“We cannot do that until we have had our marriage ceremony!” Ohene said, mortified. All children had heard the fables about people who lay together before they had their marriage ceremonies: the far-fetched one about the men whose penises turned into trees while still inside the woman, growing branches into her stomach so that he could not exit her body; the simpler, truer ones about banishment, fines, and shame.
Finally that night, Abena had been able to convince Ohene, and he had fumbled around, thrusting at the entrance until he broke through and she hurt, thrusting inside: once, twice, then nothing. There was no loud moan or whimper as they had heard escape their fathers’ mouths. He simply left the same way he had arrived.
Back then, she had been the strong, unshakable one, the one who could talk him into anything. Now Abena stared at Ohene Nyarko as he stood broad-shouldered and smirking, waiting for the favor he knew was tugging at her lips.
“I need you to take me to Kumasi,” she said. It wasn’t wise for her to travel alone and unmarried, and she knew her father would not take her.
Ohene Nyarko laughed, a large and boisterous sound. “My darling, I cannot take you to Kumasi now. It is more than two weeks’ journey and the rains will soon be coming. I must tend to my farm.”
“Your sons do most of the work anyway,” she said. She hated when he called her his “darling,” always spoken in English, as she had taught him when they were children after she’d heard her father say it once and asked him what it meant. She hated that Ohene Nyarko should call her his beloved while his wife was outside cooking his evening meal and his sons were outside tending to his farm. It didn’t seem right that he should let her walk in shame as he had done all those years, not when she knew by looking at his fields that he would soon have enough wealth for a second wife.
“Eh, but who supervises my sons? A ghost? I cannot marry you if the yams don’t grow.”
“If you have not married me by now, you will never marry me,” Abena whispered, surprised at the hard lump that had so quickly formed in her throat. She hated when he joked about marrying her.
Ohene Nyarko clicked his tongue and pulled her to his chest. “Don’t cry now,” he said. “I will take you to see the Asante capital, all right? Don’t cry, my darling.”
—
Ohene Nyarko was a man of his word, and at the end of that week, the two set out for Kumasi, the home of the Asantehene.
Everything felt new to Abena. Compounds were actually compounds, built from stone with five or six huts apiece, not one or two at most. These huts were so tall they resurrected the image of ten-foot-tall giants from the stories her mother used to tell. Giants who swooped down to pluck tiny children up from the clay earth when they were misbehaving. Abena imagined the families of giants who lived in the town, fetching water, building fires to boil the bad children in their soups.
Kumasi sprawled before them endlessly. Abena had never been to a place where she did not know everyone’s name. She had never been to a farm that she could not measure with her own eye, so small was each family’s plot. Here, the farmlands were large and luscious and filled with men to work them. People sold their wares in the middle of the town, things she had never seen before, relics from the old days of steady trade with the British and the Dutch.
In the afternoon they walked by the Asantehene’s palace. It stretched so long and wide she knew it could fit over a hundred people: wives, children, slaves, and more.
“Can we see the Golden Stool?” Abena asked, and Ohene Nyarko took her to the room where it was kept, locked away behind a glass wall so that no one could touch it.
It was the stool that contained the sunsum, the soul, of the entire Asante nation. Covered in pure gold, it had descended from the sky and landed in the lap of the first Asantehene, Osei Tutu. No one was allowed to sit on it, not even the king himself. Despite herself, Abena felt tears sting her eyes. She had heard about this stool her entire life from the elders of her village, but she had never seen it with her own eyes.
After she and Ohene Nyarko had finished touring the palace, they exited through the golden gates. Entering at the same time was a man not much older than Abena’s father, wrapped in kente and walking with a cane. He stopped, staring at Abena’s face intently.
“Are you a ghost?” he asked, almost shouting. “Is that you, James? They said you had died in the war, but I knew that could not be!” He reached out with his right hand and grazed Abena’s cheek, touching her so long and so familiarly that Ohene Nyarko finally had to remove his hand.
“Old Man, can you not see this is a woman? There is no James here.”
The man shook his head as if to clear his eyes, but when he looked at Abena again there was only confusion. “I’m sorry,” he said before hobbling away.
Once he had gone, Ohene Nyarko pushed Abena along, out of the gates, until they were firmly back in the bustle of the city. “That old man was probably half-blind,” he muttered, steering Abena by the elbow.
“Shhh,” Abena said, though there was no way the man could still hear them. “That man is probably a royal.”
And Ohene Nyarko snorted. “If he is a royal, then you are a royal too,” he said, laughing boisterously.
They kept walking. Ohene Nyarko wanted to buy new farming tools from some people in Kumasi before they headed back, but Abena couldn’t bear the thought of wasting time with people she didn’t know when she could be enjoying Kumasi, and so she and Ohene Nyarko parted ways, promising to meet again before nightfall.
She walked until the tough skin of her soles started to burn, and then she stopped for a moment, taking solace under the shade of a palm tree.
“Excuse me, Ma. I would like to talk to you about Christianity.”
Abena looked up. The man was dark and sinewy, his Twi broken or rusty, she couldn’t tell which. She took him in but could not place his face among any of the tribes she knew. “What is your name?” she asked. “Who are your people?”
The man smiled and shook his head. “It does not matter what my name is or who my people are. Come, let me show you the work we are doing here.” And because she was curious, Abena followed him.
He took her to a patch of dirt, a clearing that was waiting, begging, for something to be built there so that the city sprawl around it wouldn’t seem like a broken circle. At first Abena could not see much, but then more dark men with unplaceable faces walked over to the clearing carrying tree stumps for stools. Then a white man appeared. He was the first white man Abena had ever seen. Even though everyone whispered that there was white in her father, to her, he had always just looked like a lighter version of herself.
Here was the man the villagers really spoke of, the man who had come to the Gold Coast seeking slaves and gold however he could get them. Whether he stole, whether he lied, whether he promised alliance to the Fantes and power to the Asantes, the white man always found a way to get what he wanted. But the slave trade had finally ended, and two Anglo-Asante wars had passed. The white man, whom they called Abro Ni, wicked one, for all the trouble he had caused, was no longer welcome there.
And yet Abena saw him, sitting on the stump of a felled tree, talking to the tribeless dark men.
“Who is that?” she asked the man next to her.
“The white man?” he said. “He is the Missionary.”
The Missionary was looking at her now, smiling and motioning for them to approach, but the sun was beginning to set, ducking under the palm tree canopies that marked the west side of the city, and Ohene Nyarko would be waiting for her.
“I have to go,” she said, already pulling away.
“Please!” the dark man said. Behind him, the Missionary stood up, ready to come after her. “We are trying to build churches throughout the Asante region. Please, come find us if you ever need us.”
Abena nodded, though she was already running. When she got to the meeting spot, Ohene Nyarko was buying roasted yams from a bush girl. A girl who, like Abena, had come from some small Asant
e village, hoping to see something new, to change her circumstances.
“Eh, Kumasi woman,” Ohene Nyarko said. The girl had hoisted her big clay pot of yams back onto her head and was walking away, her hips keeping a steady, swaying pace. “You’re late.”
“I saw a white man,” she said, pressing her palm against the wall of someone’s compound as she tried to steady her breath. “A church man.”
Ohene Nyarko spit on the ground, sucked his teeth. “Those Europeans! Don’t they know to stay out of Asante? Did we not just beat them in this last war? We don’t want whatever it is they are trying to bring us! They can take their religion to the Fantes before we finish them all.”
Abena nodded absently. The men of her village often spoke of the ongoing conflict between the Asantes and the British, saying that the Fantes were sympathizers, and that no white man could come into their country and tell them that they no longer owned it. These were village people, farmers who had never seen war, most of whom had never seen the coast of the Gold Coast they so wanted to protect.
It was on a night like this that Papa Kwabena, one of the oldest men in their village, had started speaking about the slave trade. “You know, I had a cousin in the North who was stolen from his hut in the middle of the night. Swoosh! Just taken, and we don’t know by whom. Was it an Asante warrior? Was it a Fante? We don’t know. We don’t know where they took him!”
“To the Castle,” Abena’s father said, and everyone had turned to look at him. Unlucky. Who always sat in the back of the village meetings, holding his daughter in his lap as though she were a son. They allowed this because they pitied him.
“What castle?” Papa Kwabena asked.
“There’s a castle on the coast in Fanteland called the Cape Coast Castle. That is where they used to keep the slaves before they sent them away, to Aburokyire: America, Jamaica. Asante traders would bring in their captives. Fante, Ewe, or Ga middlemen would hold them, then sell them to the British or the Dutch or whoever was paying the most at the time. Everyone was responsible. We all were…we all are.”
The men all nodded, though they did not know what a castle was, what America was, but they did not want to look foolish in front of Unlucky.
Ohene Nyarko spit out a burned portion of the yam and put his hand on Abena’s shoulder. “Are you well?” he asked.
“I was thinking about my father,” she said.
A smile broke across Ohene Nyarko’s face. “Oh, Unlucky. What would he say if he saw you here with me now, eh? His precious ‘son,’ Abena, doing something he has long forbidden her to do.” He laughed. “Well, let me get you home to him now.”
—
They traveled quickly and quietly, Ohene Nyarko and his large, full frame making a way, tearing a path through terrain that had dangers Abena dared not think of. By the end of the second week, they could just make out the skyline of their own village, small though it was.
“Why don’t we rest here?” Ohene Nyarko asked, pointing to a spot just in front of them. Abena could tell that others had rested there before. There was a small cave that had formed from the ruin of fallen trees, and the space on the ground had been cleared to make room for it.
“Can’t we keep going?” Abena asked. She had begun to feel homesick for her mother and father. She had told them everything from the day she spoke her first word, and she could not wait to tell them about this, even though she knew her father would still be angry. He would want to hear it. Her parents were getting older, and she knew they had no time to harbor bad feelings.
Ohene Nyarko was already setting his things down. “It’s another day’s journey,” he said, “and I’m too tired, my darling.”
“Don’t call me that,” Abena said, dropping her own things to the ground as she sat down in the small tree cave.
“But you are.”
She didn’t want to say it. Instead, she wanted to force the words to stay inside her mouth but could feel them coming up her throat, pressing against her lips. “Then why won’t you marry me?”
Ohene Nyarko sat down next to her. “We’ve talked about that. I will marry you when I have my next big harvest. My parents always used to say that I shouldn’t marry a woman whose clan I didn’t know. They said you would bring nothing but dishonor to my children, if we had children at all, but they don’t speak for me anymore. I don’t care what the villagers say. I don’t care if your mother was thought barren until she had you. I don’t care that you are the daughter of a nameless man. I will marry you as soon as my land tells me that I am ready to marry you.”
Abena couldn’t look at him. She was staring at the bark on the palm trees, the rounded diamonds crisscrossing against each other. Each one different; each one the same.
Ohene Nyarko turned her chin toward him. “You must be patient,” he said.
“I have been patient while you married your first wife. My parents are so old that their backs have begun to curve. Soon they will fall like these trees, and then what?” She didn’t know if it was the thought of being alone without her parents or the fact of her present loneliness, but before she could fight them, tears were rolling down her face.
Ohene Nyarko placed his hands on both of her cheeks and wiped her tears with his thumbs, but they fell quicker than he could sweep them away, and so he used his lips, kissing the salty trail that had begun to form.
Soon her lips were meeting his. They were not the lips she remembered from their childhood, the ones that were thin and always dry because he refused to oil them. They were thicker, a trap for her own lips, her own tongue.
Soon they were lying down in the shadow of the cave. Abena took off her wrapper and heard Ohene Nyarko suck in his breath, removing his own. At first they just stared at each other, taking their bodies in, comparing them with what they’d known before.
He reached for her, and she flinched, remembering the last time he had touched her. How she had lain on the floor of her parents’ hut, staring up at the straw roof and wondering if there was more to it than that, the pain of it so outweighing the pleasure that she could not understand why it happened in huts across her village, the Asante, the world.
Now Ohene Nyarko pinned her arms down to the hard red clay. She bit his arm and he growled, letting go, until she hugged him back toward her. He moved like he knew the scenes that were playing inside her head. And she let him inside her. And she let herself forget everything but him.
When they had finished, when they were sweaty and spent and catching their breath, Abena laid her head against his chest, that panting pillow, his heart drumming into her ear.
Abena once spent an entire day fetching water for her father’s farm: going to the stream, dipping her bucket in, coming back and filling their basin. It was nearing nightfall, and no matter how much water she got, it never seemed to be enough. The next morning, the plants had all died, withered to brown leaves littering the land in front of their hut.
She was only five then. She did not understand that things could die, despite one’s best efforts to keep them alive. All she knew was that every morning her father watched over the plants, prayed over them, and that each season when the inevitable happened, her father, a man whom she had never seen cry, who greeted each turn of bad luck as though it were a new opportunity, would lift his head high and begin again. And so, that time, she cried for him.
He found her in the hut and sat down beside her. “Why are you crying?” he asked.
“The plants have all died, and I could have helped them!” she said between sobs.
“Abena,” he asked, “what would you have done differently if you knew the plants would die?”
She thought about this for a moment, wiped her nose with the back of her hand, and answered, “I would have brought more water.”
Her father nodded. “Then next time bring more water, but don’t cry for this time. There should be no room in your life for regret. If in the moment of doing you felt clarity, you felt certainty, then why feel regret later?”
/> She nodded as he spoke to her even though she didn’t understand his words, because she knew, even then, that he was speaking more for himself.
But now, letting her head move in rhythm with Ohene Nyarko’s breath and heart, the slow trickle of combined sweat that slid between them, she remembered those words, and she regretted nothing.
*
The year Abena visited Kumasi, everyone in her village had a bad harvest. Then the year after. And for four more years on top of those. Villagers began to move away. Some were so desperate they even went to the dreaded North, crossing the Volta in search of unclaimed land, land that hadn’t forsaken them.
Abena’s father was so old he could no longer straighten his back or hands. He could no longer farm. So Abena did it for him, watching as the ruined land spit up death year after year. The villagers were not eating. They said it was an act of penance but knew it was their only choice.
Even Ohene Nyarko’s once lush lands had turned barren, and so his promise to marry Abena after the next good harvest had been set aside.
They continued to see each other. In the first year, before they knew what the harvest would bring, they had done so brazenly. “Abena, be careful,” her mother would say in the mornings after Ohene Nyarko snuck out of Abena’s hut. “This is bad juju.” But Abena didn’t care. So what if people knew? So what if she got pregnant? Soon enough she would be Ohene Nyarko’s wife, not just his oldest friend turned mistress.
But that year, Ohene Nyarko’s plants were the first to spoil, and people scratched their heads, wondering why. Until their own plants died, and they said there must be a witch among them. Had the trouble they thought Unlucky would bring them been so long delayed? It was a woman named Aba who first saw Ohene Nyarko walking the path back from Abena’s hut at the end of the second bad year.