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  The men started to undress the ones who still had clothes on, checking them. For what? Esi didn’t know. She remembered the stone tucked in her cloth wrapper, and when the one called Fiifi reached her to undo the knot she had tied at the top of it, she launched a long, full stream of spit into his face.

  He did not cry like the boy captive she had spit on in her own village square. He did not whimper or cower or seek comfort. He simply wiped his face, never taking his eyes off her.

  The chief came to stand next to him. “What will you do about this, Fiifi? Will you let this go unpunished?” the chief asked. He spoke low, so that only Esi and Fiifi could hear.

  Then, the sound of the smack. It was so loud, it took a moment for Esi to determine whether the pain she felt was on her ear or inside it. She cowered and sank to the ground, covering her face and crying. The smack had popped the stone from her wrapper, and she found it there, on the ground. She cried even harder, trying to distract them now. Then she laid her head against the smooth black stone. The coolness of it soothed her face. And when the men had finally turned their backs and left her there, forgetting for a moment to take off her wrapper, Esi took the stone from against her cheek and swallowed it.

  *

  Now the waste on the dungeon floor was up to Esi’s ankles. There had never been so many women in the dungeon before. Esi could hardly breathe, but she moved her shoulders this way and that, until she had created some space. The woman beside her had not stopped leaking waste since the last time the soldiers fed them. Esi remembered her first day in the dungeon, when the same thing had been true of her. That day, she had found her mother’s stone in the river of shit. She had buried it, marking the spot on the wall so that she would remember when the time came.

  “Shh, shh, shh,” Esi cooed to the woman. “Shh, shh, shh.” She had learned to stop saying that everything would be all right.

  Before long, the door of the dungeon opened and a sliver of light peeked through. A couple of soldiers walked in. Something was wrong with these soldiers. There was less order to their movements, less structure. She had seen men drunk from palm wine before, the way their faces flushed and their gestures grew wilder. The way their hands moved as though ready to collect even the very air around them.

  The soldiers looked around and the women in the dungeon began to murmur. One of them grabbed a woman on the far end and pushed her against the wall. His hands found her breasts and then began to move down the length of her body, lower and lower still, until the sound that escaped her lips was a scream.

  The women in the stack started to hiss then. The hiss said, “Quiet, stupid girl, or they will beat us all!” The hiss was high and sharp, the collective cry of a hundred and fifty women filled with anger and fear. The soldier who had his hands on the woman began to sweat. He shouted back at them all.

  Their voices hushed to a hum, but did not stop. The murmur vibrated so low, Esi felt as though it were coming from her own stomach.

  “What are they doing!” they hissed. “What are they doing!” The hissing grew louder, and soon the men were shouting something back at them.

  The other soldier was still walking around, looking at each woman carefully. When he came upon Esi, he smiled, and for one quick second, she confused that act as one of kindness, for it had been so long since she’d seen someone smile.

  He said something, and then his hands were on her arm.

  She tried to fight him, but the lack of food and the wounds from the beatings had left her too weak to even collect her saliva and spit at him. He laughed at her attempt and dragged her by the elbow out of the room. As they walked into the light, Esi looked at the scene behind her. All those women hissing and crying.

  He took her to his quarters above the place where she and the rest of the slaves had been kept. Esi was so unused to light that now it blinded her. She couldn’t see where she was being taken. When they got to his quarters, he gestured toward a glass of water, but Esi stood still.

  He gestured to the whip that sat on his desk. She nodded, took one sip of the water, and watched it slip out of her numb lips.

  He put her on a folded tarp, spread her legs, and entered her. She screamed, but he placed his hand over her lips, then put his fingers in her mouth. Biting them only seemed to please him, and so she stopped. She closed her eyes, forcing herself to listen instead of see, pretending that she was still the little girl in her mother’s hut on a night that her father had come in, that she was still looking at the mud walls, wanting to give them privacy, to separate herself. Wanting to understand what kept pleasure from turning into pain.

  When he had finished, he looked horrified, disgusted with her. As though he were the one who had had something taken from him. As though he were the one who had been violated. Suddenly Esi knew that the soldier had done something that even the other soldiers would find fault with. He looked at her like her body was his shame.

  Once night fell and the light receded, leaving only the darkness that Esi had come to know so well, the soldier snuck her out of his quarters. She had finished her crying, but still he shushed her. He wouldn’t look at her, only forced her along, down, down, back to the dungeons.

  When she got there, the murmur had subsided. The women were no longer crying or hissing. There was only silence as the soldier returned her to her spot.

  Days went on. The cycle repeated. Food, then no food. Esi could do nothing but replay her time in the light. She had not stopped bleeding since that night. A thin trickle of red traveled down her leg, and Esi just watched it. She no longer wanted to talk to Tansi. She no longer wanted to listen to stories.

  She had been wrong when she’d watched her parents that night as they worked together in her mother’s hut. There was no pleasure.

  The dungeon door opened. A couple of soldiers walked in, and Esi recognized one of them from the cellar in Fanteland. He was tall and his hair was the color of tree bark after rain, but the color was starting to turn gray. There were many golden buttons along his coat and on the flaps above the shoulders. She thought and thought, trying to push out the cobwebs that had formed in her brain and remember what the chief had called the man.

  Governor James. He walked through the room, his boots pressing against hands, thighs, hair, his fingers pinching his nose. Following behind him was a younger soldier. The big white man pointed to twenty women, then to Esi.

  The soldier shouted something, but they didn’t understand. He grabbed them by their wrists, dragged them from atop or underneath the bodies of other women so that they were standing upright. He stood them next to each other in a row, and the governor checked them. He ran his hands over their breasts and between their thighs. The first girl he checked began to cry, and he slapped her swiftly, knocking her body back to the ground.

  Finally, Governor James came to Esi. He looked at her carefully, then blinked his eyes and shook his head. He looked at her again, and then began checking her body as he had the others. When he ran his hands between her legs, his fingers came back red.

  He gave her a pitying look, as though he understood, but Esi wondered if he could. He motioned, and before she could think, the other soldier was herding them out of the dungeon.

  “No, my stone!” Esi shouted, remembering the golden-black stone her mother had given her. She flung herself to the ground and started to dig and dig and dig, but then the soldier was lifting her body, and soon all that she could feel instead of dirt in her steadily moving hands was air and more air.

  They took them out into the light. The scent of ocean water hit her nose. The taste of salt clung to her throat. The soldiers marched them down to an open door that led to sand and water, and they all began to walk out onto it.

  Before Esi left, the one called Governor looked at her and smiled. It was a kind smile, pitying, yet true. But for the rest of her life Esi would see a smile on a white face and remember the one the soldier gave her before taking her to his quarters, how white men smiling just meant more evil was coming
with the next wave.

  Quey

  QUEY HAD RECEIVED A MESSAGE from his old friend Cudjo and didn’t know how he would answer it. That night, he pretended the heat was keeping him awake, an easy lie for he was drenched in sweat, but then, when wasn’t he sweating? It was so hot and humid in the bush that he felt like he was being slowly roasted for supper. He missed the Castle, the breeze from the beach. Here, in the village of his mother, Effia, sweat pooled in his ears, in his belly button. His skin itched, and he imagined mosquitoes crawling up his feet to his legs to his stomach, to rest at the watering hole of his navel. Did mosquitoes drink sweat, or was it only blood?

  Blood. He pictured the prisoners being brought into the cellars by the tens and twenties, their hands and feet bound and bleeding. He wasn’t made for this. He was supposed to have an easier life, away from the workings of slavery. He was raised among the whites in Cape Coast, educated in England. He should still be in his office in the Castle, working as a writer, the junior officer rank that his father, James Collins, had secured for him before his death, logging numbers that he could pretend didn’t represent people bought and sold. Instead, the Castle’s new governor had summoned him, sent him here, to the bush.

  “As you know by now, Quey, we’ve had a long-standing working relationship with Abeeku Badu and the other Negroes of his village, but of late, we’ve heard that they have begun trading with a few private companies. We would like to set up an outpost in the village that would act as a residence for a few of our employees, as a way of, say, gently reminding our friends there that they have certain trade obligations to our company. You’ve been specially requested for the position, and given your parents’ history with the village and given your comfort and familiarity with the language and local customs, we thought that you might be a particular asset to our company while there.”

  Quey had nodded and accepted the position, because what else could he do? But inside he resisted. His comfort and familiarity with the local customs? His parents’ history with the village? Quey was still in Effia’s womb the last time he or his mother had been there, so scared was she of Baaba. That was in 1779, nearly twenty years ago. Baaba had died in those years, and yet, still, they had stayed away. Quey felt his new job was a kind of punishment, and hadn’t he been punished enough?

  —

  The sun finally came up, and Quey went to see his uncle Fiifi. When they’d met for the first time, only a month before, Quey could hardly believe that a man like Fiifi was related to him. It wasn’t that he was handsome. Effia had been called the Beauty her whole life, and so Quey was accustomed to beauty. It was that Fiifi looked powerful, his body a graceful alliance of muscles. Quey had taken after his father, skinny and tall, but not particularly strong. James was powerful, but his power had come from his pedigree, the Collinses of Liverpool, who’d gained their wealth building slave ships. His mother’s power came from her beauty, but Fiifi’s power came from his body, from the fact that he looked like he could take anything he wanted. Quey had known only one other person like that.

  “Ah, my son. You are welcome here,” Fiifi said when he saw Quey approaching. “Sit. Eat!”

  Summoned, the house girl came out with two bowls. She started to set one bowl in front of Fiifi, but he stopped her with only a glance. “You must serve my son first.”

  “Sorry,” she mumbled, setting the bowl in front of Quey instead.

  Quey thanked her and looked down at the porridge.

  “Uncle, we’ve been here a month already and yet, still, you haven’t discussed our trade agreements. The company has the money to buy more. Much more. But you have to let us. You have to stop trading with any other company.”

  Quey had given this very speech or one like it many times before, but his uncle Fiifi always ignored him. The first night they were there, Quey had wanted to talk to Badu about the trade agreements straightaway. He thought the sooner he could get the chief to agree, the sooner he could leave. That night, Badu had invited all the men to drink at his compound. He brought them enough wine and akpeteshie to drown in. Timothy Hightower, an officer eager to impress the chief, drank half a caskful of the home brew before he passed out underneath a palm tree, shaking and vomiting and claiming to see spirits. Soon, the rest of the men also littered the forest of Badu’s front yard, vomiting or sleeping or searching for a local woman to sleep with. Quey waited for his chance to speak to Badu, sipping his drink all the while.

  He had had only two cups of wine before Fiifi approached him. “Careful, Quey,” Fiifi said, pointing at the scene of men before them. “Stronger men than these have been brought down by too much drink.”

  Quey looked at the cup in Fiifi’s hand, his eyebrow raised.

  “Water,” Fiifi said. “One of us must be ready for anything.” He motioned to Badu, who had fallen asleep in his gold throne, his chin nestled down into the round flesh of his belly.

  Quey laughed, and Fiifi cracked a smile, the first that Quey had seen since meeting him.

  Quey never talked to Badu that night, but as the weeks went on he learned that it was not Badu he needed to please. While Abeeku Badu was the figurehead, the Omanhin who received gifts from the political leaders of London and Holland alike for his role in their trade, Fiifi was the authority. When he shook his head, the whole village stopped.

  Now Fiifi was as silent as he was every other time Quey had brought up trade with the British. He looked out into the forest in front of them, and Quey followed his gaze. In the trees, two vibrant birds sang loudly, a discordant song.

  “Uncle, the agreement Badu made with my father—”

  “Do you hear that?” Fiifi asked, pointing to the birds.

  Frustrated, Quey nodded.

  “When one bird stops, the other one starts. Each time their song gets louder, shriller. Why do you think that is?”

  “Uncle, trade is the only reason we’re here. If you want the British out of your village, you have to—”

  “What you cannot hear, Quey, is the third bird. She is quiet, quiet, listening to the male birds get louder and louder and louder still. And when they have sung their voices out, then and only then will she speak up. Then and only then will she choose the man whose song she liked better. For now, she sits, and lets them argue: who will be the better partner, who will give her better seed, who will fight for her when times are difficult.

  “Quey, this village must conduct its business like that female bird. You want to pay more for slaves, pay more, but know that the Dutch will also pay more, and the Portuguese and even the pirates will pay more too. And while you are all shouting about how much better you are than the others, I will be sitting quietly in my compound, eating my fufu and waiting for the price I think is right. Now, let us not speak of business anymore.”

  Quey sighed. So he would be here forever. The birds had stopped singing. Perhaps they sensed his exasperation. He looked at them, their blue, yellow, orange wings, their hooked beaks.

  “There were no birds like this in London,” Quey said softly. “There was no color. Everything was gray. The sky, the buildings, even the people looked gray.”

  Fiifi shook his head. “I don’t know why Effia let James send you to that nonsense country.”

  Quey nodded absently and returned to the porridge in his bowl.

  —

  Quey had been a lonely child. When he was born, his father built a hut close to the Castle so that he, Effia, and Quey could live more comfortably. In those days trade had been prosperous. Quey never saw the dungeons, and he had only the faintest idea of what went on in the lower levels of the Castle, but he knew that business was good because he rarely saw his father.

  Every day was for him and Effia. She was the most patient mother in all of Cape Coast, in all of the Gold Coast. She spoke softly yet assuredly. She never hit him, even when the other mothers taunted her, telling her that she would spoil him and that he would never learn.

  “Learn what?” Effia would answer. “What did I ever l
earn from Baaba?”

  And yet Quey did learn. He sat in Effia’s lap as she taught him to speak, repeating a word in both Fante and English until Quey could hear in one language and answer in the other. She had only learned how to read and write herself in the first year of Quey’s life and yet she taught him with vigor, holding his small, fat fist in hers as they traced lines and lines and lines together.

  “How smart you are!” she exclaimed when Quey learned to spell his name without her help.

  In 1784, on Quey’s fifth birthday, Effia first told him about her own childhood in Badu’s village. He learned all of the names—Cobbe, Baaba, Fiifi. He learned there was another mother whose name they would never know, that the shimmering black stone Effia always wore about her neck had belonged to this woman, his true grandmother. Telling this story, Effia’s face darkened, but the storm passed when Quey reached up and touched her cheek.

  “You are my own child,” she said. “Mine.”

  And she was his. When he was young that had been enough, but as he grew older, he began to lament the fact that his family was so small, unlike all of the other families in the Gold Coast, where siblings piled on top of siblings in the steady stream of marriages each powerful man consummated. He wished that he could meet his father’s other children, those white Collinses who lived across the Atlantic, but he knew that it would never be. Quey had only himself, his books, the beach, the Castle, his mother.

  “I’m worried because he has no friends,” Effia said to James one day. “He doesn’t play with the other Castle children.”

  Quey had almost stepped in the door after a day of building sand castle replicas of the Cape Coast Castle when he heard Effia mention his name, and so he had remained outside to listen.

  “What are we supposed to do about that? You’ve coddled him, Effia. He’s got to learn to do some things on his own.”

  “He should be playing with other Fante children, village children, so that he can get away from here from time to time. Don’t you know anyone?”