Yaa Gyasi - Homegoing

“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.”

“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.”