James had not forgotten Akosua. He could see her every night when he slept, her lips and eyes and legs and buttocks moving across the field of his closed eyes. In his own hut on the outer edge of the compound, which he had built for himself and Amma and the other wives who were supposed to follow. He had not forgotten how much he had loved being in his grandfather’s town, among the Asantes, the warmth he’d felt from his mother’s people. The longer he stayed in Fanteland, the sooner he wished to get away. To lead a simpler life, as a farmer like Akosua’s father, not as a politician like his own father, whose work for the British and the Fantes so many years before had left him with money and power, but little else.
“James, are you listening to me?” Amma said. She was stirring a pot of pepper soup, a wrapper slung across her waist, her back leaning forward so that it seemed her bare breasts would dip into the broth.
“Yes, darling, you are right,” James said. “Tomorrow, I will go to see Mampanyin.”
Amma nodded her head, satisfied. Mampanyin was the premier apothecary for hundreds of miles around. Junior wives went to her when they wished to quietly kill the senior wives. Younger brothers went when they wanted to be chosen as successor over their elder brothers. From the ocean’s edge to the inland forests, people went to her when they had a problem that prayers alone could not fix.
James saw her on a Thursday. His father and many others had always called the woman a witch doctor, and she seemed to physically embody that role. She was missing all but her four front teeth, evenly spaced, as though they had chased all of the other teeth out of her mouth and then joined together in the middle, triumphant. Her back was perpetually hunched forward, and she walked with a cane made out of a rich black wood, carved to look like a snake was coiled around it. One of her eyes always looked away, and try as hard as he might, moving his head this way and that, James could not convince that eye to greet him.
“What is this man doing here?” Mampanyin asked the air.
James cleared his throat, unsure if he should speak.
Mampanyin spit on the ground, more phlegm than saliva. “What does this man want with Mampanyin? Can he not leave her in peace? He who does not even believe in her powers.”
“Aunty Mampanyin, I have come from my village at my wife’s request. She would like me to take some herbs so that we can make a baby.” He had rehearsed a speech on the journey there—about how he wanted to make his wife happy while also making himself happy—but the words eluded him. He could hear the uncertainty, the fear, in his voice, and he cursed himself for it.
“Eh, he calls me aunty? He whose family sells our people to the whites abroad. He dares to call me aunty.”
“That was my father and grandfather’s work. It is not mine.” He didn’t add that because of their work, he didn’t have to work, but instead could live off the family name and power.
She watched him with her good eye. “In your mind, you call me witch, eh?”
“Everyone calls you witch.”
“Tell me, is Mampanyin the one who lay down for a white man to open her legs? The white men might have left had they not tasted our women.”
“The white man will stay until there is no more money to be made.”
“Eh, now you speak of money? Mampanyin has already said she knows how your family makes money. By sending your brothers and sisters over to Aburokyire to be treated like animals.”
“America is not the only place with slaves,” James said quietly. He’d heard his father say it to David before, when they talked about the atrocities of the American South that he’d read about in the abolitionist British papers. “The way they treat the slaves in America, my brother,” David had said. “It is unfathomable. Unfathomable. We do not have slavery like that here. Not like that.”
James’s skin was starting to feel warm, but the sun had already dipped underneath the Earth. He wished he could turn and leave. Mampanyin’s wandering eye had landed on a tree in the distance, then moved up to the sky, then just past James’s left ear.
“I don’t want to do the work of my family. I don’t want to be one with the British.”
She spit again, and then focused her roving eye directly onto him, and he began to sweat. Once she had finished, her eye returned to its ambling, finally satisfied with what it had seen in him. “Your penis does not work because you don’t want it to work. My medicine is only for those who want. You speak of what you don’t want, but there is something you want.”
It was not a question. James didn’t think he could trust her, and yet he knew that with her bad eye, she had seen him. Really seen him. And since he had not been able to make the Earth move on his own, he decided to trust the witch doctor to help him move it.
“I want to leave my family and move to Asanteland. I want to marry Akosua Mensah and work as a farmer or something small-small.”
Mampanyin laughed. “The son of Big Man wants to live small-small, eh?”
She left him standing outside and went into her hut. When she came back she was carrying two small clay pots that had flies buzzing around the tops of them. James could smell them from where he stood. She sat on a chair and began swirling her index finger inside one of the pots. She pulled her finger back out and licked what was on it. James gagged.
“If you do not want your wife, why did you marry her?” Mampanyin asked.
“I was required to marry her so that our families could finally join,” James said. Wasn’t it obvious? She herself had said it. He was the son of a Big Man. There were things he had to do. Things he had to be seen doing so that everyone would know that his family was still important. What he wanted, what he most wanted, was to disappear. His father had seven other sons who could carry on the Otcher-Collins legacy. He wanted to be a man without a name. “I want to leave my family without them knowing I have left them,” he said.
Mampanyin spit into the pot and then mixed it again. Her good eye looked up at James. “Is this possible?”
“Aunty, they say that you make impossible things possible.”
She laughed again. “Eh, but they say that about Anansi, about Nyame, about the white man. I can only make the possible attainable. Do you see the difference?”
He nodded, and she smiled—the first smile she’d given him since his arrival. She beckoned him toward her, and he went, hoping that she would not ask him to eat whatever it was that was stinking in the pot. She motioned for him to sit before her, and he did so wordlessly. His parents would not like how he was stooped below her in her seat so that it seemed that she was a higher-born one than him. He could hear his mother’s voice saying, “Stand.” But he kept kneeling. Perhaps Mampanyin could make it so that neither his mother’s voice nor his father’s would ever be in his head again.
“You have come here asking me what to do, but you already know how to leave without anyone knowing you’ve left,” Mampanyin said.
James was quiet. It was true he had thought of ways to make his family think he’d gone to Asamando when really he had journeyed elsewhere. The best idea, the most dangerous, was to join the never-ending Asante-British War. Everyone knew about the war, how it seemed it would never end, how the white men were weaker than everyone had once thought, even with their large Castle made of stone.