King Peggy

by Peggielene Bartels

  Humming a little tune, Peggy sashayed down the long corridor to her bedroom and returned to packing her bags.

  Part V

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  November 2009—September 2010

  20

  Peggy had hoped that her corrupt elders would be grateful she hadn’t tossed them in jail and would, with a new sense of sobriety and humility, work closely with her in future, or at the very least not stand in her way. But such was not to be the case.

  The elders, already furious at Peggy for taking control of the fishing fees and land sales, were enraged to find that they weren’t even allowed to get free fish anymore. Daavi was assigned to chase them away if they came down to the beach with bowls in their hands but no money. This happened only once, a few days after Peggy left Ghana.

  “No free fish for you!” Daavi said to Uncle Moses, Tsiami, and Isaiah the Treasurer, who had been hovering hungrily. “Buy your own fish!” She turned to the fishermen unloading their catch, who were grinning at the sight of a woman saying such a thing to the elders. “Nana Amuah Afenyi VI has commanded that anyone seen giving free fish to the elders will be prohibited from casting his net for three days! ”

  All the fishermen laughed because they had given free fish to the elders for years and were tired of it. It was terribly funny to see the fishless old men with sour looks on their faces scurrying up the rocks on the way back to town, clutching their robes and empty bowls while trying not to slip. They didn’t come back.

  But this episode was the final straw for two of them. One day Peggy received a call from a female relative in Otuam who reported that Uncle Moses and Isaiah the Treasurer had held a secret midnight meeting with the three daughters of the late king. The subject: how to humiliate Peggy.

  To punish both Peggy and the late king with a single blow, it was decided that they would bury Uncle Joseph secretly, in a regular cemetery, and not in a magnificent royal funeral with a tomb in the palace. It was what the daughters had suggested to Peggy during her recent trip, a suggestion she had flatly rejected. Now they were trying to do it behind her back.

  At the meeting, Uncle Moses had been particularly vocal in his hatred of Peggy. “I curse her!” he had said, gesturing madly. “I want the gods to make her feet slip out of her sandals, to fall down on the ground and hit her head, and never be the same again. She has taken away the livelihoods of men! She must be punished!”

  Peggy was shocked to hear of his curse. But somehow she doubted if it would be effective. If an evil person cursed an innocent one, the gods usually visited the curse upon the curser himself. Uncle Moses should be very careful, with seventy-seven gods living in Otuam.

  Perhaps this meeting had been Uncle Moses’s way of taking a shotgun into her shower. He had certainly been upset about her opening the bank account and had gone through town spreading the rumor that Peggy hadn’t put the elders’ names on the account because she planned to use all the money to buy herself nice things. Plus, he had been almost apoplectic when Nana Kwesi kicked him out of his rent-free apartment in the palace so he could renovate it. Grumbling loudly, he moved his things into one of the two-room cottages in the boys’ quarters.

  Peggy wasn’t surprised to hear that Uncle Moses and his protégé Isaiah the Treasurer had been involved. But she was glad that Tsiami hadn’t attended, despite his involvement in the corruption and his humiliating grab for free fish. Naturally, neither Baba Kobena nor Uncle Eshun had attended. As far as Peggy had determined, neither one had been involved in stealing fishing fees, or selling land they didn’t own, or even making the fishermen give them free fish.

  In the months following her second trip to Otuam as king, when Peggy wanted to talk to a council member other than Nana Kwesi, she found herself calling Baba Kobena instead of Tsiami. Though he was illiterate, he was straightforward and reliable, a staunch supporter of family interests, and she certainly trusted him more than she did those who had stolen from the stool. Theirs was an easy, friendly relationship, and she took to calling him almost every day, asking about Otuam news and the health of friends and relatives.

  Sometimes she assigned him to mediate with quarreling neighbors or families, as Nana Kwesi wasn’t there every day, and with certain family disputes where it was better not to use an outsider. Baba Kobena, with his deep voice, hearty grin, and easy laugh, was as much a part of Otuam as the glittering mica on the red earth and was highly respected.

  Though Peggy was glad that she could rely on Baba Kobena, the evil plotted by two of her elders disturbed her. She called the morgue director to make sure that Uncle Joseph hadn’t gone anywhere and instructed him to hand over the body only to her representatives shortly before the funeral, which she had scheduled for Saturday, October 9, 2010. Surely this would put the kibosh on the plot. Yet if the late king’s daughters and her wicked elders were blocked here, would they find another way to dishonor her? It was a small but irritating worry, which she resolutely pushed to the back of her mind.

  Peggy made a list of everything she would have to do for the royal funeral. Almost all Ghanaian funerals, even those for ordinary people, had similar components. There would have to be canopies of thick red and black stripes to shield her guests from the burning African sun during the three days of events. She was expected to provide plastic chairs, either red or black, for her guests, and an area in front of the tents for the drummers, dancers, and acrobats to perform. A sound system, with enormous speakers, would play the music. The corpse was usually laid in a brass bed for the viewing, though in the case of a king an effigy would be placed in the bed, with the real corpse sitting on a royal chair arrayed in royal regalia.

  Ghanaian funerals often left families drowning in debt, Peggy knew. Many people squirreled away money for years to pay for the funeral of the next close family member to die, but it was often far from enough. They would have to borrow money, which would take years to pay back, during which time other elderly relatives would die. As a gift to her people Peggy wanted to buy the canopies, chairs, sound system, and bed and allow any resident of Otuam to use them free of charge for their family funerals.

  But, looking at her dwindling personal bank account, she decided that she couldn’t purchase everything at once. As a start she could buy the brass bed and two hundred of the four hundred chairs required for the funeral and rent the remaining chairs, canopies, and sound system. As fishing fees and land sales piled up in the Otuam bank account, she would make the additional purchases.

  She would also have to hire several rent-a-loos for guests to relieve themselves in, as there was nothing suitable near the palace for the seventy or so dignitaries who would attend. These kings, queen mothers, and local government officials would return home at night if they lived nearby or, if they lived farther afield, would stay in or near Otuam with friends and relatives. Peggy would need to cater lunch for these special guests on Saturday and Sunday and drinks for all three days. For dinner, she would provide three cows to be slaughtered on the spot; the dignitaries’ families would take the meat and cook it.

  Another cow she had vowed to the ancestors, with a portion of its meat going to her elders. Beef was a rare treat in Otuam, as most people ate fish every day, and variety consisted of the occasional goat stew or chicken. Given its expense, some people in Otuam never ate beef in their entire lives. The cost of the four cows was two thousand dollars, which she wired to Nana Kwesi.

  Next on the list was royal mourning attire, which she would purchase at a kingship store in Accra. Ghana had so many kings and queen mothers (no one had ever made an official count, but it could be in the thousands) that many stores had sprung up catering to the sartorial needs of traditional royalty. These shops sold royal cloths (multicolored bolts of kente for enstoolments and gazettings and funeral cloths in a variety of black and red patterns), matching sandals for these occasions, palanquins, crowns, red umbrellas, black funeral umbrellas, stools, and royal necklaces and bracelets, which, unlike jewelry for the unroyal, had gol
d beads strung among the colorful hand-painted beads.

  According to tradition, Peggy’s funeral invitations to the kings and queen mothers in the region would arrive in the form of bottles of schnapps personally handed over by her elders. They would also deliver bottles to local government officials and the heads of different branches of the Ebiradze family living in other cities. She wired another five hundred dollars via Western Union to Nana Kwesi to buy the drinks to give to the elders.

  But the most important, most expensive part of the funeral preparations was the palace itself. Every two weeks, Peggy sent Nana Kwesi as much money as she possibly could to repair the palace, and every day he reported on the progress. The walls were in such bad shape that he had had to gut most of them down to the studs. He hired the contractor to dig a borehole and put a tank on the palace roof, though for security reasons no pump was put outside the palace for local residents. He also put new wiring in every room, new walls, new ceilings, new tiled floors, new windows, and new doors.

  Peggy instructed Nana Kwesi to paint the exterior of the palace sky blue with white trim and to cut down the large lopsided tree, since it crowded the courtyard and its roots made walking difficult. Removing this tree would allow the four other trees, which had been dwarfed by its shade, to grow, and would provide an expansive space for the funeral ceremonies and future events.

  Though Peggy had spent thirty thousand dollars on the palace, Nana Kwesi still needed about five thousand dollars more for the kitchen and bathroom fixtures and the ceiling lights and fans. Given the money she needed for the funeral itself, Peggy realized she wouldn’t be able to complete the palace in time, which was a great disappointment. As the Other Cousin Comfort had rented out her little house, Nana Kwesi offered to find Peggy a suitable hotel in Winneba.

  But even if the palace wouldn’t be fit to live in, it still had to look good enough for the royal funeral, and Peggy called him daily to urge his work forward. Sometimes she had to remind herself that, as overwhelmed as he was with the palace renovation, Nana Kwesi had additional responsibilities in Otuam. He was supposed to meet every week or two with the elders, yet sometimes when he showed up, after paying for a taxi, he found that only Eshun, Baba Kobena, and Mama Amma Ansabah were waiting. The other new elders were too busy to attend. Tsiami was in his fields dealing with a pineapple emergency. Uncle Moses was nowhere to be found, and Isaiah had been called in to the Methodist church, where he volunteered, to handle some paperwork. Nana Kwesi knew that the absence of the last three was due to their resentment of him.

  Nana Kwesi also spent countless days poring over the land sales records, making detailed lists of dubious sales. Many of the sales had been for incredibly low prices, which indicated the corrupt elders were ready to take anything at all for land they didn’t own, and the buyer knew very well the sale was illegal and hoped to live there for practically nothing until he was kicked off. Nana Kwesi and Peggy decided in such cases the buyer would be presented with a choice: either to pay the stool the full price of the land or to vacate it so Peggy could sell it to someone else. There was, they knew, no chance of getting any proceeds back from the elders, who had spent it.

  Otuam was now Nana Kwesi’s full-time job, and one that not only didn’t pay very well, but at times actually cost him money. He had accepted the regency and volunteered to renovate the palace out of duty to his family and the belief that the dunderheaded elders might benefit from his steady hand. But even a calm, patient man like Nana Kwesi was often driven to distraction by the problems of Otuam, and the people he dealt with offered little or no recognition for his efforts.

  Peggy was glad to see that Nana Kwesi was developing a commanding demeanor and that the bashfulness she had first noticed had disappeared under the landslide of Otuam’s irritations. But sometimes he used his new take-charge manner with Peggy herself. One day, for instance, he insisted that he was going to build a new stool room behind the palace, even though Peggy told him you couldn’t just move the stools without Tsiami asking them their opinion of the matter. It was a heated argument and Peggy only won by listing all the terrible things that could happen to Nana Kwesi if he did things his way.

  She had always known that there was a danger in having a regent, as history has shown that regents often begin to think of themselves as kings and argue with the real kings. This would be particularly true for a female king and male regent in a traditional society like Ghana, where women usually did as the men told them. But Peggy could not rule Otuam from Washington, and given the characters who made up her council, a regent was absolutely necessary. And besides their occasional tiffs, Nana Kwesi was a very good regent.

  One day Uncle Moses looked at the freshly spackled, painted, and tiled interior of the palace and grunted in approval. He found Nana Kwesi in the courtyard and told him that he would be moving back into the downstairs suite, the large rooms Peggy wanted to use as her dining room and council chamber, with the little kitchenette and bathroom on the side.

  Nana Kwesi laughed at the suggestion. “I can’t imagine Nana would let you move back in,” he said. “She didn’t pay all that money to fix the rooms for you.”

  “If you don’t let me move back in,” Uncle Moses growled, shaking his fist, “I will break all the windows and spoil the palace! I will set it on fire! I don’t care what the stools might do to me!” Nana Kwesi ignored him and carried a ladder into the palace.

  Still in a huff, Uncle Moses went down to the beach to buy a basket of fish from Daavi, which also upset him as he used to get his fish for free. On the little bush path from the beach to his house, he had a fit, fell out of his sandals, and hit his head on the ground. There he lay for hours, the fish all over his head, until someone coming along the path found him and carried him home.

  When Uncle Moses regained consciousness, he said that as he had been walking with his fish, it felt as if a giant hand had whacked him over his head and back, causing him to fall senseless to the ground. It sounded ominously like an ancestral hand, and people couldn’t help but notice that after that day he didn’t seem himself. He lost interest in food, for one thing, and his puffed-up cheeks deflated along with his belly. He fell into long periods of silence. On good days he could still speak sensibly, though it was more quietly than before his fall, with none of his wild gesturing and loud arguing. Sometimes, too, his balance was affected; he cried out in terror that the ground was opening up before him and he would be swallowed up.

  Strangest of all, Uncle Moses began wearing his wife’s clothes. At one council meeting he showed up in a woman’s white lacy blouse over his trousers, and at another one he wore a dress. Peggy heard from Nana Kwesi, Baba Kobena, and Uncle Eshun how odd it was at council meetings to see Uncle Moses, sitting still and quiet, dressed like a woman.

  The other elders, who had been friends of Uncle Moses for decades, didn’t know whether or not they should ask him why he was wearing women’s clothes. Perhaps such a question might offend him, or perhaps he wasn’t even aware of it and would be alarmed. Among themselves they decided that if anyone should talk to him about this strange affectation, it should be his wife. After all, it was her clothes that he was wearing, and if she didn’t mind, they shouldn’t either.

  Every week or so Peggy called the morgue to see if anyone had tried to take Uncle Joseph out of the fridge, but no one had. Perhaps those who attended the midnight meeting had come to their senses; clearly such an effort to dishonor her would only dishonor themselves.

  Given the unpleasantness of Peggy’s last meeting with the king’s daughters, she asked a cousin of hers who knew them well to call them up and see if they would at least like to buy their father’s coffin. In Ghana people with money ordered special coffins designed to reflect the occupation of the deceased. Tsiami, if he had the cash, might be buried in a giant pineapple coffin, a fisherman in a canoe coffin. Secretaries were buried in typewriters, and kings in effigies of themselves with golden crowns. But such coffins cost thousands of dollars. Pegg
y decided she would put Uncle Joseph in a normal coffin. Even though the finest of these were only five hundred dollars or so, the daughters’ answer was a resounding no. Such a refusal was unthinkable in Ghana, where family was everything. How could all three of these women have lost the most important part of themselves as Ghanaians?

  At least the sons in Houston were paying the fridge fees, though Wellington called her and asked crossly when she was going to bury his father as the fees had gone up, and he and his brother were tired of paying them. She proudly told him the date and asked if he would like to pay for his father’s coffin.

  But Wellington said he was doing enough and wouldn’t contribute a penny more.

  Peggy’s mother had often said, “When everything seems dark and hopeless, God will send you a light.” One day in her office Peggy received a phone call from the pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church in Landover, Maryland. Founded in 1968, Shiloh was an active, prosperous African American church not far from the D.C. border, with a sanctuary that seated 1,175 and numerous ministries that provided assistance to the local community. In the winter, members donated coats, gloves, and scarves to the needy. Throughout the year, they gave clothing and toiletries to drug rehab centers and women’s shelters and children’s clothing to an unwed mothers’ home. They visited nursing homes, assisted disabled veterans in finding apartments and jobs, and held church services at shelters and in prisons. Homebound seniors could count on Shiloh members to cut their grass and shovel snow, and the needy could rely on food donations. At-risk youth found mentors at the church, which also provided tutors for any children in the area who asked for them. In addition, Shiloh had adopted an elementary school and a high school, where they were on call to provide assistance ranging from buying school supplies to counseling and tutoring. Shiloh members picked up trash from the highway they had adopted and provided a wide array of counseling services to residents of a nearby apartment complex.