“I’m home!” Quey announced, perhaps a bit too noisily, not wanting to hear what his father would say next. By the end of the day, he’d forgotten all about it, but weeks later, when Cudjo Sackee came with his father to visit the Castle, Quey remembered his parents’ conversation.
Cudjo’s father was the chief of a prominent Fante village. He was Abeeku Badu’s biggest competitor, and he had begun meeting with James Collins to discuss increasing trade when the governor asked him if he might bring his eldest son to one of their meetings.
“Quey, this is Cudjo,” James said, giving Quey a small push toward the boy. “You two play while we talk.”
Quey and Cudjo watched their fathers walk off to a different side of the Castle. Once they could hardly make them out anymore, Cudjo turned his attention to Quey.
“Are you white?” Cudjo had asked him, touching his hair.
Quey recoiled at Cudjo’s touch, though many others had done the same thing, asked him the same question. “I’m not white,” he said softly.
“What? Speak up!” Cudjo said, and so Quey had repeated himself, nearly shouting. From the distance, the boys’ fathers turned to observe the commotion.
“Not so loud, Quey,” James said.
Quey could feel color flood into his cheeks, but Cudjo had just looked on, clearly amused.
“So you’re not white. What are you?”
“I’m like you,” Quey said.
Cudjo held his hand out and demanded that Quey do the same, until they were standing arm to arm, skin touching skin. “Not like me,” Cudjo said.
Quey had wanted to cry, but that desire embarrassed him. He knew that he was one of the half-caste children of the Castle, and, like the other half-caste children, he could not fully claim either half of himself, neither his father’s whiteness nor his mother’s blackness. Neither England nor the Gold Coast.
Cudjo must have seen the tears fighting to escape Quey’s eyes.
“Come now,” he said, grabbing Quey’s hand. “My father says they keep big guns here. Show me where!”
Though he’d asked Quey to show him, Cudjo was the one who began to lead the way, running until the two boys had zipped past their fathers, toward the cannons.
—
It was in this way that Quey and Cudjo became friends. Two weeks after the day they first met, Quey had received a message from Cudjo asking if he would like to visit his village.
“Can I go?” Quey asked his mother, but Effia was already pushing him out the door, overjoyed at the prospect of a friend.
Cudjo’s was the first village that Quey had ever spent a lot of time in, and he was amazed at how different it was from the Castle and from Cape Coast. There was not even one white person there, no soldiers to say what one could or could not do. Though the children were no strangers to beatings, they were still rowdy, loud and free. Cudjo, who was eleven like Quey, was already the oldest of ten children, and he ordered his siblings about as though they were his tiny army.
“Go and fetch my friend something to eat!” he shouted at his youngest sister when he saw Quey approaching. The girl was but a toddler, thumb still inseparable from mouth, but she always did as Cudjo said as soon as he said it.
“Hey, Quey, look what I’ve found,” Cudjo said, hardly waiting for Quey to reach him before opening his palm.
Two small snails were in his hands, their tiny, slimy bodies wriggling between Cudjo’s fingers.
“This one is yours, and this one is mine,” Cudjo said, pointing them out. “Let’s race them!”
Cudjo closed his palm again and started to run. He was faster, and Quey had a hard time keeping up. When they got to a clearing in the forest, Cudjo got down on his stomach and motioned for Quey to do the same.
He gave Quey his snail, then marked a line in the dirt as the starting point. The two boys put their snails behind the line, then released them.
At first, neither snail moved.
“Are they stupid?” Cudjo asked, prodding his snail with his index finger. “You’re free, stupid snails. Go! Go!”
“Maybe they’re just shocked,” Quey said, and Cudjo looked at him like he was the one who was stupid.
But then Quey’s snail started to move past the line, followed, seconds later, by Cudjo’s snail. Quey’s snail didn’t move like a snail usually did, slowly and deliberately. It was as though he knew he was racing, as though he knew he was free. It didn’t take long for the boys to lose sight of him, while Cudjo’s snail ambled along, even turning in a circle several times.
Suddenly, Quey was nervous. Maybe Cudjo would be angry at his loss and tell him to leave the village and never come back. Quey had only just met Cudjo, but already he knew that he didn’t want to lose him. He did the only thing he could think to do. He stuck out his hand as he’d often seen his father do after business deals, and, to his surprise, Cudjo took it. The boys shook.
“My snail was very stupid, but yours did well,” Cudjo said.
“Yes, mine did very well,” Quey agreed, relieved.
“We should name them. We’ll call mine Richard because it’s a British name and he was bad like the British are bad. Yours can be named Kwame.”
Quey laughed. “Yes, Richard is bad like the British,” he said. He forgot in that second that his own father was British, and when he remembered later, he realized that he didn’t care. He felt only that he belonged, fully and completely.
—
The boys grew older. Quey grew four inches in one summer, while Cudjo grew muscle. His legs and arms rippled, so that sweat flowing down them looked like cresting waves. He became known far and wide for his wrestling prowess. Older boys from neighboring villages were brought to challenge him, and still he won every match.
“Eh, Quey, when will you wrestle me?” Cudjo asked.
Quey had never challenged him. He was nervous, not of losing, for he knew he would lose, but because he’d spent the last three years carefully watching, and knew better than anyone what Cudjo’s body was capable of. The elegance of Cudjo’s movements as he circled around his opponents, the mathematics of the violence, how an arm plus a neck could equal breathlessness, or an elbow plus a nose meant blood. Cudjo never missed a step in this dance, and his body, both forceful and controlled, awed Quey. Lately, Quey had been thinking about Cudjo’s strong arms encircling him, dragging him down to the ground, Cudjo’s body on top of his.
“Get Richard to wrestle you,” Quey said, and Cudjo let out his exuberant laugh.
After the snail race, the boys had started to name everything, good or bad, Richard. When they got in trouble with their mothers for saying something crude, they blamed Richard. When they ran the fastest or won a wrestling match, it was thanks to Richard. Richard was there the day Cudjo had swum too far out and his strokes had started to fail him. It was Richard who had wanted him to drown and Richard who had saved him, helping him to regain his rhythm.
“Poor Richard! I would destroy him-oh,” Cudjo said, flexing his muscles.
Quey reached over to squeeze Cudjo’s arm. Though the muscle did not give way, he said, “Why? Because of this small thing?”
“Enh?” Cudjo said.
“I said this arm is small. It feels soft in my hand, brother.”
Without warning, quick as a stroke of heat lightning, Cudjo locked Quey’s neck into his arms. “Soft?” he asked. His voice was hardly more than a whisper, a wind in Quey’s ear. “Careful, friend. There is nothing soft here.”
Though Quey was losing his breath, he could feel his cheeks flushing. Cudjo’s body was pressed so close to him that he felt, for a moment, that they were one body. Each hair on Quey’s arms stood at attention, waiting for what would happen next. Finally, Cudjo let him go.
Quey took in deep gulps of air as Cudjo looked on, a smile playing on his lips.
“Were you scared, Quey?” Cudjo asked.
“No.”
“No? Don’t you know every man in Fanteland is scared of me now?”
“You
wouldn’t hurt me,” Quey said. He looked straight into Cudjo’s eyes and could feel something in them falter.
Quickly, Cudjo regained his composure. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” Quey said.
“Challenge me, then. Challenge me to wrestle.”
“I won’t.”
Cudjo walked up to Quey until he was standing only inches from his face. “Challenge me,” he said, and his breath danced on Quey’s own lips.
—
The next week Cudjo had an important match. While drunk, a soldier in the Castle had boasted that Cudjo would never be able to beat him.
“Negroes fighting other Negroes is not a challenge. Put a savage against a white man, then you’ll see.”
One of the servants, a man from Cudjo’s own village, had heard the white soldier’s boast and reported it back to Cudjo’s father. The next day, the chief arrived to deliver his message personally.
“Any white man who thinks he can beat my son, let him try. In three days’ time we will see who is better.”
Quey’s father had tried to forbid the match, saying that it was uncivilized, but the soldiers were bored and restless. Uncivilized fun was exactly what they craved.
Cudjo came at the end of that week. He brought with him his father and his seven brothers, no one else. Quey had not spoken to him since the week before, and he found himself inexplicably nervous, the feeling of Cudjo’s breath still present on his lips.
The soldier who had made the boast was also nervous. He paced, and his hand shook, as all the men of the Castle looked on.
Cudjo stood across from his challenger. He looked him up and down, assessing him. Then his eyes found Quey’s in the audience. Quey nodded at him, and Cudjo smiled, a smile that Quey knew to mean “I will win this.”
And he did. Only a minute after the match started, Cudjo had his arms wrapped around the soldier’s fat belly, flipping him over and pinning him down.
The crowd roared with excitement. More challengers stepped in, soldiers whom Cudjo defeated with varying degrees of ease until, finally, all the men were drunk and spent, and Cudjo alone was unruffled.
The soldiers started to leave. After congratulating Cudjo loudly and raucously, his own brothers and father also left. Cudjo was to spend the night in Cape Coast with Quey.
“I’ll wrestle you,” Quey said when it looked like everyone had gone. The night air was starting to move into the Castle, cooling it, but only a bit.
“Now that I’m too tired to win?” Cudjo asked.
“You’ve never been too tired to win.”
“Okay. You want to wrestle me? Come catch me first!” And with that Cudjo broke into a run. Quey was faster than he was in the early years of their friendship. He caught up to Cudjo at the cannons and dove toward him, locking his legs and pulling him down to the ground.
Within seconds, Cudjo was on top of him, panting heavily while Quey struggled to turn him over.
Quey knew he should tap the ground three times, the signal to end the match, but he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to. He didn’t want Cudjo to get up. He didn’t want to miss the weight of him.
Slowly, Quey relaxed his body, and he felt Cudjo do the same. The boys drank in each other’s gazes; their breathing slowed; the feeling on Quey’s lips grew stronger, a tingling that threatened to draw his face up toward Cudjo’s.
“Get up right now,” James said.
Quey didn’t know how long his father had been standing there watching them, but he recognized a new tone in his father’s voice. It was the same measured control he used when he spoke to servants and, Quey knew though he’d never seen, to slaves before he struck them, but now there was fear mixed in.
“Go home, Cudjo,” James said.
Quey watched his friend leave. Cudjo didn’t even look back.
The next month, just before Quey’s fourteenth birthday, while Effia cried and fought and fought some more, going so far, once, as to strike James across the face, Quey boarded a ship bound for England.
*
“I heard you’re back from London. Can I see you, old friend?”
Quey couldn’t stop thinking about the message he’d received from Cudjo. He stared into his bowl and saw that he’d hardly eaten any of the porridge. Fiifi had already finished one bowl and asked for another.
“Maybe I should have stayed in London,” Quey said.
His uncle looked up from his meal and gave him a funny look. “Stayed in London for what?”
“It was safer there,” Quey said softly.
“Safer? Why? Because the British don’t tramp through bushland finding slaves? Because they keep their hands clean while we work? Let me tell you, the work they do is the most dangerous of all.”
Quey nodded, though it wasn’t what he’d meant. In England he’d gotten to see the way black people lived in white countries, Indians and Africans who were packed twenty or more to a room, who ate the slop the pigs left behind, who coughed and coughed and coughed endlessly, all together, a symphony of sickness. He knew the dangers that waited across the Atlantic, but he knew too the danger in himself.
“Don’t be weak, Quey,” Fiifi said, staring at him intently, and for just a second Quey wondered if his uncle had understood him after all. But then Fiifi returned to his porridge and said. “Isn’t there work for you to do?”
Quey shook his head, trying to collect himself. He smiled at his uncle and thanked him for the meal and then he set off.
The work wasn’t difficult. Quey and his fellow company men’s official duties included meeting Badu and his men weekly to go over the inventory, overseeing the bomboys who loaded the canoes with cargo, and updating the Castle’s governor with news of Badu’s other trade partners.
Today it was Quey’s turn to oversee the bomboys. He walked the several miles to the edge of the village and greeted the young Fante boys who worked for the British, shuttling slaves from the coastal villages to the Castle. On this day there were only five slaves, bound and waiting. The youngest, a small girl, had messed herself, but everyone ignored it. Quey had grown accustomed to the smell of shit, but fear was one smell that would stand out forever. It curled his nose and brought tears to his eyes, but he had learned long ago how to keep himself from crying.
Every time he saw the bomboys set off with a canoe full of slaves, he thought of his father standing on the shores of the Cape Coast Castle, ready to receive them. On this shore, watching the canoe push off, Quey brimmed with the same shame that accompanied each slave departure. What had his father felt on his shore? James had died soon after Quey arrived in London. The ship ride there had been uncomfortable at best, harrowing at worst, with Quey alternating steadily between crying and vomiting. On the ship, all Quey could think about was how this was what his father did to the slaves. This was what his father did to his problems. Put them on a boat, shipped them away. How had James felt every time he watched a ship push off? Was it the same mix of fear and shame and loathing that Quey felt for his own flesh, his mutinous desire?
Back in the village, Badu was already drunk. Quey said hello, and then tried to move quickly past him.
He wasn’t fast enough. Badu grabbed him by the shoulder and asked, “How’s your mother? Tell her to come and see me, enh?”
Quey pursed his lips into what he hoped looked like a smile. He tried to swallow his disgust. When he’d accepted his assignment here, Effia had cried out, begging him to refuse, begging him to run away, all the way into Asante as his never-known grandmother before him had done if that was what he needed to do in order to escape the obligation.
She’d fingered the stone pendant on her neck as she spoke to him. “There is evil in that village, Quey. Baaba—”
“Baaba is long dead,” Quey said, “and you and I are both too old to still believe in ghosts.”
His mother had spit on the ground at his feet, and shook her head so quickly he thought it might spin off. “You think you know, but you don’t know,” she said. “Evil is lik
e a shadow. It follows you.”
“Perhaps my mother will come visit soon,” Quey said now, knowing that she would never want to see Badu. Though his parents had fought, mostly about him, it was obvious to all that they had cared for each other. And, though a part of Quey hated his father, another part still wanted ardently to please him.
Quey finally freed himself from Badu and kept on walking. Cudjo’s message repeated in his head.
“I heard you’re back from London. Can I see you, old friend?”
When Quey had returned from London, he’d been too nervous to ask after Cudjo, but he hadn’t needed to. Cudjo had taken over as chief of his old village, and they still traded with the British. Quey had recorded Cudjo’s name in the Castle ledgers nearly every day when he was still working as a writer. It would be easy enough now to go see Cudjo, to talk as they used to, to tell him that he had hated London as he had hated his father, that everything about the place—the cold, the damp, the dark—had felt like a personal slight against him, designed for the sole purpose of keeping him away from Cudjo.
But what good could come of seeing him? Would one look have him back where he’d been six years ago, back on that Castle floor? Maybe London had done what his father had hoped it would do, but then again, maybe it hadn’t.
—
Weeks went steadily on, and still Quey sent no answer to Cudjo. Instead, he devoted himself to his work. Fiifi and Badu had numerous contacts in Asanteland and further north. Big Men, warriors, chiefs, and the like who would bring in slaves each day by the tens and twenties. Trade had increased so much, and the methods of gathering slaves had become so reckless, that many of the tribes had taken to marking their children’s faces so that they would be distinguishable. Northerners, who were most frequently captured, could have upwards of twenty scars on their faces, making them too ugly to sell. Most of the slaves brought to Quey’s village outpost were those people captured in tribal wars, a few were sold by their families, and the rarest kind of slave was the one that Fiifi captured himself in his dark night missions up north.