Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

are cunning. They will forgive.”
    Fiifi stopped talking and Quey watched as his uncle’s youngest daughter, a girl of only two, played in the yard. After a while, a house girl came by with a snack of groundnuts and bananas. She approached Fiifi first, but he stopped her. With a level voice and leveled gaze, he said, “You must serve my son first.”
    The woman did as she was told, bowing before Quey, and reaching out with her right hand. After they had both received their fill, the girl left while Quey watched the measured sway of her ample hips.
    “Why do you always say that?” Quey asked once he was sure she had gone.
    “Why do I say what?”
    “That I’m your son.” Quey looked down, spoke so softly that he hoped the ground would swallow his sound. “You never claimed me before.”
    Fiifi split the shell of a groundnut with his teeth, separating it from the nut itself and spitting it onto the ground before them. He looked toward the thin dirt road that led away from his compound and toward the village square. He looked as though he were expecting someone.
    “You were in England too long, Quey. Maybe you have forgotten that here, mothers, sisters, and their sons are most important. If you are chief, your sister’s son is your successor because your sister was born of your mother but your wife was not. Your sister’s son is more important to you than even your own son. But, Quey, your mother is not my sister. She is not the daughter of my mother, and when she married a white man from the Castle, I began to lose her, and because my mother had always hated her, I began to hate her too.
    “And this hate was good, at first. It made me work harder. I would think about her and all of the white people in the Castle, and I would say, My people here in this village, we will be stronger than the white men. We will be richer too. And when Badu became too greedy and too fat to fight, I began to fight for him, and even then I hated your mother and your father. And I hated my own mother and I hated my own father too for the kind of people I knew that they were. I suppose I even began to hate myself.
    “The last time your mother came to this village I was fifteen years old. It was for my father’s funeral, and after Effia had gone, Baaba told me that because she was not truly my sister, I owed her nothing. And for many years I believed that, but I am an old man now, wiser, but weaker. In my youth, no man could have touched me with his machete, but now…” Fiifi’s voice trailed off as he gestured to his wound. He cleared his throat and continued. “Soon, all that I have helped to build in this village will no longer belong to me. I have sons but I have no sisters, and so all that I have helped to build will blow away like dust in a breeze.
    “I am the one who told your governor to give you this job, Quey, because you are the person I am supposed to leave all of this to. I loved Effia as a sister once, so even though you are not of my mother, you are the closest thing to a firstborn nephew that I have. I will give you all that I have. I will make up for my mother’s wrongdoings. Tomorrow night, you will marry Nana Yaa, so that even if the Asante king and all of his men come knocking on my door, they cannot deny you. They cannot kill you or anyone in this village, because it is now your village as it was once your mother’s. I will make sure you become a very powerful man, so that even after the white men have all gone from this Gold Coast—and believe me, they will go—you will still matter long after the Castle walls have crumbled.”
    Fiifi began to pack a pipe. He blew out of it until white smoke formed little roofs above the pipe’s bowl. The rainy season was coming and soon the air would start to thicken, and the people of the Gold Coast would have to relearn how to move in a climate that was always hot and wet, as though it intended to cook its inhabitants for dinner.
    This was how they lived there, in the