The Missionary took the switch from his desk and pointed it at her. The tip of it was just inches from her nose. When she crossed her eyes she could see it clearly, and it wasn’t until then that the fear hit her.
“You are a sinner and a heathen,” he said. Akua nodded. The teachers had told them this before. “Your mother had no husband when she came here to me, pregnant, begging for help. I helped her because that is what God would have wanted me to do. But she was a sinner and a heathen, like you.”
Again Akua nodded. The fear was starting to settle somewhere in her stomach, making her feel nauseated.
“All people on the black continent must give up their heathenism and turn to God. Be thankful that the British are here to show you how to live a good and moral life.”
This time, Akua did not nod. She looked at the Missionary, but she didn’t know how to describe the look he returned to her. After he told her to stand up and bend over, after he lashed her five times and commanded her to repent her sins and repeat “God bless the queen,” after she was permitted to leave, after she finally threw the fear up, the only word that popped into her head was “hungry.” The Missionary looked hungry, like if he could, he would devour her.
—
Every day Akua woke her daughters up while the sun was still sleeping. She wrapped her wrapper, and then walked with her girls out into the dirt roads where Nana Serwah, Akos, Mambee, and all of the other women of Edweso had already begun to assemble. Akua’s voice was the strongest, and so she led them in song:
Awurade Nyame kum dom
Oboo adee Nyame kum dom
Ennee yerekokum dom afa adee
Oboo adee Nyame kum dom
Soso be hunu, megyede be hunu.
Up and down the streets they sang. Akua’s toddler, Ama Serwah, sang the loudest and most off-key, her words a slew of gibberish until the song reached her favorite part, at which point she screamed more than sang, “CREATOR GOD, DEFEAT THE TROOPS!” Sometimes the women put her in the very front, and her little legs would stomp about valiantly until Akua picked her up to carry her the rest of the way.
After the singing, Akua went back to wash herself and the children, put white clay on her body as a symbol of her support for the war efforts, eat, then sing again. They cooked for the men in shifts so that there was always something to send away. At night, Akua would sleep alone, dreaming of the fire still. Screaming again, now that Asamoah was gone.
—
Akua and Asamoah had been married for five years. He was a tradesman, and he had business in Kumasi. He had seen her one day at the missionary school and had stopped to talk to her. And from then on he stopped to talk to her every single day. Two weeks later he was back to ask if she would marry him and come to live in Edweso, for he knew she was an orphan with no other place to live.
Akua found nothing particularly remarkable about Asamoah. He was not handsome like the man called Akwasi who came to church every Sunday, standing timidly in the back and pretending not to notice as the mothers threw their daughters at him. Asamoah also seemed to possess little mental intelligence, for his whole life had been about the intelligence of the body: what he could catch or build or lift to take with him to market. She had once seen him sell two kente for the price of one because he could not count the money correctly. Asamoah was not the best choice, but he was the sure one, and Akua was happy to accept his proposal. Up until then, she had thought she would have to stay with the Missionary forever, playing his strange game of student/teacher, heathen/savior, but with Asamoah she saw that maybe her life could be something different from what she had always imagined it would be.
“I forbid it,” the Missionary said when she told him.
“You can’t forbid it,” Akua said. Now that she had a plan, a hope for a way out, she felt emboldened.
“You…you are a sinner,” the Missionary whispered, his head in his hands. “You are a heathen,” he said, louder now. “You must ask God to forgive your sins.”
Akua didn’t respond. For nearly ten years, she had filled the Missionary’s hunger. Now she wanted to attend to her own.
“Ask God to forgive your sins!” the Missionary yelled, throwing his switch at her.
The switch hit Akua on the left shoulder. She watched it drop to the floor, and then, calmly, she walked out. Behind her she could hear the Missionary saying, “He’s not a man of God. He’s not a man of God.” But Akua cared nothing for God. She was sixteen, and the fetish priest had died only a year before. She used to go to him whenever she could get away from the Missionary. She used to tell him that the more she learned about God from the Missionary, the more questions she had. Big questions like, if God was so big, so powerful, why did he need the white man to bring him to them? Why could he not tell them himself, make his presence known as he had in the days written about in the Book, with bush fires and dead men walking? Why had her mother run to these missionaries, these white people, out of all people? Why did she have no family? No friends? Whenever she asked the Missionary these questions, he refused to answer her. The fetish man told her that maybe the Christian God was a question, a great and swirling circle of whys. This answer never satisfied Akua, and by the time the fetish man died, God no longer satisfied her either. Asamoah was real. Tangible. His arms were as thick as yams, and his skin as brown. If God was why, then Asamoah was yes and yes again.
Now that war had come for them, Akua noticed that Nana Serwah was nicer to her than she had ever before been. Word of this man and that man dying came in every day, and they were both holding their breath, certain that it was only a matter of time before the name out of the messenger’s mouth was Asamoah.
—
Edweso was empty. The absence of the men felt like its own presence. Sometimes Akua would think that not much at all had changed, but then she would see the empty fields, the rotting yams, the wailing women. Akua’s dreams were getting worse too. In them, the firewoman raged against the loss of her children. Sometimes she spoke to Akua, calling her, it seemed. She looked familiar, and Akua wanted to ask her questions. She wanted to know if the firewoman knew the white man who had been burned. If everyone touched by fire was a part of the same world. If she was being called. Instead, she didn’t speak. She woke up screaming. In the midst of all this turmoil, Akua was pregnant. At least six months now, she figured by the shape and firm weight of her belly.
One day, more than halfway through the war, Akua was boiling yams to send to the soldiers, and she could not lift her eyes from the fire.
“This again?” Nana Serwah said. “I thought we had finished with your idleness. Are our people out fighting so that you can stare into the fire and scream at night for your children to hear?”
“No, Ma,” Akua said, shaking herself out of her stupor. But the next day she did it again. And again her mother-in-law scolded her. The same thing happened the day after that, and then the one after that, until Nana Serwah decided that Akua was sick and that she must stay in her hut until the sickness had left her body. Her daughters would stay with Nana Serwah until Akua had fully healed.
The first day of her hut exile, Akua was thankful for the break. She had not had rest since the men left for war, always marching through town singing the war songs or standing on her feet sweating into a large pot. Her plan was to not sleep until night had fallen. To lie on the side of the hut where Asamoah usually lay, trying to conjure up the smell of him to keep her company until night fell over the hut, casting its awful darkness into the room. But within hours Akua was asleep, and the firewoman had reappeared.