CHAPTER TWO
Hassana
I could start with how my baba went to sell his shoes in Jenne and never came back. Or how our village was crisped to the ground and how I don’t know of my mother or grandmother’s whereabouts. Or how my big sister Aminah and I lost our brother in a human caravan. Or I could tell you about the worst day of my life, when my twin sister was snatched from me. But I’ll start with the moment I stopped letting other people control what I did or where I went or what happened to me. I will start with the moment I broke free.
In 1892, when I was ten, I was forced to live on a land where the trees grew so close together, they sucked out my voice. Wofa Sarpong, a man as tall as me, had bought Aminah and me and brought us to his home in a clearing surrounded by trees that scraped the sky. Every time I looked up, I wondered how the trees stayed up so tall and didn’t topple over, and every day, the forest squeezed my chest flat like an empty cow-skin gourd. Many nights, I would wake up sweating, heart racing, and always breathless. I was a child of the savanna, of open spaces and short trees. From the horizon, we could see the camels of the caravan arriving. The world seemed vast and limitless. The forest shrank the world and my whole life with it.
There isn’t one thing I can say I liked about Wofa Sarpong and his family. Maybe only that Aminah was still there with me. She fared slightly better than me and said Wofa Sarpong’s food was quite tasty—that their tuo, which they called fufu, was sweeter than ours. She made sure I sipped their soups with fish and mushrooms, but I could have been eating the bark of a tree. It all felt heavy against my tongue; it all had no flavor. I ate because Aminah told me to. But I was half a person.
The change in my story began at the height of kola season. Wofa Sarpong had made us climb up more kola trees than I could count, as always. We little ones—his children and the ones he’d bought—scrambled up like lizards, in search of spots far away from each other to better harvest as many of the pods as we could. Wofa Sarpong said kola was God’s gift, and God would be angry if we didn’t take all that he’d given us. I was angry at Otienu, my God, for sending me to a place like this when I had done nothing wrong. Sometimes, I wondered what Wofa Sarpong’s God was like. He seemed to be blessing Wofa Sarpong with an abundance of kola nuts. I will never forget having to stretch out my arms to cut the pods of kola at their bases, while precariously balancing my bare feet on branches, each time thinking I would fall. I never did fall and managed to still my fear enough to keep grabbing the pods, which I threw down to Kwesi, Aminah, and the other older ones, who put them into big baskets they would later carry. Every day, we worked morning and afternoon, and Wofa Sarpong never thanked us for our work.
When he said, “All done,” it was our cue to climb back down. We dropped our knives in big baskets, on top of kola pods with their
into trouble, they all came together to help. That day, I was filled with incredible sadness, remarking to myself how such tiny creatures could show kindness to each other, while people like Wofa Sarpong and the men who had kidnapped us were filled with nothing but cruelty.
We got to Wofa Sarpong’s compound of four wide huts—for him and his wives and young children—and two on the other side, for his grown children and those of us he’d bought. Close to the opening of his home was a hut that stood alone, where food pots and mortars and pestles were kept. As Aminah walked ahead with her basket, I went into that solitary hut and took a black earthenware pot to Wofa Sarpong’s first wife. I felt heavy, as if a blacksmith’s anvil had been tied to my back. Wofa Sarpong’s wife scooped two glistening mounds of tuo and put them in the pot and passed the bowl to her co-wife, who fetched ladlefuls of palm soup with two specks of fish.
“Smile!” she commanded.
Usually, I would paste a half-smile on my face, something to shake them off, but that day I couldn’t even try.
I put the pot before Aminah and the other girls and they dipped their fingers in the soup and began eating. Before I could decide whether I wanted to eat or not, Aminah had led the tuo to my lips.
“Eat your fufu,” she said.
I refused to use their words. I would not call it fufu like Aminah.
I took the lump of yellow plantain and cassava to my mouth and it tasted like air. Then seconds later, my stomach churned. The food would come up if I kept trying, so I got up and went to sit under the abrofo nkatie tree. I wanted it all to end.
We had been brought over about a year before, and the sounds of the night still made me jump. Wofa Sarpong stole into our room often to see Aminah and after he left, I stayed awake listening to my sister cry by my side. That night, even though I hadn’t eaten a thing, under the weight of my sadness, I slept like a fully fed python.
All around us is water reflecting a blue that is deeper than the sky. There are people around us looking at the water, which behind us stretches past the edges of the earth. There are cloths blowing like big white scarves in the wind and we are standing on a wooden platform. Ahead of us is land that looks familiar and unfamiliar all at once, with palm-like trees that shake and bend in the wind. The trees grow bigger and bigger. We are moving.
I woke up, my clothes wet, as if a bucket of water had been flung on me. The forest had not only taken my voice—it had seeped into my dreams, severing the strongest connection I shared with my sister. When our baba disappeared, we knew he was alive because Husseina and I both dreamed he was in a room. I would see things from one angle. She would see things from the other. If I saw a face, she saw a back. Together, we saw whole. The forest had made our dreams lose their way to each other. Until now . . .
I shook Aminah awake and told her about the dream.
“These are her dreams,” I said. “Husseina is alive.”
replaced with a confusing mix of excitement and a terrible pain in my belly. My stomach’s aches doubled as I washed the Sarpong family’s clothes, and as I climbed up kola trees. I couldn’t sit still or focus, especially as Wofa Sarpong lined us up and told us something and even when Aminah spoke to me. My twin was alive and in a place surrounded by the bluest water I’d ever seen. One minute, I felt I should run and hug everyone, announcing the news; the next, fear washed over me—what if we never saw each other again, with only our dreams threading us to each other? Could I live with that? The question haunted me, twisting my insides into painful knots.
One afternoon, while we were winnowing millet, Wofa Sarpong, accompanied by a man I had never seen on the farm, gathered everyone in the courtyard where his children hid sticks and stones and where I was already sitting. The newcomer wore short shorts held up high on his waist by a leather rope. He also wore a white hat and paced up and down as he waited for Wofa Sarpong to organize us. The man went around asking everyone’s names, and I barely listened. I wanted to get back to looking for weevils and stones. I couldn’t stop thinking about Husseina.
Someone poked me in the side.
The man in the shorts and cap asked me my name.
“Hassana,” I said.
Wofa Sarpong looked at me as if I had stolen the last piece of fish in his soup.
The man asked me again.
“Hassana.” This time I meant it, realizing that when Wofa Sarpong had assembled us earlier, it was to give us new names. He didn’t want to be caught for keeping slaves. Our names gave us up. I told the man I was from Botu, that I was the second daughter of Baba Yero and Aminah-Na.
Wofa Sarpong followed the man, bowing so low it looked like he would scrape the ground, and for the first time since arriving on his farm, I wanted to laugh. I went back to my weevils and stones.
*
I taught myself to hold my breath underwater when I was seven. No women in Botu could swim, but it was as if I knew that I would have to hold my breath many times. One time, it made me the bravest girl in all of Botu. The girls and I were at the waterhole early in the morning to fetch water. Suddenly, I heard shrieking. One word emerged out of the rush of voices: crocodile. We didn’t have crocodiles at the waterhole. After the girls had rushed out of the water, I held my breath and ducked into the water. At first, silt rose up and clouded the water. I kept my breath contained in my chest as I waited for the mud to settle. The water grew clearer and I saw human legs under the crocodile hide. I lifted my head out of the water. The girls were shouting.
“Hassana, come out!” Somebody’s loud voice floated above the rest.
watched the crocodile hide approach me, and I looked back—caught eyes with Husseina, who had squeezed her face, ready to burst into tears. Then I returned to the crocodile, which was now right in front of me. We’d see how long this game could go on. The girls’ cries had become a ringing in my ears: “get-out-get-out-get-out.” The sun fried my back. The snout of the gray creature started to move higher. The girls screeched. The crocodile skin floated up, turned sideways, and splashed into the water, revealing Motaaba with his big teeth. He doubled over and laughed as I walked out of the water and took Husseina’s hand. She laid her head on my shoulder and didn’t say anything as we walked back home.
*
When Wofa Sarpong came back from seeing off the inspector, he was holding the whip he used on his donkey. He dragged me away from my bowl of millet. When he started whipping me I screamed at first, but when I heard the ugly sound of defeat coming out of my mouth, I held my breath. His whacks did nothing to me. If anything, they gave me the push I was looking for. I would no longer stay in this place to be treated like one of his donkeys. I was leaving to find Husseina. Aminah could come if she wanted, but if she wanted to be treated like an animal, she could stay.
But Wofa Sarpong beat me to my plan. Before I could begin to hatch a plot to escape, he’d fitted his donkey to the cart—piled with kola nuts—and ordered Kwesi to carry me onto the cart. Aminah threw me a branch and told me to chew its leaves to put on my body, to help with the soreness from the whipping. For a second, I thought of begging Wofa Sarpong to turn the cart around to let me stay with Aminah. But when I saw how the man’s shoulders were hunched up and how he was furiously hitting the donkey with the same switch that had caned me, shouting, “Ko! Ko!”, part of me was relieved he was taking me away.
The cart rumbled over stones, and a few times, I thought we would topple over. The forest grew denser the more we traveled, and I had to catch my breath. If only I could have fled with Aminah.
We arrived at a small hut in the middle of a palm-tree enclosure. We’d barely stopped when a tall man stooped out of the door.
“Dogo,” said Wofa Sarpong.
“Wofa, you’re here too early,” said the tall man.
“This one’s ears are too hard. She will cause me only problems. Just take her.”
“I have nothing to trade here. Some salt, maybe.”
“I’ll take it.”
Wofa Sarpong got down from the cart, dragging me down by the ears, and I almost fell but made sure I caught myself and stood tall. I wanted to spit in his face, but he was sure to hit me and my body was too sore. The enclosure smelled like water that had stayed too long in a pot. A hen clucked by the entrance to the hut, trailed by her chicks.
“Give me the chicken too,” said Wofa Sarpong.
“I need them for eggs.”
“Massa, I bring you good money and you talk about eggs.”
Another chicken came out, a gray-and-green rooster strutting proudly, unaware it was going to end up in Wofa Sarpong’s evil clutches. I looked at Dogo, the tall man, who also understood this and shrugged before following the birds around. The birds squawked and clucked, and Dogo stood up many times, fruitless, wiping his brow. Meanwhile, Wofa Sarpong went into Dogo’s hut and came out with bales of cloth and some rusted farm tools.
“The cloth is not for me,” said Dogo, palming one hand in the other to beg Wofa Sarpong.
“Tell the person to come to see me,” said Wofa Sarpong, striding like the rooster he was about to take.
“Please,” continued Dogo, but Wofa Sarpong glared at him and the tall man shut up.
I wanted to laugh, marveling at how such a tall man could quake when small Wofa Sarpong spoke. Dogo was letting Wofa Sarpong do whatever he wanted, which meant either Dogo owed Wofa Sarpong something or the tall man wasn’t very smart.
“Come and take the kola,” said Wofa Sarpong, as if he were talking to one of his children.
The chickens were still roaming.
The man went into his hut and returned with three deep baskets.
“Hey, you,” Wofa Sarpong said.
I didn’t flinch. I took my time and then regarded him. “Hassana.”
“Come and take the kola.”
I took a basket, filling it with pods of kola from the cart. From the corner of my eye, I saw Wofa Sarpong chasing after the rooster...
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