“Everyone says you are crazy,” she said. “Sometimes Nana yells at them when they say it, but they still do.”
Akua rested her head against a rock, and did not speak until she heard the girls’ soft and sleepy breaths floating about her like tiny butterflies.
—
That night Akua took the children home. Asamoah was eating in the middle of the compound when they walked in.
“How are my girls?” he asked as his daughters rushed toward him to receive their hugs. Akua hung back, her eyes following her daughters as they made their way into the hut. It had been a hot day, and Ama Serwah was already peeling off her wrapper as she ran inside. It waved behind her like a flag.
“And how is my son?” Asamoah asked Akua’s back, where Yaw hung cradled in fabric. Akua walked toward her husband so that he could touch the baby.
“Nyame willing, he is good,” she said, and Asamoah grunted his assent.
“Come get food to eat,” he said. He called for his mother and she appeared within seconds. Her old age had not diminished her swiftness, nor had it diminished her ear’s ability to distinguish the needy cry of her oldest son. She came out and nodded at Akua. She had stopped weeping at the sight of her only days before.
“You must eat so that your milk is rich,” she said, dipping her hands into the washing bowl so that she could begin the fufu.
Akua ate until her stomach grew. It looked like it could be punctured, like sweet milk would flow from her belly button, and that was all that she could picture as she cleaned her hands. Milk flowing below her feet like a river. She thanked Nana Serwah, and twisted herself up off the stool that she had been sitting on. She reached out her hands to Asamoah so that he too could hop up, grabbed the baby, and then went into their hut.
The girls were already sleeping. Akua envied them. The ease with which they entered the dream world. They sucked their thumbs still, unfazed by the pepper their grandmother applied every morning.
Beside her, Asamoah rolled once, twice. He too had been sleeping better than he had in the early days of his return. Sometimes he would reach for the ghost of his leg in the middle of the night, and then, finding his hands empty, he would cry softly. Akua never mentioned this to him when he awoke.
—
Now, flat-backed in their hut, Akua allowed herself to close her eyes. She imagined that she was lying on the sand of the beaches of Cape Coast. Sleep came for her like waves. First licking her curling toes, her swollen feet, her aching ankles. By the time it hit her mouth, nose, eyes, she was no longer afraid of it.
When she entered the dreamland she was on the same beach. She had been there only once, with the missionaries from the school. They had wanted to start a new school in a nearby village but found the townspeople unwelcoming. Akua had been mesmerized by the color of the water. It was a color she had never had a word for because nothing like it appeared in her world. No tree green, no sky blue, no stone or yam or clay could capture it. In dreamland, Akua walked to the edge of the rolling ocean. She dipped her toe into water so cool she felt she could taste it, like a breeze hitting the back of the throat. Then the breeze turned hot as the ocean caught fire. The breeze from the back of Akua’s throat began to swirl, round and round, gathering speed until it could no longer be contained within Akua’s mouth, and so she shot it out. And the spit-out breeze began to move the fiery ocean, dipping down into the depths to collect itself until spiraling wind and fiery ocean became the woman that Akua now felt she knew so well.
This time, the firewoman was not angry. She beckoned Akua out onto the ocean, and, though afraid, Akua took her first step. Her feet burned. When she lifted one up she could smell her own flesh wafting from the bottom. Still, she moved, following the firewoman until she led her to a place that looked like Akua’s own hut. Now in the firewoman’s arms were the two fire children that she had held the first time Akua dreamed of her. They were locked into either arm, head resting on either breast. Their cries were soundless, but Akua could see the sound, floating out of their mouths like puffs of smoke from the fetish man’s favored pipe. Akua had the urge to hold them, and she reached out her hands to them. Her hands caught fire, but she touched them still. Soon she cradled them with her own burning hands, playing with the braided ropes of fire that made up their hair, their coal-black lips. She felt calm, happy even, that the firewoman had found her children again at last. And as she held them, the firewoman did not protest. She did not try to snatch them away. Instead, she watched, crying from joy. And her tears were the color of the ocean water in Fanteland, that not-green, not-blue color that Akua remembered from her youth. The color began to gather. Blue and more blue. Green and more green. Until the torrent of tears began to put out the fire in Akua’s hands. Until the children began to disappear.
—
“Akua, the Crazy Woman! Akua, the Crazy Woman!”
She felt the sound of her name in the growing pit of her stomach, the weight like worry. Her eyes began to open, and she saw Edweso around her. She was being carried. Ten men at least, lifting her above their heads. She registered all of this before she registered the pain she was in, looked down to see her burned hands and feet.
The wailing women were behind the men. “Evil woman!” some of them cried. “Wicked one,” said others.
Asamoah was behind the wailing women, hopping with his stick, trying to keep up.
Then they were tying her to the burning tree. Akua found her voice.
“Please, brothers. Tell me what is going on!”
Antwi Agyei, an elder, began to bellow. “She wants to know what is going on?” he cried to the men who had gathered.
They wrapped the rope around Akua’s wrists. Her burns screamed and then she.
Antwi Agyei continued. “What kind of evil does not know itself?” he asked, and the crowd stomped its many feet against the hard earth.
They slung the rope around Akua’s waist.
“We have known her as the Crazy Woman, and now she has shown herself to us. Wicked woman. Evil woman. Raised by white men, she can die like one too.”
Asamoah pushed his way to the front of the crowd. “Please,” he said.
“You’re on her side? The woman who killed your children?” Antwi Agyei screamed. His anger was echoed in the yells of the crowd, in the stomping feet and beating hands, the undulating tongues.
Akua could not think. The woman who killed her children? The woman who killed her children? She was asleep. She must still be asleep.
Asamoah began to weep. He looked Akua in the eyes, and with her own she begged him questions.
“Yaw is still alive. I grabbed him before he died, but I could only carry one,” he said, looking at Akua still, but speaking to the crowd. “My son will need her. You cannot take her from me.”
He looked at Antwi Agyei and then to the people of Edweso. The ones who had been sleeping were now awake, had filtered in to join the others waiting to see the evil woman burn.
“Have I not lost enough flesh?” Asamoah asked them.
Before long, they cut Akua down. They left her and Asamoah to get themselves back to the hut. Nana Serwah and the doctor were tending to Yaw’s wounds. The baby was screaming, the sound seeming to come from somewhere outside of himself. They would not tell her where they had put Abee and Ama Serwah. They would not say anything at all.
Willie
IT WAS A SATURDAY, FALL. Willie stood in the back of the church, holding her songbook open with one hand so that she could clap the beat against her leg with the other. Sister Bertha and Sister Dora were the soprano and alto leads, generous, big-bosomed women who believed the Rapture was coming any day now.