Homegoing

  Ness returned to the same row of field that she was in the day before as everyone stared. It was rumored that Tom Allan’s plantation stretched longer than any of the other small plantations in the county, and to finish picking one row of cotton took two good days. Without warning, TimTam was back behind Ness. He touched her shoulder and she turned.

  “They tol’ me Pinky spoke yesterday. I s’pose I should say thank you for that. And for the other thing.”

  Ness looked at him and realized that every time she’d ever seen the man, he was chewing on something, his mouth always working its way around in a circle. “You ain’t got to do nothing,” Ness said, bending again. TimTam looked up to check if Tom Allan had arrived on the front porch yet.

  “Well, I’m grateful anyway,” he said, and he sounded it. When Ness turned her face up, she saw that he was grinning again, his wide lips pulling back to make way for teeth. “I can talk to Massa Tom for you. He ain’t gon’ do nothin’.”

  “I reckon I ain’t needed anyone to fight my battles for me before. Don’t see why I should start now,” Ness said. “Now, you go bother somebody else with your gratefulness. Margaret sure seemed like she’d be happy to take it.”

  TimTam’s face fell. He nodded at Ness and then returned to his own row. After a few minutes, Tom Allan arrived on the porch and peered out. Everyone looked at Ness from the corners of their eyes. She felt like she sometimes felt at night, in the dark in high mosquito season, when she could feel the presence of something ominous but could not see the danger itself.

  She looked at Tom Allan, not more than a speck on the porch from where she stood in the field, and wondered how long it would take for him to act, if he would call her up this very morning or spend days letting it pass, making her wait. It was waiting that bothered her, that had always bothered her. She and Sam had spent so much time waiting, waiting, waiting.

  Ness had made Sam wait outside when she was in labor. She gave birth to Kojo during a strange southern winter. An unheard-of snow had blanketed the plantations for a full week, threatening the crops, angering the landowners, making the slaves’ hands idle.

  Ness was holed up in the birthing room the night of the heaviest snowfall, and when the midwife finally arrived and opened the door, a cold wind moved through the room, bringing with it a flurry of snowflakes that melted on the tables and chairs and on Ness’s stomach.

  Throughout the pregnancy, Kojo was the kind of baby who fought the walls of his mother’s womb, and the journey out had been no different. Ness had screamed her throat raw, remembering with each push the stories the other slaves told about her own birth. They said Esi hadn’t told anyone that Ness was coming; she’d just gone out behind a tree and squatted. They said a strange sound had preceded Ness’s newborn wail, and for years after, Ness had listened to them argue about what that sound was. One slave thought it was the flutter of birds’ wings. Another that it was a spirit, come to help Ness out and then gone with a rumble. Yet another said that the sound had come from Esi herself. That she had gone out to be alone, to have her own private moment of joy with her baby before anyone came to snatch both joy and baby away. The sound, that slave had said, was of Esi laughing, which was why they hadn’t recognized it.

  Ness couldn’t imagine anyone laughing through a birth until the midwife finally pulled Kojo out into the world and her baby boy had wailed, louder than little lungs should have allowed him to wail, and Sam, who had been pacing outside in the snow, thanked his ancestors in Yoruba and waited for the chance to hold him. Then Ness understood.

  Following the birth of their son, Sam had come to be all that the Devil had wanted him to be. Tame, a good, hard worker who rarely fought or caused trouble. He would remember the way the Devil had beaten Ness for his folly, and when he held Kojo, called Jo, for the first time, he’d promised himself that no harm would come to the boy on his account.

  Then Ness found Aku and told Sam that he would be able to keep that promise. Ness had been sitting in the back of the church on Easter Sunday, the only Sunday the Devil allowed his slaves to walk the fifteen miles to the black Baptist church on the edge of town, waiting for the sermon to start. Without thinking, she began singing a little Twi tune her mother used to sing sorrowfully on nights when the work of slavery was particularly grueling, when she had been beaten for supposed insolence or laziness or failure.

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

  Ness didn’t know what she was singing, for Esi had never taught her what the words of the song meant, but in the pew in front of her, a woman turned and whispered something.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t understand,” Ness said. The words the woman spoke had been in her mother’s tongue.

  “So you are an Asante, and you don’t even know,” the woman said. Her accent was still thick, like Esi’s had been, gleaming with the lightness of the Gold Coast.

  She introduced herself as Aku, and she explained that she was from Asanteland and had been kept in the Castle just like Ness’s mother had, before being shipped to the Caribbean and then to America.

  “I know the way back out,” Aku said. The sermon was about to begin and Ness knew she wouldn’t have much time. Easter Sunday would not come again for another year, and by that time she or Aku or both could be sold; dead, even. Theirs was the kind of life that did not guarantee living. They had to act fast.

  Aku talked softly, told Ness about how she had taken Akan people north to freedom many times, so many times that she had earned the Twi nickname Nyame nsa, hand of God, of help. Ness knew that no one had ever escaped the Devil’s plantation, but listening to this woman, who sounded like her mother had, who praised the god her mother had praised, Ness knew that she wanted her family to be the first.

  Jo was one year old when Ness began planning her family’s freedom. The woman had assured her that she had taken children north before, babies who were still screaming and whining for their mothers’ tits. Jo would be no problem.

  Ness and Sam talked about it every night they were together. “You can’t raise a baby in Hell,” Ness repeated over and over again, thinking about the way she’d been stolen from her own mother. Who knew how long she’d have with her perfect child before he forgot the sound of her voice, the details of her face, the way she had forgotten Esi’s. And when Sam finally agreed, they sent word to Aku, telling her that they were ready, that they would wait for her signal, an old Twi song, sung softly in the woods as though carried by windswept leaves.

  And so they waited. Ness and Sam and Kojo, working longer and harder in the fields than any of the other slaves so that even the Devil began to smile at the mention of their names. They waited out fall and then winter, listening for the sound that would tell them it was time, praying that they wouldn’t be sold and separated before their chance came.

  They weren’t, but Ness often wondered if it wouldn’t have been better if they had been. The song came in the spring, so light Ness thought that perhaps she had imagined it, but soon Sam was grabbing Jo in one arm and Ness in the other, and the three of them were out beyond the Devil’s land for the first time that they could remember.

  That first night, they walked so long, so far, that the cracked soles of Ness’s feet opened up. She bled on the leaves, and hoped for rain so that the dogs that were surely coming wouldn’t be able to catch her scent. When the sun came up, they climbed the trees. Ness hadn’t done it since childhood, but the skill came back to her quickly. She wrapped Jo around her back with cloth and reached for the highest branch. When he cried, she smothered him against her chest. Sometimes, after she had done this, he would get so still, she would worry, long for his cries. But they were all practicing stillness there, stillness like the kind Esi used to talk about in her stories about the Big Boat. Stillness like death.

  Days passed this way, the four of them playing trees in the woods or grass in the fields, but soon Ness could feel a heat rising from the earth, and she knew, the way a person kne
w air or love just by feeling, that the Devil was after them.

  “Would you take Kojo tonight?” Ness asked Aku while Sam and the boy had wandered off in search of water to drink. “Just fo’ tonight. My back can’t take much more of him.”

  Aku nodded, giving her a strange look, but Ness knew what she wanted and she wouldn’t change her mind.

  That morning the dogs came, their panting heavy and labored as their paws slapped against the tree where Ness hid.

  From afar there was a whistle, an old Dixie tune that lifted from the ground before the sound could be attached to a body. “I know you’re here somewhere,” the Devil said. “And I’m glad to wait you out.”

  In broken Twi, Ness called to Aku, who was further up in the distance, holding baby Jo. “Don’t come down, whatever you do,” Ness said.

  The Devil continued approaching, his hum low and patient. Ness knew he would wait there forever and soon the baby would cry, need food. She looked over at the tree Sam was in and hoped he would forgive her for all that she was about to bring upon them, and then she climbed down the tree. She was on the ground before she realized that Sam had done the same.

  “Where’s the boy?” the Devil asked while his men tied the two of them up.

  “Dead,” Ness said, and she hoped her eyes had that look in them, that look that mothers got sometimes when they came back from running, having killed their children to set them free.

  The Devil raised one eyebrow and laughed a slow laugh. “It’s a shame, really. I thought I mighta had me some trustworthy niggers. Just goes to show.”

  He marched Ness and Sam back to Hell.

  Once they got there, all of the slaves were called out to the whipping post. He stripped them both bare, tied Sam so tight he couldn’t even wiggle his fingers, and made him watch as Ness earned the stripes that would make her too ugly to work in a house ever again. By the end of it, Ness was on the ground, dust covering her sores. She could not lift her head, so the Devil lifted it for her. He made her watch. He made them all watch: the rope come out, the tree branch bend, the head snap free from body.

  And so this day, while Ness waited to see what punishment Tom Allen had in store for her, she couldn’t help but remember that day. Sam’s head. Sam’s head tilted to the left and swinging.

  Pinky carried water up to the porch where Tom Allen sat, waiting. When the little girl turned back around, her eyes caught Ness’s, but Ness didn’t hold her gaze for long. She just continued to pick cotton. She thought of the act of cotton picking as she had since the day she saw Sam’s head, like a prayer. With the bend, she said, “Lord forgive me my sins.” With the pluck, she said, “Deliver us from evil.” And with the lift, she said, “And protect my son, wherever he may be.”

  James

  OUTSIDE, THE SMALL CHILDREN were singing “Eh-say, shame-ma-mu” and dancing around the fire, their smooth, naked bellies glistening like little balls catching light. They were singing because word had arrived—the Asantes had Governor Charles MacCarthy’s head. They were keeping it on a stick outside the Asante king’s palace as a warning to the British: this is what happens to those who defy us.

  “Eh, small children, do you not know that if the Asantes defeat the British they will come for us Fantes next?” James asked. He lunged at one of the little girls and tickled her until all of the children were giggling and begging for mercy. He released the girl and then put on a somber face, continuing his lecture. “You will be safe here in this village because my family is royal. Do not forget that.”

  “Yes, James,” they said.

  Down the road, James’s father was approaching with one of the white men from the Castle. He motioned to James to follow them into the compound.

  “Should the boy hear this, Quey?” the white man asked, glancing quickly at James.

  “He is a man, not a boy. He will take over my responsibilities here when I’ve finished. Whatever you say to me, you may also say to him.”

  The white man nodded, and looked at James carefully as he spoke. “Your mother’s father, Osei Bonsu, has died. The Asantes are saying we killed their king to avenge Governor MacCarthy’s death.”

  “And did you?” James asked, returning the man’s stare with force, anger beginning to boil up in his veins. The white man looked away. James knew the British had been inciting tribal wars for years, knowing that whatever captives were taken from these wars would be sold to them for trade. His mother always said that the Gold Coast was like a pot of groundnut soup. Her people, the Asantes, were the broth, and his father’s people, the Fantes, were the groundnuts, and the many other nations that began at the edge of the Atlantic and moved up through the bushland into the North made up the meat and pepper and vegetables. This pot was already full to the brim before the white men came and added fire. Now it was all the Gold Coast people could do to keep from boiling over again and again and again. James wouldn’t be surprised if the British had killed his grandfather as a way to raise the heat. Ever since his mother had been stolen and married to his father, his village had been swelteringly hot.

  “Your mother wants to go to the funeral,” Quey said. James unclenched the fist he hadn’t realized he’d made.

  “It’s too dangerous, Quey,” the white man said. “Even Nana Yaa’s royal status might not protect you. They know your village has been allied to us for years. It’s just too dangerous.”

  James’s father looked down, and suddenly James could hear his mother’s voice in his ear again, telling him that his father was a weak man with no respect for the land he walked on.

  “We will go,” James said, and Quey looked up. “Not attending the Asante king’s funeral is a sin the ancestors would never forgive.”

  Slowly, Quey nodded. He turned to the white man. “It is the least we can do,” he said.

  The white man shook hands with the two of them, and the next day, James, his mother, and his father headed north for Kumasi. His grandmother Effia would stay home with the younger children.

  —

  James held the gun in his lap as they rode through the forest. The last time he’d held one was five years before, in 1819, for his twelfth birthday. His father had taken him out into the woods to shoot at swaths of fabric he had tied to various trees in the distance. He told James that a man should learn to hold a gun the same way he held a woman, carefully, tenderly.

  Now, looking at his parents as they rode through the bush, James wondered if his father had ever held his mother that way, carefully or tenderly. If war had been the way of the world of the Gold Coast, it had also defined the world inside his compound.

  Nana Yaa wept as they rode inside the carriage. “If it weren’t for my son, would we even be going?” she asked.

  James had made the mistake of telling her what his father and the white man had talked about the day before.

  “If it weren’t for me, would you even have this son?” his father muttered.

  “What?” his mother said. “I could not understand that ugly Fante you speak.”

  James rolled his eyes. They would go on like this for the rest of the trip. He could still remember the fights they had when he was a small boy. His mother screaming loudly about his name.

  “James Richard Collins?” his mother would shout. “James Richard Collins! What kind of Akan are you that you give your son three white names?”

  “And so what?” his father would reply. “Will he not still be a prince to our people and to the whites too? I have given him a powerful name.”

  James knew now, as he knew then, that his parents had never loved each other. It was a political marriage; duty held them together, though even that seemed to be barely enough. By the time they passed the town of Edumfa, his mother was going on about how Quey wouldn’t even be a man were it not for James’s late great-uncle Fiifi. So many of their arguments led to Fiifi and the decisions he had made for Quey and their family.

  After days of travel, they stopped to spend the night in Dunkwa with David, a friend fr
om Quey’s time in England who had moved back to the Gold Coast years before with his British wife. Days, even weeks, would pass before they reached the interior where James’s grandfather’s body was being held so that all could celebrate his life.

  “Quey, old friend,” David said as James’s family approached. He had a round belly like an oversized coconut. For a second, remembering the way he had grown up slicing the fruit and drinking what awaited inside, James wondered what a man like David would spill if punctured.

  His father and David shook hands and began talking. James always noticed that the longer it had been since the two men saw each other, the louder and more impassioned their voices got, as though the volume was trying to make up for distance, or reach back in time.

  Nana Yaa nodded at David’s wife, Katherine, and then loudly cleared her throat.

  “My wife is very tired,” Quey said, and the servants came to show her to her room. James began to walk with them, hoping that he too could get some rest, but David stopped him.

  “Eh, James, you are a big man now. Sit. Talk.”

  The handful of times James had seen David, David had called him a big man. He could remember back to when he was just four years old and had tripped on something invisible, an ant maybe, and had fallen to the ground, tearing the flesh of his upper lip. He had immediately begun crying, a violent cry that began somewhere inside his chest. David picked him up with one hand, dusted off his butt with the other, and stood him on a table in front of him so that the two were staring eye to eye. “You are a big man now, James. You can’t cry at every little thing that comes your way.”

  The three men sat around a fire the servants had built, sipping palm wine. James’s father looked older to him, but only slightly, as though the three-day journey had added three years. If the trip took thirty days, Quey would look almost as old as James’s grandfather had before he died.