CHAPTER ONE
In our dreams, our father sits in a room where colour doesn’t live. Our mother suckles her baby, but both their limbs are frozen as if forgotten by time. Fire burns up our village, smoke chokes our throats, flames sear our skin. We run. Our hands clasp each other’s with the hold of glue. Her fingers are my fingers; my fingers are hers. Ours is a grip that started in the womb, before our first separation. We have lost home before, but that didn’t break us. Now, we are losing home again, but we still have each other. We run. Chased by hooves and cries and winged men. One of us trips. Sweat lubricates the thin film between our hands. Her fingers slide down mine. We were wrong. This time, it feels final. She slips away from me.
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 savannah, 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 flavour. 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 gnarled-looking shells. We walked back on a path criss-crossed with ants every couple of steps we took. I could watch ants for days. The way they went about their work one at a time, and how if one of them got 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 dreamt 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.”
The days that followed were different. The weight of sadness lifted, 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.