“Please, ma’am,” he said. “Have you seen my wife? I’m looking for my wife.”
The woman backed away from him slowly, her eyes widening with fear but never leaving his own, as though if she was to turn from him he would be free to attack her.
“You stay away from me,” the woman said, holding her hand out in front of her.
“I’m looking for my wife. Please, ma’am, just look at the picture. Have you seen my wife?”
She shook her head and the held-out hand too. She didn’t even glance at the picture once. “I’ve got children,” she said. “Please don’t hurt me.”
Was she even listening to a word he said? Suddenly, Jo felt two strong arms grab him from behind. “This nigger bothering you?” a voice asked.
“No, officer. Thank you, officer,” the woman said, breathing easier and then taking her leave.
The policeman swung Jo around to face him. Jo was so scared he couldn’t lift his eyes, so instead he lifted the picture. “Please, my wife, sir. She’s eight months pregnant and I ain’t seen her in days.”
“Your wife, huh?” the policeman said, snatching the picture from Jo’s hands. “Pretty nigger, ain’t she?”
Still Jo couldn’t look at him.
“Why don’t you let me take this picture with me?”
Jo shook his head. He’d almost lost the picture once that day and didn’t know what he would do if he lost it again. “Please, sir. It’s the only one I got.”
Then Jo heard the sound of paper tearing. He looked up to see Anna’s nose and ears and strands of hair, the shredded bits of paper flying off in the wind.
“I’m tired of all these runaway niggers thinking they’re above the law. If your wife was a runaway nigger, then she got what she deserved. What about you? You a runaway nigger? I can send you on to see your wife.”
Jo held the policeman’s gaze. His whole body felt like it was shaking. He couldn’t see it, but he could feel it inside him, an unstoppable quaking. “No, sir,” he said.
“Speak up,” the policeman said.
“No, sir. I was born free, right here in Baltimore.”
The policeman smirked. “Go home,” he said. The policeman turned and walked away, and the quaking that had been held somewhere inside Jo’s bones started to escape until he was sitting on the hard ground, trying to hold himself together.
—
“Tell him what you told me,” Mathison said. Jo was standing in Mathison’s parlor three weeks later. Ma Aku had fallen ill and could no longer go to work, but Jo still stopped by the Mathison house on his way home to see if the man had any news about Anna.
This day, Mathison was holding a scared Negro child by his shoulders. The boy could not have been much older than Daly, and if he was any more scared of being called in by a white man, his skin would have been gray instead of its cool tar black.
He stood, hands trembling, and looked up at Jo. “I saws a white man takes a pregnant woman into his carriage. Says she too pregnant to walk home, so he takes her.”
Jo bent down until his eyes were level with the shaking child’s. He grabbed the boy’s chin in his hand and made him look at him, and he searched the boy’s eyes for what seemed like days, three whole weeks to be exact, searching for Anna.
“They sold her,” Jo said to Mathison, standing back up.
“Now, we don’t know that, Jo. Could be that they had to rush medical care. Anna was rightfully free, and she was pregnant,” Mathison answered, but his voice was uncertain. They had checked every hospital, every midwife, even the witch doctors. No one had seen Anna or Baby H.
“They sold her and the baby too,” Jo said, and before he or Mathison could stop or thank him, the child pulled away and ran out of the Mathison house quicker than a flash. He would likely tell his friends all about it, being in the grand home of a white man who had been asking questions about a Negro woman. He would make himself sound better in them. He would say he stood tall and spoke firmly, that the man shook his hand after and offered him a quarter.
“We’ll keep looking, Jo,” Mathison said, observing the empty space the boy had left behind. “This isn’t over. We’ll find her. I’ll go to court if I have to, Jo. I promise you that.”
Jo couldn’t hear him anymore. The wind was coming in through the door the child had left ajar. It was moving around the big white pillars that held up the house, curving around them, bending until it fit into the thin space of Jo’s ear canal. It was there to tell him that fall had come to Baltimore and that he would have to spend it alone, taking care of his ailing Ma and his seven children without his Anna.
When he went home, the kids were all waiting. Agnes had come over with Timmy. The girl was pregnant, Jo could just tell, but he knew that she was scared to tell him, to hurt him or the three-week-old memory of her mother, scared her small piece of joy was almost shameful.
“Jo?” Ma Aku called. Jo had given her the bedroom once her pain had started worsening.
He went to her. She was lying on her back, staring up at the ceiling, her hands folded over her chest. She turned her head toward him and spoke in Twi, something she used to do often when he was a child but had stopped almost completely since he married Anna.
“She’s gone?” Ma asked, and Jo nodded. She sighed. “You will make it through this, Jo. Nyame did not make weak Asantes, and that is what you are, no matter what man here, white or black, wishes to erase that part of you. Your mother came from strong, powerful people. People who do not break.”
“You’re my mother,” Jo said, and Ma Aku, with great effort, turned her whole body toward him and opened her arms. Jo crawled into bed with her and cried as he rested his head on her bosom, as he had not done since he was a young child. Back then, he used to cry for Sam and Ness. The only thing that would pacify him was stories about them, even if the stories were unpleasant. So Ma Aku would tell him that Sam hardly spoke, but when he did it was loving and wise, and that Ness had some of the most gruesome whip scars she had ever seen. Jo used to worry that his family line had been cut off, lost forever. He would never truly know who his people were, and who their people were before them, and if there were stories to be heard about where he had come from, he would never hear them. When he felt this way, Ma Aku would hold him against her, and instead of stories about family she would tell him stories about nations. The Fantes of the Coast, the Asantes of the Inland, the Akans.
When he lay against this woman now, he knew that he belonged to someone, and that had once been enough for him.
—
Ten years passed. Ma Aku passed with them. Agnes had three children, Beulah was pregnant, and Cato and Felicity were married. Eurias and Gracie, the youngest of the bunch, both found live-in work as soon as they could. They said it was to help take off some of the burden, but Jo knew the truth. His children could not stand to be around him anymore, and, though he hated to admit it, he could not stand to be around them.
The problem was Anna. The fact that he saw her everywhere in Baltimore, at every shop, on every road. He would sometimes see ample buttocks coming around a corner and follow them for blocks on end. He’d gotten slapped once doing this. It was winter, and the woman, so light her skin looked like cream with just a drop of coffee, had turned a corner and waited for him there. Slapped him so quick, he didn’t even notice who had done it until she turned back around and he’d seen that generous swish of her hips.
He went to New York. It didn’t matter that he had become one of the best ship caulkers the Chesapeake Bay area had ever seen; he couldn’t look at a boat again. He couldn’t pick up a chisel or smell oakum or hemp or tar without thinking about the life he had once had, the woman and the children he had once had, and the thought was too much.
In New York he did whatever work he could do. Mostly carpentry, plumbing when he could get it, though he was often underpaid. He rented a bedroom from an elderly Negro woman who cooked his meals and did his laundry, unbidden. Most nights he spent at the all-black bar.
br /> He came in one blustery December day and sat down in his usual spot, running his hand over the smooth wood of the bar. The workmanship was impeccable, and he’d always suspected that some Negro had done it, perhaps during his first days of freedom in New York, so happy that he was able to do something for himself rather than for someone else that he put his whole heart into it.
The bartender, a man with an almost imperceptible limp, poured Jo his drink before Jo could even ask for it, and set it down. The man sitting next to him was whipping out that morning’s paper, now crumpled, wet from the damp of the bar or the few slung drops of the man’s drink.
“South Carolina seceded today,” the man said, to no one in particular. And, getting no particular response, he looked up from the paper and glanced around at the few people who were there. “War’s coming.”
The bartender started wiping down the bar with a rag that looked to Jo to be dirtier than the bar itself. “There won’t be a war,” he said calmly.
Jo had been hearing talk of war for years. It didn’t mean much to him, and he tried to veer away from the conversation whenever he could, leery of Southern sympathizers in the North or, worse, overly enthusiastic white Northerners who wanted him to be angrier and louder, to defend himself and his right to freedom.
But Jo wasn’t angry. Not anymore. He couldn’t really tell if what he had been before was angry. It was an emotion he had no use for, that accomplished nothing and meant even less than that. If anything, what Jo really felt was tired.
“I’m telling you, this is a bad sign. One Southern state secedes and the rest of them are gonna follow. Can’t call us the United States of America if half the states are gone. You mark my words, war’s coming.”
The bartender rolled his eyes. “I’m not marking a thing. And unless you got money for another drink, I think it’s time for you to stop marking and get going.”
The man huffed loudly as he rolled his paper in his hand. As he walked by, he tapped Jo on the shoulder with it, and when Jo turned to look at him, he winked as if he and Jo were in on some scheme together, as though they knew something the rest of the world didn’t, but Jo couldn’t figure out what that could possibly be.
Abena
AS ABENA MADE THE JOURNEY back to her village, new seeds in hand, she thought, yet again, about how old she was. An unmarried twenty-five-year-old woman was unheard of, in her village or any other on this continent or the next. But there were only a few men in her village, and none of them wanted to take a chance with Unlucky’s daughter. Abena’s father’s crops had never grown. Year after year, season after season, the earth spit up rotted plants or sometimes nothing at all. Who knew where this bad luck came from?
Abena felt the seeds in her hand—small, round, and hard. Who would suspect that they could turn into a whole field? She wondered if, this year, they would do so for her father. Abena was certain that she must have inherited the thing that had earned her father his nickname. They called him the man without a name. They called him Unlucky. And now his troubles had followed her. Even her childhood best friend, Ohene Nyarko, would not take her as his second wife. Though he would never say it, she knew what he was thinking: that she was not worth the loss of yams and wine a bride price would cost him. Sometimes, while sleeping in the private hut her father had built for her, she would wonder if she herself was a curse, not the untilled land that lay around them, but her own self.
“Old Man, I have brought you the seeds you were asking for,” Abena announced as she entered her parents’ hut. She had gone to the next village over because her father thought, yet again, that a change in seeds might bring about a change in luck.
“Thank you,” he said. Inside the hut, Abena’s mother was sweeping the floor, bent forward, one hand on the small of her back, the other gripped tightly around the palm bristles as she swayed to music that only she could hear.
Abena cleared her throat. “I would like to visit Kumasi,” she said. “I would like to see it just once before I die.”
Her father looked up sharply. He had been examining the seeds in his hands, turning them over, putting them to his ear as though he could hear them, putting them to his lips as though he could taste them. “No,” he said firmly.
Her mother didn’t stand up, but she stopped sweeping. Abena could no longer hear the bristles brushing the hard clay.
“It is time I make the journey,” Abena said, eyes level. “It is time I meet people from other villages. I will soon be an old lady with no children, and I will know nothing but this village and the next. I want to visit Kumasi. See what a large city is like, walk by the Asante king’s palace.”
Hearing the words “Asante king,” her father clenched his fists, crushing the seeds in his hands to a fine powder that slipped through the small spaces between his fingers. “See the Asante king’s palace for what?” he yelled.
“Am I not an Asante?” she asked, daring him to tell her the truth, to explain the Fante in his accent, the white in his skin. “Do my people not come from Kumasi? You have kept me here like a prisoner with your bad luck. Unlucky, they call you, but your name should be Shame, or Fearful, or Liar. Which is it, Old Man?”
With that, her father slapped her firmly across her left cheek, and the seeds in his hand powdered her face. She reached up to where the pain was. He had never hit her before. Every other child in their village had been beaten for something as small as dropping water from a bucket or as large as sleeping with someone before marriage. But her parents never hit her. Instead, they treated her as an equal, asking her opinion and discussing their plans with her. The only thing they had ever forbidden her from doing was going to Kumasi, land of the Asante king, or down into Fanteland. And while she had no use for the Coast, no respect for Fante people, her pride in the Asante was great. It was growing every day as word came of the Asante soldiers’ valiant battles against the British, their strength, their hope for a free kingdom.
For as long as she could remember her parents had made up one excuse after the other. She was too young. Her blood had not come. She was not married. She was never getting married. Abena had begun to believe that her parents had killed someone in Kumasi or were wanted by the king’s guards, maybe even by the king himself. She no longer cared.
Abena wiped the seed powder from her face and made her hand into a fist, but before she could use it, her mother came up behind her and snatched her arm.
“Enough,” she said.
Old Man had his head down as he walked out of their hut, and when the cool air from outside hit the exposed nape of her neck, Abena started to cry.
“Sit down,” her mother said, gesturing to the stool her father had just left. Abena did as she was told, and watched her mother, a woman of sixty-five, who looked no older than she herself did, still so beautiful that the village boys whispered and whistled when she bent down to lift water. “Your father and I are not welcome in Kumasi,” she said. She was speaking as one speaks to an old woman whose memories, those things that used to be hard-formed chrysalises, had turned into butterflies and flown away, never to return. “I am from Kumasi, and when I was young, I defied my parents to marry your father. He came to get me. He came all the way from Fanteland.”
Abena shook her head. “Why didn’t your parents want you to marry him?”
Akosua put one hand on top of hers and began stroking it. “Your father was a…” She stopped, searching for the right words. Abena knew her mother didn’t want to tell a secret that was not hers to tell. “He was the son of a Big Man, the grandson of two very Big Men, and he wanted to live a life for himself instead of a life that was chosen for him. He wanted his children to be able to do the same. That is all I can say. Go and visit Kumasi. Your father will not stop you.”
Her mother left the hut in search of her father, and Abena stared at the red clay walls around her. Her father should have been a Big Man, but he had chosen this: red clay formed in the shape of a circle, a packed straw roof, a hut so small it fit nothing m
ore than a few tree stump stools. Outside, the ruined earth of a farm that had never earned its title as a farm. His decision had meant her shame, her unmarried, childless shame. She would go to Kumasi.
—
In the evening, once she was certain her parents had gone to sleep, Abena slipped away to Ohene Nyarko’s compound. His first wife, Mefia, was boiling water outside her hut, the steam from the air and the pot making her sweat.
“Sister Mefia, is your husband in?” Abena asked, and Mefia rolled her eyes and pointed toward the door.
Ohene Nyarko’s farms were fruitful every year. Though their village was no more than two miles by two miles, though there was no one to even call Chief or Big Man, so small were their land and their status, Ohene was well respected. A man who could have done well elsewhere, had he not been born here.
“Your wife hates me,” Abena said.
“She thinks I am still sleeping with you,” Ohene Nyarko said, his eyes twinkling with mischief. It made Abena want to hit him.
She cringed when she thought of what had happened between them. They were only children then. Inseparable and mischievous. Ohene had discovered that the stick between his legs could perform tricks, and while Abena’s father and mother were out begging for a share of the elders’ food, as they did every week, Ohene had showed Abena those tricks.
“See?” he said as they watched it lift when she touched it. They had both seen their fathers’ this way, Ohene on those days his father went from one wife’s hut to the next, and Abena in the days before she got her own hut. But they had never known Ohene’s to do the same.
“What does it feel like?” she had asked.
He shrugged, smiled, and she knew what he felt was a good thing. She was born to parents who let her speak her mind, go after what she wanted, even if that thing was limited to boys. Now she wanted this.
“Lie on top of me!” she demanded, remembering what she’d seen her parents do so many times. Everyone in the village had always laughed at her parents, saying that Unlucky was too poor to get a second wife, but Abena knew the truth. That on those nights when she had slept on the far side of their small hut, pretending not to listen, she could hear her father whisper, “Akosua, you are my one and only.”