King Peggy

by Peggielene Bartels

  A few weeks later she was greatly saddened to hear that some of the materials had gone missing. It wasn’t very much, some bags of cement and several concrete blocks. But over the next few months, other items disappeared: a ladder, a stack of wooden planks, a bucket of nails, and more bags of cement. The problem was that the heaps of material had to be kept close to the palace so the workmen would have them when needed, and there was no place to safely store anything. The tiny houses around the courtyard were crammed with families. Nana Kwesi told the elders and the families in the boys’ quarters to be on the lookout for the thief.

  The lack of progress on the palace meant that she would not be staying in its spacious, breezy rooms when she returned, but would once more reside in the ovenlike house of her cousin. Except this time, she learned, she and her elders would not be permitted to use the comfortable parlor. Ekow had broken many of her cousin’s prized cups and dishes when he had become drunk at Peggy’s enstoolment party. To ensure that such a thing would not happen a second time, the Other Cousin Comfort would lock up the parlor.

  Nor would Peggy be able to hold the funeral in a partially repaired palace and a courtyard stacked with building materials. She had so hoped she could take the late king out of the fridge and bury him in October, but now he would have to stay there another year. His children would agitate for the royal funeral to be held sooner than that, but she simply did not have the money to pay for it. She just hoped that Uncle Joseph, who had always been kind and forgiving in life, remained so in death. When she poured libations morning and evening, she explained the situation to him and asked him not to haunt her because she was doing the best she could.

  Though she was disappointed that work had stopped on the palace, Peggy did get two pieces of good news from Otuam. Her elders and the aunties had evidently spread the word of the new king’s tough stance on wife beating because Nana Kwesi told her that it had dried up to the merest trickle. Abusive men were afraid that if they laid a hand on their wives the strict new lady king would race over from America to jail them and then kick them out of town. The only person saddened by this drop in crime was the chief inspector, who now had even less to do.

  The second piece of good news came in the form of a phone call from Nana Tufu, who had received a visit in his Main Street palace from a manager of the Rural Agricultural Development Bank. The bank people had noticed at their branches in Winneba and Essuehyia that many customers came all the way from Otuam to deposit money. If they opened a bank in Otuam, right on Main Street, they speculated, many more Otuam citizens would open accounts. Some people in Otuam had substantial amounts of cash by African standards, with their fishing, farming, and selling produce in the Mankessim market and goods in their little shops on Main Street. But there was no place to put their cash in town except for under their beds. When the new bank opened in the fall, Peggy would open up a royal bank account where all the town income would be deposited so no one could steal it.

  Peggy chuckled to think about it. What would her elders do when she locked up the fishing and land fees in the bank? It occurred to her that they thought they were smart and crafty like Anansi the Trickster, a beloved character whose exploits Ghanaians had been telling their children about for more than a thousand years. Sometimes he was portrayed as a boy, but usually he was described as a spider, because he wove webs hoping to catch others in them. Anansi the Trickster, in his constant efforts to outsmart others, often got outsmarted himself. One of Peggy’s favorite Anansi stories from her childhood went like this:

  Turtle stopped by Anansi’s cave just at dinnertime, and Anansi, wanting to eat all the fufu himself, instructed Turtle to wash his hands in the stream before eating. Turtle had to admit his hands were very dirty as he had come crawling through the dirt to Anansi’s cave. So Turtle went to the stream and washed his hands and crawled back. In the meantime Anansi was eating the fufu as fast as he could. When Turtle came back, Anansi said, “Oh! Turtle! Your hands are still dirty!” That was true, as Turtle had crawled back from the stream through the dirt.

  So Turtle wandered off to wash his hands again and this time crawled back carefully on the grass. When he arrived at Anansi’s cave, Anansi was smacking his lips, having finished the last bit of fufu.

  “So sorry, Turtle, that you took so long there is no food left for you!” Anansi cried, thinking he had outsmarted Turtle.

  Turtle eyed Anansi slowly and said, “Come to my house for dinner tomorrow and I will serve you a splendid repast.”

  The next day, Anansi stopped by the pond hoping for a good meal at Turtle’s place. Turtle welcomed him and said he had indeed prepared a great feast. Anansi was so excited he did a dance on all his spider legs. But Turtle had set the table on the bottom of the pond, and every time Anansi went down there, he could see a magnificent feast but couldn’t stay down long enough to grab anything. He kept popping back up. Turtle continued to eat as Anansi tried to figure out how to remain on the bottom long enough to grab the food. Finally he decided to fill his pockets with pebbles.

  This worked. Anansi found himself at the table looking at a delicious meal spread out. As he started to dig in Turtle said, “In my country, people have to take off their jackets before eating.” Anansi duly removed his jacket and shot straight back to the top of the pond. Soon after Turtle’s head appeared. “Did you like your meal?” he asked, licking the last bit of fufu from his lips.

  The way Peggy saw it, her elders were Anansi, thinking they could outsmart anybody and trap him or her in their devious webs. Like Anansi, once they had sent her away, they had eaten all the goods, without leaving even a crumb for anyone else. And Peggy herself was Turtle, plodding along in good faith until she realized she was being taken advantage of. Now, like Turtle, she was plotting how to outsmart the outsmarters. Once she made sure they didn’t eat another bite of fufu, she would pop her head out of the water and ask them how they had enjoyed their meal.

  Part IV

  GHANA

  September—November 2009

  12

  Peggy had a month’s vacation every year, plus accumulated leave. While it would have been hard to take a long vacation if she had still been the ambassador’s secretary, other secretaries could easily fill in for her in the press office. Peggy promptly arranged an absence of seven weeks. She had initially hoped that her brother Papa Warrior could go with her. He had been released from the hospital in August, after a stay of fifteen months, but he was still on crutches and had to go to classes until November to finish his university degree.

  She left Washington on September 16, 2009, the same day that The Washington Post ran her photo and an article about her on the front page of the Metro Section. A reporter had heard about Peggy’s kingship, interviewed her at length, and written an article entitled “Secretary by Day, Royalty by Night,” a reference to her many calls to Otuam in the early morning hours. The story began:

  The king folds her own laundry, chauffeurs herself around Washington in a 1992 Honda and answers her own phone. Her boss’s phone, too.

  Peggielene Bartels lives in Silver Spring and works as a secretary. When she steps off an airplane in Ghana on Thursday, arriving in the coastal town her family has controlled for half a century, she will be royalty—with a driver, a chef and an eight-bedroom palace, albeit one in need of repairs she will help finance herself.

  The Ebiradze had controlled Otuam for centuries, not half a century, and Aggie wasn’t exactly a chef. But Peggy was thrilled with the article—maybe now someone would want to invest in her town—and the author certainly got the palace repairs part right. At Dulles International Airport, several people recognized her, bowed and curtsied, and two of them asked her to autograph the newspaper they were holding.

  When she finally landed in Accra, Peggy made her way to the international arrivals area, where she could see Nana Kwesi waiting for her, standing head and shoulders above the others. He was grinning so hard it looked as if his face would break. She threw herself into
his arms and screamed. It was good to see him again, this kind man who had helped her so much with the palace. Cousin Charles was standing beside him, thick and solid as ever, and Peggy hugged him, too.

  To transport Peggy and her large bags to Otuam, Nana Kwesi had rented a van, which was driven by one of his workmen, Ebenezer, a slender man in his twenties. Peggy and Nana Kwesi piled in while Cousin Charles stowed the luggage in the back. They chatted good-humoredly, catching up on what was happening with family members and news from Otuam as the van crept through traffic out of Accra. Lining the road were political billboards from the December 2008 presidential election and Barack Obama’s July 2009 visit, already faded by the African sun.

  As they drove along the Accra—Cape Coast Highway, every few miles Peggy saw a red sign with white letters that read “Reduce Speed!! Five persons died here!” or “Twelve persons died here!” One of them indicated that “Seventy Persons Died Here!” and Peggy remembered that a month earlier a car passing another vehicle had crashed headlong into a fuel tanker, causing a massive explosion that incinerated a tro-tro and several cars. Despite the dangers of passing slow-moving trucks on the two-lane, winding road at high speeds, almost everyone did it.

  As the sun set, they turned left on the little road between the two stands that in the daylight hours sold lemons and pineapples, and for the next half hour bumped over the rutted road through the bush and small villages. As they lurched behind the royal palace, Nana Kwesi pointed to it. “Look!” he cried proudly. “There’s the new roof I put on!” But Peggy couldn’t see it. There was only one streetlight in Otuam, and it overlooked the bumpy dirt field by the school where kids sometimes played soccer at night. She could see, however, that all the ugly old windows had been removed. She hadn’t had the money to buy replacements, and now the windows looked like the empty gaping eye sockets of a skull.

  The car bounced to a stop in front of the Other Cousin Comfort’s blue house. Aggie ran out and gave Peggy a hug. Peggy noticed that Aggie’s turbaned bun had grown larger in the past year; it now looked like a spider’s egg sac. As Ebenezer passed Peggy’s bags to Cousin Charles, Nana Kwesi bid Peggy good night and climbed back in the van to return to his home in Winneba.

  When Peggy walked into the hall, the house felt familiar. Houses, she knew, had spirits, too, and this one seemed to be welcoming her back. She looked down at the worn, tattered sheet of linoleum made to look like pale pink tiles, the concrete floor showing through the torn patches. Ahead was the long dining room table with the ripped pale pink plastic tablecloth, and against the wall was the ancient fridge that belched and rumbled, shuddered and snorted, still going strong, evidently. Above the table was the chandelier with three bulbs, two of them still burned out, though Peggy wasn’t sure it was the same two bulbs that had been burned out a year earlier. The smell of Aggie’s fried fish hung heavily in the air.

  Cousin Charles wheeled Peggy’s bags down the long corridor and into the corner bedroom. There was the queen-sized bed and the useless closet with no shelves and no rod. There were the same two beige plastic chairs. But this time, the corners of the room were piled high with crates of Coke and beer, boxes of toilet paper, large bottles of water, and other delicacies that Nana Kwesi had bought at the modern grocery store in Winneba and delivered for her convenience, since you couldn’t buy such things in large quantities and at a reasonable price in Otuam. She had asked him, the week before, how much she owed him for these supplies. Nothing, he had said. Nothing at all.

  This time there would be no gaggle of aunties to protect her spirit, sprawled out on sleeping mats on the floor. Auntie Esi, who had been so honest about Otuam in Peggy’s last days here, had died in the summer and was now one of the ancestors. Another auntie, too, had passed, and two others had family issues they had to attend to in other towns. Only Cousin Comfort would be coming soon as a companion to Peggy. Peggy would miss the other aunties, but Cousin Comfort had always been a particular favorite, and she looked forward to her visit.

  Peggy walked into the hallway and flipped on the toilet room light switch, but the room remained dark, the shadow of the toilet outlined by the faint light from the hall. Evidently the bulb was burned out. At night, it wouldn’t be hard to find the toilet to sit on, but flinging the bucket of water at it might be tricky. She had never been very good at sports and hoped her aim would prove true.

  Next, Peggy flipped on the shower room light. That, at least, still worked. She unpacked her toiletries and took an African bucket bath. Feeling incredibly refreshed, she slipped into her bed. There was nothing like two long international flights to make you sleep well. Peggy immediately sank into a dark place, like the bottom of a deep, murky lagoon, with no dreams or thoughts of any kind.

  It was the crowing of the roosters and the baaing of the goats right outside her window that roused her. Ah yes, she said to herself, the Otuam alarm clock, eternally set for four a.m. There was no sleeping late with all that racket. This was followed by the sound of drums from somewhere deep in the bush. The king is back, the king is back, they cried in their ancient drum language.

  Peggy wrapped herself in her bright blue over-the-shoulder cloth and looked in her hand mirror. Bright blue was quite an attractive color on her. Next she put on all her royal beads, bright red lipstick, and eyeliner, wanting to look her best for the challenges that lay ahead of her that morning. She was planning on starting off her first council meeting briskly.

  The rusty iron gate on the front porch squeaked open and clanged shut. This was almost immediately followed by the bump of the screen door. “Oh boy,” Peggy said out loud. “Here they come.”

  As Peggy walked past the parlor, she cast a longing glance through the window of the locked door at the comfortable sofas and overstuffed chairs. She continued to the dining room, where she received a hearty welcome from Tsiami, Uncle Moses, Baba Kobena, Uncle Eshun, and Isaiah the Treasurer. She sat down at the head of the table, by the window, in the stiff straight-backed chair, and Tsiami took his proper place at her right hand. Nana Kwesi, coming from Winneba, didn’t plan on attending any of the four or five a.m. meetings. He would arrive every day around seven or eight.

  Aggie served everyone soft drinks, then took up her position leaning against the right side of the kitchen door frame, arms crossed.

  Peggy looked around the table. She had had a year to prepare for this very meeting and had practiced her speeches. She cleared her throat and said, “Last year we barely had time to get to know one another due to the shortness of my visit here, and all the rituals for my enstoolment. So I thought I would start this visit off by telling you all a bit about myself so we can all be clear. You may see me as a lady and think that because of my gender I am weak. But you must understand that my thoughts are those of a man. I am as strong as a man. I am as smart as a man. I demand the absolute respect of a man. If you understand this, we will get along well. But if you don’t, if you think that because you are men you can misbehave, you will find that you are greatly mistaken.”

  Her elders nodded and smiled. Oh boy, she thought. This is starting off like last year. They still don’t take me seriously. “It has been a year since my enstoolment,” she continued, “and before I left I instructed you to collect the fishing fees. Now, where are they?”

  Uncle Moses and Isaiah the Treasurer put their heads together and exchanged a brief nodding whisper, then Uncle Moses pulled a paper from his robe and pushed it across the table to her. “As the elder who deals with all fishing matters, I have written a letter to clear up the situation,” he said. Peggy frowned as she took it.

  It was in English. At the top was the Ebiradze royal emblem, a spotted tiger on a stool.

  LAND TOLLS LETTER

  September 13, 2009

  To all Drag Fishing Companies: We are directed by Nana Amuah Afenyi VI to inform you that the Land Tolls will not be paid annually again. That the Land Tolls will be paid Daily, that is if you get 10 trays of fish, 1/10 will be collected, again if yo
u get from 4 trays to 9 trays, ½ tray will be collected. Any company or net owner who fails to comply with these rules will be sacked from the beach. These rules take immediate effect. I hope these rules will be abided.

  Uncle Moses Acquah

  “What is this?” Peggy asked sharply.

  Uncle Moses cleared his throat and said, “You are right that we must begin to collect the fishing fees, which we haven’t done since the late king in the fridge first went to the village to cure himself. So we issued this letter to try to bring some order to the collection process.”

  So they were pretending they hadn’t been collecting the fees. Peggy felt her blood begin to boil. “Let me get this straight,” she said. “You are telling me with a straight face that no one has collected the fishing money since my enstoolment a year ago, despite my clear instructions to do so?”

  “Without the king being here, Nana, the process is quite confusing,” Isaiah the Treasurer replied smoothly. “So we have taken the liberty to put in place the proper collection measures, and we will start collecting this money now that you have arrived.”

  Bold-faced lie, Peggy thought. She had been expecting lies about the money, of course, but how dare they issue decrees in her name without her consent? That was infuriating. She grabbed the letter and waved it in the air. “Why did you issue this letter in my royal name without consulting me? ”

  “You were in America,” Tsiami said, shrugging.