The soldier repeated himself, louder this time, as though volume would coax understanding. Irritated, he ventured further into the room. He stepped in feces and cursed. He plucked the baby from Afua’s cradled arms, and Afua began to cry. He slapped her, and she stopped, a learned reflex.
Tansi sat next to Esi. The two had made the journey to the Castle together. Now that they weren’t walking constantly, or speaking in hushed tones, Esi had time to get to know her journey friend. Tansi was a hardy and ugly woman, barely turned sixteen. She was thick, her body built on a solid foundation. Esi hoped, and dared not hope, that they would be allowed to stay together even longer.
“Where are they taking the baby?” Esi asked.
Tansi spit onto the clay floor and swirled the spittle with her finger, creating a salve. “They will kill it, I’m sure,” she said. The baby was conceived before Afua’s marriage ceremony. As punishment, the village chief had sold her to the traders. Afua had told Esi this when she first came into the dungeon, when she was still certain that a mistake had been made, that her parents would return for her.
Now, hearing Tansi speak, Afua resumed her crying, but it was as though no one heard. These tears were a matter of routine. They came for all of the women. They dropped until the clay below them turned to mud. At night, Esi dreamed that if they all cried in unison, the mud would turn to river and they could be washed away into the Atlantic.
“Tansi, tell me a story, please,” Esi begged. But then they were interrupted again. The soldiers came in with the same mushy porridge that had been fed to them in the Fante village where Esi was held. Esi had learned to swallow it down without gagging. It was the only food they ever received, and their stomachs were empty more days than full. The porridge passed right through her, it seemed. The ground was littered with their waste, the unbearable smell.
“Ah! You’re too old for stories, my sister,” Tansi said once the soldiers left, but Esi knew she would give in soon. Tansi enjoyed the sound of her own voice. She pulled Esi’s head into her lap and began playing with her hair, pulling at the strands that had been caked with dust, so brittle that they could be broken, each one snapped like a twig.
“Do you know the story of the kente cloth?” Tansi asked. Esi had heard it numerous times before, twice from Tansi herself, but she shook her head. Asking if the story had been heard before was a part of the story itself.
Tansi began to tell her. “Two Asante men went out into the forest one day. They were weavers by trade, and they had gone out to hunt for meat. When they got to the forest to collect their traps, they were met by Anansi, the mischievous spider. He was spinning a magnificent web. They watched him, studied him, and soon realized that a spider’s web is a unique and beautiful thing, and that a spider’s technique is flawless. They went home and decided to weave cloth the way Anansi weaves his web. From that, kente was born.”
“You are a fine storyteller,” Esi said. Tansi laughed and smoothed the salve she had created onto her knees and elbows to soothe the cracked skin there. The last story she had told Esi was of how she had been captured by the northerners, plucked from her marriage bed while her husband was off fighting a war. She had been taken with a few other girls, but the rest had not survived.
By morning, Afua had died. Her skin was purple and blue, and Esi knew that she had held her breath until Nyame took her. They would all be punished for this. The soldiers came in, though Esi was no longer able to tell what time. The mud walls of the dungeon made all time equal. There was no sunlight. Darkness was day and night and everything in between. Sometimes there were so many bodies stacked into the women’s dungeon that they all had to lie, stomach down, so that women could be stacked on top of them.
It was one of those days. Esi was kicked to the ground by one of the soldiers, his foot at the base of her neck so that she couldn’t turn her head to breathe anything but the dust and detritus from the ground. The new women were brought in, and some were wailing so hard that the soldiers smacked them unconscious. They were piled on top of the other women, their bodies deadweight. When the smacked ones came to, there were no more tears. Esi could feel the woman on top of her peeing. Urine traveled between both of their legs.
—
Esi learned to split her life into Before the Castle and Now. Before the Castle, she was the daughter of Big Man and his third wife, Maame. Now she was dust. Before the Castle, she was the prettiest girl in the village. Now she was thin air.
Esi was born in a small village in the heart of the Asante nation. Big Man had thrown an outdooring feast that lasted four nights. Five goats were slaughtered and boiled until their tough skins turned tender. It was rumored that Maame did not stop crying or praising Nyame for the entire duration of the ceremony, nor would she set baby Esi down. “You never know what could happen,” she kept repeating.
At that time, Big Man was known only as Kwame Asare. Esi’s father was not a chief, but he commanded just as much respect, for he was the best warrior the Asante nation had ever seen, and at age twenty-five he already had five wives and ten children. Everyone in the village knew his seed was strong. His sons, still toddlers and young children, were already tough wrestlers and his daughters were beauties.
Esi grew up in bliss. The villagers called her ripe mango because she was just on the right side of spoiled, still sweet. There was nothing her parents would refuse her. Even her strong warrior of a father had been known to carry her through the village at night when she couldn’t sleep. Esi would hold the tip of his finger, to her as thick as a branch, as she toddled past the huts that made up each compound. Her village was small but growing steadily. In the first year of their walks, it wouldn’t take but twenty minutes to reach the forest edge that cut them off from the rest of Asanteland, but that forest had been pushed farther and farther back until by the fifth year the journey there took nearly an hour. Esi loved walking to the forest with her father. She would listen, enraptured, as he told her how the forest was so dense it was like a shield, impenetrable to their enemies. He would tell her how he and the other warriors knew the forest better than they knew the lines of their own palms. And this was good. Following the lines of a palm would lead nowhere, but the forest led the warriors to other villages that they could conquer to build up their strength.
“When you are old enough, Esi, you will learn how to climb these trees with nothing but your bare hands,” he said to her as they walked back to the village one day.
Esi looked up. The tops of the trees looked as though they were brushing the sky, and Esi wondered why leaves were green instead of blue.
When Esi was seven years old, her father won the battle that would earn him the name Big Man. There had been rumors that in a village just north of theirs, warriors had come back with splendors of gold and women. They had even raided the British storehouse, earning gunpowder and muskets in the process. Chief Nnuro, the leader of Esi’s village, called a meeting of all the able-bodied men.
“Have you heard the news?” he asked them, and they grunted, slammed their staffs against the hard earth, and cried out. “The swine of the northern village are walking about like kings. All around Asante people will say, it is the northerners who stole guns from the British. It is the northerners who are the most powerful warriors in all of the Gold Coast.” The men stomped their feet and shook their heads. “Will we allow this?” the chief asked.
“No!” they cried.