—
Edweso was empty. The absence of the men felt like its own presence. Sometimes Akua would think that not much at all had changed, but then she would see the empty fields, the rotting yams, the wailing women. Akua’s dreams were getting worse too. In them, the firewoman raged against the loss of her children. Sometimes she spoke to Akua, calling her, it seemed. She looked familiar, and Akua wanted to ask her questions. She wanted to know if the firewoman knew the white man who had been burned. If everyone touched by fire was a part of the same world. If she was being called. Instead, she didn’t speak. She woke up screaming. In the midst of all this turmoil, Akua was pregnant. At least six months now, she figured by the shape and firm weight of her belly.
One day, more than halfway through the war, Akua was boiling yams to send to the soldiers, and she could not lift her eyes from the fire.
“This again?” Nana Serwah said. “I thought we had finished with your idleness. Are our people out fighting so that you can stare into the fire and scream at night for your children to hear?”
“No, Ma,” Akua said, shaking herself out of her stupor. But the next day she did it again. And again her mother-in-law scolded her. The same thing happened the day after that, and then the one after that, until Nana Serwah decided that Akua was sick and that she must stay in her hut until the sickness had left her body. Her daughters would stay with Nana Serwah until Akua had fully healed.
The first day of her hut exile, Akua was thankful for the break. She had not had rest since the men left for war, always marching through town singing the war songs or standing on her feet sweating into a large pot. Her plan was to not sleep until night had fallen. To lie on the side of the hut where Asamoah usually lay, trying to conjure up the smell of him to keep her company until night fell over the hut, casting its awful darkness into the room. But within hours Akua was asleep, and the firewoman had reappeared.
She was growing, her hair a wild bush of ochre and blue. She was growing bolder. No longer simply burning the things that were around her, but now acknowledging Akua. Seeing her.
“Where are your children?” she asked. Akua was too afraid to answer her. She could feel that her body was in the cot. She could feel that she was dreaming, and yet she could not exert control over that feeling. She could not tell that feeling to grow hands, nudge her body into waking. She could not tell that feeling to throw water on the firewoman, put her out of her dreams.
“You must always know where your children are,” the firewoman continued, and Akua shuddered.
The next day she tried to leave the hut, but Nana Serwah had the Fat Man sit at her door. His body, too fat to fight in the war that his peers were in, was just the right size for locking Akua in.
“Please!” Akua shouted. “Just let me see my children!”
But the Fat Man would not budge. Nana Serwah, standing next to him, shouted back, “You can see them once you are no longer sick!”
Akua fought for the rest of the day. She pushed but the Fat Man did not move. She screamed but he did not speak. She banged on the door but his ears would not hear.
Periodically, Akua could hear Nana Serwah coming to him, bringing him food to eat and water to drink. He said thank you, but nothing else. It was as though he felt like he had found his way to serve. The war had come to Akua’s door.
By nightfall, Akua was afraid to speak. She crouched in the corner of the hut, praying to every god she had ever known. The Christian God whom the missionaries had always described in terms both angry and loving. Nyame, the Akan God, all-knowing and all-seeing. She prayed too to Asase Yaa and her children Bia and Tano. She even prayed to Anansi, though he was nothing more than the trickster people put in their stories to amuse themselves. She prayed aloud and feverishly so that she would not sleep, and by morning she was too weak to fight the Fat Man, too weak to know if he was even still there.
For a week she stayed like this. She had never understood the missionaries when they said they could sometimes spend a whole day in prayer, but now she did. Prayer was not a sacred or holy thing. It was not spoken plainly, in Twi or English. It need not be performed on the knees or with folded palms. For Akua, prayer was a frenzied chant, a language for those desires of the heart that even the mind did not recognize were there. It was the scraping up of the clay floor into her dark palms. It was the crouching in the shadow of the room. It was the one-syllable word that escaped her lips over and over and over again.
Fire. Fire. Fire.
—
The Missionary would not let Akua leave the orphanage to marry Asamoah. Since the day she told him of Asamoah’s proposal, he had stopped his lessons, stopped telling her that she was a heathen or asking her to repent her sins, to repeat “God bless the queen.” He only watched her.
“You can’t keep me here,” Akua said. She was gathering the last of her things out of her quarters. Asamoah would be back before nightfall to get her. Edweso was waiting.
The Missionary stood in the doorframe, his switch in his hand.
“What? Will you beat me until I stay?” she asked. “You’d have to kill me to keep me here.”
“I’ll tell you about your mother,” the Missionary finally said. He dropped the switch to the floor and walked toward Akua until he was standing so close she could smell the faint stench of fish on his breath. For ten years, he had come no closer to her than the length of that switch. For ten years he had refused to answer her questions about her family. “I’ll tell you about your mother. Anything you want to know.”
Akua took a step back from him, and he did the same. He looked down.
“Your mother, Abena, she wouldn’t repent,” the Missionary said. “She came to us pregnant—you, her sin—but still she wouldn’t repent. She spit at the British. She was argumentative and angry. I believe she was glad of her sins. I believe she did not regret you or your father, even though he did not care for her as a man should.”
The Missionary was speaking softly, so softly that Akua couldn’t be certain that she was hearing him at all.
“After you were born, I took her to the water to be baptized. She didn’t want to go, but I—I forced her. She thrashed as I carried her through the forest, to the river. She thrashed as I lowered her down into the water. She thrashed and thrashed and thrashed, and then she was still.” The Missionary lifted his head and looked at her finally. “I only wanted her to repent. I—I only wanted her to repent…”
The Missionary started crying. It was not the sight of tears that caught Akua’s attention so much as the sound. The terrible sound, the heaving sound, like something wrenched from the throat.
“Where is her body?” Akua asked. “What did you do with her body?”
The sound stopped. The Missionary spoke. “I burned it in the forest. I burned it with all of her things. God forgive me! God forgive me!”
The sound returned. This time, shuddering came with it, a shaking so violent that soon the Missionary fell down to the ground.
Akua had to walk over his body to leave.
—
Asamoah returned at the end of the week. Akua could hear him with her growing ear, though she could not yet see him. She felt weighted to the ground, her limbs heavy logs on the floor of some dark forest.
At the door, Nana Serwah was sobbing and screaming. “My son-o! My son! My son-o! My son!” Then Akua’s growing ear heard a new sound. Loud step. Space. Loud step. Space.
“What is the Fat Man doing here?” Asamoah asked. His voice was loud enough that Akua considered moving, but it was as though she were in the dream space again, unable to make her body do what her mind wanted it to.
Nana Serwah could not answer her son, so busy was she in her wailing. The Fat Man moved, his enormous girth a boulder rolling to reveal the door. Asamoah entered the room, but still Akua could not get up.
“What is the meaning of this?” Asamoah roared, and Nana Serwah was shaken from her wailing.
“She was sick. She was sick, so we…”
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Her voice trailed. Akua could hear the sound again. Loud step. Space. Loud step. Space. Loud step. Space. Then Asamoah was standing in front of her, but instead of two legs, she only saw one.
He crouched down carefully so that their eyes could better meet, balancing so well that Akua wondered how long it had been since he’d last seen the missing leg. He seemed so well acquainted with the space.
He noticed her swollen belly and shuddered. He reached out his hand. Akua looked at it. She had not slept in a week. Ants had begun to pass over her fingers and she wanted to shake them off, or give them to Asamoah, lace her small fingers between his large ones.
Asamoah stood and turned to his mother. “Where are the girls?” he asked, and Nana Serwah, who had started crying anew, this time at the sight of Akua trapped on the ground, ran to fetch them.
Ama Serwah and Abee came in. To Akua they looked unchanged. Both girls still sucked their thumbs, despite the fact that Nana Serwah put hot pepper on the tips of them every morning, noon, and night to warn them away. The girls were developing a taste for heat. They looked from Asamoah to Akua, holding hands with their grandmother, thumbs in mouths. Then, wordlessly, Abee wrapped her entire little body around her father’s leg as though it were a trunk, as though it were the fufu stick she was so fond of holding, stronger than she was, sturdier. The toddler, Ama Serwah, moved closer to Akua, and she could see that she had been crying; a thick line of snot trailed from her nose to lick her upper lip, her mouth gaping wide open. It looked like a slug exiting a cave in order to enter a cavern. She touched her father’s knee, but kept moving to rest where Akua was. Then she lay down beside her. Akua could feel her little heart beating in time with her own broken one. She reached out to touch her daughter, to pull her into her arms, and then she stood and surveyed the room.
*
The war ended in September, and the earth around them began to register the Asante loss. Long fissures in the red clay formed about Akua’s compound, so dry was the season. Crops died, and food was limited, for they had given all they had to the men who were fighting. They had given all they had, assured that it would come back to them in the abundance of freedom. Yaa Asantewaa, Edweso’s warrior Queen Mother, was exiled to the Seychelles, never to be seen again by those who lived in the village. Sometimes Akua would walk by her palace in her wanderings and wonder: What if?
The day she had gotten up from the ground, she had not wanted to speak, nor would she let her children or Asamoah leave her sight. And so the broken family nestled into one another, each hoping the others’ presences would fill the wound their personal war had left behind.
In the beginning, Asamoah did not want to touch her and she did not want to be touched. The space where his leg had been taunted her. She could not figure out how to situate her body next to his while they lay in bed at night. In the past, she would curl into him, one of her legs intertwined between his two, but now she could not get comfortable, and her restlessness fed his restlessness. Akua no longer slept through the night, but Asamoah hated to see her awake and tortured and so she pretended to sleep, allowing the waves of her breasts to rise and fall to the current of breaths. Sometimes Asamoah would turn and stare at her. She could feel him considering her while she pretended to sleep, and if she slipped, opened her eyes or lost her breathing rhythm, his big booming voice would command her to sleep. If she convinced him, she would wait for his real breathing to match her contrived one, and then she would lie there, wishing the firewoman away. If she slept, she would do so only lightly, dipping the ladle of sleep into the shallow pool of dreamland, hoping she would not see the firewoman there before she beckoned herself awake.
Then, one day, Asamoah no longer wanted to sleep. He nuzzled Akua’s neck.
“I know you’re awake,” he said. “I know you do not sleep these days, Akua.”
And still she tried to pretend, ignoring his hot breath against her skin, breathing still and the same.
“Akua,” he said. He had turned his body so that his mouth now met her ear, and the sound of her name was a strong stick hitting a hollow drum.
She did not answer as he continued to speak her name. The first day she’d left the house after her week of exile, the townspeople had looked away as she passed, embarrassed and ashamed of how they had let Nana Serwah treat her. Her mother-in-law too could not see her without bursting into tears, her pleas for forgiveness muffled by the sound. It was only Kofi Poku, the child who had pointed out the white man, the evil one, and so consigned him to burn, who saw the silent Akua and whispered “Crazy Woman.” Crazy Woman. Wife of Crippled Man.
That night, Crippled Man turned Crazy Woman onto her back and entered her, forcefully at first, and then more timidly. She opened her eyes to see him working more slowly than he used to, using his arms to push off, push in, his sweat dripping slowly off the bridge of his nose to land on her forehead and trickle down to meet the floor.
When he finished, Asamoah turned away from her and wept. Their daughters were asleep across from them, thumbs in mouths. Akua turned too. Exhausted, she slept. And in the morning, when she realized that she had not dreamed of fire, she felt that she would be all right. And weeks later, when Nana Serwah snatched baby Yaw from between Akua’s legs with one hand and sliced the cord with the other, when Akua heard his loud and mewling cry, she knew that her son would be all right too.
—
Slowly Akua began to speak more. She slept rarely, but when she did, she would wander. Some days she woke up at the door, other days curled up between her daughters. The sleep time was short, quick, so that as soon as she had moved she was awake again. She would return to her place beside Asamoah, stare at the straw and mud of the roof above them until the sun began to peek through the cracks. Rarely, Asamoah would catch her in her night wanderings while he himself was in midsleep. He’d reach for his machete, then remember his missing leg and give up. Defeated, Akua thought, by his wife and his own misery.
Akua was wary of the villagers, and the only people who brought her any joy were her children. Ama Serwah was speaking real words now, leaving behind the fast and frantic nonsense speech of her early twos. Now no one questioned Akua when she wanted to take long walks with her children. They didn’t question her when she thought a stick was a snake or when she left the food in the fire to burn. When they whispered “Crazy Woman,” they had to do it behind Nana Serwah’s back, because if the woman heard them, she would give them a tongue-lashing that would sting almost as much as the real thing.
Akua would start each walk by asking her daughters where they wanted to go. She would sling baby Yaw in a wrapper around her back and wait for the girls to direct her. Often, they would say the same things. They wanted to walk by Yaa Asantewaa’s palace. The place had been preserved in her honor, and the girls liked to stand outside the gate, singing the postwar songs. Their favorite one was:
Koo koo hin koo
Yaa Asantewaa ee!
Obaa basia
Ogyina apremo ano ee!
Waye be egyae
Na Wabo Mmoden
Sometimes Akua would sing along softly, rocking Yaw back and forth in time with the music as she praised the woman who fought before cannons.
The girls would need to rest often, and their favorite spot to do it was underneath trees. Akua would spend long afternoons with them, napping in the small slices of shade provided by impossibly large trees.
“I want to be like Yaa Asantewaa when I am an Old Lady!” Ama Serwah declared on one such day. The girls had grown too tired to keep walking, and the only tree nearby was the one where the white man had burned. The blackness of the charred bark seemed to crawl up from the roots and toward the lowest branches. Akua resisted stopping there at first, but the baby’s weight made her feel like she was carrying ten handfuls of yam. Finally she stopped, lying flat on her back, the small mountain of her not-yet-deflated belly hiding her girls from sight as they lay at her feet, Yaw at her side.
“Will they sing song
s about you, my dear?” Akua asked, and Ama Serwah burst into giggles.
“Yes!” she said. “They’ll say, Look at the Old Lady, Ama Serwah. Isn’t she strong, and pretty too?”
“And what about you, Abee?” Akua asked, shielding her eyes from the mighty midday sun.
“Yaa Asantewaa was Queen Mother, daughter of a Big Man,” Abee said. “That is why she gets a song. Ama Serwah and I are only the daughters of a Crazy Woman raised by white men.”
Akua could not move as readily as she once used to. She didn’t know if this was because of the baby that had grown in her stomach, demanding her food and energy, or if it was a result of her week spent in exile on the floor of her hut. She wanted to spring to her feet, to look her daughter in the eye, but all she could manage was a gentle torque of her lower back, first to the left and then to the right, until she had gathered enough force to sit up, and see Abee, who was playing with the peeling bark.
“Who told you I am crazy?” she asked, and the child, who could not yet tell if she was on the verge of getting in trouble, shrugged. Akua wanted to be angrier, but she couldn’t find the energy anywhere in her body. She needed to sleep. Really sleep. Two days before, she had forgotten the yams she dropped into the oil, forgotten them as her eyes slept. By the time Nana Serwah shook her awake, the yams had burned to black. Her mother-in-law had said nothing.
“Everyone says you are crazy,” she said. “Sometimes Nana yells at them when they say it, but they still do.”
Akua rested her head against a rock, and did not speak until she heard the girls’ soft and sleepy breaths floating about her like tiny butterflies.
—
That night Akua took the children home. Asamoah was eating in the middle of the compound when they walked in.
“How are my girls?” he asked as his daughters rushed toward him to receive their hugs. Akua hung back, her eyes following her daughters as they made their way into the hut. It had been a hot day, and Ama Serwah was already peeling off her wrapper as she ran inside. It waved behind her like a flag.