King Peggy

by Peggielene Bartels

  Tsiami didn’t say anything, but Nana Kwesi thought he could hear a shrug.

  Finally Tsiami said, “I’m the one they talk to. I’m the one who feeds them schnapps. They’ll never do anything bad to me.”

  Peggy was livid when she heard the news. Her own chief priest, stealing the paint and nails and wood she had purchased at the expense of her formerly sterling credit in the United States. Peggy was particularly disturbed that Tsiami thought he could get away with anything because he had an insider’s edge with the stools, who would indulgently forgive their prodigal son.

  But even the ancestors wouldn’t protect him from a phone call in which she would give him a piece of her mind. She had prepared a fine speech to lambaste him, but then Nana Kwesi called with sad news. Tsiami’s wife had had a seizure and died.

  The event was the talk of Otuam. Though the woman had been in her seventies, she had always been strong and healthy, had ten living children, and walked miles every day on the pineapple farm, planting, weeding, and harvesting. The suddenness of her death, coming so soon after the discovery of Tsiami’s theft of the palace building materials, was seen as clear proof of the ancestors’ anger. It was well known that sometimes the ancestors punished you by killing the person you loved most, making you stay on earth without her, knowing you were responsible for her death.

  Peggy received several phone calls from her elders asking her to place a condolence call to Tsiami. Nana Kwesi, Uncle Moses, Baba Kobena, Isaiah the Treasurer, Mama Amma Ansabah, and Uncle Eshun: they all called her begging her to follow the proper etiquette. But Peggy was so mad about the building materials that she hesitated to call Tsiami. She was afraid that her call of condolence might degenerate into abusing the bereaved if she couldn’t keep her temper. Perhaps it would be more regal to make no call at all.

  But, she told herself, she was a king, and as a king she had to maintain royal etiquette. A tsiami was the king’s closest advisor, and Peggy was expected by the council of chiefs to uphold Ghanaian royal traditions. A condolence call was certainly necessary, and Peggy steeled herself not to mention Tsiami’s thefts.

  “Tsiami, I am so very sorry to hear about the sudden death of your wife,” she said carefully when he answered his cell phone.

  “You know that land you sold last year on the beach?” he asked.

  Peggy made a face. Had he heard her? Why was he talking about her land on the beach?

  Tsiami continued, “I want you to give me half the money so I can finish the house I’m building. That way, when guests come for my wife’s funeral, they can stay in the house.”

  Peggy was stunned by his reply. No word of thanks for her call, no mention of his grief at the death of his companion of half a century. He just wanted more money.

  “I am shocked at you, Tsiami!” she cried. “You already had plenty of help from me building that house because you stole so many of my supplies for the royal palace. And now you want more? You want me to give you cash? ”

  “Yes,” Tsiami said. “I want you to give me cash. I’m your tsiami after all, and a family member.”

  “Let me tell you something, Tsiami,” Peggy countered, “you aren’t getting a dime out of me. And if you ask me again, I will throw you in jail where you can think about your crimes for a few days!” She hung up the phone panting in anger.

  As Peggy had feared, her condolence call hadn’t gone very well at all.

  In August Peggy reserved her flights. She would leave Washington on September 24 on the new United Airlines direct flight to Accra. That would give her plenty of time to prepare for the official inauguration of the boreholes on October 7, and the funeral on October 9. She would return to Washington on October 21, which would give her almost two weeks after the funeral to take care of other issues and disputes in Otuam.

  Peggy was sad to hear that Cousin Comfort wouldn’t be coming to Otuam this year. She hadn’t been well, and her knees were so sore and swollen that she could barely get out of bed. Peggy would miss Comfort, her confidante and the quintessential African auntie, wise and patient, humorous and kind.

  But she was delighted that her brother, Papa Warrior, would be coming from Australia to spend the entire month with her in Ghana, arriving a day after she did. He wanted to attend the royal funeral and hoped to buy some land near Otuam and build a business on it.

  “I know that you will need help over there,” he told her. “I want you to know that I will be there for you.”

  It was a new idea, Papa Warrior looking out for Peggy, instead of the other way around, and it felt very strange, not quite right somehow. But the more she thought about it, the more she realized it would be a great relief to have her brother with her in Otuam. Yes, Papa Warrior was impetuous, impatient, and loud, but these very qualities had always helped him get things done quickly in his life while those with greater patience plodded along or stopped moving altogether. When she thought of the hours-long council sessions that awaited her, with her elders going around and around in circles arguing over tiny funeral details, she hoped that Papa Warrior could help guide the conversation forward, if that was at all possible in Otuam.

  There was someone else Peggy needed to invite to Otuam. Though she hadn’t had time to see William during her last trip to Ghana, Peggy asked him to attend the funeral, knowing he wouldn’t come, but courtesy dictated she let him know he would be welcome. They chitchatted about the funeral preparations and family members, and about his toddlers and her elders, who were in many ways quite similar.

  And then there was Ekow. A couple of weeks before Peggy left for Ghana, she received a surprising phone call from him. In the midst of her numerous worries about the upcoming royal funeral, there had floated one thin strand of panic that Ekow might make a scene in front of all her important guests. He had made scenes routinely at major family events the past few years, but appearing drunk and belligerent while wielding a hammer at a royal funeral would really be the last straw.

  Therefore, she was delighted to hear Ekow say that he had given up drinking altogether, and smoking, too. After his last trip to Otuam—in which he had been jailed and kicked out of town—he had arrived back in his room in Accra and cried. His dearest relatives couldn’t stand to be around him. Sure, as family members they helped him out of pity, but Ekow didn’t want to be pitied. He wanted to be liked, to be helpful, to be respected even. But how could Ekow ever be respected? He decided then and there, he told Peggy, to change his life, which clearly required total abstinence from alcohol.

  Ekow hadn’t had a cigarette or a drop to drink since then, he continued. Some days it was unbearably hard, but he had joined the Redeemed Church of Christ, located just across the street from the house where he rented a little room, and he prayed with his fellow church members morning and evening. These church members gave Ekow odd jobs to do—he was incredibly handy with carpentry and painting—and meals when there were no odd jobs and he was hungry.

  Now that Ekow had found God and stopped sinning, he wanted to open his own business, a tiny roadside kiosk in Accra where he would sell the staples of Ghanaian life: phone cards, minerals, baggies of water, tins of cookies, Pringles potato chips, matches, kerosene lamps, and bags of rice. He had found a man retiring from his kiosk business with an excellent location, near Ekow’s home and church on a busy street. The poor condition of the kiosk—it cried out for repairs and fresh paint—was reflected in its low price, about two hundred dollars. If Ekow had another one hundred dollars or so, he could buy at wholesale the items he wanted to sell and open up shop. And he would have a large group of repeat customers; his fellow church members, those who had so generously helped him in the past, would surely buy snacks from his kiosk.

  “Nana,” he said softly, “I know that you probably wouldn’t trust me with that much money after my behavior last year, and after what I did with the money you sent years ago to my mechanics’ school. But I have truly turned over a new leaf. Could you send me fifty dollars as a start? Sometimes I don’
t have enough food to eat. The church members feed me well when they see I look hungry, but sometimes they don’t notice, and I am too embarrassed to tell them. I would like this money to buy some food and repay some money I borrowed.”

  Peggy thought about the request. A year ago she would have yelled at him and hung up the phone. But something was different now, and it wasn’t just Ekow’s voice, calm and clear, no longer punctuated by shrieks and whispers. Returning to Ghana had made Peggy more aware than ever before of the concept of African family, of the interlocking layers of support needed to ensure that the weakest do not falter.

  She also felt a sense of community that she had never had before, which extended beyond her personal family into the human one. There was Nana Kwesi overseeing the palace repairs in the stifling heat and rushing out in a taxi to Otuam to chair council meetings. There was the amazing generosity of Shiloh Baptist Church, some of whose members had suffered in the recession but still tithed, still wanted to help Otuam.

  There was the Washington journalist who said, as she handed over seven thousand dollars for a borehole, “It’s not right that I have so many pairs of shoes, and your town’s kids don’t have water.” Or the businessman planning fund-raisers for the ambulance, who said, “Helping to save your people’s lives is the most meaningful thing I’ve ever done.”

  On her first day back at the embassy, she had been startled to find more than a dozen checks from readers of the Washington Post article, small checks mostly, some of them only five and ten dollars. Most donors wrote notes saying they had been deeply impressed by Peggy’s desire to help her people, and they were giving her what they could spare. Overcome with gratitude as she had been by these many acts of kindness, who was she to turn a cold shoulder to her own nephew?

  Peggy certainly didn’t want to be taken advantage of again. Perhaps Ekow had sobered up only long enough to call her to ask for money, which he would promptly spend at the nearest bar. But she had to give him another chance. She formulated a plan to balance practicality with family and forgiveness. She would send Ekow the fifty dollars a week before her arrival in Ghana, and once she was there she would take a good, long look at him to see if her money had ended up in the bags beneath his eyes.

  It was with a feeling of tremendous relief that she told Nana Kwesi to call the morgue to let them know that her elders would arrive on Thursday, October 7, to take the late king out of the fridge and drive him to Otuam for his October 9 funeral. Yes, she would finally be rescuing him from that cold place after two and a half years, and the knowledge made her ecstatic.

  But Nana Kwesi called her back a few minutes later and said, “Nana, I don’t know how to tell you this, but the morgue says no one has been paying the fridge fees. They won’t release the body until you give them one hundred and forty million cedis.” That was about $9,700.

  Peggy couldn’t believe it. For two years Wellington had told her he had been paying the morgue, even complained about rising rates. Now she knew why the secret plotters hadn’t followed through with the plan hatched at the midnight meeting to bury Uncle Joseph like a commoner: they couldn’t afford the morgue fees to take possession of the body. Evidently they hoped that at this late date she wouldn’t be able to afford the morgue fees either, and all her vaunted plans for a stunning funeral would be ruined. Her calls to Wellington remained unanswered, probably because he had caller ID.

  She couldn’t postpone the funeral because the Shiloh Baptist group had already booked their flights to Ghana, and all the kings and dignitaries had been invited. All in all, there would probably be about five hundred people.

  But where was she going to find another $9,700 at the last minute, after two years of carefully budgeting the countless funeral expenses? Mulling over the situation, she concluded that everything in Ghana was negotiable, probably even morgue fees, so with charm and skillful persuasion, she might be able to get them reduced. As for what she was still expected to pay, she would have to empty out her Otuam bank account, her Silver Spring bank account, pay some bills late, borrow money from friends, and look under her sofa cushions for spare change. But she would do it.

  Part VI

  GHANA

  September—October 2010

  22

  The road leading to Otuam was worse than ever. Now, in addition to yawning potholes, long, foot-wide chasms ran down the center of it. It looked like a face pockmarked by deep acne scars then ravaged by wrinkles. As the van dipped into a particularly profound cleft, Ebenezer clenched the steering wheel and cursed under his breath, while Peggy smacked her head on the ceiling and cried, “What happened to the road? ”

  Nana Kwesi shook his head sadly. “There has been too much rain during this past rainy season,” he said. “Often it rained all day, every day, buckets and buckets of rain, and without drainage channels most of the roads are almost impassable. The bridge over the river in the middle of Agona Swedru was washed out in the June flood, and now the town has been cut in half to car traffic. The people built a little metal bridge so they can cross on foot, but they can’t take any heavy goods from one side of town to the other. It could be years before the government has enough money to build a new bridge.”

  Peggy was sorry for the people of Agona Swedru, and sorry that she wouldn’t be able to visit her favorite shop, Nadrass Enterprises, for beads, cloths, and sandals, as it was located on the far side of the town, and Peggy was afraid of walking over the jerry-rigged bridge. But most of her thoughts were of Otuam. How on earth was she going to fix the road? How much would it cost? She certainly couldn’t do it before the funeral, and the busload of Shiloh Baptist people would rattle up the road cracking their heads.

  This was a spur-of-the-moment, unofficial visit to Otuam. No elders or townspeople would be waiting for her. Nana Kwesi had just picked Peggy up from the airport, and on the way to her hotel in Winneba she had asked him to drive her to Otuam for just a few minutes so she could see the palace.

  As soon as she had seen Nana Kwesi waiting for her at the arrivals area, she noticed that he was thinner. Gone also was the happy childlike gaze of wonder. Her elders and the pressure of the funeral had been getting to him. Her heart sank. It was because of her that this kind, smiling man had become hardened, harried.

  He didn’t even seem to want to talk much on the drive. He’s nervous, Peggy said to herself, about all the responsibilities of the funeral. That, too, is my fault.

  They rolled onto the beginning of Main Street, which looked the same as she had always known it. There were the same people milling about the little shops and chatting in the street. There were the same well-kept homes next to tottering shacks. There were the same little paths on the left leading down to the fishermen’s huts and the sea. And everything was dotted with the same sprinkling of painted chickens and short-legged goats.

  But then Ebenezer stopped the car in front of the police station as Nana Kwesi pointed to the other side of the road. “Look!” he cried. “Over there! That’s the church borehole! ”

  Just in from the road Peggy saw a gleaming black six-thousand-gallon tank on top of a whitewashed concrete block building that housed a new borehole, with a state-of-the-art pump in front. Her heart skipped a beat. She had done it! Well, actually, the church had done it, but as king she had obtained the church’s support and that was certainly something.

  “It’s beautiful, Nana Kwesi,” she said softly. She composed herself and asked, “Where is the other one? ”

  Ebenezer put the car in gear as Nana Kwesi said, “The one given by the white woman journalist is down the road, next to the mosque. People have already named them the church borehole and the white borehole. Together they serve thousands of people on both sides of Main Street. The town is very happy to have them.”

  They drove a few blocks and stopped in front of the mosque. Peggy saw a black tank atop a white building identical to the first one and sighed with pleasure. “You have done well, Nana Kwesi, to go out and get bids from companies, and hire
the best firm, and oversee the construction. You have done very well.”

  For a moment the haggard look lifted from Nana Kwesi’s face, and his old smile crept over it, the kind that could light up a room. We all need recognition, she thought. We all need thanks for a job well done. Just a few well-timed kind words can make life go from bitter to very sweet. She thought of all the times she had called him and pushed and pressed for updates on his progress and felt guilty. Perhaps I haven’t expressed my gratitude to him sufficiently.

  Ebenezer drove down the rest of Main Street then swept to the right, across the sandy field and past the school. And looming in front of her was a place Peggy had never seen before. What was that glorious, azure blue building with the white columns and railings straight ahead? Had they made a wrong turn and ended up in some mysterious corner of Otuam? Hadn’t she seen all of Otuam? Peggy’s heart lurched a bit in fear as she wondered if they had slipped into another realm, the realm of the ancestors. This building shouldn’t be there.

  She looked behind her and realized that the new structure sat squarely on the site of the old royal palace. But this was not the royal palace. It looked like a different building entirely. In the United States, she knew, sometimes people put entire houses on trucks and carted them to a new site. She had never heard of this being done in Ghana, but could Nana Kwesi in frustration have knocked down the rotten old palace and trucked in a new, prefabricated one? Maybe that was what had happened, and he had been afraid to tell her.

  Spewing sand, the car rolled to a stop in front of the building and Peggy realized that the old tree in the center of the courtyard was gone, as she had ordered, and its absence had confused her. But there were the same little cabins, the boys’ quarters, and the children playing tag and women pounding fufu and old men lounging in rusted pool chairs. Yes, she thought, relieved, this is the royal palace, a greatly changed royal palace, but the same building underneath.