Akosua was still looking at her family, and he knew how crazy he sounded, and he knew how much he was asking her to give up. The Asante puberty rites were a serious matter. There was a weeklong ceremony to bless the girls’ fresh womanhood. The rules thereafter were strict. Women in menses could not visit the stool houses, could not cross certain rivers. They lived in separate houses and painted their wrists with white clay on the days they bled. If anyone found out a woman had bled but not told, the punishment would be great.
“Do you trust me?” James asked, knowing it was a question he had no right to ask.
“No,” Akosua answered finally. “Trust is a thing to be earned. I don’t trust you. I have seen what power can do to men, and you are from one of the most powerful families.”
James’s head grew light. He felt faint, like he would soon fall.
“But,” Akosua continued, “if you come back for me, then you will earn my trust.”
James nodded slowly, understanding. He would be back in his village by the end of the month, at his own wedding by the end of the year. The war would continue, and nothing, not his life nor his heart, was guaranteed. But listening to Akosua speak, he knew he would make a way.
*
James could not explain to Amma why he did not want to sleep in her hut. They had been married for three months and his excuses were wearing thin. On their wedding night, he had told her he was ill. For the entire week after, his body had taken over the excuse-making for him, his penis lying limp between his legs each time he went to her, even on the nights she braided her hair the way he liked it and rubbed coconut oil on her breasts and between her thighs. After that week, he had spent another two pretending to be too embarrassed to go to her, but soon, that too had failed him.
“You must go to see the apothecary. There are herbs you can take to help with this. If I do not get pregnant soon, people will start to believe there is something wrong with me,” Amma said.
He felt bad for her. It was true. Failure to conceive was always believed to be the woman’s fault, a punishment for infidelity or loose morals. But, in these few short months, James had gotten to know his wife well. She would soon tell everyone in the village that there was something wrong with him, and word would get back to his father and mother that he had not fulfilled his husbandly duties. He could hear his mother now. “Oh, Nyame, what have I done to deserve this? First a weak husband and now a weak son!” James knew he would have to figure something out soon if he wanted to remain faithful to the memory of Akosua.
It was a memory he gripped tightly. It had been nearly a year since James had promised Akosua that he would come back for her, and he had come no closer to creating a plan to fulfill that promise. The Asantes were winning battle after battle against the British and the people of his village had begun to murmur that maybe the Asantes would win against the white men. And then what? Would more white men come to replace the ones who had died? Who would protect them if the Asantes came to meet them, to finally exact revenge for Abeeku Badu and Fiifi’s grievances toward them? They had made an alliance with the British so long ago, maybe the white men had already forgotten.
James had not forgotten Akosua. He could see her every night when he slept, her lips and eyes and legs and buttocks moving across the field of his closed eyes. In his own hut on the outer edge of the compound, which he had built for himself and Amma and the other wives who were supposed to follow. He had not forgotten how much he had loved being in his grandfather’s town, among the Asantes, the warmth he’d felt from his mother’s people. The longer he stayed in Fanteland, the sooner he wished to get away. To lead a simpler life, as a farmer like Akosua’s father, not as a politician like his own father, whose work for the British and the Fantes so many years before had left him with money and power, but little else.
“James, are you listening to me?” Amma said. She was stirring a pot of pepper soup, a wrapper slung across her waist, her back leaning forward so that it seemed her bare breasts would dip into the broth.
“Yes, darling, you are right,” James said. “Tomorrow, I will go to see Mampanyin.”
Amma nodded her head, satisfied. Mampanyin was the premier apothecary for hundreds of miles around. Junior wives went to her when they wished to quietly kill the senior wives. Younger brothers went when they wanted to be chosen as successor over their elder brothers. From the ocean’s edge to the inland forests, people went to her when they had a problem that prayers alone could not fix.
James saw her on a Thursday. His father and many others had always called the woman a witch doctor, and she seemed to physically embody that role. She was missing all but her four front teeth, evenly spaced, as though they had chased all of the other teeth out of her mouth and then joined together in the middle, triumphant. Her back was perpetually hunched forward, and she walked with a cane made out of a rich black wood, carved to look like a snake was coiled around it. One of her eyes always looked away, and try as hard as he might, moving his head this way and that, James could not convince that eye to greet him.
“What is this man doing here?” Mampanyin asked the air.
James cleared his throat, unsure if he should speak.
Mampanyin spit on the ground, more phlegm than saliva. “What does this man want with Mampanyin? Can he not leave her in peace? He who does not even believe in her powers.”
“Aunty Mampanyin, I have come from my village at my wife’s request. She would like me to take some herbs so that we can make a baby.” He had rehearsed a speech on the journey there—about how he wanted to make his wife happy while also making himself happy—but the words eluded him. He could hear the uncertainty, the fear, in his voice, and he cursed himself for it.
“Eh, he calls me aunty? He whose family sells our people to the whites abroad. He dares to call me aunty.”
“That was my father and grandfather’s work. It is not mine.” He didn’t add that because of their work, he didn’t have to work, but instead could live off the family name and power.
She watched him with her good eye. “In your mind, you call me witch, eh?”
“Everyone calls you witch.”
“Tell me, is Mampanyin the one who lay down for a white man to open her legs? The white men might have left had they not tasted our women.”
“The white man will stay until there is no more money to be made.”
“Eh, now you speak of money? Mampanyin has already said she knows how your family makes money. By sending your brothers and sisters over to Aburokyire to be treated like animals.”
“America is not the only place with slaves,” James said quietly. He’d heard his father say it to David before, when they talked about the atrocities of the American South that he’d read about in the abolitionist British papers. “The way they treat the slaves in America, my brother,” David had said. “It is unfathomable. Unfathomable. We do not have slavery like that here. Not like that.”
James’s skin was starting to feel warm, but the sun had already dipped underneath the Earth. He wished he could turn and leave. Mampanyin’s wandering eye had landed on a tree in the distance, then moved up to the sky, then just past James’s left ear.
“I don’t want to do the work of my family. I don’t want to be one with the British.”
She spit again, and then focused her roving eye directly onto him, and he began to sweat. Once she had finished, her eye returned to its ambling, finally satisfied with what it had seen in him. “Your penis does not work because you don’t want it to work. My medicine is only for those who want. You speak of what you don’t want, but there is something you want.”
It was not a question. James didn’t think he could trust her, and yet he knew that with her bad eye, she had seen him. Really seen him. And since he had not been able to make the Earth move on his own, he decided to trust the witch doctor to help him move it.
“I want to leave my family and move to Asanteland. I want to marry Akosua Mensah and work as a farmer or something small-small.
”
Mampanyin laughed. “The son of Big Man wants to live small-small, eh?”
She left him standing outside and went into her hut. When she came back she was carrying two small clay pots that had flies buzzing around the tops of them. James could smell them from where he stood. She sat on a chair and began swirling her index finger inside one of the pots. She pulled her finger back out and licked what was on it. James gagged.
“If you do not want your wife, why did you marry her?” Mampanyin asked.
“I was required to marry her so that our families could finally join,” James said. Wasn’t it obvious? She herself had said it. He was the son of a Big Man. There were things he had to do. Things he had to be seen doing so that everyone would know that his family was still important. What he wanted, what he most wanted, was to disappear. His father had seven other sons who could carry on the Otcher-Collins legacy. He wanted to be a man without a name. “I want to leave my family without them knowing I have left them,” he said.
Mampanyin spit into the pot and then mixed it again. Her good eye looked up at James. “Is this possible?”
“Aunty, they say that you make impossible things possible.”
She laughed again. “Eh, but they say that about Anansi, about Nyame, about the white man. I can only make the possible attainable. Do you see the difference?”
He nodded, and she smiled—the first smile she’d given him since his arrival. She beckoned him toward her, and he went, hoping that she would not ask him to eat whatever it was that was stinking in the pot. She motioned for him to sit before her, and he did so wordlessly. His parents would not like how he was stooped below her in her seat so that it seemed that she was a higher-born one than him. He could hear his mother’s voice saying, “Stand.” But he kept kneeling. Perhaps Mampanyin could make it so that neither his mother’s voice nor his father’s would ever be in his head again.
“You have come here asking me what to do, but you already know how to leave without anyone knowing you’ve left,” Mampanyin said.
James was quiet. It was true he had thought of ways to make his family think he’d gone to Asamando when really he had journeyed elsewhere. The best idea, the most dangerous, was to join the never-ending Asante-British War. Everyone knew about the war, how it seemed it would never end, how the white men were weaker than everyone had once thought, even with their large Castle made of stone.
“People think they are coming to me for advice,” Mampanyin said, “but really, they come to me for permission. If you want to do something, do it. The Asantes will be in Efutu soon, this I know.”
She was no longer looking at him. Instead, she focused on the contents of the pot. There was no way this woman could know what the plans of the Asantes were. Theirs was the most powerful army in all of Africa. It was said that when the white men first came upon the Asante warriors with their bare chests and their loose cloth wraps, they had laughed, saying, “Are these not the cloths our women would wear?” They had prided themselves on their guns and their uniforms: the button-down jackets and trousers. Then the Asantes had slaughtered them by the hundreds, cut out the hearts of their military leaders and eaten them for strength. After that, at least one British soldier could be seen wetting those trousers they once praised as he retreated from the men they once underestimated.
If all that they said about the Asante army was true, it was impossible that they would be poorly organized enough to let a Fante fetish woman know of their plans. James knew that her roving eye had found itself in Efutu, in the future, and had seen him there, just as it had seen his heart’s desire just then.
—
But still James did not go to Efutu. Amma was waiting for him when he went back home.
“What did Mampanyin say?” his wife asked.
“She said you must be patient with me,” he said, and his wife huffed, dissatisfied. James knew she would spend the rest of the day gossiping with her girlfriends about him.
For a week James was miserable. He started to have doubts about Akosua, about his wish to live a small life. Was his life now so bad? He could stay in the village. He could continue the work of his father.
James had all but decided to do this when his grandmother came over to eat one night.
Effia was an old lady, and yet it was still possible to see the youth that once was somewhere beneath the many lines of her face. She had insisted on living in Cape Coast, in the house her husband had built, even after Quey had grown prominent in her village. She said she would never again live in the village that evil had built.
As they all ate outside in Quey’s compound, James could feel his grandmother watching him, and after the house girls and boys had all come to collect their dishes, and James’s father and mother had retired for the evening, he could feel his grandmother watching him still.
“What’s wrong, my own child?” she asked when the two of them were finally alone.
James didn’t speak. The fufu they had eaten sat like a rock at the bottom of his belly, and he thought it would make him sick. He looked at his grandmother. They said she was once so beautiful that the Castle governor would have burned their whole village down just to get to her.
She touched the black stone necklace she wore at her neck and then reached for James’s hand. “You are not content?” she asked.
And James could feel the pressure build behind his eyes as tears threatened to break through. He squeezed his grandmother’s hand. “I’ve heard my mother call my father weak my whole life, but what if I’m just like him?” James said. He expected his grandmother to react, but she remained silent. “I want to be my own nation.” He knew she wouldn’t be able to understand what he said, and yet it seemed that she had heard him. Even though he spoke in a whisper, she heard him.
His grandmother didn’t speak at first, just watched him. “We are all weak most of the time,” she said finally. “Look at the baby. Born to his mother, he learns how to eat from her, how to walk, talk, hunt, run. He does not invent new ways. He just continues with the old. This is how we all come to the world, James. Weak and needy, desperate to learn how to be a person.” She smiled at him. “But if we do not like the person we have learned to be, should we just sit in front of our fufu, doing nothing? I think, James, that maybe it is possible to make a new way.”
She kept smiling. The sun was setting behind them, and James finally let himself cry in front of his grandmother.
And so, the next day, James told his family that he was going back to Cape Coast with Effia, but instead he went to Efutu. He found work with a doctor whom his grandmother knew, who had worked for the British when she lived in the Castle. All James had to do was tell him that he was James Collins’s grandson, and he immediately received work and a place to stay.
The doctor was Scottish and so old he could hardly walk upright, let alone heal illnesses without catching them. He had moved to Efutu after working for the company for only one year. He spoke fluent Fante, had built his compound himself from the ground up, and had remained unmarried, even though many of the local women had brought their young daughters to him as offerings. To the townspeople he was a mystery, but they had grown fond of him, affectionately calling him the White Doctor.
It was James’s job to help keep the medicine room clean. The White Doctor’s medical hut was next door to his living quarters, and it was small enough so that he didn’t really need James’s help at all. James swept, organized the medicines, washed the rags. Sometimes, in the evenings, he would cook a simple meal for the two of them, and they would sit in the yard, facing the dirt stretch of road, while the White Doctor told stories about his time in the Castle.
“You look just like your grandmother. What was that the locals used to call her?” He scratched his fine white hair. “The Beauty. Effia the Beauty, right?”
James nodded, trying to see her through the doctor’s eyes.
“Your grandfather was so excited to marry her. I remember the night before she was to come to
the Castle, we took James over to the company store just as the sun was going down and drank up almost all of the new liquor shipment. James had to tell the bosses back in England that the ship that had transported the liquor had sunk or been taken over by pirates. Something like that. It was a great night for all of us. A little rabble-rousing in Africa.” A dreamy look came over his face, and James wondered if the old man had gotten the adventure he seemed to have been chasing here in the Gold Coast.
In a month, James would get what he had been chasing. The call came in the middle of the night. Fast-paced, high-pitched panting and shrieking as the watchmen of Efutu went from hut to hut, shouting that the Asantes were coming. The British and Fante armies stationed there sent out word for backup to join them, but the panic in the watchmen’s eyes told James that the Asantes were closer than any help could be. Already by that point, villages throughout Fanteland, Ga-land, and Denkyira had been living in fear of Asante raids. British soldiers had been stationed intermittently in the towns and villages surrounding Cape Coast. Their goal was to keep the Asantes from storming the Castle, lest they do it successfully, but Efutu, only a week’s journey from the Coast, was far too close for comfort.
“You must run!” James shouted at the White Doctor. The old man had lit a palm oil lamp next to his cot and pulled out a leather-bound book, reading with his spectacles perched at the tip of his nose. “They will kill you when they see you. They will not care that you are old.”
The White Doctor turned the page. He didn’t look up at James as he waved goodbye.
James shook his head and left the hut. Mampanyin had told him that he would know what to do when the time came, and yet here he was, so panicked that he could hardly breathe. He could feel the warm liquid traveling down his legs as he ran. He could not think. He could not think quickly enough to devise a plan, and before he knew it, shots were being fired all around him. The birds took flight, a black and red and blue and green cloud of wings, ascending. James wanted to hide. He couldn’t remember what had been so bad about his old life. He could learn to love Amma. He’d spent so much time seeing the bad in his parents’ marriage that he’d assumed there had to be something better. What if there wasn’t? He had trusted a witch with his happiness. With his life. Now he would surely die.