Homegoing: List 2

Ness’s mother, Esi, had been a solemn, solid woman who was never known to tell a happy story.

He chewed the chaffy end of a wheat stalk and spit.

Margaret looked at Ness, but Ness got the feeling that she was really looking through her, or rather, that she was looking five minutes into Ness’s past, trying to discern whether or not the conversation Ness had just had with TimTam meant that the man was interested in her.

While there may have been a piece of paper declaring that she belonged to Tom Allan Stockham, there was no such paper shackling her to the whims of her fellow slaves.

Margaret rushed her into the back room, and left in search of field clothes, and Ness stood in the center of that room, running her hands along her body, reveling in her ugly nakedness.

Everyone knew her as the woman who had snubbed TimTam, and the ladies, angry when they thought that she was the object of his desire and even angrier when they realized she didn’t want to be that object, treated her as though she were little more than a strong wind, an annoyance that you could still push through.

At night, she would return to her quarters, beat out her pallet until dust billowed from it, wrapping around her like a hug.

It was on a night like this, just when she had snapped her pallet into the air, that the pounding started, fists beating against the door of the women’s cabin in a steady, urgent rhythm.

Pinky’s hand brushed Ness’s shoulder, and she opened her eyes to see the girl staring at her, round moon eyes imploring.

Tom Jr., who had never been much for gallantry, decided to try it just then for his sister’s sake. "Well, apologize to Mary!” he said to Pinky.

The events of the day had planted a little dual seed of respect and pity for Ness that they watered with deference of their own.

Sam refuses to learn English. Each night, in retribution for his still-black tongue, the Devil sends him back to their marriage bed with lashes that are reopened as soon as they heal.

He picks her up gingerly and places her on their pallet.

It is the first night that Sam sleeps in the cot with her, and in the morning, when she wakes to fresh pain and festered sores, she finds him sitting at her feet, peering at her face with his big, tired eyes.

Ness was one of the few slaves that he had ever publicly berated, and she knew that she had embarrassed him, what with his own child lying in the dirt while Pinky stood silent and unscathed.

Ness was one of the few slaves that he had ever publicly berated, and she knew that she had embarrassed him, what with his own child lying in the dirt while Pinky stood silent and unscathed.

She felt like she sometimes felt at night, in the dark in high mosquito season, when she could feel the presence of something ominous but could not see the danger itself.

An unheard-of snow had blanketed the plantations for a full week, threatening the crops, angering the landowners, making the slaves’ hands idle.

Without thinking, she began singing a little Twi tune her mother used to sing sorrowfully on nights when the work of slavery was particularly grueling, when she had been beaten for supposed insolence or laziness or failure.

James knew the British had been inciting tribal wars for years, knowing that whatever captives were taken from these wars would be sold to them for trade.

Who would protect them if the Asantes came to meet them, to finally exact revenge for Abeeku Badu and Fiifi’s grievances toward them?

Her back was perpetually hunched forward, and she walked with a cane made out of a rich black wood, carved to look like a snake was coiled around it.

British soldiers had been stationed intermittently in the towns and villages surrounding Cape Coast.

Jo jumped off the boat and looked behind him at the beautiful Chesapeake Bay, at the large, imposing ships that lined the Fell’s Point shipyards.

Jo only knew the South from the stories Ma Aku told him, same way he knew his mother and father, Ness and Sam. As stories and nothing more. He didn’t miss what he didn’t know, what he couldn’t feel in his hands or his heart. Baltimore was tangible.

Jo had been working with the same tools since he first started caulking.

He loved the sound those two tools made together when he laid the oakum into the seams, tapping the iron gently to coerce the oakum to stay, the seam to fill, the boat to keep from leaking.

“Taking away your name is the first step,” he’d said somberly. So somberly that Jo hadn’t felt it wise to ask what he was thinking—the first step to what?

Poot always said that Baltimore was a great city to be a black man in. There were black porters and teachers, preachers and hucksters. A free man didn’t have to be a servant or a coach driver. He could make something with his own hands. He could fix something, sell something.

It was there to tell him that fall had come to Baltimore and that he would have to spend it alone, taking care of his ailing Ma and his seven children without his Anna.

He came in one blustery December day and sat down in his usual spot, running his hand over the smooth wood of the bar.

She walked until the tough skin of her soles started to burn, and then she stopped for a moment, taking solace under the shade of a palm tree.

The man was dark and sinewy, his Twi broken or rusty, she couldn’t tell which.

Some were so desperate they even went to the dreaded North, crossing the Volta in search of unclaimed land, land that hadn’t forsaken them.

The villagers were not eating. They said it was an act of penance but knew it was their only choice.

He said the Akuapem people in the Eastern Region were already reaping the benefits of the new plant, selling it to the white men overseas at a rate that was reminiscent of the old trade.

He slept in Abena’s hut that night, as brazenly and openly as if they had been married for forty years or more, and this gave Abena hope that soon they would be.

Behind him, being led by rope, were four fat and obstinate goats, bleating as though they could smell the iron of the slaughter knife.

What she wanted was for Ohene Nyarko to shout his love for her from the rooftops. To say, now that the whole village has been fed and feted, I will marry you. And not tomorrow, but today. This very day. This celebration will be for us.

He had made all of the piles, and in the afternoon, the head of each family would come to collect them, spread them onto their own small plots of land, and wait for the strange new trees to grow and flourish so that soon the village would be restored to what it once was, or surpass it.