King Peggy

Home > Other > King Peggy > Page 19
King Peggy Page 19

by Peggielene Bartels


  Tsiami stood up to open the meeting. “Nana, wonfreye!” he cried. Let us call all good things to come to us!

  “Yemrah,” cried the people in the ancient response. Let the good things come!

  “Nana, wonfreye!” he cried, louder.

  “Yemrah!”

  “Nana, wonfreye!” he cried at the top of his lungs.

  “Yemrah!”

  Tsiami told the group that the king had just arrived from the United States and would be gazetted in two weeks’ time. He asked if any townspeople had anything they wanted to say to their king, and all six of them shook their heads and looked at the concrete floor. Peggy felt a bit dejected. They didn’t have anything to say to their king.

  But this disappointment was soon eclipsed by something far worse. Peggy saw a figure striding toward her. At first she didn’t believe it was him, didn’t believe he would have the audacity to show his face. Perhaps it was someone else, the strong morning sun confusing her eyes. She blinked and looked again. No, there was no mistaking him.

  Kwame Lumpopo.

  Today he was all in white, crisp white shirt, neatly pressed white trousers, and a white straw hat, looking as if he had emerged from the air-conditioned set of a movie shoot. Though it was only shortly past nine a.m., Peggy and her elders were already wilted, dusty, and perspiring. She wondered if he was wearing white as a symbol of purity, honesty, and integrity. She knew that in old American films, the good cowboys wore white, no matter how dusty it was in their frontier towns, and the bad ones wore black, and here was Kwame Lumpopo striding through the dust yet unscathed by it, ludicrously portraying himself as a good cowboy, which he certainly was not. He was, without doubt, the bad cowboy who rustled cattle and stole horses and deserved to be shot by the sheriff outside the saloon, or hanged as a public spectacle in the town square.

  Kwame Lumpopo even had the nerve to flash Peggy a wide white grin and friendly wave as he carefully picked his way around the piles of building materials in the courtyard. She wondered how the man could walk so jauntily with the stool room just a few feet away. Could he be sure the stool had forgiven him for spreading vicious lies about her? She looked up at the large, three-sided porch overhead. Maybe her angry stool would cause Nana Kwesi’s temporary columns to collapse, and the roof would fall on Kwame Lumpopo, burying his starched white clothes in a heap of dust. She didn’t think she would mind. She might, in fact, leave him there as a warning to anyone who disrespected the king of Otuam.

  He walked around the circle of elders, shaking each one’s hand, and then he stood before Peggy with his hand extended. “Nana!” he cried, smiling as if nothing bad had ever passed between them. “Welcome home! ”

  But Peggy just stared straight ahead, which happened to be at his stomach. It was a flat stomach for a middle-aged man, she had to give him that.

  “Why do you not shake my hand?” Kwame Lumpopo asked, horrified to be so humiliated in front of the elders. In Ghana, no matter how mad you were at a relative, you always greeted him politely, especially when others were present. But Peggy would never forget what Kwame Lumpopo had done. Never. He had coaxed her into trusting him and then conned her, scammed her, and stolen her money as if she were just a stupid woman.

  “You know why, Kwame Lumpopo,” she replied icily, still avoiding his eyes. He stepped back to look at her better, and she had a harder time focusing on his midsection.

  “Well, I see we have some things to discuss,” he said defensively. “I have done nothing wrong. We must meet and have a discussion.”

  “Nothing wrong?” she cried. “After you stole so much of my money? I never want to talk to you again. Please leave. And bring me back my royal umbrella! Today! ”

  Stunned, Kwame Lumpopo stumbled backward, then turned and ran. His swagger became a stagger as his tall frame lurched past the piles of wood and stone in the courtyard and disappeared around a corner.

  Uncle Moses stood up angrily. “Why did you do that?” he cried, swinging his arms. “You can’t treat a family member like that.”

  “He is a thief,” Peggy replied. “He stole my money. He walked under my umbrella at family funerals as if he were the king. Then he told people so many evil lies about me that my stool cried. You are all well aware of that.”

  “If you are still upset, then we must have a family meeting to iron things out,” Baba Kobena advised in his soothing dark voice. “He will give you the umbrella back, and perhaps he can pay you the money back.”

  “I don’t want him to pay me back,” Peggy snapped. “If he paid me back then he could rejoin the council, and I don’t want him back. I do not tolerate thieves.” She cast her elders a meaningful glance.

  “He has truly treated her disgracefully,” Nana Kwesi added. “He wanted to steal the money for the palace roof I put on, but Nana and I went around him. I don’t think this palace would have a new roof if the money had gone through his hands.”

  “But still,” Uncle Eshun said, his chin resting on his hands, resting on his cane, “he is a relative.”

  “We must understand Nana’s disappointment in Kwame Lumpopo, however,” Isaiah the Treasurer pointed out. “And we must unite to find a solution.”

  There was something about Isaiah’s fawning that irritated Peggy even more than Uncle Moses’s bossiness and Tsiami’s stubbornness. Perhaps this was because the bossiness and stubbornness were sincere, while the fawning was not sincere. It was a coat of fresh paint over a piece of rotten, worm-infested wood.

  “I have found the solution,” she said, scowling.

  Uncle Moses carefully wrapped the royal cow horn up in its red flannel covering and said, “Just remember, when you cook a sea turtle, it stews in its own juices.” Peggy wasn’t sure what that meant, and she didn’t care to ask.

  Isaiah the Treasurer cupped his pointed chin in his hand and stared at Nana Kwesi with unblinking eyes as Baba Kobena took off his lozenge-shaped black hat and toyed with it. Tsiami stood up with a bottle of schnapps to perform the libations. He had lost the keys to the stool rooms, he explained, so he would have to pour the libations right outside the doors rather than inside.

  Tsiami thanked the ancestors for Peggy’s safe return and prayed for her success as king. The ancient gnarled tree in the center of the courtyard was alive with birds singing sweetly, as if in welcome, and its long branches whispered and swayed in the breeze as the elders chanted and prayed. Peggy noticed that the libations sank straight down into the floor, a very good sign that the ancestors were thirsty and had accepted them. They, too, were welcoming their chosen king home.

  Throughout the rest of the day, Peggy received visitors who wanted to welcome her back to Otuam. She was glad that many of her guests brought pails of fresh fish or bottles of beer, given how much her council ate and drank. But by midafternoon, jet lag hit her hard, and she longed to lie down. She hoped these visits would be brief, but at the same instant knew such a thing was impossible. Ghanaians weren’t always conscious of time passing, particularly when they were enjoying the moment. When they came for a visit they hung around for hours, chatting or just sitting silently drinking beer.

  Her guests discussed the price of mackerel on Main Street and Kofi Aswongo’s lost goat. How Kwame Ninsin had painted Effi Boateng’s yellow-striped chickens green and claimed them as his own until one night she crept out onto Main Street with a bucket of paint and made them yellow again. How the Mankessim—Cape Coast tro-tro was so overloaded that it tipped over, injuring several riders and scattering their bags, which had been attached to its roof. One of the bags had opened, revealing very dirty underpants. Several times Peggy wished her guests would leave, but it would have been very rude to suggest it.

  Her hopes soared when one group of visitors rose from the table and bid her farewell, but just then another group walked in the door. She forced a smile and welcomed them. She took very seriously the oath she had made at her enstoolment to always be available to meet with her people. And these visits showed that some peo
ple, at least, were interested in their new king, despite the poor turnout at the town meeting.

  As the sun set, the chief inspector came by with two of his officers to pay his respects. At fifty-two, Kwame Appiah was a tall, slender man with a handsome, lined face. Periodically, his intelligent bright eyes darted around the table, as if he was calculating which of Peggy’s visitors had the potential to commit a crime. Sipping his beer, he confirmed what Peggy had heard, that wife beating had indeed stopped since her enstoolment a year earlier. Now all he had to deal with was drunks, and he didn’t think any royal order would stop people from drinking.

  The policemen and other visitors left around seven p.m., and shortly thereafter Nana Kwesi climbed back in his cab headed for Winneba. Then, before Peggy could catch her breath, the queen mother, Paulina Nyamekyeh, and her cousin, the Soul, Faustina, came by to welcome the king home and join her and Cousin Charles for dinner. They had been in school earlier that day and unable to attend the palace ceremony.

  Paulina was now sixteen, and even more beautiful than she had been a year earlier. Peggy studied her. Her flawless skin was dark, the color of bittersweet chocolate. Her long, almond-shaped eyes were set close together. They were very dark, almost black, fringed by thick black lashes. Her nose was long and aquiline, the nostrils perfectly molded. Her mouth was small with plump full lips. She had high cheekbones, a square jaw, and slightly pointed chin. Her teeth were truly marvelous. In a town where many children had rotten, crooked, or dirty teeth, Paulina’s were white and even, as if she had endured years of orthodontia like the children of wealthy Washingtonians.

  As they ate fried fish on rice with red sauce, Peggy noticed how well behaved the girls were, friendly and respectful, typical Ghanaian children. The dinner was greatly enlivened when Cousin Charles opened the ancient refrigerator to grab a beer and the door came off in his hands and fell to the floor with a crash. He stood there looking at it in surprise, his hand gripping an imaginary handle, while Peggy and the girls howled with laughter. Somehow it struck Peggy so funny she couldn’t stop laughing, and she clutched her belly because it started to ache.

  To Peggy, the door falling off that ancient machine represented all of Africa in a nutshell. It reminded her of a very famous novel by a Nigerian author named Chinua Achebe, which was still widely read in Africa, Europe, and the United States more than fifty years after its publication, called Things Fall Apart. Even though the title referred to a man’s life falling apart, it pretty much summed up all of the things that broke every day in Africa. That was why every family had at least one person, usually a man, who could fix anything, whether it was rewiring a lamp, reprogramming a computer, reconditioning an engine and putting it into an ancient car, or hammering a new table leg onto an old table. In Peggy’s family, Cousin Charles was the one to call when Things Fall Apart.

  Now he tried to pull the door off the floor but it was too heavy, with all the bottles of beer on the inside shelves, so he patiently removed them. Then he lifted the door up and examined its hinge, which seemed all right, but the corresponding hinge on the side of the refrigerator had lost a piece. Cousin Charles looked around the room, saw a wine cork on the table, cut it in half with his dinner knife, and shoved it into the hole in the fridge hinge. He carefully put the door back on, pushing the pin up into the cork, and the door stayed.

  “There!” he said, satisfied. He looked at Peggy. “I know that in America you go out and buy new things when something breaks. But this is African engineering at an African price.”

  Peggy nodded approvingly. “That’s what Americans call recycling, Charles,” she said, digging her fork into her fried fish and rice.

  The one thing Cousin Charles couldn’t fix was the light in the toilet room. The problem wasn’t the bulb but something in the wiring that he couldn’t repair. And so, at night, Peggy blindly flung the bucket of water in the general direction of the toilet.

  At five o’clock the next morning, Aggie tapped on Peggy’s door to let her know she had a visitor, a cousin of hers who lived in the boys’ quarters next to the palace. Peggy had, of course, been up since the chickens and goats started shrieking at four. But she liked to lie on her sheets and feel the silken smoothness of the early morning air against her skin until she absolutely had to get up.

  “Tell him to come in,” she said, standing up and throwing a cloth around her.

  Peggy didn’t recognize the man, but it was only members of the Ebiradze clan who lived rent-free in the little cabins surrounding the royal courtyard.

  “Nana, ma akye, woho tsen den?” the man asked. Good morning. How are you?

  “Woho tsen den?” Peggy replied, nodding.

  “Nana, I saw Tsiami just now,” the man said. “He was carrying a flashlight in one hand and the keys to the stool rooms in the other, taking the daughters of the late king into the stool rooms to pour libations. It looked to me that he was sneaking around like a crocodile. They are there now. I wondered if you knew about it.”

  Peggy certainly had not known about it. And the day before, Tsiami said he had lost the keys so he couldn’t open the doors for her welcome home ceremony. What was more, he was always supposed to ask the king’s permission before unlocking the stool rooms for a ceremony. Even more disturbing, the children of the late king hadn’t come by to pay their respects to Peggy first, nor to ask her permission themselves. Had they simply overlooked this courtesy, or was it an intentional slap in the face of their father’s successor?

  But right now Peggy needed to deal with her errant tsiami. “Tell him I want to see him,” she said.

  About ten minutes later, Tsiami shuffled into the house and wordlessly slipped into the chair next to Peggy’s at the dining room table.

  “Tsiami,” she said, “I heard you were just in the stool rooms with the children of the late king.”

  “That is a lie,” he replied, suddenly studying the cracks in the ceiling.

  “No, the lie occurred yesterday when you said you had lost the stool room keys. You had them the whole time but you didn’t want to open the doors. You were mad at me because I had yelled at you about the letter to the fishermen.”

  Tsiami shrugged. The gesture infuriated Peggy, but she was determined not to show it. She was a king. A calm, regal king.

  “I just want you to know,” she said firmly, “that if the ancestors are mad at me for not pouring the libations in the proper way, and if they are going to drag me down to hell, I am not going alone. I am taking you with me.”

  “No, you will not,” Tsiami said, shaking his head vigorously. “You will not be taking me down to hell with you. I will not go.”

  Peggy was having a hard time keeping her temper. “You will go with me, Tsiami, because I will grab hold of you and drag you down! I’m telling you! Maka, maka!”

  “That is not how it will be,” Tsiami said. “I will escape you so you will not drag me down.”

  Now Peggy felt her eyes bulging from their sockets. “I will not let you escape! If the ancestors are mad at me because you botched the libations, I will tell them to wait a minute before they drag me down to hell, and I will find you and put my two hands around your throat and then I will say, ‘Okay, ancestors, I am ready to go now! ’ ”

  Tsiami shook his head. “They will not wait for you. It is well known that if the ancestors want to drag you down, they will take you immediately.”

  “You are disrespecting me because I am a woman! Let me say this, Tsiami. No matter how badly you treat me, there is one thing you must do properly, and that is to pour the libations according to tradition and keep the ancestors happy. If you can’t even do that right, I’m going to find another tsiami!”

  Tsiami stood up bristling with anger and, mustering as much dignity as he could, adjusted his cloth and wordlessly walked out of the house into the darkness, the rusty gate banging shut behind him.

  Aggie, who had been leaning against the kitchen door with her arms crossed, burst out laughing. She disappeared into
the kitchen and reappeared with a plate of cut pineapple and a bowl of porridge, along with a fork and spoon, which she set down before Peggy.

  “Nana, you know better than anyone I’ve ever met how to tell a man off,” she said admiringly. “Is that what they teach women in the USA? Do they have courses there that teach girls how to do it? I would like to take such a course.”

  Peggy plunged her fork into a chunk of pineapple and thought about it. No, she hadn’t learned this particular skill in Washington, or London, for that matter, places where fighting chauvinism was a favorite female pastime. She had learned it well before she ever left Ghana. But how?

  Then she recalled that it had to do with the dinner dishes, which she and her siblings were supposed to take turns washing each night. Peggy always dutifully took her turn. But when it came time for her two older half brothers to pitch in, they invariably wandered off, calling over their shoulders that “Peggy should do the dishes because she is a girl.” Many times Peggy did their dishes, muttering under her breath about the injustice of it all. Why should her brothers get out of doing the dishes just because they were male? Why should she have to do their work because she was female? It just wasn’t fair.

  And then one night when she was nine years old, and her brothers went off laughing instead of doing the dishes, Peggy came up with a new idea. She waited until her brothers were fast asleep. Then she crept into their room with stacks of dirty dishes and carefully placed them in her brothers’ beds. She returned with two glasses of water and threw them on her sleeping brothers, who woke up wet and angry, surrounded by piles of dirty dishes. “Mother!” the boys wailed. “Look what Peggy did!” Many other African women would have scolded their daughters in such a case, telling them that women were there to serve their fathers, brothers, and husbands without complaint. But her mother only laughed because she wanted Peggy to be strong.

  From then on, whenever her brothers tried to make Peggy do the dishes on their night, she would punish them the same way. After several soakings, her brothers wordlessly washed the dishes on their assigned nights. That was when Peggy learned that if a woman stood up for herself against mean-spirited men, she could win and teach them a lesson, and maybe next time they would think twice before stepping all over her.

 

‹ Prev