Homegoing

  Now it was Yaw’s turn to smile. Esther laughed, her whole wide mouth open, and suddenly Yaw had the strange urge to reach in and pull something of that happiness out for himself so that he might keep it with him always.

  They went to the market. Fat women with babies at their breasts sold soup, corn, yams, meat. Men and young boys stood bartering with each other. Some sold food, others sold carvings and wooden drums. Yaw stopped by the stand of a boy who looked to be about thirteen who was using a slim knife to carve symbols into a drum. The boy’s father stood careful watch beside him. Yaw recognized the man from last year’s Kundum. He was one of the best drummers Yaw had ever seen, and as the man stared at his son, Yaw could see that he wanted the boy to be even better.

  “You like to drum?” Esther asked.

  Yaw didn’t realize she had been watching him. It was so rare that he had to be concerned with other people. He hadn’t been angry after all. Just nervous.

  “Me? No, no. I never learned how.”

  She nodded. She led the freshly purchased, roped goat behind her, and at times while they walked, the animal grew obstinate, digging its hooves into the ground and nudging its head against the air, its horns reflecting light. She tugged it forcefully, and it bleated, perhaps at her, though perhaps it would have done so anyway.

  Yaw realized that he should say something. He cleared his throat and looked at her, but his words stuck. She smiled at him.

  “I make a very good goat pepper soup,” she said.

  “Is that right?”

  “Yes, so good you would think your mother made it. Where is your mother?” she asked in her breathless way.

  The goat stood still, screamed. Esther wrapped the rope once more around her wrist and tugged. It occurred to Yaw that he should offer to walk the goat for her, but he didn’t.

  “My mother lives in Edweso. I haven’t seen her since the day I turned six.” He paused. “She did this to me.” He pointed to the scar, angled his body so that she could see it more clearly.

  Esther stopped walking and so Yaw stopped too. She looked at him, and for a second he worried that she would reach out and try to touch him, but she didn’t.

  Instead she said, “You’re very angry.”

  “Yes,” he said. It was something he rarely admitted to himself, let alone to anyone else. The longer he looked at himself in a mirror, the longer he lived alone, the longer the country he loved stayed under colonial rule, the angrier he became. And the nebulous, mysterious object of his anger was his mother, a woman whose face he could barely remember, but a face reflected in his own scar.

  “Anger doesn’t suit you,” Esther said. She gave the goat one more good tug, and Yaw listened to it bleat as the two of them walked ahead of him.

  —

  He was in love with her. Five years passed before he realized it, though perhaps he knew on that first day. It was summer, and the insistent fog of heat was upon them, so ever-present it felt like a low hum, a heat you could hear. Yaw didn’t have to teach summer term, and so he had hours, whole days, to sit and read and write. Instead, he watched Esther clean from his spot at the desk. He pretended to be annoyed when she rolled off her list of endless questions, but since that first day, he always answered them all, each and every one. When it was not raining, he would sit outside under the shade of a big, bushy mango tree while she drew water from the well. She carried it back to the house in two buckets, and the swollen muscles of her arms would flex, and the sheen of sweat would appear on them, and when she passed him she would smile, the gap so lovely it made him want to cry.

  Everything made him want to cry. He could see the differences between them as long ravines, impossible to cross. He was old; she was young. He was educated; she was not. He was scarred; she was whole. Each difference split the ravine wider and wider still. There was no way.

  And so, he didn’t speak. In the evenings, she would ask him what he wanted for dinner, what he was working on, whether he had heard any updates about the independence movement, whether he was still considering traveling for more education.

  He said what needed to be said, nothing more.

  “The banku is too sticky today,” she said while they ate one night. In the beginning, she had insisted on taking her meals separately from him, saying that it wouldn’t be proper for them to eat together, which was true enough. But the thought of her alone in her room with nowhere for all of her questions to go seemed to him to be the worse option. So now, this and every night, she ate across from him at his small wooden table.

  “It’s good,” he said. He smiled. He wished he were a beautiful man, with skin as smooth as clay. But he was not the kind of man who could win a woman just with his presence. He would have to do something.

  “No, I’ve made much better in the past. It’s okay. You don’t have to eat it if you don’t like it. I’ll make something else for you. Would you like soup?”

  She was starting to pick up his plate, so he held it down.

  “This is good,” he said again, more forcefully. He wondered what he should do to win her. For the past five years she had been drawing him more and more out of himself. Asking him questions about his schooling, about Edward, about the past.

  “Would you like to go to Edweso with me?” Yaw asked. “To visit my mother?” As soon as he said it, he regretted it. For years, Esther had been nudging him to go, but he either deflected or ignored her. Now, his love had made him desperate. He didn’t even know if the Crazy Woman of Edweso was still alive.

  Esther looked uncertain. “You want me to go?”

  “In case I need someone to cook for me as I travel,” he said hurriedly, trying to cover his tracks.

  She considered this for a moment, and then she nodded. For the first time since he had met her, she had no further questions.

  *

  There were 206 kilometers between Takoradi and Edweso. Yaw knew because he could feel each kilometer as though it were a stone lodged in his throat. Two hundred and six stones collected in his mouth, so that he could not speak. Even when Esther asked him a question, like how much longer were they to travel, how would he explain her presence to the townspeople, what would he say to his mother when he saw her, the stones blocked his words from passing. Eventually, Esther too grew silent.

  He remembered so little of Edweso, so he could not say if things had changed. When they reached the town, they were greeted first by a sweltering heat, the sun’s rays stretched out like a cat after a nap. There were only a few people standing about the square that day, but the ones who were there stared freely, shocked at the sight either of the car or of the strangers.

  “What are they looking at?” Esther whispered miserably. She was worried about herself, that people would think it improper for them to be traveling together, unmarried. She had not said this to him yet, but he could see it in the way she lowered her eyes and walked behind him.

  Before long, a little boy, no older than four, holding the long train of his mother’s wrapper, pointed at Yaw with his tiny index finger. “Look, Mama, his face! His face!”

  The boy’s father, who stood on the other side of him, snatched his hand away. “Stop that nonsense!” he said, but then he looked more closely along the line the boy’s finger had drawn.

  He approached Yaw and Esther where they stood, uncertain, holding one bag each. “Yaw?” he asked.

  Yaw dropped his bag to the ground and walked closer to the man. “Yes?” he said. “I’m afraid I don’t remember you.” He held his hand above his brows to shield his eyes from the sun, but was soon extending it again to shake the man’s hand.

  “They call me Kofi Poku,” the man said, shaking back. “I was about ten when you left. This is my wife, Gifty, and my son Henry.”

  Yaw shook hands all around and then turned toward Esther. “This is my…This is Esther,” he said. And Esther too shook hands all around.

  “You must be here to see Crazy Woman,” Kofi Poku said before realizing his mistake. He covered his m
outh. “I’m so sorry. I mean Ma Akua.”

  Yaw could tell from the way his eyes searched and his mouth slowed that Kofi Poku had not had to call his mother by her name in years. Perhaps ever. As far as Yaw knew, the Crazy Woman of Edweso could have earned her title well before his birth. “Please, don’t worry,” Yaw said. “We are here to see my mother, yes.”

  Just then, Kofi Poku’s wife leaned in to his ear to whisper something, and the man’s eyebrows lifted, face brightening. When he spoke, it was as though the idea had been his all along.

  “You and your wife must be very tired from your journey. Please, my wife and I would like you to stay with us. We will make you dinner.”

  Yaw started to shake his head, but Kofi Poku waved his hand, as though trying to counteract Yaw’s shake with his own. “I insist. Besides, your mother keeps odd hours. It would not be good for you to go to her today. Wait until tomorrow evening. We will send someone to tell her you are coming.”

  How could they refuse? Yaw and Esther had planned on going straight to Akua’s house to stay, but instead they walked the short mile’s distance from the town square to the Poku house. When they got there, Kofi Poku’s other children, three daughters and one son, were beginning dinner. One of the girls, the tallest and most slender, sat before a great big mortar. The boy held the pestle, which was nearly twice his height. He held it straight up and then would send it crashing down just as the girl’s hand finished turning the fufu in the mortar, barely escaping the impact.

  “Hello, my children,” Kofi Poku called, and all of the children stopped what they were doing and stood, so that they could greet their parents, but when they saw Yaw their voices hushed and their eyes widened.

  The one who looked like the youngest girl, with two puffs of hair on either side of her head, pulled on her brother’s pants leg. “Crazy Woman’s son,” she whispered. Yet still, all could hear, and Yaw knew for certain now that his story had become legend in his hometown.

  Everyone stood there, embarrassed for a minute, and then Esther with her large and muscular arms snatched the pestle from the older boy and quickly struck the fufu in the mortar before anyone had time to think or react. The ball of fufu flattened, and the fufu stick fell with a thud against the clay earth.

  “Enough!” Esther shouted once they had all turned to stare at her. “Has this man not suffered enough that he should come home to this?” she asked.

  “Please excuse my child,” Mrs. Poku said, using her voice to speak instead of her husband’s for the first time since they’d met her. “It’s just that they have heard the stories. They will not make the mistake again.” She turned, allowed her gaze to rest on each of the five children, even the toddler at her feet, and quickly, without any need for further explanation, they understood.

  Kofi Poku cleared his throat, and motioned for the two of them to follow him to their seats. As they did, Yaw whispered, “Thank you,” and Esther shrugged. “Let them think that I am the crazy one,” Esther said.

  They sat down to their meal. The kids served them, frightened but kind. Kofi Poku and his wife told them what to expect from Yaw’s mother.

  “She lives with only a house girl in that place your father built for her on the edge of town. She rarely goes out anymore, though sometimes you can see her outside, tending to her garden. She has a lovely garden. My wife often goes there to admire the flowers that grow there.”

  “Does she speak when you see her?” Yaw asked Mrs. Poku.

  The woman shook her head. “No, but she has always been kind to me. She even gives me some flowers to take home. I put them in the girls’ hair before we go to church, and I think it will bring them good marriages.”

  “Don’t worry,” Kofi Poku said. “I’m sure she will know you. Her heart will know you.” His wife and Esther both nodded, and Yaw looked away.

  It was dark in the courtyard, but the heat had not lessened, only transformed, buzzing with mosquitoes and humming with gnats.

  Yaw and Esther finished their food. They said thank you. They were taken to their room, where Esther insisted on the floor while Yaw got the mattress, a tough, springy thing that fought his back. Like that, and there, they slept.

  —

  They spent the morning preparing, walking around Edweso, and eating many times. They had been told that Yaw’s mother rarely slept and seemed to prefer evenings to mornings. And so they bided their time. Esther had left Takoradi only once in her life, and Yaw loved seeing the wonder in her eyes as they took in the strangeness of this new town.

  Everyone thought they were married. Yaw did not correct them, and, to his delight, Esther did not correct them either, though Yaw wondered if this was more a factor of her politeness than her desire. He was too afraid to ask.

  Soon, the sky began to darken and with each new shade, Yaw’s stomach began to tighten. Esther kept glancing at him carefully, taking in his face as though it held instructions for how she herself should feel.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she said.

  Since they’d met five years before, Esther had been the one to encourage his homecoming. She said it had something to do with forgiveness, but Yaw wasn’t certain that he believed in forgiveness. He heard the word most on the few days he went to the white man’s church with Edward and Mrs. Boahen and sometimes with Esther, and so it had begun to seem to him like a word the white men brought with them when they first came to Africa. A trick their Christians had learned and spoke loudly and freely about to the people of the Gold Coast. Forgiveness, they shouted, all the while committing their wrongs. When he was younger, Yaw wondered why they did not preach that the people should avoid wrongdoing altogether. But the older he got, the better he understood. Forgiveness was an act done after the fact, a piece of the bad deed’s future. And if you point the people’s eye to the future, they might not see what is being done to hurt them in the present.

  When it was finally evening, Kofi Poku led Yaw and Esther to Yaw’s mother’s house on the outskirts of town. Yaw knew it immediately from the lush things that grew in her garden. Colors that Yaw had never seen before bloomed off of long green stalks that rustled from the wind or the small creatures that moved beneath them.

  “This is where I leave you,” Kofi Poku said. They had not even reached the door yet. For any other family, in this and many other towns, it would have been considered rude for a townsperson to be so close to a person’s house and not greet the master of the house, but Yaw could see the discomfort in the man’s face, and he waved to him and thanked him again while he made his way off.

  The door to the house was open, but still Yaw knocked twice, Esther standing behind him.

  “Hello?” a confused voice called. A woman who looked older than Yaw, carrying a clay bowl, rounded the corner. When she saw Yaw, saw his scar, she gasped, and the bowl fell to the ground, shattering, scattering pieces of red clay from the door all the way into the garden. Tiny pieces of clay that they would never find, that would be absorbed into that earth from which they came.

  The woman was shouting. “We thank God for all of his mercies! We thank him that he is alive. Our God, he does not sleep-oh!” She danced around the room. “Old Lady, God has brought you your son! Old Lady, God has brought you your son so you do not have to go to Asamando without seeing him. Old Woman, come and see!” she yelled.

  Behind him, Yaw could hear Esther clapping her hands together in her own mini praise. He didn’t turn, but he knew she was smiling brightly, and the warmth of that thought emboldened him to step a bit further into the room.

  “Does she not hear me?” the woman mumbled to herself, turning sharply toward the bedroom.

  Yaw kept moving, at first following the woman, but then continuing straight until he reached the living room. His mother sat in the corner.

  “So you have returned home at last,” she said, smiling.

  If he had not already known that the woman in this house was his mother, he would not have known by looking at her. Yaw was fifty-five, which
meant she would be seventy-six, but she seemed younger. Her eyes had the unburdened look of the young, and her smile was generous, yet wise. When she stood up her back was straight, her bones not yet hunched from the weight of each year. When she walked toward him, her limbs were fluid, not stiff, the joints never halting. And when she touched him, when she took his hands in her own, her scarred and ruined hands, when she rubbed the backs of his hands with her crooked thumbs, he felt how soft her own burns were, how very, very soft.

  “The son has come home at last. The dreams, they do not fail to come true. They do not fail.”

  She continued to hold his hands. In the entryway, the servant woman cleared her throat. Yaw turned to find her and Esther standing there, grinning at them.

  “Old Woman, we will make dinner!” the woman shouted. Yaw wondered if her voice was always this loud or if the volume was for him.

  “Please, don’t go to any trouble,” he begged.

  “Eh? The son comes home after all these years, does the mother not kill a goat?” She sucked her teeth on the way out of the door.

  “And you?” Yaw asked Esther.

  “Who will boil the yam while the woman kills the goat?” she asked, her voice mischievous.

  Yaw watched them go, and for the first time he grew nervous. Suddenly, he felt something he had not felt in a long, long time.

  “What are you doing?” he shouted, for his mother had put her hand on his scar, running her fingers along the ruined skin that he alone had touched for nearly half a century.

  She continued, undeterred by the anger in his voice. She took her own burned fingers from the lost eyebrow to the raised cheek to the scarred chin. She touched all of it, and only once she had finished did Yaw begin to weep.

  She pulled him down to the ground with her, pulled his head to her bosom, and began to chant, softly, “My son-o! My son! My son-o! My son!”

  The two stayed like this for a long while, and after Yaw had cried more tears than he had ever cried before, after his mother had finished calling his name out into the world, he peeled himself away so that he could look at her.