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  Esi had been in the women’s dungeon of the Cape Coast Castle for two weeks. She spent her fifteenth birthday there. On her fourteenth birthday, she was in the heart of Asanteland, in her father’s, Big Man’s, compound. He was the best warrior in the village, so everyone had come to pay their respects to the daughter who grew more beautiful with each passing day. Kwasi Nnuro brought sixty yams. More yams than any other suitor had ever brought before. Esi would have married him in the summer, when the sun stretched long and high, when the palm trees could be tapped for wine, climbed by the spriest children, their arms holding the trunk in a hug as they shinnied to the top to pluck the fruits that waited there.

  When she wanted to forget the Castle, she thought of these things, but she did not expect joy. Hell was a place of remembering, each beautiful moment passed through the mind’s eye until it fell to the ground like a rotten mango, perfectly useless, uselessly perfect.

  A soldier came into the dungeon and began to speak. He had to hold his nose to keep from vomiting. The women did not understand him. His voice didn’t seem angry, but they had learned to back away at the sight of that uniform, that skin the color of coconut meat.

  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 st
orehouse, 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.

  Kwaku Agyei, the most sensible among them, hushed their cries and said, “Listen to us! We may go to fight the northerners, but what have we? No guns, no gunpowder. And what will we gain? So many people will praise our enemies in the north, but will they not still praise us as well? We have been the strongest village for decades. No one has been able to break through the forest and challenge us.”

  “So will you have us wait until the northern snake slithers its way into our fields and steals our women?” Esi’s father asked. The two men stood on opposite sides of the room, and all the other men stood between them, turning their heads from one to the other in order to see which gift would win: wisdom or strength.

  “I only say, let us not be too hasty. Lest we appear weak in the process.”

  “But who is weak?” Esi’s father asked. He pointed to Nana Addae, then Kojo Nyarko, then Kwabena Gyimah. “Who among us is weak? You? Or maybe you?”

  The men shook their heads one by one, and soon they were all shaking their entire bodies into a rallying cry that could be heard throughout the village. From the compound where Esi stood helping her mother fry plantains, she heard them, and dropped two slices of plantains so quickly that oil jumped up and splashed her mother’s leg.

  “Aiieee!” her mother cried out, wiping the oil away with her hands and blowing on the burn. “Stupid girl! When will you learn to be careful around fire?” Maame asked. Esi had heard her mother say this or something like it many times before. Maame was terrified of fire. “Be careful of fire. Know when to use it and when to stay cold,” she would often say.

  “It was an accident,” Esi snapped. She wanted to be outside, catching more of the warriors’ discussion. Her mother reached over and yanked her ear.

  “Who are you talking to that way?” she hissed. “Think before you act. Think before you speak.”

  Esi apologized to her mother, and Maame, who had never been able to stay mad at Esi for longer than a few seconds, kissed the top of her head as the men’s cries grew louder and louder.

  Everyone in the village knew the story. Esi had her father tell it to her every night for a whole month. She would lie with her head in his lap, listening as he spoke of how the men stole out for the northern village on the evening of the rallying cry. Their plan was thin: overtake the town and steal whatever had been stolen. Esi’s father told her of how he led the group through the forest until they came upon the circle of warriors protecting the newly acquired goods. Her father and his warriors hid in the trees. Their feet moved with the lightness of leaves on the forest ground. When they came upon the warriors of the northern village, they fought bravely, but it was of no use. Esi’s father and many others were captured and packed into huts that had been converted into a prison camp.

  It was Kwaku Agyei and his few followers who had had the foresight to wait in the forest until after the eager warriors had rushed in. They found the guns that the northerners were hiding and loaded them quickly and quietly before moving in to where their fellow men were being held captive. Though there were only a few of them, Kwaku Agyei and his men were able to hold off the warriors with the stories they told of the many men they had waiting behind them. Kwaku Agyei said that if this mission failed, there would be one raid every night until the end of time. “If it isn’t the West, it will be the whites,” he reasoned, darkness glinting from the gap between his front teeth.

  The northerners felt they had no choice but to give in. They released Esi’s father and the others, who parted with five of the stolen guns. The men returned to their village in silence, Esi’s father consumed by his embarrassment. When they reached the edge of their village, he stopped Kwaku Agyei, got down on both of his knees, and bowed his head before him. “I am sorry, my brother. I will never again rush into a fight when it is possible to reason.”

  “It takes a big man to admit his folly,” Kwaku Agyei said, and they all continued into the village, the contrite and newly christened Big Man leading the way.

  This was the Big Man who returned to Esi, the one she knew as she grew older. Slow to anger, rational, and still the strongest and bravest warrior of them all. By the time Esi turned twelve their small village had won more than fifty-five wars under Big Man’s leadership. The spoils of these wars could be seen as the warriors carried them back, shimmering gold and colorful textiles in large tan sacks, captives in iron cages.

  It was the prisoners that fascinated Esi the most, for after each capture they would be put on display in the center of the village square. Anyone could walk by and stare at them, mostly young, virile warriors, though sometimes women and their children. Some of these prisoners would be taken by the villagers as slaves, house boys and house girls, cooks and cleaners, but soon there would be too many to keep and the overflow would have to be dealt with.

  “Mama, what happens to all the prisoners after they leave here?” Esi asked Maame as they passed by the square one afternoon, a roped goat, their dinner, trailing behind them.

  “That’s boys’ talk, Esi. You don’t need to think about it,” her mother replied, shifting her eyes.

  For as long as Esi could remember, and perhaps even before, Maame had refused to choose her own house girl or house boy from among the prisoners who were paraded through the village each month, but because there were now so many prisoners, Big Man had started to insist.

  “A house girl could help you with the cooking,” he said.

  “Esi helps me with my cooking.”

  “But Esi is my daughter, not some common girl to be ordered about.”

  Esi smiled. She loved her mother, but she knew how lucky Maame was to have gotten a husband like Big Man when she had no family, no background to speak of. Big Man had saved Maame somehow, from what wretchedness Esi did not know. She knew only that her mother would do almost anything for her father.

  “All right,” she said. “Esi and I will choose a girl tomorrow.”

  And so they chose a girl and decided to call her Abronoma, Little Dove. The girl had the darkest skin Esi had ever seen. She kept her eyes low, and though her Twi was passable, she rarely spoke it. She didn’t know her age, but Esi guessed Abronoma was not much older than she was. At first, Abronoma was horrible at the chores. She spilled oil; she didn’t sweep under things; she didn’t have good stories for the children.

  “She’s useless,” Maame said to Big Man. “We have to take her back.”

  They were all outside, basking under the warm midday sun. Big Man tilted his head back and let out a laugh that rumbled like thunder in the rainy season. “Take her back where? Odo, there’s only one way to train a slave.” He turned to Esi, who was trying to climb a palm tree the way she’d seen the other kids do it, but her arms were too small to reach around. “Esi, go and get me my switch.”

  The switch in question was made from two reeds tied together. It was older than Esi’s paternal grandfather, having been passed down from generation to generation. Big Man had never beaten Esi with it, but she had seen him beat his sons. She’d heard the way it whistled when it snapped back off of flesh. Esi moved to enter the compound, but Maame stopped her.

  “No!” she said.

  Big Man raised his hand to his wife, anger flashing quickly through his eyes like steam from cold water hitting a hot pan. “No?”

  Maame stammered, “I—I just think that I should be the one to do it.”

  Big Man lowered his hand. He
stared at her carefully for a while longer, and Esi tried to read the look that passed between them. “So be it,” Big Man said. “But tomorrow I will bring her out here. She will carry water from this yard to that tree there, and if even so much as a drop falls, then I will take care of it. Do you hear me?”

  Maame nodded and Big Man shook his head. He had always told anyone who would listen that he had spoiled his third wife, seduced by her beautiful face and softened by her sad eyes.

  Maame and Esi went into their hut and found Abronoma, curled up on a bamboo cot, living up to her name of a little bird. Maame woke her and had her stand before them. She pulled out a switch that Big Man had given her, a switch she had never used. She then looked at Esi with tears in her eyes. “Please, leave us.”

  Esi left the hut and for minutes after could hear the sound of the switch and the harmonizing pitch of two separate cries.

  The next day Big Man called everyone in his compound out to see if Abronoma could carry a bucket of water on her head from the yard to the tree without spilling a drop. Esi and her whole family, her four stepmothers and nine half siblings, scattered around their large yard, waiting for the girl to first fetch water from the stream into a large black bucket. From there, Big Man had her stand before all of them and bow before starting the journey to the tree. He would walk beside her to be certain there was no error.

  Esi could see Little Dove shaking as she lifted the bucket onto her head. Maame clutched Esi against her chest and smiled at the girl when she bowed at them, but the look Abronoma returned was fearful and then vacant. When the bucket touched her head, the family began to jeer.