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  “She’ll never make it!” Amma, Big Man’s first wife, said.

  “Watch, she will spill it all and drown herself in the process,” Kojo, the eldest son, said.

  Little Dove took her first step and Esi let out the breath she had been holding. She herself had never been able to carry so much as a single plank of wood on her head, but she had watched her mother carry a perfectly round coconut without it ever rolling off, steady as a second head. “Where did you learn to do that?” Esi had asked Maame then, and the woman replied, “You can learn anything when you have to learn it. You could learn to fly if it meant you would live another day.”

  Abronoma steadied her legs and kept walking, her head facing forward. Big Man walked beside her, whispering insults in her ear. She reached the tree at the forest’s edge and pivoted, making her way back to the audience that awaited her. By the time she got close enough that Esi could make out her features again, there was sweat dripping off the ledge of her nose and her eyes were brimming with tears. Even the bucket on her head seemed to be crying, condensation working its way down the outside of it. As she lifted the bucket off of her head, she started to smile triumphantly. Maybe it was a small gust of wind, maybe an insect looking for a bath, or maybe the Dove’s hand slipped, but before the bucket reached the ground, two drops sloshed out.

  Esi looked at Maame, who had turned her sad, pleading eyes to Big Man, but by that point, the rest of the family was already shouting for punishment.

  Kojo began to lead them into a song:

  The Dove has failed. Oh, what to do? Make her to suffer or you’ll fail too!

  Big Man reached for his switch, and soon the song gained its accompaniment: the percussion of reed to flesh, the woodwind of reed to air. This time, Abronoma did not cry.

  —

  “If he didn’t beat her, everyone would think he was weak,” Esi said. After the event, Maame had been inconsolable, crying to Esi that Big Man should not have beaten Little Dove for so small a mistake. Esi was licking soup off of her fingers, her lips stained orange. Her mother had taken Abronoma into their hut and made a salve for her wounds, and now the girl lay on a cot sleeping.

  “Weak, eh?” Maame said. She glared at her daughter with malice that Esi had never before seen.

  “Yes,” Esi whispered.

  “That I should live to hear my own daughter speak like this. You want to know what weakness is? Weakness is treating someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves.”

  Esi was hurt. She had only said what anyone else in her village would have said, and for this Maame yelled at her. Esi wanted to cry, to hug her mother, something, but Maame left the room then to finish the chores that Abronoma could not perform that night.

  Just as she left, Little Dove began to stir. Esi fetched her water, and helped tilt her head back so that she could drink it. The wounds on her back were still fresh, and the salve that Maame had made stank of the forest. Esi wiped the corners of Abronoma’s lips with her fingers, but the girl pushed her away.

  “Leave me,” she said.

  “I—I’m sorry for what happened. He is a good man.”

  Abronoma spit onto the clay in front of her. “Your father is Big Man, eh?” she asked, and Esi nodded, proud despite what she had just seen her father do. The Dove let out a mirthless laugh. “My father too is Big Man, and now look at what I am. Look at what your mother was.”

  “What my mother was?”

  Little Dove’s eyes shot toward Esi. “You don’t know?”

  Esi, who had not spent more than an hour away from her mother’s sight in her life, couldn’t imagine any secrets. She knew the feel of her and the smell of her. She knew how many colors were in her irises and she knew each crooked tooth. Esi looked at Abronoma, but Abronoma shook her head and continued her laugh.

  “Your mother was once a slave for a Fante family. She was raped by her master because he too was a Big Man and big men can do what they please, lest they appear weak, eh?” Esi looked away, and Abronoma continued in a whisper. “You are not your mother’s first daughter. There was one before you. And in my village we have a saying about separated sisters. They are like a woman and her reflection, doomed to stay on opposite sides of the pond.”

  Esi wanted to hear more, but there was no time to ask the Dove. Maame came back into the room, and saw the two girls sitting beside each other.

  “Esi, come here and let Abronoma sleep. Tomorrow you will wake up early and help me clean.”

  Esi left Abronoma to her rest. She looked at her mother. The way her shoulders always seemed to droop, the way her eyes were always shifting. Suddenly, Esi was filled with a horrible shame. She remembered the first time she’d seen an elder spit on the captives in the town square. The man had said, “Northerners, they are not even people. They are the dirt that begs for spit.” Esi was five years old then. His words had felt like a lesson, and the next time she passed, she timidly gathered her own spit and launched it at a little boy who stood huddled with his mother. The boy had cried out, speaking a language that Esi didn’t understand, and Esi had felt bad, not for having spit, but for knowing how angry her mother would have been to see her do it.

  Now all Esi could picture was her own mother behind the dull metal of the cages. Her own mother, huddled with a sister she would never know.

  —

  In the months that followed, Esi tried to befriend Abronoma. Her heart had started to ache for the little bird who had now perfected her role as house girl. Since the beating, no crumb was dropped, no water spilled. In the evenings, after Abronoma’s work was done, Esi would try to coax more information from her about her mother’s past.

  “I don’t know any more,” Abronoma said, taking the bundle of palm branches to sweep the floor, or straining used oil through leaves. “Don’t worry me!” she screamed once she’d reached the height of her annoyance.

  Still, Esi tried to make amends. “What can I do?” she asked. “What can I do?”

  After weeks of asking, Esi finally received an answer. “Send word to my father,” Abronoma said. “Tell him where I am. Tell him where I am and there will be no bad blood between us.”

  That night, Esi couldn’t sleep. She wanted to make peace with Abronoma, but if her father knew what she had been asked to do, surely there would be war in her hut. She could hear her father now, yelling at Maame, telling her that she was raising Esi to be a small woman, weak. On the floor of her hut, Esi turned and turned and turned, until finally her mother hushed her.

  “Please,” Maame said. “I’m tired.”

  And all Esi could see behind her closed eyelids was her mother as house girl.

  Esi decided then that she would send the message. Early, early, early the next morning she went to the messenger man who lived on the edge of the village. He listened to her words and the words of others before setting out into the forest every week. Those words would be carried from village to village, messenger man to messenger man. Who knew if Esi’s message would ever reach Abronoma’s father? It could be dropped or forgotten, altered or lost, but at the very least, Esi could say that she had done it.

  When she got back, Abronoma was the only person yet awake. Esi told her what she had done that morning, and the girl clapped her hands together and then gathered Esi into her small arms, squeezing until Esi’s breath caught.

  “All is forgotten?” Esi asked once the Dove had released her.

  “Everything is equal,” Abronoma said, and relief rushed through Esi’s body like blood. It filled her to the brim and left her fingers shaking. She hugged Abronoma back, and as the girl’s body relaxed in her arms, Esi let herself imagine that the body she was hugging was her sister’s.

  —

  Months went by, and Little Dove grew excited. In the evenings she could be found pacing the grounds and muttering to herself before sleep. “My father. My father is coming.”

  Big Man heard her mutterings and told everyone to beware of her
, for she might be a witch. Esi would watch her carefully for signs, but every day it was the same thing. “My father is coming. I know it. He is coming.” Finally, Big Man promised to slap the words out of the Dove if she continued, and so she stopped, and the family soon forgot.

  Everyone went along as usual. Esi’s village had never been challenged in Esi’s lifetime. All fighting was done away from home. Big Man and the other warriors would go into nearby villages, pillaging the land, sometimes setting the grass on fire so that people from three villages over could see the smoke and know the warriors had come. But this time things were different.

  It began while the family was sleeping. It was Big Man’s night in Maame’s hut, so Esi had to sleep on the ground in the corner. When she heard the soft moaning, the quickened breath, she turned to face the wall of the hut. Once, just once, she had watched them where they lay, the darkness helping to cover her curiosity. Her father was hovering over her mother’s body, moving softly at first, and then with more force. She couldn’t see much, but it was the sounds that had interested her. The sounds her parents made together, sounds that walked a thin line between pleasure and pain. Esi both wanted and was afraid to want. So she never watched again.

  That night, once everyone in the hut had fallen asleep, the call went out. Everyone in the village had grown up knowing what each sound signified: two long moans meant the enemy was miles off yet; three quick shouts meant they were upon them. Hearing the three, Big Man jumped from the bed and grabbed the machete he stored under each of his wives’ cots.

  “You take Esi and go into the woods!” he screamed at Maame before running from the hut with little time to cover his nakedness.

  Esi did what her father had taught her, grabbing the small knife that her mother used to slice plantains and tucking it into the cloth of her skirt. Maame sat at the edge of her cot. “Come on!” Esi said, but her mother didn’t move. Esi rushed to the bed and shook her, but she still didn’t move.

  “I can’t do it again,” she whispered.

  “Do what again?” Esi asked, but she was hardly listening. Adrenaline was coursing through her so urgently that her hands trembled. Was this because of the message she had sent?

  “I can’t do it again,” her mother whispered. “No more woods. No more fire.” She was rocking back and forth and cradling the fat flap of her stomach in her arms as though it were a child.

  Abronoma came in from the slave quarters, her laugh echoing through the hut. “My father is here!” she said, dancing this way and that. “I told you he would come to find me, and he has come!”

  The girl scurried away, and Esi didn’t know what would become of her. Outside, people were screaming and running. Children were crying.

  Esi’s mother grabbed Esi’s hand and dropped something into it. It was a black stone, glimmering with gold. Smooth, as if it had been scrubbed carefully for years to preserve its perfect surface.

  “I have been keeping this for you,” Maame said. “I wanted to give it to you on your wedding day. I—I left one like this for your sister. I left it with Baaba after I set the fire.”

  “My sister?” Esi asked. So what Abronoma said was true.

  Maame babbled nonsense words, words she had never spoken before. Sister, Baaba, fire. Sister, Baaba, fire. Esi wanted to ask more questions, but the noise outside was growing louder, and her mother’s eyes were growing blank, emptying somehow of something.

  Esi stared at her mother then, and it was as though she were seeing her for the first time. Maame was not a whole woman. There were large swaths of her spirit missing, and no matter how much she loved Esi, and no matter how much Esi loved her, they both knew in that moment that love could never return what Maame had lost. And Esi knew, too, that her mother would die rather than run into the woods ever again, die before capture, die even if it meant that in her dying, Esi would inherit that unspeakable sense of loss, learn what it meant to be un-whole.

  “You go,” Maame said as Esi tugged at her arms, tried to move her legs. “Go!” she repeated.

  Esi stopped and tucked the black stone into her wrapper. She hugged her mother, took the knife from her skirt, put it in her mother’s hand, and ran.

  She reached the woods quickly and found a palm tree that her arms could manage. She had been practicing, not knowing that it was for this. She wrapped her arms around the trunk, hugging it while using her legs to push her up, up, as far as she could go. The moon was full, as large as the rock of terror that was sitting in Esi’s gut. What had she ever known of terror?

  Time passed and passed. Esi felt like her arms were encircling fire instead of the tree, so badly were they burning. The dark shadows of the leaves on the ground had started to look menacing. Soon, the sound of screaming people falling from the trees like plucked fruit could be heard all around her, and then a warrior was at the bottom of her tree. His language was unfamiliar, but she knew enough to know what came next. He threw a rock at her, then another, then another. The fourth rock slammed into her side, but still she held on. The fifth hit the lattice of her clasped fingers; her arms came undone, and she fell to the ground.

  —

  She was tied to others; how many, she didn’t know. She didn’t see anyone from her compound. Not her stepmothers or half siblings. Not her mother. The rope around her wrists held her palms out in supplication. Esi studied the lines on those palms. They led nowhere. She had never felt so hopeless in her life.

  Everyone walked. Esi had walked for miles with her father before and so she thought that she could take it. And indeed the first few days were not so bad, but by the tenth the calluses on Esi’s feet split open and blood seeped out, painting the leaves she left behind. Ahead of her, the bloody leaves of others. So many were crying that it was difficult to hear when the warriors spoke, but she wouldn’t have understood them anyway. When she could, she checked to see if the stone her mother had given her was still safely tucked in her wrapper. She didn’t know how long they would be allowed to keep their clothes. The leaves on the forest ground were so damp with blood and sweat and dew that a child in front of Esi slipped on them. One of the warriors caught him, helped him to stand up, and the little boy thanked him.

  “Why should he thank him? They are going to eat us all,” the woman behind Esi said. Esi had to strain to hear through the haze of tears and buzz of insects that surrounded them.

  “Who will eat us?” Esi asked.

  “The white men. That is what my sister says. She says the white men buy us from these soldiers and then they cook us up like goats in soup.”

  “No!” Esi cried, and one of the soldiers was quick to run up to her and poke her side with a stick. Once he left, her flank throbbing, Esi pictured the goats that walked freely around her village. Then she pictured herself capturing one—the way she roped its legs and laid its body down. The way she slit its neck. Was this how the white men would kill her? She shuddered.

  “What’s your name?” Esi asked.

  “They call me Tansi.”

  “They call me Esi.”

  And like that, the two became friends. They walked all day. The sores on Esi’s feet had no time to heal, so soon were they reopened. At times, the warriors would leave them tied to trees in the forest so that they could go ahead and survey the people of new villages. At times, more people from those villages would be taken and added to the rest of them. The rope around Esi’s wrists had started to burn. A strange burn, like nothing she had ever felt before, like cool fire, the scratch of salty wind.

  And soon, the smell of that wind greeted Esi’s nose, and she knew from stories she had heard that they were nearing Fanteland.

  The traders slapped their legs with sticks, making them move faster. For almost half of that week, they walked both day and night. The ones who couldn’t keep up were beaten with the sticks until suddenly, like magic, they could.

  Finally, once Esi’s own legs had started to buckle, they reached the edge of some Fante village. They were all packed into a d
ark and damp cellar, and Esi had time to count the group. Thirty-five. Thirty-five people held together by rope.

  They had time to sleep, and when they awoke they were given food. A strange porridge that Esi had never eaten before. She didn’t like the taste of it, but she could sense that there would be nothing else for a long while.

  Soon, men came into the room. Some were the warriors that Esi had seen before, but others were new.

  “So these are the slaves you have brought us?” one of the men said in Fante. It had been a long while since Esi had heard anyone speak that dialect, but she could understand him clearly.

  “Let us out!” the others tied to Esi began to shout, now that they had an ear that could listen. Fante and Asante, fellow Akans. Two peoples, two branches split from the same tree. “Let us out!” they shouted until their voices grew hoarse from the words. Nothing but silence greeted them.

  “Chief Abeeku,” another said. “We should not be doing this. Our Asante allies will be furious if they know we have worked with their enemies.”

  The one called Chief threw up his hands. “Today their enemies pay more, Fiifi,” he said. “Tomorrow, if they pay more, we will work with them too. This is how you build a village. Do you understand?”

  Esi watched the one called Fiifi. He was young for a warrior, but already she could tell that one day he would be a Big Man too. He shook his head, but didn’t speak again. He went out of the cellar and brought back more men.

  They were white men, the first Esi had ever seen. She could not match their skin to any tree or nut or mud or clay that she had ever encountered.

  “These people do not come from nature,” she said.

  “I told you, they have come to eat us,” Tansi replied.

  The white men approached them.

  “Stand up!” the chief shouted, and they all stood. The chief turned to one of the white men. “See, Governor James,” he said in fast Fante, so fast Esi hardly understood him and wondered how this white man could. “The Asante are very strong. You may check them for yourselves.”