her flank throbbing, Esi pictured the goats that walked freely around her village. Then she pictured herself capturing one—the way she roped its legs and laid its body down. The way she slit its neck. Was this how the white men would kill her? She shuddered.

“What’s your name?” Esi asked.

“They call me Tansi.”

“They call me Esi.”

And like that, the two became friends. They walked all day. The sores on Esi’s feet had no time to heal, so soon were they reopened. At times, the warriors would leave them tied to trees in the forest so that they could go ahead and survey the people of new villages. At times, more people from those villages would be taken and added to the rest of them. The rope around Esi’s wrists had started to burn. A strange burn, like nothing she had ever felt before, like cool fire, the scratch of salty wind.

And soon, the smell of that wind greeted Esi’s nose, and she knew from stories she had heard that they were nearing Fanteland.

The traders slapped their legs with sticks, making them move faster. For almost half of that week, they walked both day and night. The ones who couldn’t keep up were beaten with the sticks until suddenly, like magic, they could.

Finally, once Esi’s own legs had started to buckle, they reached the edge of some Fante village. They were all packed into a dark and damp cellar, and Esi had time to count the group. Thirty-five. Thirty-five people held together by rope.

They had time to sleep, and when they awoke they were given food. A strange porridge that Esi had never eaten before. She didn’t like the taste of it, but she could sense that there would be nothing else for a long while.

Soon, men came into the room. Some were the warriors that Esi had seen before, but others were new.

“So these are the slaves you have brought us?” one of the men said in Fante. It had been a long while since Esi had heard anyone speak that dialect, but she could understand him clearly.

“Let us out!” the others tied to Esi began to shout, now that they had an ear that could listen. Fante and Asante, fellow Akans. Two peoples, two branches split from the same tree. “Let us out!” they shouted until their voices grew hoarse from the words. Nothing but silence greeted them.

“Chief Abeeku,” another said. “We should not be doing this. Our Asante allies will be furious if they know we have worked with their enemies.”

The one called Chief threw up his hands. “Today their enemies pay more, Fiifi,” he said. “Tomorrow, if they pay more, we will work with them too. This is how you build a village. Do you understand?”

Esi watched the one called Fiifi. He was young for a warrior, but already she could tell that one day he would be a Big Man too. He shook his head, but didn’t speak again. He went out of the cellar and brought back more men.

They were white men, the first Esi had ever seen. She could not match their skin to any tree or nut or mud or clay that she had ever encountered.

“These people do not come from nature,” she said.

“I told you, they have come to eat us,” Tansi replied.

The white men approached them.

“Stand up!” the chief shouted, and they all stood. The chief turned to one of the white men. “See, Governor James,” he said in fast Fante, so fast Esi hardly understood him and wondered how this white man could. “The Asante are very strong. You may check them for yourselves.”

The men started to undress the ones who still had clothes on, checking them. For what? Esi didn’t know. She remembered the stone tucked in her cloth wrapper, and when the one called Fiifi reached her to undo the knot she had tied at the top of it, she launched a long, full stream of spit into his face.

He did not cry like the boy captive she had spit on in her own village square. He did not whimper or cower or seek comfort. He simply wiped his face, never taking his eyes off her.

The chief came to stand next to him. “What will you do about this, Fiifi? Will you let this go unpunished?” the chief asked. He spoke low, so that only Esi and Fiifi could hear.

Then, the sound of the smack. It was so loud, it took a moment for Esi to determine whether the pain she felt was on her ear or inside it. She cowered and sank to the ground, covering her face and crying. The smack had popped the stone from her wrapper, and she found it there, on the ground. She cried even harder, trying to distract them now. Then she laid her head against the smooth black stone. The coolness of it soothed her face. And when the men had finally turned their backs and left her there, forgetting for a moment to take off her wrapper, Esi took the stone from against her cheek and swallowed it.

Now the waste on the dungeon floor was up to Esi’s
ankles. There had never been so many women in the dungeon before. Esi could hardly breathe, but she moved her shoulders this way and that, until she had created some space. The woman beside her had not stopped leaking waste since the last time the soldiers fed them. Esi remembered her first day in the dungeon, when the same thing had been true of her. That day, she had found her mother’s stone in the river of shit. She had buried it, marking the spot on the wall so that she would remember when the time came.

“Shh, shh, shh,” Esi cooed to the woman. “Shh, shh, shh.” She had learned to stop saying that everything would be all right.

Before long, the door of the dungeon opened and a sliver of light peeked through. A couple of soldiers walked in. Something was wrong with these soldiers. There was less order to their movements, less structure. She had seen men drunk from palm wine before, the way their faces flushed and their gestures grew wilder. The way their hands moved as though ready to collect even the very air around them.

The soldiers looked around and the women in the dungeon began to murmur. One of them grabbed a woman on the far end and pushed her against the wall. His hands found her breasts and then began to move down the length of her body, lower and lower still, until the sound that escaped her lips was a scream.

The women in the stack started to hiss then. The hiss said, “Quiet, stupid girl, or they will beat us all!” The hiss was high and sharp, the collective cry of a hundred and fifty women filled with anger and fear. The soldier who had his hands on the woman began to sweat. He shouted back at them all.

Their voices hushed to a hum, but did not stop. The murmur vibrated so low, Esi felt as though it were coming from her own stomach.

“What are they doing!” they hissed. “What are they doing!” The hissing grew louder, and soon the men were shouting something back at them.

The other soldier was still walking around, looking at each woman carefully. When he came upon Esi, he smiled, and for one quick second, she confused that act as one of kindness, for it had been so long since she’d seen someone smile.

He said something, and then his hands were on her arm.

She tried to fight him, but the lack of food and the wounds from the beatings had left her too weak to even collect her saliva and spit at him. He laughed at her attempt and dragged her by the elbow out of the room. As they walked into the light, Esi looked at the scene behind her. All those women hissing and crying.

He took her to his quarters above the place where she and the rest of the slaves had been kept. Esi was so unused to light that now it blinded her. She couldn’t see where she was being taken. When they got to his quarters, he gestured toward a glass of water, but Esi stood still.

He gestured to the whip that sat on his desk. She nodded, took one sip of the water, and watched it slip out of her numb lips.

He put her on a folded tarp, spread her legs, and entered her. She screamed, but he placed his hand over her lips, then put his fingers in her mouth. Biting them only seemed to please him, and so she stopped. She closed her eyes, forcing herself to listen instead of see, pretending that she was still the little girl in her mother’s hut on a night that her father had come in, that she was still looking at the mud walls, wanting to give them privacy, to separate herself. Wanting to understand what kept pleasure from turning into pain.

When he had finished, he looked horrified, disgusted with her. As though he were the one who had had something taken from him. As though he were the one who had been violated. Suddenly Esi knew that the soldier had done something that even the other soldiers would find fault with. He looked at her like her body was his shame.

Once night fell and the light receded, leaving only the darkness that Esi had come to know so well, the soldier snuck her out of his quarters. She had finished her crying, but still he shushed her. He wouldn’t look at her, only forced her along, down, down, back to the dungeons.

When she got there, the murmur had subsided. The women were no longer crying or hissing. There was only silence as the soldier returned her to her spot.

Days went on. The cycle repeated. Food, then no food. Esi could do nothing but replay her time in the light. She had not stopped bleeding since that night. A thin trickle of red traveled down her leg, and Esi just watched it. She no longer wanted to talk to Tansi. She no longer wanted to listen to stories.

She had been wrong when she’d watched her parents that night as they worked together in her mother’s hut. There was no pleasure.

The dungeon door opened. A couple of soldiers walked in, and Esi recognized one of them from the cellar in Fanteland. He was tall and his hair was the color of tree bark after rain, but the color was starting to turn gray. There were many golden buttons along his coat and on the flaps above the shoulders. She thought and thought, trying to push out the cobwebs that had formed in her brain and remember what the chief had called the man.