Yaa Gyasi - Homegoing

“We have only one child,” Old Man had said, but the elders just turned their heads.

“What have you done?” Abena’s mother asked her at dinner that night, crying into her hands before lifting them up to the heavens. “What have I done to deserve this child?”

But at that point, only two bad years had gone by, and Abena assured them that the plants would grow, and Ohene Nyarko would marry her. Now their only solace was the fact that it seemed Abena had inherited her mother’s supposed barrenness, or Old Man’s family’s curse, or whatever it was that kept her from conceiving a child.

“Nothing will grow here,” Old Man said. “This village is finished. No one can keep living like this. No one can take one more year eating nothing but nuts and tree bark. They think they are exiling just you, but really this land has condemned us all to exile. You watch. It’s only a matter of time.”

—

Ohene Nyarko came back a week later with the new seeds. The plant was called cocoa, and he said it would change everything. He said the Akuapem people in the Eastern Region were already reaping the benefits of the new plant, selling it to the white men overseas at a rate that was reminiscent of the old trade.

“You don’t know how much these little seeds cost me!” Ohene Nyarko said, holding them in his palm so that everyone around him could see and feel and smell them. “But it will be worth it for the village. Trust me. They will have to stop calling us the Gold Coast and start calling us the Cocoa Coast!”

And he was right. Within months Ohene Nyarko’s cocoa trees had sprouted, bearing their gold and green and orange fruit. The villagers had never seen anything like it, and they were so curious, so eager to touch and open the pods before they were ready, that Ohene Nyarko and his sons had taken to sleeping outside so that they could keep watch.

“But will this feed us?” the villagers wondered after they had been shooed away by the children or yelled at by Ohene Nyarko himself.

Abena saw less and less of Ohene Nyarko in those first few months of his cocoa farming, but the absence comforted her. The harder he worked on the farm, the sooner his harvest would be good; and the sooner the harvest was good, the sooner they could marry. On the days she did see him, he would speak of nothing other than the cocoa and what it had cost him. His hands smelled of that new smell, sweet and dark and earthy, and after she had left him, she would continue to smell it on the places he had touched, the full dark circles of her nipples or just behind her ears. The plant was affecting them all.

Finally, Ohene Nyarko said that it was time for the harvest, and all the men and women from the village came to do as he instructed, as he had been instructed by the farmers in the Eastern Region. They cracked open the cocoa fruit to find the sweet white pulp that surrounded the small purple beans, and placed the pulpy beans on a bed of banana leaves, then covered them with more leaves. After that, Ohene Nyarko sent them home.

“We can’t live off of this,” the villagers whispered as they walked back to their houses. Some of the families had already started packing up their huts, discouraged by what they had seen inside the cocoa pods. But the rest of them came back after five days to spread the fermented beans in the sun so that they would dry. The villagers had each donated their kente sacks, and once dry, the cocoa beans were packed into these sacks.

“Now what?” they asked each other, glancing around as Ohene Nyarko put the sacks into his hut.

“Now we rest,” he announced to the group waiting outside. “Tomorrow I will go to the trading market and sell what I can.”

He slept in Abena’s hut that night, as brazenly and openly as if they had been married for forty years or more, and this gave Abena hope that soon they would be. But the man beside her on the floor was not the confident man who had promised an entire village redemption. In her arms, the man she had known since before they wore cloth to cover their loins trembled.

“What if this doesn’t work? What if I can’t sell them?” he asked, his head buried in her bosom.

“Shh! Stop that talk,” she said. “They will sell. They have to sell.”

But he kept crying and shaking so that she could not hear him when he said, “I’m afraid of that too,” and she would not have understood even if she had.

He was gone by the time she woke up the next morning. The villagers had found and killed a scrawny young goat in preparation for his return, cooking the tough meat for days as best they could in the hope that it would turn tender. The younger children, thinking they were fast and clever, would try to snatch small pieces of partially cooked meat from the animal when their mothers weren’t looking, but the women, born with a sixth sense for children’s mischief, would swat their hands, then clutch them at the wrists, holding them over the fire until the children cried out and swore to behave.

Ohene Nyarko did not come back that night or the next. He came back in the afternoon of the third day. Behind him, being led by rope, were four fat and obstinate goats, bleating as though they could smell the iron of the slaughter knife. The sacks he had carried out, full of cocoa beans, had come back to them filled with yams and kola nuts, some fresh palm oil, and plenty of palm wine.

The villagers threw a celebration the likes of which they had not thrown in years, with dancing and shouting and bare, jiggling breasts. The old men and women danced the Adowa, lightly swaying their hips and bringing their hands up and over, as though ready to receive from the Earth and then give back to her.

Their stomachs had grown smaller, it seemed, and so the food they ate filled them quickly, and they filled the crevices that were left between the food with sweet palm wine.

Unlucky and Akosua were so happy the bad years had finally ended that they held each other close, watching the others dance, watching the children drum against their full bellies in time with the music.

In the middle of all the celebration, Abena looked over at Ohene Nyarko as he surveyed the people of the village they all loved so fiercely, his face full of pride and something she couldn’t quite place.

“You’ve done well,” she said, approaching him. He had kept his distance all night, and she thought it was because he didn’t want to draw attention to the two of them in the middle of the celebration, didn’t want the villagers to start wondering what this meant for Abena’s exile. But the meaning was all Abena was able to think about. She had not told anyone yet, but she was four days late. And though she had been four days late before in her life, and imagined that she would be four days late again before she died, she wondered if this time was the time.

What she wanted was for Ohene Nyarko to shout his love for her from the rooftops. To say, now that the whole village has been fed and feted, I will marry you. And not tomorrow, but today. This very day. This celebration will be for us.

Instead, he said, “Hello, Abena. Did you get enough to eat?”

“Yes, thank you.”

He nodded and drank from a calabash of palm wine.

“You have done well, Ohene Nyarko,” Abena said, reaching out to touch his shoulder, but her hand grazed nothing but air. He wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Why did you move?” she asked, stepping away from him.

“What?”

“Don’t say ‘what’ like I am crazy. I tried to touch you and you moved.”

“Quiet, Abena. Don’t make a scene.”

She didn’t make a scene. Instead, she turned and began walking, walking past the people dancing, past her parents crying, walking until she found the floor of her hut and lay down upon it, one hand clutching her heart and the other clutching her stomach.