Homegoing (9 page)

“You can keep all the captives but one,” Fiifi was saying to someone. “Take them back with you when we split up in Dunkwa.”

Quey had just been summoned to his compound. Before him, warriors were dressing for battle, muskets, machetes, and spears in hand.

Quey moved further in, trying to see the man his uncle spoke to.

“Ah, Quey, you’ve finally come to greet me, enh?”

The voice was deeper than Quey remembered and yet he knew it immediately. His hand trembled as he held it out to shake with his old friend. Cudjo’s grip was firm, his hand soft. The handshake took Quey back to Cudjo’s village, to the snail race, to Richard.

“What are you doing here?” Quey asked. He hoped his voice didn’t betray him. He hoped he sounded calm and sure.

“Your uncle has promised us a good mission today. I was eager to accept.”

Fiifi clapped Cudjo’s shoulder and moved on to speak to the warriors.

“You never returned my message,” Cudjo said softly.

“I didn’t have time.”

“I see,” Cudjo said. He looked the same, taller, broader, but the same. “Your uncle tells me you haven’t yet married.”

“No.”

“I married last spring. A chief must be married.”

“Oh, right,” Quey said in English, forgetting himself.

Cudjo laughed. He took up his machete and leaned in closer to Quey. “You speak English like a British man, just like Richard, enh? When I have finished up north with your uncle, I will return to my own village. You are always welcome there. Come and see me.”

Fiifi gave one last cry to gather the men, and Cudjo went running. As he sped off, Cudjo glanced back and smiled at Quey. Quey didn’t know how long they would be gone, but he knew he would not sleep until his uncle returned. No one had told him anything about the mission. Indeed, Quey had seen the warriors go out a handful of times and never questioned it, but now his heart thumped so hard it felt like a toad had replaced his throat. He could taste every beat. Why had Fiifi told Cudjo that Quey wasn’t married? Had Cudjo asked? How could Quey be welcomed in Cudjo’s village? Would he live in the chief’s compound? In his own hut, like a third wife? Or would he be in a hut on the edge of the village, alone? The toad croaked. There was a way. There was no way. There was a way. Quey’s mind raced back and forth with every thump.

One week passed. Then two. Then three. On the first day of the fourth week, Quey was finally summoned to the slave cellar. Fiifi was lying against the wall of the cellar, his hand covering his flank as it oozed blood from a large gash. Soon one of the company doctors arrived with a thick needle and thread and began sewing Fiifi up.

“What happened?” Quey asked. Fiifi’s men were guarding the cellar door, clearly shaken. They held both machetes and muskets, and when so much as a leaf rustled in the woods, they would clutch each weapon tighter.

Fiifi began laughing, a sound like the last roar of a dying animal. The doctor finished closing up the wound and poured a brown liquid over it, causing Fiifi to stop laughing and cry out.

“Quiet!” one of Fiifi’s soldiers said. “We don’t know who may have followed us.”

Quey knelt down to meet his uncle’s eyes. “What happened?”

Fiifi was gnashing his teeth against the slow-moving wind. He lifted an arm and pointed to the cellar door. “Look what we have brought, my son,” he said.

Quey stood up and went to the door. Fiifi’s men handed him a lamp and then moved aside so that he could enter. When he did, the darkness echoed around him, reverberating against him as though he had stepped inside a hollowed drum. He lifted the lamp higher and saw the slaves.

He didn’t expect to see many, for the next shipment was not set to arrive until early the following week. He knew immediately that these were not slaves the Asantes brought in. These were people Fiifi had stolen. There were two men tied together in the corner, big warriors, bleeding from minor flesh wounds. When they saw Quey, they began to jeer in Twi, thrashing against their chains so that they broke fresh flesh, bleeding anew.

On the opposite wall sat a young girl who made no noise. She looked up at Quey with large moon eyes, and he knelt down beside her to study her face. On her cheek was a large oval-shaped scar, a medical mark James had taught Quey years before, before he’d shipped him off to England, a mark of the Asantes.

Quey got up, looking at the girl still. Slowly, he backed away, realizing who the girl must be. Outside, his uncle had passed out from the pain, and the soldiers had loosened their grips on their weapons, content that no one had followed them.

Quey looked at the one closest to the door, grabbed his shoulder, shook him. “What in God’s name are you doing with the Asante king’s daughter?”

The soldier lowered his eyes, shook his head, and did not speak. Whatever Fiifi had planned, it could not fail, or the entire village would pay with their lives.

Every night after that night, Quey sat with Fiifi as he
healed. He heard the story of the capture, how Fiifi and his men had stolen into Asante in the dead of night, informed by one of their contacts as to when the girl would have the fewest guards around her, how Fiifi had been slit around like a coconut by the tip of her guard’s machete when he reached for her, how they had dragged their captives south, through the forest, until they reached the Coast.

Her name was Nana Yaa and she was the eldest daughter of Osei Bonsu, the highest power in the Asante Kingdom, a man who commanded respect from the queen of England herself for his sway over the Gold Coast’s role in the slave trade. Nana Yaa was an important political bargaining tool, and people had been trying to capture her since her infancy. Wars had been started over her: to get her, to free her, to marry her.

Quey was so worried he didn’t dare ask how Cudjo had fared. Soon, Quey knew, Fiifi’s informant would be caught and tortured until he told who had taken her. It was only a matter of time until the consequences came to meet them.

“Uncle, the Asantes will not forgive this. They will—”

Fiifi cut him off. Since the night of the capture, every time Quey tried to broach the topic of the girl, to gauge Fiifi’s intentions, the man clutched his side and grew quiet or told one of his long-winded fables.

“The Asantes have been angry with us for years,” Fiifi said. “Ever since the time they found out we traded other Asantes brought to us by some northerners Badu found. Badu told me then that we trade with the ones who pay more. It is the same thing I told the Asantes when they found out, the same thing I told you. Asante anger is to be expected, Quey, and you are right that it is not to be underestimated. But trust me, they are wise where we are cunning. They will forgive.”

Fiifi stopped talking and Quey watched as his uncle’s youngest daughter, a girl of only two, played in the yard. After a while, a house girl came by with a snack of groundnuts and bananas. She approached Fiifi first, but he stopped her. With a level voice and leveled gaze, he said, “You must serve my son first.”

The woman did as she was told, bowing before Quey, and reaching out with her right hand. After they had both received their fill, the girl left while Quey watched the measured sway of her ample hips.

“Why do you always say that?” Quey asked once he was sure she had gone.

“Why do I say what?”

“That I’m your son.” Quey looked down, spoke so softly that he hoped the ground would swallow his sound. “You never claimed me before.”

Fiifi split the shell of a groundnut with his teeth, separating it from the nut itself and spitting it onto the ground before them. He looked toward the thin dirt road that led away from his compound and toward the village square. He looked as though he were expecting someone.

“You were in England too long, Quey. Maybe you have forgotten that here, mothers, sisters, and their sons are most important. If you are chief, your sister’s son is your successor because your sister was born of your mother but your wife was not. Your sister’s son is more important to you than even your own son. But, Quey, your mother is not my sister. She is not the daughter of my mother, and when she married a white man from the Castle, I began to lose her, and because my mother had always hated her, I began to hate her too.

“And this hate was good, at first. It made me work harder. I would think about her and all of the white people in the Castle, and I would say, My people here in this village, we will be stronger than the white men. We will be richer too. And when Badu became too greedy and too fat to fight, I began to fight for him, and even then I hated your mother and your father. And I hated my own mother and I hated my own father too for the kind of people I knew that they were. I suppose I even began to hate myself.

“The last time your mother came to this village I was fifteen years old. It was for my father’s funeral, and after Effia had gone, Baaba told me that because she was not truly my sister, I owed her nothing. And for many years I believed that, but I am an old man now, wiser, but weaker. In my youth, no man could have touched me with his machete, but now…” Fiifi’s voice trailed off as he gestured to his wound. He cleared his throat and continued. “Soon, all that I have helped to build in this village will no longer belong to me. I have sons but I have no sisters, and so all that I have helped to build will blow away like dust in a breeze.

“I am the one who told your governor to give you this job, Quey, because you are the person I am supposed to leave all of this to. I loved Effia as a sister once, so even though you are not of my mother, you are the closest thing to a firstborn nephew that I have. I will give you all that I have. I will make up for my mother’s wrongdoings. Tomorrow night, you will marry Nana Yaa, so that even if the Asante king and all of his men come knocking on my door, they cannot deny you. They cannot kill you or anyone in this village, because it is now your village as it was once your mother’s. I will make sure you become a very powerful man, so that even after the white men have all gone from this Gold Coast—and believe me, they will go—you will still matter long after the Castle walls have crumbled.”

Fiifi began to pack a pipe. He blew out of it until white smoke formed little roofs above the pipe’s bowl. The rainy season was coming and soon the air would start to thicken, and the people of the Gold Coast would have to relearn how to move in a climate that was always hot and wet, as though it intended to cook its inhabitants for dinner.

This was how they lived there, in the bush: Eat or be eaten. Capture or be captured. Marry for protection. Quey would never go to Cudjo’s village. He would not be weak. He was in the business of slavery, and sacrifices had to be made.

THERE WAS NO
DRINKING GOURD
, no spiritual soothing enough to mend a broken spirit. Even the Northern Star was a hoax.

Every day, Ness picked cotton under the punishing eye of the southern sun. She had been at Thomas Allan Stockham’s Alabama plantation for three months. Two weeks before, she was in Mississippi. A year before that, she was in a place she would only ever describe as Hell.

Though she had tried, Ness couldn’t remember how old she was. Her best guess was twenty-five, but each year since the one when she was plucked from her mother’s arms had felt like ten years. Ness’s mother, Esi, had been a solemn, solid woman who was never known to tell a happy story. Even Ness’s bedtime stories had been ones about what Esi used to call “the Big Boat.” Ness would fall asleep to the images of men being thrown into the Atlantic Ocean like anchors attached to nothing: no land, no people, no worth. In the Big Boat, Esi said, they were stacked ten high, and when a man died on top of you, his weight would press the pile down like cooks pressing garlic. Ness’s mother, called Frownie by the other slaves because she never smiled, used to tell the story of how she’d been cursed by a Little Dove long, long ago, cursed and sisterless, she would mutter as she swept, left without her mother’s stone. When they sold Ness in 1796, Esi’s lips had stood in that same thin line. Ness could remember reaching out for her mother, flailing her arms and kicking her legs, fighting against the body of the man who’d come to take her away. And still Esi’s lips had not moved, her hands had not reached out. She stood there, solid and strong, the same as Ness had always known her to be. And though Ness had met warm slaves on other plantations, black people who smiled and hugged and told nice stories, she would always miss the gray rock of her mother’s heart. She would always associate real love with a hardness of spirit.

Thomas Allan Stockham was a good master, if such a thing existed. He gave them five-minute breaks every three hours, and the field slaves were allowed onto the porch to receive one mason jar full of water from the house slaves.

This day in late June, Ness waited in line for water beside TimTam. He was a gift to the Stockham family from their neighbors, the Whitmans, and Tom Allan often liked to say that TimTam was the best gift he’d ever received, better even than the gray-tailed cat his brother had given him for his fifth birthday or the red wagon he’d received for his second.

“How your day been?” TimTam asked.

Ness turned toward him just slightly. “Ain’t all days the same?”

TimTam laughed, a sound that rumbled like thunder built from the cloud of his gut and expelled through the sky of his mouth. “I s’pose you right,” he said.

Ness was not certain she would ever get used to hearing English spill out of the lips of black people. In Mississippi, Esi had spoken to her in Twi until their master caught her. He’d given Esi five lashes for every Twi word Ness spoke, and when Ness, seeing her battered mother, had become too scared to speak, he gave Esi five lashes for each minute of Ness’s silence. Before the lashes, her mother had called her Maame, after her own mother, but the master had whipped Esi for that too, whipped her until she cried out “My goodness!”—the words escaping her without thought, no doubt picked up from the cook, who used to say it to punctuate every sentence. And because those had been the only English words to escape Esi’s mouth without her struggling to find them, she believed that what she was saying must have been something divine, like the gift of her daughter, and so that goodness had turned into, simply, Ness.

“Where you comin’ from?” TimTam asked. He chewed the chaffy end of a wheat stalk and spit.

“You ask too many questions,” Ness said. She turned away. It was her turn to receive water from Margaret, the head house slave, but the woman poured only enough to fill a quarter of the glass.

“We ain’t got enough today,” she said, but Ness could see that the buckets of water on the porch behind her were enough to last a week.

Margaret looked at Ness, but Ness got the feeling that she was really looking through her, or rather, that she was looking five minutes into Ness’s past, trying to discern whether or not the conversation Ness had just had with TimTam meant that the man was interested in her.

TimTam cleared his throat. “Now, Margaret,” he said. “That ain’t no kinda way to treat somebody.”

Margaret glared at him and plunged her ladle into the bucket, but Ness didn’t accept the offering. She walked away, leaving the two people to stew. While there may have been a piece of paper declaring that she belonged to Tom Allan Stockham, there was no such paper shackling her to the whims of her fellow slaves.

“You ain’t gotta be so hard on him,” a woman said once Ness resumed her position in the field. The woman seemed older, mid to late thirties, but her back hunched even when she stood up straight. “You new here, so you don’t know. TimTam done lost his woman long while ago, and he been taking care of little Pinky by hisself ever since.”

Ness looked at the woman. She tried to smile, but she had been born during the years of Esi’s unsmiling, and she had never learned how to do it quite right. The corners of her lips always seemed to twitch upward, unwillingly, then fall within milliseconds, as though attached to that sadness that had once anchored her own mother’s heart.

“Ain’t we all done lost someone?” Ness asked.

Ness was too pretty to be a field nigger. That’s what
Tom Allan said to her the day he’d taken her back to his plantation. He’d bought her on good faith from a friend of his in Jackson, Mississippi, who said she was one of the best field hands he’d ever seen, but to make quite sure to only use her in the field. Seeing her, light-skinned with kinked hair that raced down her back in search of her round shelf of buttocks, Tom Allan thought his friend must have made some kind of mistake. He pulled out the little outfit he liked for his house niggers to wear, a white button-down with a boat neckline and capped sleeves, a long black skirt attached to a little black apron. He’d had Margaret take Ness into the back room so that she could change into it, and Ness had done what she was told. Margaret, seeing Ness all done up, clutched her hand to her heart and told Ness to wait there. Ness had to press her ear to the wall to hear what Margaret said.

“She ain’t fit for da house,” Margaret told Tom Allan.

“Well, let me see her, Margaret. I’m sure I can decide for myself whether or not somebody’s fit to work in my own house, now can’t I?”

“Yessuh,” Margaret said. “I reckon you is, but it ain’t something you gon’ want to see, is what I’m sayin’.”

Tom Allan laughed. His wife, Susan, came into the room and asked what all the fuss was about. “Why, Margaret’s got our new nigger locked up in the back and won’t let us see her. Stop this nonsense now and go fetch her here.”

If Susan was like any of the other masters’ wives, she must have known that her husband’s bringing a new nigger into the house meant she had better pay attention. In this and every other southern county, men’s eyes, and other body parts, had been known to wander. “Yes, Margaret, bring the girl so we can see. Don’t be silly about it.”

Margaret shrugged her shoulders and went back to the room, and Ness pulled her ear from the wall. “Well, you bess come out” was all Margaret said.

And so Ness did. She walked out to her audience of two, her shoulders bared, as well as the bottom halves of her calves, and when Susan Stockham saw her, she fainted outright. It was all Tom Allan could do to catch his wife while shouting at Margaret to go change Ness at once.

Margaret rushed her into the back room, and left in search of field clothes, and Ness stood in the center of that room, running her hands along her body, reveling in her ugly nakedness. She knew it was the intricate scars on her bare shoulders that had alarmed them all, but the scars weren’t just there. No, her scarred skin was like another body in and of itself, shaped like a man hugging her from behind with his arms hanging around her neck. They went up from her breasts, rounded the hills of her shoulders, and traveled the full, proud length of her back. They licked the top of her buttocks before trailing away into nothing. Ness’s skin was no longer skin really, more like the ghost of her past made seeable, physical. She didn’t mind the reminder.

Margaret came back in the room with a head scarf, a brown top that covered the shoulders, a red skirt that went all the way to the floor. She watched Ness put them on. “It a shame, really. For a second, I’s thought you mighta been prettier than me.” She clucked her tongue twice and left the room.

And so Ness worked in the field. It was not new
to her. In Hell, she’d worked the land too. In Hell, the sun scorched cotton so hot it almost burned the palms of your hands to touch it. Holding those small white puffs almost felt like holding fire, but God forbid you let one drop. The Devil was always watching. Hell was where she had learned to be a good field hand, and the skill had carried her all the way to Tuscumbia.

It was her second month at the Stockham plantation. She lived in one of the women’s cabins, but she had made no friends. Everyone knew her as the woman who had snubbed TimTam, and the ladies, angry when they thought that she was the object of his desire and even angrier when they realized she didn’t want to be that object, treated her as though she were little more than a strong wind, an annoyance that you could still push through.

In the mornings, Ness prepared her pail to take out to the field with her. Cornmeal cakes, a bit of salt pork, and, if she was lucky, some greens. In Hell, she had learned to eat standing up. Picking cotton with her right hand, shoveling food in with her left. It wasn’t something she was required to do here at Tom Allan’s, work while eating, but she didn’t know any other way.

“Look like she think she better den us,” one woman called, just loudly enough so Ness could hear.

“Tom Allan sho gon’ think so,” another said.

“Nuh-uh, Tom Allan ain’t paid her no mind since she got kicked out da big house,” the first one said.

Ness had learned how to tune the voices out. She tried to remember the Twi that Esi used to speak to her. Tried to still her mind until all that was left was the thin, stern line of her mother’s lips, lips that used to usher out words of love in a tongue that Ness could no longer quite grasp. Phrases and words would come to her, mismatched or lopsided, wrong.

She worked all day like this, listening to the sounds of the South. The insistent buzz of mosquitoes, that screech of cicadas, the hum of slave gossip. At night, she would return to her quarters, beat out her pallet until dust billowed from it, wrapping around her like a hug. She would set it back down again and wait for a sleep that rarely came, trying her best to still the harrowing images that danced behind her closed eyelids.

It was on a night like this, just when she had snapped her pallet into the air, that the pounding started, fists beating against the door of the women’s cabin in a steady, urgent rhythm. “Please!” a voice called. “Please, help us.”

A woman named Mavis opened the door. TimTam stood there cradling his daughter, Pinky, in his arms. He pushed into the room, his voice choked though there were no tears in his eyes. “I think she got what her mama had,” he said.

The women cleared a spot for the girl and TimTam set her down before he started to pace. “Oh Lord, oh Lord, oh Lord,” he cried.

“You bess go fetch Tom Allan so’s he can get the doctor,” Ruthie said.

“Doctor ain’t helped last time,” TimTam said.

Ness stood behind a row of women, their shoulders squared as if headed into battle. She pushed her way through to the center to catch a glimpse of the child. Pinky was small and sharp-edged, as though her body were built from sticks with no bend to them. Her hair was tied up in two big puffs. The whole time the women were watching her, she made no noise save for a quick intake of breath.

“Ain’t nothing wrong wid her,” Ness said.

Suddenly, TimTam stopped his pacing as everyone turned to stare at Ness. “You ain’t been round here long,” TimTam said. “Pinky ain’t spoke a word since her mama died and now she can’t stop with these hiccups.”

“Ain’t nothing but hiccups,” Ness said. “Those ain’t killed anyone yet, far’s I know.” She looked around at all the women shaking their heads at her disapprovingly, but she couldn’t tell what she had done wrong.

TimTam pulled her aside. “These women ain’t told you?” he whispered, and Ness shook her head. The women so rarely spoke to her, and she had finally gotten good at tuning out their gossip. TimTam cleared his throat and hung his head a little lower. “See, we know ain’t nothing wrong wid her but the hiccups, but we been tryin’ to get her to speak, so…”

His voice trailed off as Ness began to understand that the whole thing had been nothing more than a plot to trick little Pinky into utterance. Ness pulled away from TimTam and looked at the small congregation of women carefully, from one to the next and then the next. She made her way to the center of the room, where Pinky lay on the pallet, her eyes staring up at the ceiling. The girl turned her eyes toward Ness and hiccuped once more.

Ness addressed the room. “Lord, I don’t know what kinda foolishness I done walked into at this here plantation, but y’all need to leave this girl alone. Maybe she don’t want to speak cuz she know just how crazy it make you or maybe she ain’t got nothin’ to say yet, but I reckon she ain’t gon’ start tonight just because y’all makin’ like you actors in a travelin’ show.”

The women wrung their hands and shifted their feet, and TimTam’s head sunk a little lower.

Ness walked back to her pallet, finished beating the dust out, and lay down.

TimTam walked over to Pinky. “Well, les go,” he said, reaching for the girl, but she pulled away. “I said, les go,” he repeated, shame coloring his voice gray, but the girl snatched herself away again. She went over to where Ness lay, her eyes shut tightly as she begged sleep to come quick. Pinky’s hand brushed Ness’s shoulder, and she opened her eyes to see the girl staring at her, round moon eyes imploring. And because Ness understood loss, and because she understood motherlessness and wanting and even silence, she reached for the girl’s hand and pulled her down onto the bed.