Yaa Gyasi - Homegoing

The wailing women were behind the men. “Evil woman!” some of them cried. “Wicked one,” said others.

Asamoah was behind the wailing women, hopping with his stick, trying to keep up.

Then they were tying her to the burning tree. Akua found her voice.

“Please, brothers. Tell me what is going on!”

Antwi Agyei, an elder, began to bellow. “She wants to know what is going on?” he cried to the men who had gathered.

They wrapped the rope around Akua’s wrists. Her burns screamed and then she.

Antwi Agyei continued. “What kind of evil does not know itself?” he asked, and the crowd stomped its many feet against the hard earth.

They slung the rope around Akua’s waist.

“We have known her as the Crazy Woman, and now she has shown herself to us. Wicked woman. Evil woman. Raised by white men, she can die like one too.”

Asamoah pushed his way to the front of the crowd. “Please,” he said.

“You’re on her side? The woman who killed your children?” Antwi Agyei screamed. His anger was echoed in the yells of the crowd, in the stomping feet and beating hands, the undulating tongues.

Akua could not think. The woman who killed her children? The woman who killed her children? She was asleep. She must still be asleep.

Asamoah began to weep. He looked Akua in the eyes, and with her own she begged him questions.

“Yaw is still alive. I grabbed him before he died, but I could only carry one,” he said, looking at Akua still, but speaking to the crowd. “My son will need her. You cannot take her from me.”

He looked at Antwi Agyei and then to the people of Edweso. The ones who had been sleeping were now awake, had filtered in to join the others waiting to see the evil woman burn.

“Have I not lost enough flesh?” Asamoah asked them.

Before long, they cut Akua down. They left her and Asamoah to get themselves back to the hut. Nana Serwah and the doctor were tending to Yaw’s wounds. The baby was screaming, the sound seeming to come from somewhere outside of himself. They would not tell her where they had put Abee and Ama Serwah. They would not say anything at all.

IT WAS A SATURDAY, FALL. Willie stood in the back of the church, holding her songbook open with one hand so that she could clap the beat against her leg with the other. Sister Bertha and Sister Dora were the soprano and alto leads, generous, big-bosomed women who believed the Rapture was coming any day now.

“Willie, what you need to do is let yourself sing, girl,” Sister Bertha said. Willie had come in straight from cleaning a house. She’d rushed to remove her apron as she walked in, but, though she didn’t know it, a smear of chicken grease still lined her forehead.

Carson was sitting in the audience. Bored, Willie figured. He kept asking her about school, but she couldn’t let him go until baby Josephine got old enough to go. He narrowed his eyes at her when she told him, and sometimes she dreamed about sending him down south to stay with her sister, Hazel. Maybe she wouldn’t mind a child with that much hate floating around in his eyes. But Willie knew she could never actually do it. In her letters down home, she wrote about how things were going well, how Robert was getting on nicely. Hazel would write back that she would come visit soon, but Willie knew she never would. The South was hers. She wanted no part of the North.

“Yes, what you need to do is let the Lord take that cross you carryin’,” Sister Dora said.

Willie smiled. She hummed the alto line.

“You ready to go?” she asked Carson when she got offstage.

“Been ready,” he said.

She and Carson left the church. It was a cold fall day, a crisp wind coming toward them from the river. There were a few cars on the street, and Willie saw a rich, mahogany-colored woman walk by in a raccoon coat that looked as soft as a cloud. On Lenox, every other marquee said that Duke Ellington would be playing there: Thursday, Friday, Saturday.

“Let’s walk a little longer,” Willie said, and Carson shrugged, but he took his hands out of his pockets and his step picked up, so she could see that she had finally said the right thing.

They stopped to let some cars pass, and Willie looked up to see six little children looking down at her from an apartment building window. It was a pyramid of children, the oldest, tallest, lining the back row, the youngest in front. Willie reached her hand up and waved, but then a woman snatched them away and closed the curtains. She and Carson crossed the street. It seemed like there were hundreds of people out in Harlem that day. Thousands, even. The sidewalks were sinking with the weight, some literally cracking beneath them. Willie saw a man the color of milky tea singing on the street. Beside him a tree-bark woman clapped her hands and bounced her head. Harlem felt like a big black band with so many heavy instruments, the city stage was collapsing.

They turned south on Seventh, past the barbershop that Willie swept from time to time to earn a few cents, past several bars and one ice cream parlor. Wille reached into her purse and felt around until her hand hit metal. She tossed a nickel to Carson, and the boy smiled at her for what seemed like the first time in years. The sweetness of the smile was bitter too, for it reminded Willie of the days of his endless crying. The days when there was no one in the world except for the two of them, and she was not enough for him. She was barely enough for herself. He raced in to buy a cone, and when he came back out with it, the two of them kept walking.

If Willie could have taken Seventh Avenue south all the way back down to Pratt City, she probably would have. Carson licked his ice cream cone delicately, sculpting that round shape with his own tongue. He would lick all the way around, and then look at it carefully, lick again. She couldn’t remember the last time she had seen him so happy, and how easy it was to make him that way. All it took was a nickel and a walk. If they walked forever, maybe she would start to get happy too. She might be able to forget how she’d wound up in Harlem, away from Pratt City, away from home.

—

Willie wasn’t coal black. She’d seen enough coal in her lifetime to know that for sure. But the day Robert Clifton came with his father to the union meeting to hear Willie sing, all she could think was that he was the whitest black boy she had ever seen, and because she thought that, her own skin had started to look to her more and more like the thing her father brought home from the mines, under his fingernails and dusting his clothes, every single day.

Willie had been singing the national anthem at union meetings for the past year and a half. Her father, H, was the union leader, so it hadn’t been very hard to convince him to let her sing.

The day Robert came in, Willie was in the back room of the church, practicing her scales.

“You ready?” her daddy asked. Before Willie had begged to sing, there was no anthem sung at union meetings.

Willie nodded and went out to the sanctuary, where all the union members were waiting. She was young, but she already knew that she was the best singer in Pratt City, maybe even in all of Birmingham. Everyone, women and children alike, came to the meetings just to hear that old world-weary voice come out of her ten-year-old body.

“Please stand for the anthem,” H said to the crowd, and they did. Willie’s father teared up the first time she’d sung it. Afterward, Willie could hear a man say, “Look at old Two-Shovel. Getting soft, ain’t he?”

Now Willie sang the anthem, and the crowd watched, beaming. She imagined that the sound came from a cave at the very bottom of her gut, that like her father and all the men in front of her, she was a miner reaching deep down inside of her to pull something valuable out. When she finished, everyone in the room stood and clapped and whistled, and that was how she knew she had reached the rock at the bottom of the cave. Afterward, the miners went on with their meeting and Willie sat in her father’s lap, bored, wishing she could sing again.