King Peggy

by Peggielene Bartels

  17

  The following morning, as the sun was rising, Cousin Charles walked through the bush to Main Street to take a cab to the highway, where he would board the early morning tro-tro back to Cape Coast and his job grinding lenses at the optician’s. But Cousin Comfort remained, much to Peggy’s delight. They had lain in bed most of the early morning hours laughing at how poorly the men had behaved at the gazetting party. None of the women, they agreed, had had to be carried out unconscious.

  Now that the gazetting was over, Peggy wondered if she should make plans to visit William. But for the next few days, at least, there were other things to do. One of them was to attend the grand opening of the Rural Agricultural Development Bank, Otuam branch, located in a modern building at the top of Main Street. There, as musicians played, Peggy opened the first account, and Nana Tufu opened the second one. The citizens of Otuam, delighted that a bank had finally opened, pulled wads of cash from under their mattresses and out of holes in the floor and opened their own accounts. Then they danced with joy in the street.

  After the bank opening, Peggy’s next order of business was asking the chief fishmongers to identify in person the elders who had been collecting the fees so there could be no denying their crimes, and then to force the thieves to confess. She sent word to the four fishing bosses and her elders to attend a mandatory meeting the following morning at six. The subject: whether any fishing fees had been paid, and if so, to whom. Nana Kwesi volunteered to come to Otuam extra early for the meeting, but Peggy didn’t think his presence was a good idea. Some of her elders were already irritated by the young outsider, favored by their lady king, and they might prove more defensive with him there.

  But plans were afoot to ensure that no elders would attend. While Peggy was eating her fried fish that evening, Baba Kobena called her and said Uncle Moses had instructed all the elders to miss the meeting and play checkers with him under the tree in front of Mr. Yorke’s International School, a well-traveled path where many could see their blatant disrespect of their unreasonable king. Peggy, in turn, let all her elders know that anyone who didn’t show up for the meeting would find a taxi in front of his house, stuffed with four bored police officers just itching to cart him off to jail.

  As the sun rose, the four fishing bosses, three men and a woman, dutifully marched into the house and sat on benches at the far end of the dining room table. Tsiami showed up, sliding wordlessly into his chair on Peggy’s right side without looking at Peggy or Cousin Comfort, then sagging unhappily and pouting his lips. He wore the incongruous combination of a traditional robe and a Syracuse University baseball cap, navy blue with orange letters, which he slapped disconsolately onto the table.

  A few minutes later, Uncle Moses bustled in the door wearing his neatly pressed brown security guard uniform, evidently on his way to lie under the popo tree and guard the cell phone wire. No sooner had the screen slammed shut than he puffed up his cheeks walrus style and asked angrily, “What is this about? Such a summons! What an insult! Such disrespect!”

  At his side was Isaiah the Treasurer, who laid a calming hand on Uncle Moses’s arm and said, “Moses, we must listen to what our gracious king has to say before we start any argument. Surely it must be of the utmost significance—”

  “Sit down and be quiet,” Peggy commanded, and they did.

  As Aggie served the visitors water and minerals, her spatula tucked under her arm like a weapon at the ready, she was grinning broadly. “What a lovely day it is,” she said to Uncle Moses as she plunked his Coke down so hard it spilled a bit. He shot her a withering glance as she sashayed back into the kitchen, swinging her broad hips in an exaggerated fashion.

  Baba Kobena arrived, wearing a long black robe and wide-brimmed black hat, mourning attire for his colleagues, Peggy thought, and Uncle Eshun shuffled in behind him. Both Baba and Eshun looked nervous, but Isaiah the Treasurer seemed not to have a care in the world, complimenting Peggy on the effect of her bright blue cloth on her complexion. She realized that he reminded her of that gold butler robot in Star Wars, C-3PO. She never could stand that obsequious character. As Aggie brought more drinks, Uncle Moses grumbled to himself, and Tsiami, typically, ignored everybody while studying the rips in the pale pink plastic tablecloth.

  “As you know,” Peggy said briskly, turning to the four fishing bosses at the end of the table, “you fish in the king’s waters. Your fishermen live on the king’s land. And you keep your canoes on the king’s beaches. You owe the stool regular fees based on how many fish you bring in. If you refuse to pay these fees, I can kick you out of town and bring in fishermen who will pay them. If you have not paid them, tell me how much you owe and we can make payment arrangements. If you have paid them, tell me whom you paid them to.”

  The four fishing bosses looked uneasily at the elders and then at one another. It was the woman who stood up first. At forty-seven, Dzadi Yatu, known as Daavi, was Otuam’s most successful businessperson, even though she had been born an Ewe, in Eweland, in the eastern coastal area of Ghana. Ewes were known as the best fishermen in Africa, and many left their tribal area to start fishing businesses far from home.

  Daavi had come to Otuam at the age of eighteen, a bride with a baby in tow. For many years now she had lived independently of her husband, who ran his own fishing enterprise on Lake Volta. She owned two enormous canoes and employed a total of forty-six people. She sold her fish, fresh and smoked, in Accra, Cape Coast, Mankessim, and Kumasi.

  Despite her shrewd business sense, Daavi was known for her kind heart. She readily loaned money to those who needed it to pay a doctor or hold a funeral and allowed the borrowers or their family members to work the loan off by cleaning and selling fish. Everyone in Otuam looked up to Daavi, and many girls wanted to grow up to be just like her. Yet even though Daavi was a decided success and a whiz with numbers, she was illiterate. She had had her name tattooed in huge letters on her left forearm so if anyone asked her how to spell it, she could just show them her arm.

  As Otuam’s wealthiest entrepreneur, Daavi had a certain image to uphold. Today she was dressed in a beautiful pale green linen gown with puffed sleeves edged with gold lace and a matching head wrap. She wore high-heeled gold sandals and real gold jewelry. Her hair was relaxed into large, neat curls that fell below her bulbous head wrap. A bit on the plump side, she was, nonetheless, a very pretty woman. Men chased her, but she had no time to flirt, and besides, if she chose a boyfriend he would probably just want to move in on her business and steal her fish. Looking at her, Peggy recognized a kindred spirit: a woman who was honest, strong, and smart.

  “I owe fees from this season,” Daavi said, pushing wads of bills across the table to Peggy. “There is three and a half million cedis.” That was about $250. “I was saving it to give to you personally, Nana, because I know what is going on. Your elder Uncle Moses has been going through the fishing village collecting fees with Tsiami at his side. After the old king’s death last year, I paid Uncle Moses and Tsiami three and a half million cedis.”

  Uncle Moses stood up and cried, “You did not! That woman is lying! ”

  “You know I paid you that money!” Daavi cried. “You are like a fish caught in a net, ready to do anything to escape, including telling a lie! ”

  “That’s ridiculous!” Uncle Moses replied. “When was the last time you heard a fish tell a lie?”

  “I don’t know whether fish tell lies or not, Uncle Moses, but I’m fairly certain you do,” Peggy said.

  “What about Tsiami?” Uncle Moses asked, pointing at the figure slouched so low in his chair that his chin was almost level with the table. It was as if Tsiami hoped to slip under the table completely, and that way no one would yell at him. “Why don’t you ask him? Daavi mentioned Tsiami, too, not just me. It’s not fair for you to pin all the blame on me.”

  Peggy studied her priest, who seemed to be sliding farther under the table. “Tsiami,” she commanded, “sit up!” Grunting, he pushed himself up. “Did y
ou take those fishing fees?”

  Tsiami shrugged his skinny shoulders and looked straight ahead. “You know,” he said, “I’m so old, I actually can’t remember.”

  “You remember every day to come down to the beach and collect them!” Daavi cried. “Your memory can’t be all that bad!” Standing in the doorway of the kitchen, Aggie burst out laughing.

  “Stop insulting me, all of you!” Tsiami replied, sitting bolt upright and slapping the table. “It is disrespectful of the ancestors to insult a tsiami.”

  “Disrespectful of the ancestors?” Peggy asked. That was a good one. “My chief priest, who holds the ancestral libations in one hand and steals money from the town with the other! You have shown disrespect to the ancestors.”

  Tsiami shrank back into his chair. “Well, what about Uncle Moses sitting here? He’s worse than any of us. Why are you picking on me?”

  “Oh, everyone will have his turn, don’t worry. Now, Tsiami,” Peggy asked, with sweetness in her voice, “do you think you can cheat me because I am a woman? Like you cheated the dead king in the fridge because he was old? ”

  Tsiami was wounded. “Why are you doing this?” he said petulantly. “You are trying to scrutinize our asses.”

  “That’s right!” Peggy smiled and said with relish, “Big, small, medium-sized, short, and tall asses, I will scrutinize them all! I will stick my head up there with a flashlight! Be prepared!”

  Tsiami knew better than to say anything to that. As Peggy spoke with the other three fishing bosses, he sat rigidly in his chair, looking straight ahead, like an ancient mahogany sculpture of a pharaoh, his cloth draped over his left shoulder. Odd, Peggy thought, as she cast a glance in his direction, how absolutely motionless the man could sit and then leap up and stride across the room in a heartbeat while her other elders were still trying to rise from their seats, dealing with aching joints and old bones.

  All of the other three fishing bosses said that they, too, had given money to Tsiami, Uncle Moses, and Isaiah the Treasurer, as well as free fish every afternoon when the canoes came in. Peggy clucked in disapproval. “You mean my royal elders wait down at the beach with bowls in their hands begging for free fish?” The bosses nodded solemnly. “That is very undignified,” Peggy said.

  She turned to Isaiah. “Well,” she said, “what do you have to say to the fishermen? Do you, too, accuse them of lying?”

  “Nana,” Isaiah said smoothly, “I would never call anyone a liar, which is a dreadfully unkind word, after all. But you must realize that if these fishermen want to get out of paying you last year’s fees, all they have to say is that they have already paid them and point out some innocent scapegoat as the person accused of taking them. Yes, these fishermen certainly have good reason to accuse us. Perhaps they are the fish looking for the hole in the net.”

  At this accusation, Daavi and the three fishermen stood up and started yelling and shaking their fists. Peggy interrupted. “Quiet! Now I want to ask the fishmongers if they ever gave fees to Uncle Eshun, sitting there with the cane, or Baba Kobena over here in the black hat.”

  Baba Kobena and Eshun raised calm eyes to the fishmongers, all of whom shook their heads. “Never,” said Daavi. “Neither of them has ever taken fees. The one in the hat buys fish from us sometimes, and the one with the cane used to, before his stroke.”

  “Very well,” Peggy said. “I want to thank you all for leaving your canoes to meet with me this morning. You have been very helpful. Now you may return to work. I wish to speak to my council alone.”

  The fishmongers seemed relieved to be dismissed and hurried away from the byzantine accusations of the royal council down to the fresh salt air of the beach where the waves, wind, and fish never lied.

  Peggy looked at her council and turned solemn. “So the three of you have been stealing from me, and from the seven thousand people of this town. You may think it’s just a little here and a little there, but that money, over time, could have provided this town with a certain measure of prosperity. You’ve been stealing from the kids and making them walk for hours before school with buckets of water on their heads. You’ve been keeping illiterate those children whose parents can’t afford their school fees. You’ve been stealing from the medical clinic, which needs a doctor, a dentist, and an ambulance. As a result, people have died—women in a difficult labor and those having heart attacks and strokes. You are, in a way, murderers.”

  Tsiami put his elbows on the table, propped his chin in his hands, and promptly shut his eyes. Was he actually falling asleep right in front of her?

  Peggy shook her head and continued, “I have news for you. This corrupt system is going to change!” She banged both fists on the table so hard that their drinks rattled, but Tsiami still didn’t open his eyes. “Change has come to America, and I have come from America to bring change to Otuam! I am the Obama of this place!”

  “You have lived in the U.S. so long that you have become a white woman,” Uncle Moses scoffed.

  “Uncle Moses, I am a white woman,” Peggy rejoined crisply, knowing that when he used the term white he meant Western, sophisticated, educated, all those things that white people were supposed to be. Yet he had meant it as an insult: a daughter of Ghana, a child of Africa, she had forgotten the traditions of her birthplace and adopted new, foreign customs. “And I am also a man and a king. Never forget that.”

  She had them there, cornered. There would be no cleansing of the old, corrupt ways until they had made a clean breast of it, endured the shame of a confession. Peggy said, “I must insist that everyone who has taken any fishing fees tell me the truth about it. If people confess their crimes, I may be merciful. But if I they don’t, I will squeeze their balls so hard their eyes will pop out!” There, she had said it, the most shocking of all the speeches she had practiced in front of the bathroom mirror in Silver Spring. How would her elders react? Would they be surprised? Frightened?

  The men broke out into guffaws of laughter, some of them slapping their knees, others hitting the table. Tsiami suddenly opened his eyes and brayed out a loud yawn. He looked around questioningly and asked, “What did she say this time about balls?” and the others threw back their heads and roared.

  Their laughter exasperated Peggy. Clearly, her speech had not had the desired effect. She would try another tack. “I will put you all in jail if you don’t confess,” she said. “My forgiveness depends on your confessions. I will send Aggie to the police station to bring the chief inspector here now if the guilty ones don’t confess.”

  “All right,” Uncle Moses said quickly.

  Peggy inclined her head and let a long, cruel silence hang in the air as she waited for their confessions. She could wait all day, while her elders squirmed under the crushing weight of it. Beating them up with her bluster had turned out to be a failed strategy that just made them laugh. This silence was more brutal than any words could be, perhaps because there was usually more truth in silence than in words.

  Finally, Tsiami said, “We did take that fishing money. All three of us.”

  “We’re afraid you’re going to put us in jail,” Isaiah the Treasurer said miserably. “We know you have the right to do so, dear Nana, but we are too old to go to jail. We will die there. And we will lose our honor and our good names forever.”

  Maybe you should have thought of your honor and your good names before you stole the town’s money, Peggy thought.

  “We simply can’t pay you back,” said Uncle Moses. “I don’t see how we can at our age, without full-time work, and we took so much.” The irony was not lost on Peggy that Uncle Moses was confessing to theft while wearing his security guard uniform.

  Finally, she spoke. “What did you do with the money?” she asked quietly.

  “We spent it on women and liquor,” replied Tsiami. Cousin Comfort shrieked and stuffed her napkin into her mouth, while Aggie cried, “Ah-henh!”

  At last the truth comes out, Peggy thought. She studied the three elders. Their faces we
re tense. They knew that at any minute the chief inspector could pick them up in a taxi and throw them in the pitch-black cell where they would sit on the concrete floor crying until Peggy let them out. Yes, as the personification of justice in her town, she would have liked to put them there, punish them for their years of selfish misdeeds. But would it truly be the best thing for Otuam? Their large extended families, she knew, would get involved, claiming innocence, begging for mercy, pulling their friends into the fray. Wouldn’t it just keep the town mired in the past, swirling in a maelstrom of accusations and denials, for months if not years into the future?

  After all the cruelties committed by both blacks and whites during the years of apartheid in South Africa, Archbishop Desmond Tutu had initiated the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Those who admitted their crimes, even murder, would find forgiveness. South Africa found it was the best way to bury a disgraceful past and march boldly into a new and promising future.

  Perhaps the best thing would be to let the past go. She would pardon them for all fishing fee thefts committed up until that day. A king, especially a female American one, should be above petty retaliation, should think of the greater good of the community instead of her own thirst for punishment. She thought of the fifth virtue of a wise ruler, forgiveness.

  “Hmm,” Peggy said. “I am glad that you have confessed to me. I will forgive you. I will not make you pay the money back. But be advised, from now on if I get wind of a single cedi going missing, going into your pockets, you will rot in jail. There will be no second forgiveness.”

  The three of them broke into wide grins. “We are going to be making a lot of changes to the structure of this council and the collection of town fees,” she said. “But let me say one thing: your days of theft and corruption are over.”

  Eager to return to his pineapple fields, Tsiami slapped his Syracuse University baseball cap on his head, stood up, and raced out the door. The others ambled slowly out of the house into the awakening day. The screen door—slap—and the gate—bang—slammed hard behind them.