If not for visits to my cousin at the palace, our former life would have seemed an illusion. My mother would not accept money from any family members, but one of my brothers heard Yaa was selling goods, and arranged for her to be sent to the local boarding school. Without Yaa, Amba wanted to go to the missionary school; and without their school fees to pay, she no longer had to work on the streets.
It was not often my mother was tired, but once a month she stayed home to rest. I went out to farm on my own.
A letter came from Kwamena. I sat under a palm tree to read it, but the first sentences, his talk of Du Bois and Garvey, of names that were no longer my currency, were already too much.
I took up my cutlass. The sun beat down on my head, which was full of thoughts of Kwamena, in jacket and tie, in a lecture hall.
I went home. When I turned into our courtyard, I saw my mother hanging washing out to dry. My ire increased.
‘Has it come to this, Mama? Have you forgotten who you are?’
‘It is because I have not forgotten that I do this.’
I sat on a rock by the wall. ‘I don’t understand. I don’t understand why you must lower yourself like this.’
‘This is your sister’s laundry.’
‘Yaa’s? You’re picking up her laundry? You want her to grow soft and useless? Like the other royals who can do nothing for themselves?’
My mother did not stop hanging and she did not raise her voice. ‘You did not have to suffer as you grew, or lift a finger for yourself. You will not remember, but she was born with a mark on her forehead, and your father outdoored her, not in common cotton, but in Adwinasa kente and Ago velvet. She was born for greatness, not this life.’
‘Yes, Ma, neither were we. Mark or no mark. None of us were born for this, but what do you think it is doing to this girl, to have to sell oranges for her school fees on Monday, and have her clothes washed and ironed by her mother on Tuesday?’
‘I am giving her the only thing I can, to remind her of who she is.’ My mother stopped hanging and looked at me. ‘I went to her school today. They are coming on a school trip to Kaba tomorrow and the whole class wants to see her home, because they know she is a princess. She was crying, “How can I bring them to this house?” I have only one day. I shall borrow some rugs. I will make curtains with some of the lace left me by your father.’
I looked down at her callused thinned hands, at her back once straight and proud, at her hair that had always been tied up in the most sumptuous of cloths that now stood coarse and grey, and nodded.
All night, she sang and prayed for our health, well-being and happiness. All night, she sewed and cleaned and arranged.
Amba was in Akakom with Miss Meiklejohn doing missionary work, so it was only my mother and I that waited the next morning for Yaa and her schoolmates to arrive. My mother wrapped her Adwinasa royal kente around her, tied her hair in silk cloth. She put out one of my old kentes on the bed for me to wear. We sat on the porch outside the house, as if there was nothing else to do, as we had not done for a lifetime. Under the shade of the odum tree, I drank cold beer and my mother water, as the town people stopped and talked of the price of cocoa, of their families, of my work with my Uncle JB.
‘Do you think she has got lost?’ my mother asked me as the hours crept.
‘To her own house?’ As I spoke an image rose in my mind. ‘Mama, I’ll be back.’ I walked to the palace.
There was a large bus outside its gates and through them I could see young girls in green-and-white checked dresses and straw hats. I walked past the guards towards the palace building. There she was, rushing from room to room, shouting orders as if she had never stopped, holding one courtier by the arm, motioning to another. She ran up the stairs holding on to the balustrade, opened the door to the King’s chambers, walked in. I looked at the girls as they watched the door, talking and laughing, their voices like the songs of the kokokyinaka bird that hid in the forest mountains outside Kaba.
My cousin appeared at the balustrade with my sister and his spokesman. It seemed that he had grown taller, as well as older. He looked down at the girls and waved, then held my sister by the back of the neck, laughed at something she said.
How did she do this; how, despite the depths we had fallen to, did she manage to create laughter all around her? Maybe, it was true what my mother had said, that she was marked.
I walked back out of the gates and towards the dried-up River Birim.
Maybe our father’s worldly departure, our fall, had forced her to enhance her wit, her ability to draw attention to herself, as if constantly trying to move from the shade into that first-promised light.
When she later came to the capital with me and my brothers, despite her being a girl, we involved her in our political discussions, allowed her to sip port and claret, smoke the long thin cigarettes that were my father’s habit. Working for our brothers in the holidays, she asked for money so she could get the best clothes and food to take to school, as if it were all a game.
What was in her that could not be quelled? That shone from her eyes, filled her laugh, her dresses, the room, so that even if she had brought the girls from school to our house, they would not have believed she lived there. How could it contain her?
There was her laughter again, through the open windows, as I approached.
‘He made us soup with snails, and the meat in it, Mummy, you should have seen…’
I opened the door.
‘Bra,’ my sister ran to me, her mouth an open smile, ‘have you seen what Mummy has done to our house? It looks like the palace. And only for me. Tchya.’ She danced the slow dance of the Adowa. ‘Hmm. They thought I was bluffing, but the Gyaase served them more fufu than they could take. You should have seen Martini’s face.’
‘Martini?’
‘She will come and pick me. Now when we go back to school people will know not to bluff me.’
I sat and watched as she made my mother laugh by kissing her and dancing and kneeling by her feet.
I longed for a dream of my father.
‘Is it true you and Uncle JB are starting trouble with the English?’ my sister asked me.
I had started working for his paper in the afternoons and it was causing some consternation amongst the British. ‘Who told you?’
She rubbed her hand across the table. ‘Just a friend of Martini’s.’
‘Martini again. What kind of friend?’
‘A civil servant.’
‘What kind of civil servant is a friend of a schoolgirl? Is he too coming to pick you?’
She turned towards my mother and started playing with her silk cloth. ‘When you have finished with this, I will take it and wear it around my neck,’ she said.
‘Take it,’ my mother said, removing it from her head.
I got up and took the silk cloth from her hands. ‘And your school allows this kind of thing? I thought it was a Catholic school, and not a breeding ground for young whores.’
There was a moment’s pause, as if the walls of the room had to soak in my words, push them back out again.
‘Apologise to your sister.’
Yaa lay face down on the sofa and began to cry as if I had beaten her.
But the heat in my stomach would not let me. I walked out of the house, sat on the porch and watched as people went by on their business, everyone seemingly at rights with the world.
A car pulled up outside and a young girl in Yaa’s school uniform stepped out.
‘Good evening,’ she said to me.
I did not think of my sister as anything but a girl, but seeing Martini, the way she held temptation in the sway of her hips, reminded me that she was almost a young woman.
‘Good evening. You are the girl they call Martini?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s a nickname, sir.’
‘Its meaning?’
‘Sir, I’ll be late.’
I walked towards the car.
> ‘Good evening,’ I said to the man behind the wheel.
He nodded and got out. He was older than me, wore a hat and suit. ‘Oheneba,’ he said, using my title. He held out his hand.
I could not shake it. ‘I hope you do not find this insolent but, if you are not related to these girls, what are you doing with them?’
He pulled out a cigarette and offered one to me.
I waited.
‘I understand your worry, but it is unnecessary. I am a friend of Martini’s father. He has asked me to look after her. I buy her books, clothes she can’t afford…’
‘And what does she give you in return?’
‘Even if that were your concern,’ he said, ‘you would be mistaken in your conclusions. Some of us are Good Samaritans.’
The door to the house opened and the girls came out. My mother stood in the doorway.
‘Does your school know you’re going back with a stranger?’ I asked Yaa.
‘He’s not a stranger. He’s Martini’s friend.’ She held her chin out towards me.
‘I asked you a question.’
She shook her head.
‘I will drop my sister off at school, thank you,’ I said.
‘You have a car?’
I did not answer him, but put my arm around her shoulder and held it there, despite her attempts to break free.
She slept in the bed that night with my mother.
Later, when I was long gone and my mother still wrote me letters in spite of my silence, she told me that Yaa still slept in her bed when she visited, even when she had children of her own.
I heard them pray that night, got up to see them kneeling side by side; their eyes closed; their faces lit with an intensity of faith that I would never know.
*
My first impression of England was of thick low-hanging mists swallowing the tops of the land. They reminded me of the mists that hung above the Kaba Mountains, but born of cold not of heat.
The noise of war followed me to London and mingled with that of the crowded streets, the advertising hoardings, the trams and double-decker buses and automobiles, all the way to the address Felix’s friend Nancy had given me to pick up the cheque.
It was only when I arrived there that I found silence.
It was there as soon as she opened the door.
In her matt red lipstick, the powdery white of her skin, the dark of her thick waved hair, and black wrap-around dress that did not give much room to her curves, but was generous to her décolleté, and in the ebony and ivory bracelets that wound up her arms like snakes. She smoked a long cigarette in a holder as she held open the door and its smoke wove its way above her head like a welcome signal. She must have inhaled before she opened, because she did not speak, but waved me inside and nodded.
I entered the hallway. The door to the drawing room was ajar. There were thick Turkish and sheepskin rugs on the wooden floors, colourful paintings in gilt frames crammed on to every space of the high-ceilinged walls and books covering every surface.
‘Darling,’ her voice was hoarse. ‘You look absolutely frozen. Let me get you a throw.’
She did not wait for me to answer, so I went into the drawing room and picked up a thick magazine from the sofa. Présence Africaine. I opened it. There were articles by the writers Felix had spoken to me about. Poems by Léopold Senghor and Blaise Cendrars and Aimé Césaire. Felix told me Césaire had coined a term, Négritude, that described the collective destiny of black people. He had not answered when I asked him which collective destiny it referred to.
‘On second thoughts,’ she stood in the door, ‘you’ll need a bath. Come. I’ll run you one.’
I followed her up the stairs, through a room scattered with furs and clothes of every imaginable fabric and texture, into a room with a bath standing alone and regal at its centre.
She turned the tap and put her red-nailed finger under the pouring water.
‘Mmm. Enjoy. I’ll put a robe on the bed for you.’ She walked out, without waiting for me to answer.
I had not said a single word since I had come in. I could have been any man, any black man, who had walked off the street into her bath. I took off my dirty clothes and got in.
That night she made dinner. The potatoes and vegetables were overcooked and the meat underdone though they were served on the finest blue bone china and with delicate gold cutlery. After the meal she served port in the drawing room in crystal glasses, and I sat back and smiled despite the bad taste in my mouth from the food.
‘What is it? You like what you see of London?’
‘I have not been treated like this since my father died.’
She said nothing for a long time. ‘Let’s go upstairs.’
I followed her again up the stairwell. There were three flights of stairs and I wondered who else lived in this vast house and how comfortable my bed would be.
We stopped outside the room with the clothes scattered on the floor like wild flowers.
‘You’ll sleep with me tonight,’ she said.
I looked at her. I had never spent the night with a woman, or spoken more than formally with a white one, yet here was one I had barely met, inviting me to share her bed. I wondered at first if it was a joke or if perhaps she was worried about me catching cold, but when I looked through the open door, I saw that she had already dropped her wrap-around dress to the floor. She had her back to me. Her hands reached behind her to undo her brassiere. I looked at the white of her hands, the red of her nails, the black of the stiff material and of her waved hair.
At home, white was the colour of our beginnings, of water and semen; red the colour of our living, of the earth and blood; black the colour of our ends, of air and power.
As I stood watching her brassiere fall, I thought of the growth of power from temporal to spiritual.
Of the interdependence that made all existence possible.
How I was so stuck in this white, with no red to encompass me, no black to power me ahead.
She turned. And all was silent again.
*
Amba was the first person I saw when I arrived back home at my uncle’s house. She lay on the bench by the porch as people did not in London and, when she saw me, she sat up and stared for a long time, as if I was the ghost I felt I was when I left. She walked to me and put my cheek in her left hand and with her right covered my head.
I stood between her hands like the shipwreck I felt then. I left my bag outside the house and walked with her to the sea.
We sat on one of the cliffs and watched the waves rush against them, as if in penitence for sins of which they would never be relieved.
She did not ask me questions about the war or of London and I was grateful, as I had been before, for her company.
I took her hand in mine and kissed it. ‘Marry me,’ I said. ‘My Amba. Marry me.’
She let her hand rest there, and when I got up to walk towards the house, she did not let it free of mine. ‘My ring?’ she asked.
I laughed. And for the first time I kissed her. The kiss was as familiar as anything I had known. It was like kissing Yaa or my mother or Kwamena. And in that moment I loved her like I never had loved before. Not my father. Or Felix. Or Nancy.
It was a love so strong that I felt I might never leave its current. It was to be the only time I felt this, and my deception might be what killed her.
The promise of everlasting love never fulfilled.
There are so many things I am sorry for.
But most of all for this girl of purity and innocence who loved, as if there were no danger in it, and who thought that her future would be one of love returned.
*
That night, the final Wirempe ceremony was to end the funeral rites, so that my father’s spirit would journey to Asamando, the dwelling of the ancestors. I waited by the sacred stones at the palace for the Odumonkomakyerema and the others to take my father’s stool to the forest to be invigorated by ancestral spirits. It was my first Wirempe ce
remony and that of most of the others. The last one had been thirty-one years earlier. I sat and waited on the bench facing the stones, but no one came. Sweat was forming in my palms despite the night air. I wiped them on my batakari smock. The black sky began to lighten. I walked to the Odumonkomakyerema’s house, but he was not there. I went to the other elders’ houses and they were empty. I arrived at my own. Uncle Kagya was staying with us through the funeral obsequies. He and all the elders were sitting in a circle of chairs in the courtyard drinking schnapps. I could see my mother standing on the steps of the doorway. The girls were long asleep. I went forward. All my kin’s faces were closed and I did not know to whom to turn. I stood at the entrance of the courtyard, until I remembered I was no longer a boy, but the head of my family. I went forward to my Uncle Kagya.
‘Uncle, good morning.’ I bowed my head. ‘I am now head of my mother’s family and no longer a boy. I hope you permit me to ask what has happened that you are all so solemn, when the final rites are supposed to be taking place?’
‘The Odikro of Apapam has disappeared.’ He took a sip of his schnapps.
I sat down on the step next to my uncle.
‘Until he is found, the Amantoomiensa refuse to take part in the ceremony. They say that we have killed him so that he could follow the King in death.’
Did any of this matter in light of my father’s final rites?
‘It is absurd. We haven’t used human sacrifices for many years,’ a senior spokesman said.
‘We all know how heavy our King’s departure was,’ another said. ‘They will say that he needed a servant to follow him to the land of ancestors.’
‘Nonsense, everyone knows that the Odikro was epileptic. How can a ruler be deformed and rule at the same time?’
They all spoke at once now. The moment for the final ceremony was passing.
‘Last year the Sanaahene, the King’s Lord Chamberlain, was destooled, because he was circumcised.’
‘Ei. They say he had an epileptic fit in the marketplace. To be shamed in public is more than sufficient cause for an Odikro to take his own life.’
The God Child Page 18