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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Children's Books
- Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
A teen feminist epic of love, courage and determination, as twin sisters try to find each other again in 19th-century West Africa and Brazil'Uplifting… sizzles with sister-love and magic. What an incredible story-teller!' Yaba Badoe, author of A Jigsaw of Fire and StarsTwin sisters Hassana and Husseina are torn apart after a brutal raid on their village. This tragedy will set them on a voyage to unfamiliar cities and cultures where they will forge new families, ward off dangers and begin to truly know themselves.As the twins pursue separate paths in Brazil and the Gold Coast of West Africa, they remain connected through their shared dreams. But will they ever manage to find each other again?A rich, sweeping historical adventure, The Deep Blue Between is a moving story of the unbreakable bonds of sisterhood
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For Tumi and Tami
CONTENTS
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 9caravan 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 10worked 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 11dipped 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 12had 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.
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 13down as he waited for Wofa Sarpong to organize us. The man went round 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 sides.
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 14up 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.
I 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 grey 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 15wanted, 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 on to 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 swish 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 travelled, 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 16myself 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 smelt 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 grey 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, marvelling 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. 17
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. He lunged after it and fell flat. I couldn’t help it. I chortled.
He eventually caught the rooster and hen and put them in the cart with the cloth, farm tools and a bag of salt.
“You still have the chicks,” said Wofa Sarpong. “They will grow and give you eggs. As for this one… who will buy a hard-headed girl like this?”
“The white men in the Volta still take all kinds,” said Dogo. “There is no business in the Gold Coast any more. I go east now.”
“She almost let the inspector have me. Make sure the obroni takes her far far. I’ll see you soon.”
I hadn’t wanted to learn Wofa Sarpong’s language, but without even trying I could understand almost everything he said.
Wofa Sarpong climbed up into his cart and left me with Dogo, at whose feet the motherless chicks were now gathered and shivering.
Evening descended quickly, covering everything in grey. 18
“Come and eat,” Dogo said in Hausa, one of the languages that I grew up speaking. “Tomorrow, you meet your new master.”
Knowing that he could speak Hausa made me relax enough to sit down and eat the bowl of boiled beans he offered. He laid out a mat for me in the hut and spread out one outside for himself.
That night, my eyelids wouldn’t close shut. Every rustle, every bird cry, every whisper of wind kept me awake. I must have fallen asleep towards the beginning of morning.
“I’ll bathe first and then you’ll go next,” he said, sticking his head in the doorway, and waking me up.
Dogo wasn’t a very smart man. No wonder Wofa Sarpong treated him as he had. Even though the night terrified me, I could easily have fled into its darkness. Now, he was leaving me on my own so he could bathe. I decided that he’d looked at me and seen a small powerless girl. I watched through the door and when he was out of sight, I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and stole some of the beans that were sitting in the corner of his hut and tied them in a knot at the top of my cloth. Wofa Sarpong had left Dogo only three farm tools, including a small machete, which I took.
Dogo hummed and splashed water on his body, and I slid out of the hut in the opposite direction, doing what Aminah and I should have done together a long time ago. On the tip of my toes, I stepped only where I could find wet soil. I walked fast and quietly, remaining only on paths where I saw footprints, because that would lead me 19to people and not into a leopard’s den. I walked and my stomach began to grumble. The thought of how I would prepare the beans hadn’t fully formed when I’d taken them, and now raw beans weren’t going to assuage my hunger. I kept going. I wanted to run as far away from Dogo as I could, then start asking for this place with blue water where Husseina had ended up.
I followed the trail and arrived at a part of the forest where palm trees had clumped together. They didn’t have the mismatched look of the rest of the forest. There had to be people around. I didn’t know if I could trust them, but I could trade them some beans or the machete for food and information and continue on my way. I pushed through the trees and came to an open space, not unlike Wofa Sarpong’s compound. Only, here, there were also huts made of white cloth, not unlike the cloth in Husseina’s dream. The similarity of it pocked the skin on my arms. I had come in with so much force that the people who lived there stopped and looked at me.
There were about five of them, all men, three of them paler than the white beans I’d stolen from Dogo. They looked just like people, with two arms and two legs, but their skin seemed to have no colour. Two men approached, one of them colourless. I couldn’t imagine what they would do to me, so I held up my machete and brandished it. It bought me some time. I could turn around and run back fast to Dogo and say I got lost or I could stay and try to fight them, but they outnumbered me. Or I could reason with them. 20
They kept their distance, and the colourless man, probably about as old as my father, crouched. He put his hands at his sides and waved me to him. I was well and truly stuck. I had nowhere else to go, so I dropped the machete and pinched my fingers together and brought them to my lips. If they could feed me, I would find the energy to outsmart them. The colourless man seemed to have understood me and barked out something to the other man he’d come with. He wore a hat that looked like the inspector’s at Wofa Sarpong’s. He came and took me by the hand, and I let him. His palms were soft and made me think of a gecko’s underbelly. Trust is a strange animal. I let the weight of my hands sink into his. I trusted him.
He took me to the front of a cloth hut and sat me on a mat. The hut was connected to the earth with strings and looked as if a small gust of wind could blow it over. A boy brought two calabashes—one with fingers of boiled green plantains, the other with water. I bit into the plantain, barely chewing before I swallowed. My colourless friend spoke, and a man who looked like me translated in Wofa Sarpong’s language.
“What do you call yourself?”
“Hassana,” I said, not even thinking that saying so could be used to return me to Dogo or Wofa Sarpong.
“Where are you going?”
What could I tell him? I didn’t have the word for the colour blue. I could just say the water.
The two men exchanged words, and the interpreter tried again. 21
“Where’s your family?”
I shook my head. I didn’t feel like talking. I looked at the plantain and returned to chewing. The plantain was mostly tasteless but with a slight sweetness that made me enjoy it.
All around the village, people had come out of their huts like ants before heavy rainfall. Women and children stared at me as if I had fallen from the sky. I decided to just eat my plantain. After that I’d thank them and get going. A woman brought me another bowl. In it was nkotomire stew, the green cocoyam leaf sauce that Wofa Sarpong’s wives often cooked. I only had half a finger of plantain left, so I broke it and dipped my fingers deep in the rich green sauce and slurped my fingers. I heard giggling. Children younger than me approached and were pointing at me and laughing. I bared my teeth at them and they screamed and ran to their mothers. I don’t know why I did that. I dug my fingers into the nkotomire and tasted the fresh palm oil that had been used to fry the sauce, the onions that had turned golden brown, the leafiness of the nkotomire and the sharp saltiness of the dried tilapia.
“She’s rude,” I heard one of the mothers say and suck her teeth.
Right then, I decided to bury in my chest the fact that I could understand them. I would play dumb and use that to get fed. When I understood where I was and where I needed to go, I would escape.
I licked my fingers clean of palm oil and stew and out of nowhere a loud round burp escaped from my throat. Suddenly it hit me: I had enjoyed the meal. Either the 22food was well flavoured, unlike Wofa Sarpong’s food, or I had begun to taste again. I stood up with the two calabashes. The colourless men had gathered by a wheel-like object that looked like the one on Wofa Sarpong’s cart. Everything was strange here—the houses, the colour of the people—but I grew brave. I went to the woman who had brought over the stew and palmed my right hand in my left and lowered my knee to the ground, to show her I was grateful.
“It’s all right,” said the woman, taking the calabashes and waving me away.
The older colourless man came back and parted the door to his cloth hut. He put his hands together and pressed them against his cheek and closed his eyes. Sleep, he was suggesting. The last thing I wanted to do was sleep, but I did as he said and went in and lowered myself on to the mat. I hadn’t taken my machete, I realized. Before I could protest, sleep fell on me and engulfed me with its warm dark fur.
We are at the waterhole, a gaggle of girls. She sits on the banks and dips her toes into the water. I duck into the water and come out, waving out to her at the shore. Come, I beckon. She shakes her shoulders up and down. Come, I insist. She refuses. We dance that way, until I wade to her and pull her into the water. At first her feet touch the pond’s bed, then I drag her in deeper. She falls and flails about, struggling to breathe. She is sucked into the water and disappears.
23Heavy shapes hovering over me shook me awake. I had been dreaming about Husseina, as often happened, but it wasn’t her dream. Experiencing her dreams took something I hadn’t yet put my finger on. I pulled myself out of my sleepy state and realized the face closest to mine was Dogo’s. I almost screamed. He covered my mouth, dragged me outside the hut.
“Why did you do that?” he said to me.
I looked around and tried to catch the eye of my friend. He was staring at Dogo. What had Dogo told them? Why had I given in to sleep? That was very stupid of me.
“You can’t run away just like that. You belong to me,” Dogo whispered.
Maybe if I accused him of some crime, of Dogo treating me the way Wofa Sarpong had my sister, sneaking into her room, these people would understand. I opened my eyes widely at Dogo. Then again, Wofa Sarpong had tried to say we were his family and not his slaves. There must be something wrong with being someone’s slave.
“No,” I began. “No, no, no.” I lifted my hands and covered my eyes, peeked through slits between my fingers.
“Let me take my daughter and go,” said Dogo.
“I am his slave,” I shouted in Wofa Sarpong’s language.
To my surprise, my colourless friend—not a thin man—darted across and grabbed Dogo by the throat, lifting him up in the process. Dogo tried to say something, his voice strangled in his throat. The colourless man was also shorter than Dogo and yet the tall man was being tossed about like the dolls Husseina and I used to play with. He let Dogo go. 24
“Pikin dey lie,” Dogo finally managed. He said it so many times it is forever etched in my mind. “She my pikin.” The child is lying, I would later understand. She is my child.
“Go!” the colourless man shouted, and rained other heavy words in his language on Dogo.
Dogo stared at me before turning and leaving. His face wasn’t angry, but marked with disbelief and sadness at what I’d just done. My heart felt like someone had wrung it. The wrong man was paying for the crime. It shouldn’t have been Dogo in the colourless man’s clasp—it should have been Wofa Sarpong. It should have been the men who had burnt my village down and killed half my family. But, I told myself, for associating with Wofa Sarpong, Dogo deserved to lose me.
I learnt that the man who had become my protector was called Richard Burtt. He gave me my own cloth hut and refused to let me have my machete back, but I knew he would strangle a man to save my life. From that day, everywhere he went, I followed. We ate together from the same plate, which I insisted on, because I didn’t want to be poisoned by the village people who looked at me suspiciously. Soon, I realized people in the village also needed Richard—his presence kept them safe—so they generally left me alone.
Every night, I went to sleep in my cloth hut—tent, Richard corrected me—I willed Husseina’s dream to return. I wanted to close my eyes and get lost in the world of her dreams. I would shut my eyes tight, clench my jaw, 25draw my knees into my chest and wait for sleep to come with its shrouding power. When it did eventually come, it would loosen my tight hug, and slow my breathing, lulling me into its warm embrace, but the dreams that came weren’t her dreams—they were dreams that spoke of the past.
I would wake up, sometimes in the middle of the night, and go out of my tent. Every night, there was a different person guarding the village. Never one of Richard’s people. Always people with the same skin as me. Richard told me that people with my skin were called “black people” and the people with colourless skin were called “white people”. I didn’t agree, since my skin was more red than black, and the people in this part of Kintampo were a deep brown. As for the ones we called white, I thought they were pink. When I told him, he laughed.
I was learning things from Richard that I was sure would make it easier to find Husseina. Richard had been in what he called “the Gold Coast” to study plants to find out what could be used to treat sicknesses. He was going to put everything he found in a book, and when I followed him around, I would hold a box with compartments in which he would throw samples of leaves. I learnt the names in Twi of plants and names Richard said were scientific. Names in English, in his language. He helped me plant my beans, which, in just a few days, sprouted into seedlings. I felt as if I had given birth to life. He’d left his wife and two daughters in a land called Great Britain to do service for his country. It was a noble thing he was doing, to willingly be separated 26from his family. I hadn’t gone away from Aminah in the same way—I just had to find Husseina.
During afternoon sleep, a time when the whole compound went silent, I often stayed up, looking at the line that formed from the coming together of the two pieces of cloth that made my tent, or I would go outside and look at my bean plants. Then, I would memorize everything I’d learnt, repeating words so they would roll off my tongue as if I’d been born with them.
“It’s not right,” a woman said to me, one such afternoon, as I was touching the first pod that had grown on my plant. She was called Ma’Adjoa and had fed me on my first day there.
“You are a girl; he’s a man. You’re leaving yourself exposed for bad things to happen. Come and stay with me.”
The little ones often sang that Ma’Adjoa had eaten the children in her womb. I was scared that what they said was true, but I felt for her. It didn’t feel right for one person to be condemned by the whole village, so to thank her, I ate lunch with her and dinner with Richard. But I still slept in my tent.
About three full moons since being adopted by Richard, I was sitting outside the tent. Richard had scribbled letters in the sand. He took the stick he used when he went into the forest to search for plants and pointed at the first letter, C.
“K,” I sounded.
To the next, I said, “Ah”, and finally, “T.”
“Put it together,” said Richard. 27
“Cat.”
He wrote another word. I struggled with it, but I could read “dog” and “ant”.
Richard dropped his cane and clapped loudly, grabbed me into the air and said, “Clever girl!”
I felt so proud of myself. And yet I didn’t have any idea of what I’d read.
“We have to get you books from Accra,” he said. “I’ll tell the next chap who comes up.”
I liked learning Richard’s English. Porters brought over the books Richard had ordered for me. The books were made of a very fragile kind of cloth. The first time I touched one of them, I pulled too hard and it tore.
“Treat it like an egg,” said Richard.
I listened to him and grew protective of the books, like a mother hen, to the point that when the other village children came and tried to touch the books, I hit their fingers with Richard’s cane. If I was not delicate, how much more so would these illiterate children be? Richard called me “the prefect of books”.
Kwasidas, Sundays, became my favourite days. There was another white man we called Osofopapa, and who Richard called a priest, who went around in the mornings ringing an upside-down metal cup to get the children and the adults to join in with them. The first time I attended, I went because Richard said I would learn about a God who is good.
“Who is your God?” I asked him. 28
“The creator of all life. He is the reason we have breath, why there are animals and plants and rivers and forests. He’s here and there and everywhere.”
His God and Otienu seemed similar. I wanted to ask Otienu a lot of questions about why he let such bad things happen to my family, but I was sure we left Otienu behind in Botu, and that’s where he differed with Richard’s God—he wasn’t here and there and everywhere. I wanted to know if this good God could answer my questions.
