Homegoing (5 page)

“Mama, what happens to all the prisoners after they leave here?” Esi asked Maame as they passed by the square one afternoon, a roped goat, their dinner, trailing behind them.

“That’s boys’ talk, Esi. You don’t need to think about it,” her mother replied, shifting her eyes.

For as long as Esi could remember, and perhaps even before, Maame had refused to choose her own house girl or house boy from among the prisoners who were paraded through the village each month, but because there were now so many prisoners, Big Man had started to insist.

“A house girl could help you with the cooking,” he said.

“Esi helps me with my cooking.”

“But Esi is my daughter, not some common girl to be ordered about.”

Esi smiled. She loved her mother, but she knew how lucky Maame was to have gotten a husband like Big Man when she had no family, no background to speak of. Big Man had saved Maame somehow, from what wretchedness Esi did not know. She knew only that her mother would do almost anything for her father.

“All right,” she said. “Esi and I will choose a girl tomorrow.”

And so they chose a girl and decided to call her Abronoma, Little Dove. The girl had the darkest skin Esi had ever seen. She kept her eyes low, and though her Twi was passable, she rarely spoke it. She didn’t know her age, but Esi guessed Abronoma was not much older than she was. At first, Abronoma was horrible at the chores. She spilled oil; she didn’t sweep under things; she didn’t have good stories for the children.

“She’s useless,” Maame said to Big Man. “We have to take her back.”

They were all outside, basking under the warm midday sun. Big Man tilted his head back and let out a laugh that rumbled like thunder in the rainy season. “Take her back where?
Odo,
there’s only one way to train a slave.” He turned to Esi, who was trying to climb a palm tree the way she’d seen the other kids do it, but her arms were too small to reach around. “Esi, go and get me my switch.”

The switch in question was made from two reeds tied together. It was older than Esi’s paternal grandfather, having been passed down from generation to generation. Big Man had never beaten Esi with it, but she had seen him beat his sons. She’d heard the way it whistled when it snapped back off of flesh. Esi moved to enter the compound, but Maame stopped her.

“No!” she said.

Big Man raised his hand to his wife, anger flashing quickly through his eyes like steam from cold water hitting a hot pan. “No?”

Maame stammered, “I—I just think that I should be the one to do it.”

Big Man lowered his hand. He stared at her carefully for a while longer, and Esi tried to read the look that passed between them. “So be it,” Big Man said. “But tomorrow I will bring her out here. She will carry water from this yard to that tree there, and if even so much as a drop falls, then
I
will take care of it. Do you hear me?”

Maame nodded and Big Man shook his head. He had always told anyone who would listen that he had spoiled his third wife, seduced by her beautiful face and softened by her sad eyes.

Maame and Esi went into their hut and found Abronoma, curled up on a bamboo cot, living up to her name of a little bird. Maame woke her and had her stand before them. She pulled out a switch that Big Man had given her, a switch she had never used. She then looked at Esi with tears in her eyes. “Please, leave us.”

Esi left the hut and for minutes after could hear the sound of the switch and the harmonizing pitch of two separate cries.

The next day Big Man called everyone in his compound out to see if Abronoma could carry a bucket of water on her head from the yard to the tree without spilling a drop. Esi and her whole family, her four stepmothers and nine half siblings, scattered around their large yard, waiting for the girl to first fetch water from the stream into a large black bucket. From there, Big Man had her stand before all of them and bow before starting the journey to the tree. He would walk beside her to be certain there was no error.

Esi could see Little Dove shaking as she lifted the bucket onto her head. Maame clutched Esi against her chest and smiled at the girl when she bowed at them, but the look Abronoma returned was fearful and then vacant. When the bucket touched her head, the family began to jeer.

“She’ll never make it!” Amma, Big Man’s first wife, said.

“Watch, she will spill it all and drown herself in the process,” Kojo, the eldest son, said.

Little Dove took her first step and Esi let out the breath she had been holding. She herself had never been able to carry so much as a single plank of wood on her head, but she had watched her mother carry a perfectly round coconut without it ever rolling off, steady as a second head. “Where did you learn to do that?” Esi had asked Maame then, and the woman replied, “You can learn anything when you have to learn it. You could learn to fly if it meant you would live another day.”

Abronoma steadied her legs and kept walking, her head facing forward. Big Man walked beside her, whispering insults in her ear. She reached the tree at the forest’s edge and pivoted, making her way back to the audience that awaited her. By the time she got close enough that Esi could make out her features again, there was sweat dripping off the ledge of her nose and her eyes were brimming with tears. Even the bucket on her head seemed to be crying, condensation working its way down the outside of it. As she lifted the bucket off of her head, she started to smile triumphantly. Maybe it was a small gust of wind, maybe an insect looking for a bath, or maybe the Dove’s hand slipped, but before the bucket reached the ground, two drops sloshed out.

Esi looked at Maame, who had turned her sad, pleading eyes to Big Man, but by that point, the rest of the family was already shouting for punishment.

Kojo began to lead them into a song:

The Dove has failed. Oh, what to do? Make her to suffer or you’ll fail too!

Big Man reached for his switch, and soon the song gained its accompaniment: the percussion of reed to flesh, the woodwind of reed to air. This time, Abronoma did not cry.

“If he didn’t beat her, everyone would think he was weak,”
Esi said. After the event, Maame had been inconsolable, crying to Esi that Big Man should not have beaten Little Dove for so small a mistake. Esi was licking soup off of her fingers, her lips stained orange. Her mother had taken Abronoma into their hut and made a salve for her wounds, and now the girl lay on a cot sleeping.

“Weak, eh?” Maame said. She glared at her daughter with malice that Esi had never before seen.

“Yes,” Esi whispered.

“That I should live to hear my own daughter speak like this. You want to know what weakness is? Weakness is treating someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves.”

Esi was hurt. She had only said what anyone else in her village would have said, and for this Maame yelled at her. Esi wanted to cry, to hug her mother, something, but Maame left the room then to finish the chores that Abronoma could not perform that night.

Just as she left, Little Dove began to stir. Esi fetched her water, and helped tilt her head back so that she could drink it. The wounds on her back were still fresh, and the salve that Maame had made stank of the forest. Esi wiped the corners of Abronoma’s lips with her fingers, but the girl pushed her away.

“Leave me,” she said.

“I—I’m sorry for what happened. He is a good man.”

Abronoma spit onto the clay in front of her. “Your father is Big Man, eh?” she asked, and Esi nodded, proud despite what she had just seen her father do. The Dove let out a mirthless laugh. “My father too is Big Man, and now look at what I am. Look at what your mother was.”

“What my mother was?”

Little Dove’s eyes shot toward Esi. “You don’t know?”

Esi, who had not spent more than an hour away from her mother’s sight in her life, couldn’t imagine any secrets. She knew the feel of her and the smell of her. She knew how many colors were in her irises and she knew each crooked tooth. Esi looked at Abronoma, but Abronoma shook her head and continued her laugh.

“Your mother was once a slave for a Fante family. She was raped by her master because he too was a Big Man and big men can do what they please, lest they appear
weak,
eh?” Esi looked away, and Abronoma continued in a whisper. “You are not your mother’s first daughter. There was one before you. And in my village we have a saying about separated sisters. They are like a woman and her reflection, doomed to stay on opposite sides of the pond.”

Esi wanted to hear more, but there was no time to ask the Dove. Maame came back into the room, and saw the two girls sitting beside each other.

“Esi, come here and let Abronoma sleep. Tomorrow you will wake up early and help me clean.”

Esi left Abronoma to her rest. She looked at her mother. The way her shoulders always seemed to droop, the way her eyes were always shifting. Suddenly, Esi was filled with a horrible shame. She remembered the first time she’d seen an elder spit on the captives in the town square. The man had said, “Northerners, they are not even people. They are the dirt that begs for spit.” Esi was five years old then. His words had felt like a lesson, and the next time she passed, she timidly gathered her own spit and launched it at a little boy who stood huddled with his mother. The boy had cried out, speaking a language that Esi didn’t understand, and Esi had felt bad, not for having spit, but for knowing how angry her mother would have been to see her do it.

Now all Esi could picture was her own mother behind the dull metal of the cages. Her own mother, huddled with a sister she would never know.

In the months that followed, Esi tried to befriend Abronoma. Her
heart had started to ache for the little bird who had now perfected her role as house girl. Since the beating, no crumb was dropped, no water spilled. In the evenings, after Abronoma’s work was done, Esi would try to coax more information from her about her mother’s past.

“I don’t know any more,” Abronoma said, taking the bundle of palm branches to sweep the floor, or straining used oil through leaves. “Don’t worry me!” she screamed once she’d reached the height of her annoyance.

Still, Esi tried to make amends. “What can I do?” she asked. “What can I do?”

After weeks of asking, Esi finally received an answer. “Send word to my father,” Abronoma said. “Tell him where I am. Tell him where I am and there will be no bad blood between us.”

That night, Esi couldn’t sleep. She wanted to make peace with Abronoma, but if her father knew what she had been asked to do, surely there would be war in her hut. She could hear her father now, yelling at Maame, telling her that she was raising Esi to be a small woman, weak. On the floor of her hut, Esi turned and turned and turned, until finally her mother hushed her.

“Please,” Maame said. “I’m tired.”

And all Esi could see behind her closed eyelids was her mother as house girl.

Esi decided then that she would send the message. Early, early, early the next morning she went to the messenger man who lived on the edge of the village. He listened to her words and the words of others before setting out into the forest every week. Those words would be carried from village to village, messenger man to messenger man. Who knew if Esi’s message would ever reach Abronoma’s father? It could be dropped or forgotten, altered or lost, but at the very least, Esi could say that she had done it.

When she got back, Abronoma was the only person yet awake. Esi told her what she had done that morning, and the girl clapped her hands together and then gathered Esi into her small arms, squeezing until Esi’s breath caught.

“All is forgotten?” Esi asked once the Dove had released her.

“Everything is equal,” Abronoma said, and relief rushed through Esi’s body like blood. It filled her to the brim and left her fingers shaking. She hugged Abronoma back, and as the girl’s body relaxed in her arms, Esi let herself imagine that the body she was hugging was her sister’s.

Months went by, and Little Dove grew excited. In the evenings
she could be found pacing the grounds and muttering to herself before sleep. “My father. My father is coming.”

Big Man heard her mutterings and told everyone to beware of her, for she might be a witch. Esi would watch her carefully for signs, but every day it was the same thing. “My father is coming. I know it. He is coming.” Finally, Big Man promised to slap the words out of the Dove if she continued, and so she stopped, and the family soon forgot.

Everyone went along as usual. Esi’s village had never been challenged in Esi’s lifetime. All fighting was done away from home. Big Man and the other warriors would go into nearby villages, pillaging the land, sometimes setting the grass on fire so that people from three villages over could see the smoke and know the warriors had come. But this time things were different.

It began while the family was sleeping. It was Big Man’s night in Maame’s hut, so Esi had to sleep on the ground in the corner. When she heard the soft moaning, the quickened breath, she turned to face the wall of the hut. Once, just once, she had watched them where they lay, the darkness helping to cover her curiosity. Her father was hovering over her mother’s body, moving softly at first, and then with more force. She couldn’t see much, but it was the sounds that had interested her. The sounds her parents made together, sounds that walked a thin line between pleasure and pain. Esi both wanted and was afraid to want. So she never watched again.

That night, once everyone in the hut had fallen asleep, the call went out. Everyone in the village had grown up knowing what each sound signified: two long moans meant the enemy was miles off yet; three quick shouts meant they were upon them. Hearing the three, Big Man jumped from the bed and grabbed the machete he stored under each of his wives’ cots.

“You take Esi and go into the woods!” he screamed at Maame before running from the hut with little time to cover his nakedness.

Esi did what her father had taught her, grabbing the small knife that her mother used to slice plantains and tucking it into the cloth of her skirt. Maame sat at the edge of her cot. “Come on!” Esi said, but her mother didn’t move. Esi rushed to the bed and shook her, but she still didn’t move.