Yaa Gyasi - Homegoing

“Let them kids go!” H shouted loudly. A boy had peed himself waiting for the shaft, and H suddenly remembered the one who had been chained to him as they rode the train over, who had wet himself and cried endlessly when they stood before the pit boss. “They ain’t but kids. Let ’em go!”

“Are you gonna stop this foolishness and get back to work?” came the reply.

Then, suddenly, the boy who had wet himself started to run. He was nothing but a blur in the corner of H’s eye before the gunshot went off.

And the people on strike broke the line, swarming the few white bosses who were standing guard. They broke the shafts and dumped the coal from the tramcars before breaking those too. H grabbed a white man by the throat and held him over the vast pit.

“One day the world gon’ know what you done here,” he said to the man, whose fear was written plainly across his blue eyes, bulging now that H’s grip had tightened.

H wanted to throw the man down, down to meet the city underneath the earth, but he stopped himself. He was not the con they had told him he was.

—

It took six more months of striking for the bosses to give in. They would all be paid fifty cents more. The running boy was the only one to die in the struggle. The pay increase was a small victory, but one that they would all take. After the day the running boy died, the strikers helped clean up the mess the fight had made. They picked up their shovels, found the boy who’d been gunned down, and buried him in the potter’s field. H wasn’t sure what the others were thinking when they finally laid the boy to rest among the hundreds of other cons who had died there, nameless, but he knew that he was thankful.

After the union meeting where the raise was announced, H walked home with Joecy. He saw his friend off to his house, and then he went next door to his own. When he got there, he saw that his front door was swinging open, and a strange smell was coming from inside. He still had his pick on him, caked with the dirt and coal from the mine. He lifted the pick over his head, certain that a pit boss had come to meet him. He crept in lightly, ready for whatever came next.

It was Ethe. Apron tied around her waist and handkerchief wrapped around her head. She turned from the stove, where she was cooking greens, and faced him.

“You might as well set that thing down,” she said.

H looked at his hands. The pick was raised, just slightly, above his head, and he lowered it to his side and then to the floor.

“I got your letter,” Ethe said, and H nodded and the two of them just stood there and stared at each other for a moment before Ethe found her voice again.

“Had to get Miz Benton from up the street to read it fo’ me. First, I just let it sit there on my table. Every day, I would pass it, and I’d think ’bout what I was gon’ do. I let two months go by that way.”

The fatback at the bottom of the pot started to crackle. H didn’t know if Ethe could hear it because she had not looked away from him, nor he from her.

“You have to understand, H. The day you called me that woman’s name, I thought, Ain’t I been through enough? Ain’t just about everything I ever had been taken away from me? My freedom. My family. My body. And now I can’t even own my name? Ain’t I deserve to be Ethe, to you at least, if nobody else? My mama gave me that name herself. I spent six good years with her before they sold me out to Louisiana to work them sugarcanes. All I had of her then was my name. That was all I had of myself too. And you wouldn’t even give me that.”

Smoke began to form above the pot. It rose higher and higher, until a cloud of it was dancing around Ethe’s head, kissing her lips.

“I wasn’t ready to forgive you that for a long time, and by the time I was, the white folks was already payin’ you back for somethin’ I know you ain’t done, but nobody would tell me how I could get you out. And what was I s’posed to do then, H? You tell me. What was I s’posed to do then?”

Ethe turned away from him and went to the pot. She began scraping the bottom of it, and the stuff she lifted up with the spoon was about as black as anything H had ever seen.

He went to her, took her body in his arms, let himself feel the full weight of her. It was not the same weight as coal, that mountain of black rock that he’d spent nearly a third of his life lifting. Ethe did not submit so easily. She did not lean back into him until the pot had been scraped clean.

EVERY TIME AKUA DROPPED a quartered yam into sizzling palm oil, the sound made her jump. It was a hungry sound, the sound of oil swallowing whatever it was given.

Akua’s ear was growing. She had learned to distinguish sounds she had never before heard. She had grown up in the missionary school, where they were taught to go to God with all their worries and problems and fears, but when she came to Edweso and saw and heard a white man being swallowed alive by fire, she dusted off her knees, knelt down, and gave this image and sound to God, but God had refused to keep them. He returned her fear to her every night in horrible nightmares where fire consumed everything, where it ran from the coast of Fanteland all the way into Asante. In her dreams the fire was shaped like a woman holding two babies to her heart. The firewoman would carry these two little girls with her all the way to the woods of the Inland and then the babies would vanish, and the firewoman’s sadness would send orange and red and hints of blue swarming every tree and every bush in sight.

Akua couldn’t remember the first time she’d seen fire, but she could remember the first time she’d dreamed of it. It was in 1895, sixteen years after her mother, Abena, had carried her Akua-swollen belly to the missionaries in Kumasi, fifteen years after Abena had died. Then the fire in Akua’s dream had been nothing more than a quick flash of ochre. Now the firewoman raged.

Akua’s ear was growing, so at night she now slept flat on her back or stomach, never on her side, afraid of crushing the new weight. She was certain that the dreams entered through her growing ear, that they latched onto the sizzling sounds of fried things in the daytime and lodged themselves in her mind at night, and so she slept flat-backed to let them through. Because even though she feared the new sounds, she knew she needed to hear them too.

Akua knew she’d had the dream again that night when she woke up screaming. The sound escaped her mouth like breath, like pipe smoke. Her husband, Asamoah, woke up next to her and swiftly reached for the machete he kept beside him, looking at the ground to check for the children, then at the door to check for an intruder, and ending by looking at his wife.

“What is the meaning of this?” he asked.

Akua shivered, suddenly cold. “It was the dream,” she said. She didn’t realize she was crying until Asamoah pulled her into his arms. “You and the rest of the leaders should not have burned that white man,” she said into her husband’s chest, and he pushed her away.

“You speak for the white man?” he asked.

She shook her head quickly. She’d known since she picked him for marriage that her husband feared her time among the white missionaries had made her weaker, less of an Asante somehow. “It’s not that,” she said. “It’s the fire. I keep dreaming about fire.”

Asamoah clicked his tongue. He had lived in Edweso his whole life. On his cheek he bore the mark of the Asante, and the nation was his pride. “What do I care of fire when they have exiled the Asantehene?”

Akua could not respond. For years, King Prempeh I had been refusing to allow the British to take over the Kingdom of Asante, insisting that the Asante people would remain sovereign. For this, he was arrested and exiled, and the anger that had been brewing all over the Asante nation grew sharper. Akua knew her dreams would not stop this anger from brewing in her husband’s heart. And so she decided to keep them to herself, to sleep on her stomach or back, to never again let Asamoah hear her scream.