She popped the pineapple chunk into her mouth, and the taste was incredibly sweet. Still, she couldn’t shake the suspicion that her elders and the children of the late king had been doing something behind her back today. What had Auntie Esi said about the children of the late king? Don’t trust any of the children of the late king. There is a terrible hatred there, one that, I fear, has followed Joseph into death.
Her worries were eased later that morning when the late king’s daughters, Perpetual, Dorcas, and Mary Magdalene, came to have a private word with her. Yes, Peggy thought, relieved, they have come to pay their respects after all. But after the traditional greetings, Perpetual took a sip of her Fanta and said, “Nana, it has been well over a year since our father died, and we want to bury him immediately.”
“Immediately,” said Dorcas.
Peggy’s heart sank. “You must have seen the condition of the palace this morning when you went with Tsiami to pour libations,” she pointed out. “It is not yet a dignified backdrop for a royal funeral, with the paint peeling and the empty windows, and the courtyard full of building materials. It is my sincere goal to hold the funeral a year from now, when I return. The palace will be beautiful then, and the courtyard, cleared and landscaped, will be surrounded by funeral tents, a fitting place for the ceremonies.”
“We will get him out of the morgue and bury him secretly,” Perpetual replied firmly. “Then you can hold the dignified funeral whenever you are ready, using a wooden effigy instead of the body.”
Peggy was shocked. What the women were suggesting would dishonor their father and herself. Not to mention, it would dishonor them. A deceased king must be interred with drumming, dancing, libations, and other rituals. You couldn’t just throw him in the ground, ignoring all the sacred time-honored traditions. Auntie Esi had been right. Obviously these women wanted to punish their father in death for his behavior in life. Their request the year before for a speedy funeral hadn’t been out of respect, she now understood, but out of revenge. And perhaps their libation pouring on the stools that morning hadn’t been to bless their father, but to beg the ancestors to drag him down to hell for his misdeeds.
“Why would you suggest such a dishonorable thing?” she asked sharply.
Perpetual shrugged. “If you want to hold an expensive funeral, that’s your business,” she said, a nasty edge to her voice. “But we want him buried now. ”
Peggy shook her head. “I need your father’s body for the funeral. That is the proper way to have a funeral, after all, with the body. I won’t lie to people and tell them we will bury a person who has been buried a year already. He will be buried in a royal tomb in the palace, according to custom.”
“He’s our father,” Perpetual growled. “We should decide where and when to bury him, not you.” Behind her thick, large glasses, her eyes became small and hard.
“He’s my predecessor,” Peggy barked back. “Each new king owes the last one the dignity of a royal burial. And who do you think you’re talking to in that tone of voice? How dare you! ”
“That man doesn’t deserve a magnificent funeral,” Perpetual hissed.
“He doesn’t deserve one,” Dorcas agreed.
“Well, I intend to give him the best funeral a Fante king ever had!” Peggy snapped, provoked.
The three women stood up and, muttering to one another, left the house. Aggie brought in a glass of just-squeezed orange juice and set it down gently before Peggy. “That was very strange,” she said. “They don’t want to bury their father as a king. How could you hate somebody so much, after he is dead, that you would want to dishonor yourself in order to dishonor him? ”
Peggy sipped the juice, so sweet and fresh, and shook her head. “I’m sorry for their family issues, but I can’t let them get in the way of my plans for Otuam. I’m going to bring honor and progress to my people, and secretly tossing the former monarch in a ditch will not achieve my goals.”
14
The day had started off badly, with Tsiami making such a fool of himself and the late king’s daughters’ mean-spirited request, but it rapidly got worse. When the sun was at its highest point, and Peggy was eating her fried fish, a taxi careened to a stop in front of the house, spewing sand and pebbles. Holding two suitcases, Ekow barged in the front door.
“Mama, Mama, King Nana Mama, I am here!” he cried.
Peggy stared at him, dismayed. Ekow had, if it was possible, lost weight since she had last seen him a year earlier. His face looked more like a dried prune than ever, and his ears seemed to stick out farther than before.
“Ekow,” she said briskly. “How did you know I was coming here?”
“The relatives are all talking about it,” he said. “It is nice and very, very fine. I will sleep on the floor in your room. I will help you keep things clean.” He bustled down the hall to Peggy’s room, dragging his two bags. Peggy looked at his retreating form and groaned.
A few minutes later, Tsiami stopped by to apologize for pretending he had lost the stool room keys, for taking the late king’s children into the stool rooms without Peggy’s permission, and for lying about it all. “It is quite common for kings and their tsiamis to fight frequently,” he said, shrugging. “But still, I can’t imagine what got into me.”
“I know exactly what got into you, Tsiami,” Peggy retorted. “Alcohol. Through your mouth. That’s what got into you. Do you think I don’t know where much of the ancestral libations ends up? If someone gives you a bottle of schnapps to pour to the ancestors, you pour half down your throat and the other half into the ground. Yours is the perfect profession for an alcoholic.”
Tsiami said nothing.
“And the next time you pour libations for a ceremony at the palace, I am going to smell your breath first to make sure you are sober. I am going to stick my head inside your mouth and take a deep whiff, so be prepared. I will not have you botch the ancestral libations.”
Tsiami considered this. “All right. I will drink afterward, then.”
“Fine,” Peggy replied. “But if you don’t perform your priestly duties correctly, I will fire you, which will be a great dishonor. So bear that in mind.”
Tsiami nodded, stood up, and strode out of the house. Gazing at his skinny form retreating into the bush, Peggy was glad that he had apologized. Perhaps her efforts at trying to teach him to respect her would pay off, the way they had paid off with her brothers and the dish duty. Come to think of it, though, her brothers had been very young, and youth is a time when the human mind is flexible and readily accepts new notions. Age, on the other hand, stiffens people, who may become rigidly inflexible, like those trees in California that had petrified and turned to rock. Most likely it wouldn’t be so easy to teach her elders anything at all as they, too, had probably already turned to rock.
As Aggie cleared the lunch dishes, Peggy ran a hand through her hair. It occurred to her that she had only been in Otuam two days and had already lost her temper five times. She counted them. Yesterday morning, at her very first council meeting, she had exploded when she saw the fishing fees letter issued in her name and without her permission. She had yelled at Kwame Lumpopo at the palace ceremony. This morning she had threatened to drag Tsiami down to hell for lying about the stool room keys, and she had barked at him again when he came to apologize. She had become infuriated with the disrespect of the late king’s daughters.
Peggy tried to remember if she had ever lost her temper five times in two days in her life. She didn’t think so. This was a new record.
Should she try to curb her temper, bite her lip, and swallow the retort begging to be heaved into the conversation? Would her elders respect her more if she controlled herself, or would they take her equanimity as permission to run roughshod all over her? Would Tsiami have apologized if she hadn’t yelled at him in the first place? She wasn’t sure. As a woman, didn’t she need to prove that she was tougher than any man, or her elders would never listen to a word she said? It was well known the world over th
at successful male leaders were called successful leaders, and successful female leaders were called bitches. She mulled this over.
What was more, she was not sure she could control her temper if she tried. What caused her to snap so quickly? Was it the heat? The jet lag? Or were her elders outrageously irritating? She worried that the real reason was that she was just a secretary in over her head who couldn’t deal with her many challenges. Taking a deep breath, she cupped her right hand around her mother’s little gold bracelet on her left wrist to feel the strength within it.
Well, she decided, I will take things one day at a time.
But her equanimity was sorely tested. A new source of irritation was her elders’ unceasing attempts to get her to reconcile with Kwame Lumpopo. Peggy wanted to do so much for Otuam in the few weeks she would be there, and here she was mired in quicksand and chained to her nemesis, that disgraceful scam artist. Even though she had fired him from the council, he was still there in spirit, at every council meeting, hovering above her, haunting her. It was so unfair.
The elders were deeply disturbed about the way she had treated him at the palace ceremony. Nothing made Ghanaians more uneasy than a rift in the family, and an African family consisted of cousins so distant you could no longer name a common ancestor but just knew you were related somehow. Sometimes you couldn’t have the satisfaction of staying mad at anybody because relatives would come out of the woodwork telling you that you were, in fact, distant cousins with your enemy, so you had to make up.
During a very hot midafternoon council meeting, Baba Kobena urged, “You must forgive him,” for the umpteenth time, flashing his large lower teeth. “Fishes swim in schools, and we are one big family, swimming together. Moreover, it is unseemly for a king to be upset at her cousin, and in public, too. Ghanaians don’t act that way.”
Peggy shot him a look. “I’m an American. We Americans drop our misbehaving relatives.”
The elders shook their heads and murmured in disapproval.
“Nana, with all due respect, if a chair is missing a leg, it will not balance on only three legs. If you throw one leg out because you don’t like it, the chair will be useless,” Isaiah the Treasurer said firmly.
“I’m throwing the Kwame Lumpopo leg out,” Peggy quipped.
“And he is a thief,” Nana Kwesi added. “I agree that she should speak to him pleasantly in public because he is a family member, but she cannot have him back on her council.”
Peggy’s elders tended to ignore Nana Kwesi. They knew they were going to have a hard time ignoring him once Peggy was back in Washington and he acted for her as regent, but for now they could ignore him.
“What if he agrees to pay you the money back?” Uncle Eshun asked Peggy.
“I don’t want it,” Peggy replied. “First of all, how is he going to pay back two thousand dollars? The man doesn’t work. I think he gets all his money by cheating people, mostly female people, and think how many innocent people he would have to cheat in order to pay me back.”
Just then the discussion was punctuated by a crash of shattering crockery in the kitchen, followed by male and female shrieks and curses. Peggy pushed herself up from her chair, marched to the kitchen, and swung open the door to see Aggie wielding a butcher knife as Ekow raced out the back door, stick arms above his head, screaming wildly. On the floor were a broken plate and a mess of tomatoes.
“Stop it, both of you!” Peggy cried, pulling a handkerchief out of her bra and mopping her forehead. It was already so hard being king, what with the heat and Kwame Lumpopo and the stealing. The last thing she needed was Aggie going after Ekow with a butcher knife.
She returned to her chair and noticed that her elders’ gaze was riveted on something outside of the window behind her. She turned around to see Ekow, still flailing his arms, disappearing into the bush.
“Let us continue,” she said.
Ekow truly did his best to be helpful around the house. He swept the floors and helped Aggie wash the dishes in large tubs on the kitchen floor. Outside, with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, he did the laundry, stirring it in large pans of hot soapy water that had been heated on the kerosene burner in the kitchen, rinsing it with cool clear water, and hanging it carefully on the lines behind the dining room. He made the beds, though sometimes he put the blanket on the bottom and the two sheets on top.
Whenever Peggy came out of the bathroom she found Ekow standing there like a statue, holding a bucket of water, ready to toss it into the toilet. Peggy was embarrassed that he had been standing there listening to everything. In the United States, whenever she used the bathroom and thought people outside might hear, she ran the water in the sink. But here there was no water in the sink. Peggy thought about telling Ekow to stop bringing water for the toilet, but she knew he was saving Aggie the trouble of fetching it from the tank in the kitchen.
Every night, Ekow slept on a mat at the foot of her bed, an unlikely guardian of the king’s spirit. Despite Peggy’s initial misgivings, the arrangement with Ekow seemed to be working out. Every day she gave him some spare change to run up to Main Street and buy the smallest pack of cigarettes they sold, a slender case with eight cigarettes inside.
But Ekow was tempted by other merchandise, as events were soon to prove. It all started a few days before the gazetting, when several strangers stopped by the house to tell Peggy that Ekow had borrowed money from them on Main Street, saying that he was the king’s nephew and Peggy would pay it back as soon as they saw her. He had borrowed only a few hundred cedis from each one, but every time Peggy pulled the money from her bra she grew annoyed at another useless scamming man in the family. When Ekow returned to the house late in the afternoon, Peggy scolded him severely. What had he wasted her money on, she wanted to know. Ekow shrugged and went out back to smoke a cigarette and see if the laundry was dry.
But Peggy was soon to find out what Ekow had wasted her money on. It started that evening as she ate her fish. Ekow kept opening and closing the refrigerator door, which Cousin Charles had only recently repaired and was already starting to tilt a bit. When Peggy told him to cut it out, he went into the kitchen and emerged with a bucket of water, which he sloshed across the dining room floor. “I will take a bath,” he proclaimed, “and after that I will put on your bra and underwear.”
Picturing skinny little Ekow in her underwear, Peggy started to laugh, but then she caught herself and told him to behave. When she went to bed, instead of bedding down on his sleeping mat, Ekow paced up and down, muttering to himself. As he did so, Peggy got a whiff of something pungent and sickeningly sweet.
Her heart sank. “You stink of marijuana, Ekow!” she said with dismay. “You can’t sleep in my room. Go into the hall and sleep on the floor.” She pushed him out the door, banged it shut, and loudly turned the key.
Ekow didn’t go to sleep on the hall floor. He walked up and down outside her room, talking loudly to himself and pounding on the walls. Periodically, Cousin Charles came out of his room down the hall to tell him to shut up, and they started arguing. After about forty minutes of trying to get some sleep, Peggy was wound up tight. She had so much to do for Otuam, so very much, and was so tired from sitting at the table sixteen hours a day in the heat, meeting with council members and visitors. At the very least she needed a good sleep every night.
She turned the large key in her lock, which rattled and scraped, and threw open her door.
“Get out of this house so I can sleep!” she cried. “I’m the king and I need my sleep! Take your sleeping mat and your suitcases and get on the tro-tro tomorrow to Accra! ”
When Cousin Charles had ejected Ekow from the house, throwing his suitcases and sleeping mat after him and slamming the door, Peggy said, “Maybe now we can get some sleep.”
But almost immediately there was a loud banging on the door, louder than the banging of a fist. Cousin Charles opened it and there stood Ekow, wielding a hammer, which he had evidently retrieved from his suitcase.
Cousin Charles closed the door and barred it.
All Peggy could think of was that Ekow was going to damage the house, the way he had broken the Other Cousin Comfort’s cherished china cups and bowls during her enstoolment. The Other Cousin Comfort had been kind enough not to send Peggy a bill, though locking up the comfortable parlor was punishment enough. Now, however, Ekow threatened severe damage to the house, which was not Peggy’s. As king, how could she allow Ekow to damage someone else’s property? Yet as his aunt, how could she send her own nephew to jail? Because that was what was going through her mind at each blow of the hammer. Ekow had to go to jail.
“Charles, go and fetch the police,” Peggy said, her mind suddenly made up. “They have to pick him up. He’s going to damage the house.”
“I’m going with him!” Aggie said.
Cousin Charles opened the front door and pushed Ekow and his hammer out of the way, slapping him hard, clearing a path for Aggie and himself to run to the police. Peggy shut the door, lifted the heavy bar, and slipped it into place.
Almost immediately, Ekow started banging on the door again with his hammer. Peggy figured it was about fifteen minutes on foot to the police station, maybe longer in the dark since Cousin Charles and Aggie had forgotten to take a flashlight. She would, most likely, have to wait at least a half hour for help to come, while Ekow was trying to break the door down. She sat down on a dining room chair and waited, shuddering in sympathy with the door at each blow.
It seemed like an eternity until she heard men’s voices on the front porch. She crept to the door and put her ear against it. Then she heard the slapping sound of flesh against flesh. She lifted the heavy bar from the door and opened it slowly. Four policemen were dragging Ekow away, hitting him. Charles and Aggie stood on the porch. Cousin Charles’s glasses were askew, and Aggie’s turban had fallen off. Her unkempt braids were twisted in different directions like friendly snakes.
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