King Peggy

by Peggielene Bartels

“How often do we talk on the phone?” she asked. “And this letter was written four days ago. You knew I was coming! You couldn’t have waited until this morning to consult with me? I’m the king, not you! ”

  Tsiami’s long thin fingers made little circles on the tablecloth, which he studied as he said, “Why should we have consulted you when this is obviously the best way to handle the fishing fees? We spent a lot of time discussing it, and you should just go along with it.”

  “This is a disrespectful way to treat a king!” Peggy roared, slapping the table. “You would not treat me this way if I were a man! And this is not the best way to handle the fishing fees. Who is going to go down to the beach every day and count fish? We will take a percentage of the fish weekly or monthly.”

  “We have lived here for many years!” Uncle Moses cried, throwing out his arms. “I was born, bred, and buttered in Otuam! I am in charge of disputes in the fishing village! I know more about the fishermen than you. You were born in Cape Coast! You have been in America all this time! What do you know of fish?”

  “With all due respect, Nana, I believe this is the best possible method,” Isaiah the Treasurer added smoothly.

  Without looking up from his lap, Tsiami chimed in petulantly, “Why don’t you just do what we say? Why are you making everything so difficult? You just got here a few hours ago and you are already making trouble.”

  Peggy turned to him. Perhaps now was the time to use one of her speeches, the one she had designed to let them know that she was as strong as they were in terms they could understand. “Maybe I don’t have balls, like the rest of you, but I am a man with breasts! I am a man, and a king, and you mustn’t forget it!” She slapped herself on the chest for emphasis and waited for the response.

  Other than Aggie’s burp of a guffaw from the kitchen doorway, this comment was met with a stunned silence. The elders had never heard a woman say such a thing before.

  “No, you’re not,” Tsiami said, shaking his head vigorously, staring at his knees. “You are certainly not a man with breasts. It is well known that you have to have balls to be a man. Having breasts does not qualify a person to be a man.”

  Apparently Tsiami hadn’t understood her point. “I am!” she cried, slapping her chest again with both hands. “I am a man with breasts.”

  Tsiami had swung his legs to the right side of his chair, and now he seemed to be scrutinizing his royal blue plastic sandals. Shaking his head more slowly, he said, “No, you’re not. That is not possible.”

  “I am! I am!” Peggy cried. “I am a man, like you.”

  “You’re not,” Tsiami calmly replied. “Because you don’t have balls.”

  And so it went for a while, Peggy yelling and slapping her chest, insisting she was a man with breasts, and Tsiami feebly but stubbornly protesting and Uncle Moses supporting him. Finally, she launched into her second carefully practiced speech. “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 even you who chose me. It was the ancestors. They chose me to straighten this town out and teach you a lesson. You think I’m a woman, and you try to treat me like one, but I am actually a man. With breasts, not balls!” Peggy slammed her fist on the table for emphasis, hoping that would make them pay attention. “Maka!” she cried, which meant “I’m telling you.” “Maka, maka!”

  Being a peaceful people, most Ghanaians don’t like to see a disagreement between friends, and many are willing to jump into the middle of an argument to resolve it amicably, pointing out some middle ground whereby both aggrieved parties could save face. But such an intervention usually just makes the two arguers angry at the peacemaker for interfering in other people’s business, and they both start yelling at him until he gets angry too and starts yelling back. Then another peacemaker joins in to break up the fracas among the three, and soon there are four people arguing, and so on until everyone is drawn into the argument.

  Such was the case now. Baba Kobena tried to break up the fight among Peggy, Tsiami, and Uncle Moses, who vented their anger at him for interrupting, which made him so angry that he yelled back at them. Eshun, in his wobbly voice, also tried to intervene until Uncle Moses told him to shut up and he, too, started yelling. Isaiah the Treasurer stood and proclaimed grandly, “This council must unite!” to which Tsiami replied, “Oh, for God’s sake, Isaiah, shut the hell up.”

  Within a few minutes, everyone was talking at once. Several times an elder stood up and cried “Ah-go!” which meant “May I have your attention, please!” The proper response was “Ah-meh,” which meant “Yes, you have my attention,” followed by a respectful silence. But no one was crying Ah-meh. They were either arguing or crying Ah-go, while Peggy was crying Maka.

  Isaiah the Treasurer stood and hoisted his trousers even farther up his torso before pointing his finger at several elders and yelling. Uncle Eshun started rapping his cane on the table to make up for his weak voice, and Baba Kobena angrily threw his wide-brimmed black hat on the floor.

  The interesting thing about a Ghanaian argument is how quickly it ends—often with a chuckle and no lingering grudges. Those who engage in the most vicious verbal altercation in the morning are often seen cheerfully drinking beer together under a tree in the afternoon as if nothing unpleasant had happened. And so, after a time, Baba Kobena, Eshun, and Isaiah grew tired and, watching stubborn Tsiami and bossy Uncle Moses still fighting with Peggy, started to laugh loudly. Finally, even Peggy and her two angry elders ran out of steam. Suddenly silent, they looked at their mirthful colleagues and started to laugh themselves. It was, Peggy realized, the typical ending to a major Ghanaian argument.

  Peggy never expected that she and her elders would come to a decision on the collection of fishing fees in a single meeting. Her people loved to talk, preferably loudly and all at once, so it would be quite impossible to accomplish anything at one sitting, especially if there was any contention. Moreover, such a speedy resolution of an important issue would be an American way of handling matters. In Ghana it would feel shockingly rushed and disrespectful of tradition, which demanded careful consideration of all points of view. But she also knew that in her first meeting she had made her point. Though it had taken a bit of crudeness and a loud argument, she had shown her elders that she was not going to allow them to walk all over her.

  Toward six a.m. the elders pushed back their chairs and stood up. “We’ll be back later,” Tsiami said before ambling off to his pineapple fields. He loved his fields almost as much as he loved being tsiami, and he considered his pineapples, though small, the sweetest in the world. He had brought Peggy two of them as a welcome home gift, and now Aggie cut one of them into squares and presented it to Peggy on a plate, next to her bowl of porridge and cup of coffee.

  Peggy loved the pineapples, mangos, and coconuts of the Fante region. Their flavors were fresh and true, as if you could taste the very spirit of the plant. In Western countries many fruits and vegetables, she knew, were grown on huge factory farms, sprayed with hormones to make them unnaturally large, tainted with pesticides, picked still sour, and ripened in the truck on the way to market. Ghanaian fruit was carefully tended by loving brown hands, ripened by the golden embrace of the sun, and fed by refreshing seasonal rains.

  After finishing her breakfast, Peggy pushed back her chair and walked onto the front porch, where she sat down on the long handmade bench. Though the four a.m. argument with her elders had been upsetting, it had served its purpose and now she suddenly felt exhilarated to be back in her beloved Ghana.

  The sun was just starting to rise, and she watched the sky turn slowly from a leaden color to silver, and then to a rose gold. In Ghana there was usually only an hour when the sun was up and the world was still cool, the magical hour between six and seven in the morning. During that time a breeze played around your neck and shoulders like the caresses of a light silk scarf. Suddenly, around se
ven, the breeze would stop, and the heat would start to rise. By ten the sun became a giant yellow fist, hammering the top of your head into the ground.

  As the sun strengthened, Peggy could see pieces of mica twinkling on the red earth. When she was a child and had visited her great-uncle Rockson, Nana Amuah Afenyi IV, she had been fascinated by the shiny flakes, which she picked up and stuffed in her pockets. It was as if eons ago the vaulted mirror of the sky had shattered, hurling a billion tiny glinting shards onto the red-gold earth of Otuam.

  Peggy noticed a large brown hen in front of the house, mumbling in chicken self-talk. “Let me see, does that look edible, yes, I think I will eat it, oh no, it wasn’t good at all, kaplooey, there, I have spat it out. Where are those chicks, yes, keep close to my tail feathers.” The hen’s six yellow chicks followed her like a tide, spreading out around her and washing back together again.

  A few feet from the chickens, a black goat and a white goat chewed leaves on a bush with fixed determination. Peggy knew that goats, too, had their own language. There was the “Hey, buddy, how’s it going?” bleat, which they uttered as they trotted briskly past each other. There was the warning bleat, “Get away from this patch of leaves, you bastard, it’s mine.” That, of course, was usually from the male goats. The most profoundly disturbing bleat was that of a calf crying passionately for its mother. It was a bloodcurdling, almost human sound, like that of a cat being skinned alive, and it continued unabated until the mother bleated a comforting “Don’t worry, little one! I am over here behind this bush.”

  All around her were the voices of birds—short piping whistles, long shrill tweets, raucous caws, and cheerful chirps. As the sun brightened, the world became even more alive, and the silver stillness, peppered by animal cries, suddenly buzzed with human activity. A fisherman came out from the concrete block house in front of Peggy’s, on the other side of a sandy patch and clump of scrubby bushes. Beneath a lean-to, he stretched a fishing net over a vertical frame, took a needle and thread, and started repairing gaps in the net where frantic fish had thrashed their way out. A man walked by Peggy’s porch with a heap of long sticks of firewood on his head; some families couldn’t afford kerosene burners and collected sticks in the bush for fires to cook food and heat water for laundry.

  Peggy noticed a dozen or so clear plastic water baggies, torn open and emptied, on the ground where lazy people had thrown them, and where the breeze rolled them around like large, unsightly dust balls. I will have to have something done about that, she thought. Maybe Mr. Yorke can organize the schoolchildren to clean up the trash.

  From somewhere behind the Other Cousin Comfort’s house, Peggy heard the slap of dishwater hitting the dirt, thrown, perhaps, by Aggie. Several young children ran out of the next-door neighbor’s house on the left, chasing one another and laughing. One of them had a standard bush toy—an old tin can with rusty nails in it that kids could shake like a loud rattle and dance to the beat. Another had a long stick nailed to an empty spool of fishing line, which he rolled in the dirt. A bedraggled barefoot toddler stood perplexed, her thumb in her mouth. Older children walked home from the borehole in groups of two or three, adeptly balancing large tin buckets of water on their heads and chattering.

  Several men walked briskly in front of Peggy into the bush toward their fields. Women from the nearby houses came out holding long dried palm fronds and, bending over at the waist, energetically swept the dirt in front of their houses, making a scraping, swishing sound. Though wealthy Ghanaians cultivated lawns around their gated mansions, swept dirt was the sign of a tidy village house; any sprout of grass would be considered unsightly and immediately plucked.

  Friends and neighbors greeted one another cheerfully. Peggy closed her eyes and listened. The voices of Ghanaians had a different timbre entirely from Americans’. Their voices were rich, deep, and reminded her of different kinds of candy—there was the bittersweet chocolate voice of an old man, the caramel and nut voice of a middle-aged woman, the mint chocolate voice of a middle-aged man, the butter cream voice of a young woman.

  And Peggy’s voice? Someone had once told her it was like hot chocolate, and that her laughter was like boulders of chocolate rolling down a mountain. She had thought the remark was odd at the time but now, listening to the African voices all around her, she understood it.

  Behind the human voices were those of chickens, goats, and birds, in trees and thickets, a three-dimensional living grid of speech. She opened her eyes and saw the shimmering gray-green leaves of the trees dance in the breeze, undulate, leap.

  Peggy said to herself, I can sit here and just be. I don’t have to do. In the States I am always doing, rarely being.

  Back in Washington, it seemed hard to live in the present. Peggy rushed from the accomplishments of the past headlong into her goals for the future, aided by ever-faster technology. She could have a computer program do her taxes and invest her money and organize her closets, or buy a cell phone that sent e-mails, took pictures, made her coffee, and washed her clothes. She pictured every American holding a remote control, pushing buttons to accomplish what they wanted in life.

  In recent years, Americans had invented many new buttons ostensibly to stay connected with people, yet these same buttons actually disconnected them from the people sitting right beside them, or from family members in the next room. Virtual, remote-control connection destroyed human connection, and she sensed that many Americans were, despite their hectic schedules, lonely. She remembered one morning in the elevator of her condo building, when she bid a hearty African Good morning! to a man who was inside when the doors opened. He looked at her and snapped, “What’s so good about this morning?” She had seen such pain and loneliness in his face that she ached for him. No African would ever say something like that.

  She had also seen, on the rare occasions she allowed herself dinner at the Parthenon Restaurant, whole families sitting around a table eating, not speaking to one another, just pushing buttons. Perhaps they had sent text messages to the kitchen, placing their orders without uttering a word to a human being.

  Many Africans saw America as a promised land because it was rich in conveniences and gadgets. Americans could make hot air cool and cold air warm. They almost all had running water. They could send men to the moon and cure many cancers. But many of them couldn’t loosen their grip on their remote controls enough to sit on a breezy porch with friends and family, talking about nothing in particular, or sitting in contented silence listening to the birds. If some of them were sitting here now on the porch, she thought, with birds singing and children playing and sunshine slanting through the trees, they would nervously whip a remote control out of their pockets and start pushing buttons.

  My people have no running water, she thought, and bad schools, and minimal health care, and electricity only part of the time. Most have no cars, no television, and no radio, and the kids don’t have games or toys. We are poor in gadgets, but rich in so many other ways. And America, despite all its riches, and despite all the buttons you can push there, is in some respects poor.

  Once again she asked herself the question she always asked. Am I African or American? And she answered herself with the same reply: I am both.

  13

  Later that morning, a town hall meeting would be held at the royal palace. Tsiami would start off the meeting by pouring libations at the stool rooms, thanking the ancestors for the safe return of the king. But when he arrived at the Other Cousin Comfort’s house with several other elders, Peggy took one look at him, swaying slightly, and thought he had already poured some of the libations down his throat.

  As they prepared to leave the house, Nana Kwesi’s taxi pulled up, grinding to a dusty halt in front of the porch. Nana Kwesi jumped out and bid good morning to Peggy.

  The group walked the few hundred feet down the sandy path and through the bushes to the royal courtyard. Peggy immediately noticed that many changes had taken place during her absence. The new white tin palace ro
of was indeed beautiful, painted sky blue around the edges. The empty windows actually looked better than the old, rusty, louvered ones had.

  The three-sided porch on the second floor had temporary columns. Nana Kwesi had been greatly alarmed to find how rotten the old columns were; the fancy Doric pediment above the porch had been likely to collapse at any moment. He immediately removed the old columns, supported the roof with thick clusters of wooden poles, and ordered new Grecian-style columns from a supplier in Cape Coast. Peggy thought she might someday eat her meals on that porch, enjoying the fresh ocean breeze that rolled in over the trees behind the palace. And she would certainly sit there and gaze down on the courtyard to watch royal ceremonies, drumming, and dancing.

  Right now the courtyard was littered with building materials—long planks, piles of iron rods, and stacks of concrete blocks, and Peggy was glad to see that there were still large quantities left, despite the mysterious thief. Goats and chickens made good use of the piles as vantage points from which to survey the scene. The large tree in the center of the courtyard spread its thick branches over the building supplies, as well as the usual gaggle of old men, who lounged in rusty patio chairs. Children chased one another around. In front of their little dwellings in the boys’ quarters, women washed clothes in large cauldrons of steaming water over open fires, stirring them with sticks, or squatted and pounded cassava into fufu with big pestles. As she watched her people perform these basic activities—so simple, ancient, and African—she felt a wave of joy sweep over her to be Ghanaian.

  The ceremony would be held on the palace patio. Someone had already set up Peggy’s public stool, and benches for the elders had been placed along the edges of the patio.

  Uncle Moses unwrapped the royal cow horn from its red flannel cloth and blew it loudly, puffing up his full cheeks. Hearing the summons for a royal meeting, six men appeared carrying plastic chairs and a wooden bench. Peggy sighed. That was only one more than had attended her town meeting the year before. Six. Out of seven thousand.