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King Peggy

Page 16

by Peggielene Bartels


  Ghanaians had such close ties with their large extended families that almost every weekend there was a funeral for an elderly, distant relative who had died, and you would be obligated to travel to his or her village to mourn, feast, and dance. The disadvantage was that many Africans rarely had a weekend to relax and were expected to contribute money to the family of the departed; the advantage was that they had plenty of food and entertainment.

  Now Peggy heard that Kwame Lumpopo had attended several family funerals walking under her red royal umbrella, which she had left in his possession, as if he were the king of Otuam, with everybody clapping and bowing down to him. He hadn’t asked her permission, which she wouldn’t have given anyway. Nor had he ever mentioned it.

  The final straw came in one of Peggy’s periodic conversations with Nana Tufu, who, as official royal mediator of Otuam and with a concrete palace right in the center portion of Main Street, knew about almost everything that was going on in town as soon as it happened. If the pond was drying up, or the fishing catch was larger than usual, or a government minister was visiting Otuam, Nana Tufu would know about it and tell her. One day Peggy mentioned the lawsuit against the late king who was in the fridge, and his fine of eight hundred dollars, which she had wired Kwame Lumpopo before her enstoolment.

  “Eight hundred dollars?” Nana Tufu repeated. “The fine was only three hundred dollars, not eight hundred.”

  Peggy realized that Kwame Lumpopo had paid off the three-hundred-dollar fine, and the other five hundred dollars had disappeared down his trousers, as so many things did. When she and Nana Tufu hung up, she burst into tears of hurt and shock. She was that most pitiful of creatures, an African woman who had let herself get scammed by an African man. Only she had less excuse than anybody because she was strong, and educated, and American. If she had made such a dumb mistake at the very beginning of her reign, how could she hope to clean up her corrupt council? How could she bring water, medical care, and education to her people? Maybe she couldn’t. And to think, she had been considering making him her regent, acting on her behalf when she was in Washington. What a foolish idea that had been. She felt herself sinking down, down to that dark quiet place where pain lived with its Siamese twin, loneliness.

  The pain was intensified the next day when Peggy’s cousin Florence from Takoradi called and said, “Don’t send any money to Kwame Lumpopo. Do you remember during your stay in Otuam how he kept asking you for money so he could buy food for the household and the visitors? Every day you gave him twenty or thirty dollars, and he would bring eggs, bread, rice, and tomatoes. But groceries in Otuam are very cheap, much cheaper than in America, and you gave Kwame Lumpopo way too much money. He kept most of it for himself. After the enstoolment he was seen in bars in Takoradi waving around wads of cash and buying drinks for young women.”

  Florence continued, “Oh, and if he asks you for money for a chicken or a goat for rituals, don’t send him any because none of the Otuam ceremonies needs a chicken or a goat. Kwame Lumpopo will just keep the money and head back to the bar. He’s already bragging to his drinking buddies—who told their wives, who told me—that this will be the next way he will scam you.”

  Bragging to his drinking buddies … who told their wives… The new king of Otuam was an object of ridicule in some circles, it seemed. After thanking her cousin and hanging up the phone, Peggy crawled into bed, curled herself into a ball, and pulled the blanket over her head. On the little table next to the bed were her Bible, a picture of Jesus, and a framed program from her mother’s funeral with her mother’s photo on the cover. Periodically Peggy peeked out of the covers and looked at them. God, Jesus, and her mother; clearly, that was all she had in this world. Everyone and everything else were bound to hurt her.

  For two days Peggy was in a deep depression. Though she went through the motions of daily life, inside it was as if her soul had been sprained. On the third day her anger began to rise, which was a good thing. Instead of feeling sorry for herself and the injustice of the world, she began to get very, very mad at Kwame Lumpopo. Her mind was no longer benumbed with pain but energized at the need to find a suitable punishment for such a disgraceful con artist.

  She soon came up with an idea. She had been ready to send Kwame Lumpopo fifteen hundred dollars to start replacing the roof of the royal palace, but now she certainly wouldn’t send the money through him. Nor would she tell him it wasn’t coming his way. She would let him wait while she sent the money to Nana Kwesi instead, and one day Kwame Lumpopo would be glad-handing around Otuam, see the workmen crawling all over the roof of the palace, and blow a gasket.

  Sure enough, about ten days after she had wired Nana Kwesi the money, Peggy was typing a letter in the press office when Kwame Lumpopo called. She stared at the UNAVAILABLE flashing on the caller ID and chuckled. Now, she said to herself, she had him where she wanted him.

  “I was in Otuam today,” he said, without even saying hello, and she could hear his voice buckling in barely controlled anger. “And I saw Nana Kwesi and his men ripping off the old roof on the royal palace. I was surprised he had started work on it because you hadn’t sent me the money yet. When I asked him why he had already started, he smiled at me and said you had wired him the money directly last week.”

  Peggy used silence as a weapon. She let Kwame Lumpopo’s last words dangle there uncomfortably in the five thousand miles between them.

  “Did you wire Nana Kwesi the roof money?” he thundered.

  Hmmm, she thought. That’s no way to talk to a king.

  “I did,” she replied icily.

  “What do you mean sending that money to someone other than me?” he roared. “I was the one to call you with the good news that you were the new king. You agreed that you and I had a special bond and I would help you in Otuam. From now on you must wire all the money through me, and I will need some immediately to buy a chicken and a goat for a priestly ritual.”

  Even though she was at work, even though she knew a king should keep her cool, Peggy cried, “Go to hell, Kwame Lumpopo!” Though it certainly wasn’t regal or ladylike, and her boss had probably heard it through the thin wall, it felt good. She had been wanting to say it for some time.

  There was silence on the line, as he must have been shocked by the sudden angry outburst of a woman who he had thought would be meekly subservient to him. “You stole the money Kwadwo Boateng gave you for my enstoolment gift,” Peggy continued, “and you stole the money I wired you to give Kwesi Cooper, who loaned me money for the enstoolment photos. You stole most of the food money I gave you in Otuam, and you stole most of the money I sent you to settle the lawsuit of the late king who is in the fridge. Now you are trying to steal the goat and chicken money, and you are very sorry that I prevented you from stealing the roof money.”

  Peggy paused for a moment to take a deep breath. “I am not sending you any more money because you are a big-time thief!” she said. “Just because you were the one to call me and let me know I was selected king does not mean I have to do what you say. I am king, not you, and you cannot steal my money anymore, not for the roof, the goat, the chicken, or any other thing. And by the way, I am firing you from my council of elders.” Then she hung up the phone and glared at it as if it were Kwame Lumpopo himself.

  She ran a hand through her hair and tried to collect her thoughts. How did she feel about what had just happened? Rattled, certainly. Exultant, too. What would Kwame Lumpopo do? Run to the council and complain about her? That might be a good thing. That way, the others would begin to learn that they couldn’t walk all over her.

  About a week after that, Peggy got a four a.m. call from Tsiami, who told her that her stool had been crying in the night, sobbing really. The people who lived in the boys’ quarters in the palace courtyard had heard it, crept out of their rooms with flashlights, and tiptoed to the palace. There they discovered that the crying was coming from inside her locked stool room. Some of them wondered if the stool was upset because it had gotte
n wet when the old palace roof was ripped off.

  One of them raced with a flashlight through the bush and over the pineapple fields to tell Tsiami, who as chief priest was the only one able to talk to Peggy’s stool to find out why it was crying. A few hours later, as the sun was rising over Otuam, he prayed and poured Coke on the stool. Kwame Lumpopo, the stool told him, had been running around all over Otuam saying bad things about the king. He had said Peggy was a very nasty woman who told lies about him, that she was an ungrateful wretch to treat him so badly after he had been the one to tell her she had been chosen king, and she was uppity because she had lived in the United States for so many years that she thought she was smarter than everyone else. Now the stool spirits, who heard everything people said, were looking for him so they could kill him. But by that time Kwame Lumpopo had already left town and gone back to Takoradi, where the stool had no power to kill anybody.

  When Tsiami emerged from the stool room and stepped onto the patio of the royal palace, the other elders were standing there with concerned looks on their faces. A crying stool could portend great hardship for Otuam—storms, droughts, floods, or pestilence. They were relieved when Tsiami told them the stool was crying because it was mad at Kwame Lumpopo for telling people malicious stories about the king. That wasn’t frightening news at all, unless your name was Kwame Lumpopo.

  The elders went home and told their families about this amazing occurrence, and the family members told their friends, and soon word spread all over town about Peggy’s crying stool who wanted to kill Kwame Lumpopo. Someone called Kwame Lumpopo and told him that the stool wanted to kill him, and he was horrified. He immediately stopped talking trash about Peggy because he didn’t want to die the next time he set foot in Otuam. He wasn’t sure how the stool might kill him, but he knew it could make him have a heart attack and hit the ground dead, or the vengeful tree spirit inside it could ask a tree to fall and crush him.

  Peggy laughed heartily at the story. Her stool had put a stop to Kwame Lumpopo’s nonsense, and she hadn’t had to lift a finger.

  She was less glad to hear that Isaiah the Treasurer had suddenly found the money to start his own taxi service. “No one knows where he got the money to do it,” Auntie Esi told her. “Suddenly he bought three used taxis, which now sit on Main Street, and he does a good business driving people to the market towns. Some people say he has been selling land that isn’t his—that he’s been selling your land, Nana—and pocketing the money.”

  Peggy spent a lot of time thinking about this new revelation. And the more she thought about everything happening in Otuam, the madder she got.

  Here she was, sending every penny to Otuam to renovate the royal palace, ruining her formerly perfect credit by not paying her own bills, and the elders were stealing the town’s funds and selling its stool land. Was she fighting an impossible battle in Otuam? How could she, Peggielene Bartels, a mere secretary, change decades, perhaps centuries of corruption and chauvinism? Had she bitten off more than she could chew? What if she failed, if the only result of her efforts to help Otuam was to devastate her own financial situation in the United States? With her sinking credit rating, she doubted she could even get a car loan when the spirit of her 1992 Honda finally joined the car spirit ancestors.

  Peggy believed that her elders would expect womanly weakness, and they would only take her seriously if she was, at times, brash, loud, and strong. She decided to prepare several speeches that she would make to her elders when she returned to Otuam, good speeches that would truly frighten them, and doing this lifted her spirits. Once she had memorized the words, she practiced in front of her mirror, trying to twist her face into the most frightening scowl possible. In the Fante language there was an idiom that she liked—to frown your face like a frog—and now she practiced that frown, the brows knit together, the unblinking eyes bulging out. Then she said her speech:

  You have elected a man with breasts! Maybe I don’t have balls, but for all that, I am a king, and a man.

  That would surprise those elderly men.

  She would add:

  Why did you people call me at four a.m. and wake me out of a sound sleep and tell me I am king just so you could push me around? If that is all you wanted to do, you should have let me sleep. But it wasn’t you who chose me. It was the ancestors. They chose me to straighten this town out and teach you a lesson.

  She liked that one, too. Then she came up with another:

  If any of you is stealing from me, stealing from the kids and making them walk for hours before school with buckets of water on their heads, you had better watch out.

  Then, she might even add:

  I am going to squeeze your balls so hard your eyes will pop out.

  It would be quite shocking, but it had a nice ring to it. Actually, it was her favorite one.

  Peggy decided that when she returned to Otuam she would get to the bottom of the missing money, and if she found the elders had been stealing from her, money she could have used to help the poor people of her town, she might throw them in jail, which would give the chief inspector something to do.

  But in debating her strategy, Peggy realized that any truly harsh measures would have to wait until after her gazetting ceremony the following September, during the visit when she hoped to bury her uncle. To be officially recognized by the Ghanaian federal government, at some point after his enstoolment a Ghanaian king had to join the nearest council of chiefs, a group of thirty or forty kings in a particular region who met regularly to discuss matters of concern. The kings consulted one another on how to resolve disputes among their subjects and sometimes even among the kings themselves, how to best work with politicians to bring water, roads, and medical care to their villages, and how to uphold ancient traditions. Any member who failed to honor royal customs, who shamed kingship in any way, would be hauled up before a tribunal and, if found guilty, fined.

  The term gazetting came from the fact that after the candidate was accepted into the council of chiefs, news of the event would be published in the local gazettes. Once a king was gazetted, if he had any trouble with his elders, the other kings in the group would stand by him, adding huge heft to his—or her—power.

  It wasn’t easy joining the council, and many enstooled kings weren’t accepted. Candidates had to file numerous sets of papers, including lengthy genealogical records. The council looked closely into a king’s reputation and moral character and rejected anyone known to be violent, dishonest, lazy, or habitually drunk. And the council of chiefs refused to gazette any king whose rule was disputed by relatives or elders. If Peggy’s elders realized she intended to jail them, they could prevent her gazetting by claiming that the rituals of her selection or enstoolment hadn’t been conducted properly. Peggy must, therefore, tread carefully until after her gazetting ceremony. She needed her elders to fill out her paperwork; meet with the council of chiefs in Essuehyia, a forty-five-minute drive from Otuam, to plan the ceremony; and assure them that all was harmonious in Otuam.

  Because the gazetting was such an important ceremony involving so many kings, it didn’t come cheap. On her gazetting day, Peggy would be expected to give $350 in cash to Nana Tufu as a gift for sponsoring her, and she had to give $750 to the council of chiefs itself, along with a goat and several bottles of whiskey. She knew she would have to pay for all this, since her elders had stolen the town funds. She didn’t mind, though. These would be the last funds they would ever steal, so they might as well enjoy them as much as they could.

  Once she was gazetted, Peggy would use all of her power to investigate Otuam’s finances, clean up whatever corruption she found, and make sure the town income went to help her people. She would dilute the council’s power by appointing younger, honest elders, if she could find any, and some women.

  And she decided to make Nana Kwesi her regent. He was the only possible choice, as all her other elders were completely unsuitable. When she broached the subject in one of their frequent calls, he seemed surpri
sed but quickly accepted. He had the time, he explained, since his construction projects had dried up due to the global recession, which had even affected Ghana. And he shared her outrage over the evident corruption in Otuam.

  When Peggy called her elders one by one to let them know her choice of regent, their reaction was predictable. “But he’s not from this town,” they cried.

  “That,” she replied, “is a good thing.”

  “And he’s too young,” they said. “Much younger than we are.”

  “That, too,” she said, “is a good thing.”

  Nana Kwesi had confirmed her trust by using his contractor’s contacts to obtain greatly reduced prices on the materials for renovating the palace. In the months since her return to America, she had sent him six thousand dollars in installments to put on the new roof, taking what she could from her salary, along with money some of her art customers had sent in to pay off objects on layaway. It was a lot of money, but a cousin had told her the roof would have cost anyone else ten thousand dollars.

  Nana Kwesi suggested that Peggy have a borehole dug on one side of the palace, connected to new plumbing in the kitchens and bathrooms. The late king had had a rain tank on the roof, which sat idly waiting for the bounty of the heavens. But the borehole would have an active spirit, constantly pumping up fresh water to fill the tank so the palace would never go without. Unfortunately, such a luxury was quite expensive—seven thousand dollars, as Nana Kwesi would have to hire a special contractor to dig it. Peggy decided that since she was spending so much money on her own water, she would have the contractor install a pump outside the palace so people living nearby could draw water, too.

  Due to its cost, the palace borehole would have to wait, but Peggy sent Nana Kwesi money to buy new pipes for inside the palace, which he purchased and unloaded in the courtyard along with the other building materials. He wanted to start working right away on the interior, but she wasn’t able to send more money for his men’s salaries. She was getting very late with her own bills and further work would have to wait.

 

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