by Yaba Badoe
Gran-pa built his house before I was born. Even so, when I tumbled into the world, he made space for me. I sleep on a raffia mat behind an ancient sofa his father bought at the time of Ghana’s independence. Our Freedom Day sofa is still wrapped in plastic, a sign that only the most important people who come to the house are allowed to place their backsides on it. As usual, Milo leaped on Old Freedom and like a true man about town, stretched out, laying his head on one of Gran-ma’s precious pink cushions.
Under cover of dusk, I sat on my sleeping mat and rubbing the nsoromma tattoo on my wrist, opened up to my sister-friend’s summons: ‘What is it, Little Linet?’
I sensed her agitation as soon as she burrowed into my mind. She’d been crying. Zula, already with her at our sanctuary in the forest, was doing everything in her power to calm her. Even so, a sob escaped.
‘Hush,’ Zula said. ‘There’s no need for this.’
Linet snuffled and all I could feel and hear as I joined them was the violent heaving of her chest, like a crushed pair of bellows unable to inhale air. She made an effort to control herself – an attempt shredded by tears.
‘What is it, Little Linet?’ I asked. ‘Has Bracken been bitten by a snake? Is there a problem at the lake?’
We were in shadow, able to see without being seen at the river goddess’ shrine. Trees pared of fruit in star time still flourished here. There were no dangling bats visible, no sign of the slither and hiss of catastrophe I’d sensed the day before when I’d spoken on the phone to Gran-pa in Accra. After he’d consulted with our teachers, he confirmed what Zula had said. Bats were an omen that skin-walkers were on the prowl and could attack us anywhere, at any time. They were coming.
A cool breeze whispered through the leaves of the hardwood trees that formed the outer rim of the glade. Sap still surged under bark, heartwood strengthened, stretching, while underground, tangled roots untangling signalled to their neighbours. I kindled a fire with a spark from my finger to silence the hum of mosquitoes.
‘Bracken’s fine,’ Linet replied. ‘I’m not worried about her, but my grandmother. She’s going to die.’
She sobbed, lip-swollen-heart-breaking sobs. ‘And another thing – I discovered today that I drove my mother crazy when I was born. Nana says her hormones ran riot and she tried to drown me. If it hadn’t been for Bracken howling for Nana, I wouldn’t be here.’
She shuddered. Our minds merged and as the three of us became one, Linet’s tears trickled down my cheeks as well. I wiped them away. I’d often wondered how it was that although she lived in a brick house with a tiled roof in the country that had colonised mine, Linet was always under siege, beset by storms of emotion that held her captive. Now I understood. It’s bad enough to have a mother who doesn’t want you, like mine. But to have one who tried to kill you was too much. Within seconds, all three of us arrived at a place beyond language in which a sequence of images unravelled.
What we saw was: Nana Merrimore washing Linet in a tub, Nana Merrimore cooking breakfast and afterwards asking what Linet had seen at the bottom of the lake. Threaded through the pictures like shadows on the sun were ghosts, one in particular. I peered, trying to make out a face. Next moment a mighty blow slammed my chest as if someone had hit me with a fufu pestle.
‘If there’s one thing I want you to remember, it’s that your mother wasn’t herself when she tried to harm you,’ I heard Nana Merrimore say. Then: ‘No, Linet, I’m not going to die.’
The old woman held and caressed my sister-friend, soothing her through words and touch. But no matter what Nana Merrimore had said, Zula and I detected the tear in Linet’s heart, and felt the agony of it.
‘What should we do?’ whispered Zula.
‘Only a fool knows exactly what to do in a crisis,’ Okomfo Gran-pa would say.
‘Don’t know,’ I replied.
‘Take your time, Adoma.’ Gran-pa again. ‘Think before you jump into a river strong enough to sweep an elephant away.’ Gran-pa, the shrewdest man in our village, the head of our family business, the shrine to the goddess that protects us and other villages upstream.
I took note of his advice as another thought came to me: a hunch accompanied by an image of a deep, dark well of water. I looked down the well and called Linet’s name. An echo rebounded, boomeranging in a jangle of noise that petered out in a whimper. Little Linet is lonely and feels lost, I decided.
What would Gran-pa do to ease her pain? What words would he use to take the hurt away? Gran-pa’s wisdom rustled through my mind, awakening my own, while Zula, thinking along the same lines, recalled her grandmother’s good sense.
‘Grandma says that what a baby chick sees in the nest it repeats when it grows up. Nana Merrimore is your nest, Linet. Your grandmother, not your mother. Even when you’ve learned to fly, Nana will be in you and no one living or dead can take her away.’
Zula spoke and words tripped off my tongue into our circle: ‘Linet, whenever you need us, we’re with you. We’re lucky because we’re never going to be alone, us three.’
Huddled in a ball, Linet wiped her nose on a knee. ‘That’s easy to say, but the truth is I feel more cursed than lucky, and I don’t ever want to leave my nest.’
‘I’ve got your back, my sister,’ I replied, remembering days when I’m like that: in a melancholy mood. Days when my mother’s home, and after scolding me, unleashes furious prayers over me. Days when Gran-pa and my mother argue, when she condemns what we do at the shrine as ju-ju and then Gran-pa says: ‘As for you and your Holy, Holy religion, have you ever wondered how the white man made us follow him? How he made us believe in his ways and in so doing turned some of us into skin-walkers as well?’
I remembered days when everything tastes sad, days during the rainy season, when my spirit, bitten by mosquitoes, is sick with fever.
Under the circumstances, all we could do, Zula and I, was to hold Linet close. We did. We held her, warmed her and then watched as the wound she was nursing sprouted into a garland of thorns that circled her heart.
‘One day soon, my nana’s going to die,’ said Linet. ‘When she goes, I’ll be alone. And they’ll put me in a home somewhere.’
‘Don’t you have relatives you can go to?’ asked Zula.
‘Nana Merrimore is all I’ve got in the world.’
‘Except for us,’ I stressed, recalling the many moments we’d shared together: the hours we’d spent perfecting the delicate skill of listening before speaking, the knack of observing, the art of intuition and herb-lore.
And Linet? Though the lake flowed through her, it appeared to haunt her. The image of the well rose in my mind once again and resonated in Zula, for after I’d dipped a finger in its water, she did too. It chilled us to the bone, this place of loneliness in our sister.
I tried to imagine what it must be like to have no relatives to speak of. Not to know where your mother was, the name of your father. Though I lived with my grandparents because my mother didn’t have time for me, I knew where she was and the name of the man, who, having planted his seed in her womb, wanted nothing more to do with me. According to Okomfo Gran-pa, after my birth my mother had wanted a fresh start and so he and Gran-ma had taken me in. Yet I had cocoa sacks of aunts and uncles and cousins; so many, in fact, that whenever I started counting them, before I could finish, another cousin had been born and I’d have more to add to my list.
‘But isn’t Nana Merrimore healthy?’ asked Zula.
Linet nodded.
‘If she’s healthy,’ Zula went on, ‘she has every chance of living to a great age.’
Linet sighed, then said quickly before she could hold back her words: ‘I saw the ghost of Hester Merrimore this morning. She gave me this.’
Linet opened her hand to reveal a small, purple stone with a faint sparkle of amethyst.
‘This is a truth-teller’s stone,’ said Zula, touching it. ‘It will protect you. Wear it as a talisman,’ she instructed, closing Linet’s hand.
Linet tight
ened her grip. ‘In her heart of hearts, Nana believes that when a Linet-girl sees Hester’s ghost the oldest Merrimore alive doesn’t have much longer to live. I can’t change what she believes, so the odds are…’ She moaned, pressing her palms to her eyes to stop her tears.
I held her: ‘No one knows what’s going to happen tomorrow,’ I said. ‘Up one day, down the next. Anyway, what about Lance?’
‘Seek him out,’ Zula pressed. ‘Befriend him.’
Linet wasn’t so sure: ‘Who will take my side when Nana’s gone?’
‘We will,’ said Zula and I.
‘But,’ I added, ‘your grandmother’s still alive and might be for a long time.’
‘Adoma!’
Gran-ma. Gran-ma called a second time, and this time her anger slashed the silky cocoon of our circle.
Linet trembled. Her shiver, rubbing against me, reminded me of the frightened, lonely child I become after one of my mother’s tirades, a child with the knowledge that not all mothers are good because some are dangerous and wage war on their children. I’m sure Zula sensed it too, for what I remember is that Zula blinked and from a pearly grey eye a teardrop fell.
8
Adoma
‘Adoma! Adoma! Where are you? Ha! Asleep again!’ Gran-ma squeezed her lips, kissing her teeth in disgust. ‘I’ve never met a girl who sleeps as much as you do! Are you feverish?’
I said goodbye to my sisters and turned as if protesting at Gran-ma’s intrusion.
She continued shaking me: ‘You’ll soon be a woman, my girl. You won’t be able to sleep as much then!’
I yawned to extinguish a smile. And then like someone clinging to sleep, I pulled away from Gran-ma.
‘Gallivant, that’s all you do,’ she grumbled. ‘You’re either playing football with Kofi or roaming the streets like a stray goat.’
Gran-ma continued whipping me with her tongue. She assumed I’d fallen asleep on my mat, a mistake I chose not to correct. That she claimed I was idle suited both of us. I could slip away whenever I pleased. Besides, as a diviner, who placed pebbles and water from our sacred river in a pot to peep into the future of her clients, if Gran-ma pretended she didn’t know what I was up to, she couldn’t be accused of being a follower of the craft. Old women can be lynched in seconds here, while a child of the sky, a warrior like me, can escape by running like the wind.
‘Adoma, get up! I’m not here to wait on you!’
Faking drowsiness, I rubbed my eyes and slowly got up from my mat. Too slowly as it turned out, for by the time I was standing, Gran-ma’s attention had shifted to Milo.
‘Just look at that monkey creature of yours! Get off my sofa! If I see you on Old Freedom again, I swear on all the gods in Ashanti, I shall put you in my cooking pot. I shall butcher you and eat you, chop-chop!’
She shooed him away. He sprang into my arms chattering through bared teeth.
This chimp understands language, I tell you! He knows who to trust, who to fear and realises that as long as I’m around, no one this side of the equator, not even Gran-ma, would dare harm him. He knows this, because until he’s old enough to fend for himself, Milo is my responsibility. Milo also appreciates that due to her liking for ‘bush’ meat, Gran-ma could never be a true friend.
‘Shush,’ I said to soothe his chattering. ‘She’s only teasing. Aren’t you, Gran-ma?’
A short, round ball of a woman, skin the colour of nutmeg, eyes black as coal, Gran-ma winked at Milo.
‘If you stay off Old Freedom,’ she said, ‘you’re safe from my pot. You understand?’
Milo buried his face in my shoulder.
‘Well?’ said Gran-ma. ‘I’m waiting for an answer.’
I nodded on Milo’s behalf.
‘Good,’ Gran-ma said. ‘We now understand each other better than husband and wife. Adoma, come and eat.’
*
Two days later, when Gran-pa returned before daybreak on a night bus from Accra, having already told him about the colony of fruit bats that had invaded the goddess’ shrine in star time, I shared an incident that pestered me.
‘Last night, Gran-pa, between waking and sleeping, I changed.’
He looked at me. Still in his travelling clothes: khaki-khaki shirt and trousers, he was eating a crust of bread for breakfast.
‘I changed,’ I repeated. ‘I was not as you see me here, Gran-pa, but newly made into a queen of the forest at our shrine.’
He beckoned and then touched the tattoo on my wrist. Straight away he saw what I’d seen and sensed what I’d felt. On padded paws I’d slunk through undergrowth and jumped up a tree. Claws gripped bark before muscles sinuous as silk draped on a branch. A cool breeze whispered through the leaves around me. Behind me, the silhouette of forest foliage loomed, looping in wolf-light, while quiet as a ghost, I watched with eyes that weren’t mine and listened, ears pricked.
‘I was a stranger even to myself, Gran-pa, yet I knew it was me, because the trees in the forest: leaves, roots, bark, heartwood, sapwood – everything – whispered my name.’
Gran-pa nodded, moving quickly, urgently. ‘Something’s happening, Adoma, and we need to be there.’
Since time was of the essence, Gran-pa decided that instead of walking to our sanctuary, which would take an hour and a half at least, we should travel on his scooter. We set off with me sitting behind him, Milo swaddled like a baby on my back.
My grandfather held the firm belief that early morning is the best time to begin a journey. The sun was already up, the first blush of its light soft and gentle before the harsh sting of high noon. The air was cool as we careered out of the village down a dirt track pitted with mounds and stones. Gran-pa knew the path well, and by twisting and turning his motor, avoided damaging its tyres. We sped along, Gran-pa greeting farmers and labourers on their way to work, while I waved at women cooking by the roadside, my age mates ambling to school.
Once our village was behind us, farm plots gave way to the lush green vegetation of ancient palms laden with flowering creepers. On we rode, following meandering paths through neighbouring villages and farms, until we approached the edge of the forest – a protected area for animals, birds and trees.
Gran-pa brought his scooter to a halt and dismounted. I followed him. I put Milo down and slung a rucksack on my back. It contained, among other items, water and a midday snack of boiled yam and fish. I trotted beside Gran-pa, while Milo scampered ahead into the forest where he’d been discovered beneath the body of his dead mother.
‘Not so long ago,’ Gran-pa said, ‘all of this was deep forest. A forest so dark you had to carry a lamp to find your way through it. They cut the trees to build the village back there. First came the village, then villagers slashed through virgin forest to grow cocoa. And before long, they destroyed more trees to make charcoal for their women’s cooking pots.’ He tut-tutted, shaking his head. ‘Now they wonder why the rains don’t come with the same vigour as before. They wonder why the land is drying up and the air is dusty.’
Gran-pa strode into the undergrowth, along a path I’d memorised when he first brought me here, years before. He followed the route I take when I attend to the river goddess’ shrine, when I dance for her and bring food to her. Milo raced ahead, and when we passed a giant silk cotton tree surrounded by an orchard of wild bananas, he clambered up a trunk and swung from tree to tree whooping with joy. Further on, a grove of towering mahoganies was marked with red paint – a sign that someone intended to cut them down illegally.
‘Open my bag, Adoma.’
I did as I was told and removed a plastic bottle of paint remover and two sponges from the rucksack. I handed the bottle and a sponge to Gran-pa and with the other copied what he was doing: wetting the sponge and swabbing off the paint first from one tree, then a second, until one after the other the entire grove was clean of paint. This is what we did every time we came to the forest – saved as many trees as we could from destruction. It was, after all, a protected area, but from our experience of
protecting trees from harm, I understood that in Ghana rules didn’t apply to everyone.
The job done, I followed Gran-pa’s example and tramped from tree to tree, stroking the bark of the first, crouching at the gigantic roots of another. As he touched and caressed the huge plants, so did I; and in the same way that he did, I sensed them. Even more so, when Gran-pa began chatting as if to old friends:
‘Who knows if this will do any good,’ he said to a mahogany so tall that the simple act of stretching my neck to glimpse its crown made me dizzy.
‘It may fool our enemies for a week or so,’ Gran-pa went on. ‘Maybe a fortnight, if we’re lucky. But in the end they’ll put their mark on you again and cut you down. Those devils have no respect for a tree as venerable as you, comrade.’
As Gran-pa patted its trunk, and proceeded to the next, I did the same. I didn’t talk to trees though; I simply touched them, alert to the foraging of their roots, the hiss and whisper of leaves, as one tree gestured to another. As I listened, a colony of blood-orange glider butterflies drifted from the canopy and flitted about my face.
‘Between breath and feather, scales and wings,’ I murmured, ‘talk to me, friends, tell me what you’ve seen.’
A few settled on my head, while others dusted my eyelashes and cheeks with their paint, before landing on my arms and legs. The agitation of wings and whirl of antennae spoke even louder than the trees. My heart leaped.
‘Gran-pa,’ I said. ‘We may be too late…’
I brushed the gliders away with a waft of wind from my hand. It carried them to where Milo rootled in the canopy. Suddenly he stopped. Still as a sloth, he cocked his head, uttered a bark, and scrambled to the safety of my arms.
‘Someone’s coming, Gran-pa,’ I said. ‘Let’s hurry to the shrine.’
