King Peggy Read online

  Copyright © 2012 by Peggielene Bartels and Eleanor Herman

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Insert photographs copyright © 2012 by Sarah Preston

  Cartography by Mapping Specialists

  Cover design by John Fontana

  Cover photograph © Deborah Feingold

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bartels, Peggielene

  King Peggy : An American secretary, her royal destiny, and the inspiring story of how she changed an African village / Peggielene Bartels and Eleanor Herman. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Bartels, Peggielene, 1953—Travel—Ghana—Otuam. 2. Ghana—Kings and rulers—Biography. 3. Americans—Ghana—Biography. 4. Ghana—Social life and customs—21st century. 5. Secretaries— Washington (D.C.)—Biography. I. Herman, Eleanor, 1960 — II. Title.

  DT512.44.B36A3 2011

  966.7—dc23

  [B]

  2011019544

  eISBN: 978-0-385-53433-8

  v3.1

  To my mother, Madam Mary E. Vormoah, who was my best friend and made me the woman I am today.

  — PB

  To the people of Otuam, and all the Otuams around the world, for their hope and joy in the face of poverty.

  — EH

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map of King Peggy’s Village of Otuam, Ghana

  Prologue

  Part I: Washington, D.C., August—September 2008

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part II: Ghana, September 2008

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part III: Washington, D.C., October 2008 —September 2009

  Chapter 11

  Part IV: Ghana, September—November 2009

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part V: Washington, D.C., November 2009—September 2010

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Part VI: Ghana, September—October 2010

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Epilogue

  Authors’ Note

  Acknowledgments

  Illustrations

  About the Authors

  Other Books by This Author

  Prologue

  In the dream Peggy was back in Kumasi, a child again, walking home from school in her sky blue uniform with the round white collar. Usually the path was dusty in the dry season, pocked with puddles in the rainy season, but now it was smooth as marble; her black sandals glided over it and her feet remained clean.

  The sky was a bright turquoise vault above her head, so beautiful it broke the heart, and the warm golden sun on her shoulders felt like a loving embrace. Just as she had every school day when she lived in Kumasi, in the dream she walked behind the king’s palace, a rambling brick structure painted blue and white and built around a large courtyard where royal festivities were held. The Ashanti king of Kumasi, known as the Asantehene, was a very important leader with millions of subjects, and he was rich beyond measure because he owned some of the biggest gold mines in the world. All day at his palace, important visitors were coming and going—tribal priests, elders, government ministers, ambassadors, chairmen of important companies, and humble people asking him for justice.

  She stood outside the rear of the palace and looked at it, wondering what was going on in there. But there was nothing for her, a skinny little girl, in a king’s palace. And so she glided down the marble path to her home.

  Because Peggy had the dream so many times she knew it must be a message from the spirit world. Like many Africans, Peggy understood that dreams meant something. They were not just random thoughts, fears, or hopes, or something from dinner irritating your intestines. Sometimes a dream was a message from God or Jesus, or from your ancestors, or even from the better part of yourself talking to the stupid part of yourself. Dreams were like encoded letters from the spirit world that must be carefully decoded and interpreted. They guided you in your choices, warned you of deception and accidents, or showed you the future.

  “What does the dream mean, Mother?” Peggy asked when she called her mother in Ghana.

  Mother thought about it a long while. “It’s been thirty years since you walked behind that palace to go to school in Kumasi,” Mother said. “Perhaps it’s just a memory.”

  “But why would I have it so often, thirty years later?” Peggy insisted. “Here I am living in the United States all this time; there’s nothing to remind me of the king’s palace in Kumasi. The dream has to mean something.”

  A moment of silence dangled in the transatlantic air. Peggy could picture Mother’s long smooth face and shining dark eyes as she considered the question. Finally, she said, “Pray for God and the ancestors to show you what the dream means, Peggy. Perhaps, in time, they will.”

  Mother was right. God and the ancestors would show Peggy the meaning of the dream in their own time, but it would be long after Mother had joined them.

  Part I

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  August—September 2008

  1

  Is the king dead? Peggielene Bartels wondered as she stood in the small mail room off the lobby, rubbing her thumbs across the front of the envelope, the ugly red stamp—UNDELIVERABLE—splayed across the blue ink of the address carefully penned in her own hand. For the third time a letter to her uncle Joseph had boomeranged back from Ghana. Another resident jostled her apologetically as he took out his little silver key and opened his mailbox, but Peggy just kept staring at the letter.

  Uncle Joseph was her mother’s brother, and for twenty-five years he had been king of Otuam, a community of seven thousand souls where Peggy’s family had originated hundreds of years earlier. Periodically, when she had returned to Ghana to visit her mother, the two of them would drive to Otuam to see Uncle Joseph, known there by his royal title Nana Amuah Afenyi V.

  The king of Otuam was a tall man with heavy-lidded eyes, the lower lids revealing a great deal of white below the iris. He had been director of all the prisons in Accra, Ghana’s capital. In 1983 at the age of sixty-seven, he had retired and, upon the unexpected death of his sixty-three-year-old cousin, Nana Amuah Afenyi IV, was chosen the new king.

  Peggy remembered Uncle Joseph as a gentle, smiling man who never raised his voice. A man always ready to forgive. A man everybody liked. Sometimes Peggy wondered how such a man could be a king when kings were supposed to be tough and strong. If she had been in his position, she wasn’t sure she would have been so kind. She wouldn’t have cared if some people disliked her as long as she was a good king, punishing evildoers who took advantage of the weak.

  The last time she had seen Uncle Joseph was at her mother’s funeral in 1997. He had arrived at her mother’s home in Takoradi with a group of his elders, a kindness that even in her overwhelming grief Peggy had appreciated. For years she had regularly sent her mother money, and once her mother was in a better place where no money was needed, Peggy decided to s
end the money to her uncle out of respect. It was only one hundred dollars a month, but it went a long way in a Ghanaian town where many people lived on a dollar a day. And Peggy knew that even though Uncle Joseph was a king, he was not rich. His palace was falling down around his head, with a leaking roof and mildewed walls begging for spackling and fresh paint. And she worried that he might need medicine.

  He had been grateful for the money, and the two had kept in touch in the eleven years since her mother’s passing. Earlier that year—had it been January?—he had had a stroke and been hospitalized, but he had seemed to be recuperating. She had spoken to him on his cell phone now and then during his months-long stay in the hospital in Accra, and someone had picked up his mail for him at his post office box in Winneba, the city nearest to Otuam with mail service.

  But for the past three months, her letters had come bouncing back. Nor had he collected her Western Union wire transfers. She had tried calling Uncle Joseph on his cell phone, but it was disconnected. How old would he be now? Ninety? No, ninety-two.

  Truth be told, if he was dead she probably wouldn’t hear about it immediately. In Ghana it was considered terribly disrespectful to say The king is dying or The king is dead. When the king was very ill in the hospital people said, The king has gone to his village for a cure.

  If it didn’t look like the king was going to make it, his elders said, The king is still in the village taking care of himself.

  When they said, He’ll be in the village a long time. He won’t be coming back anytime soon, that’s when you knew he had died.

  But a king’s elders didn’t even say that right after the king died. They waited for weeks, even months after his death, before they said he wouldn’t be coming back anytime soon from the village.

  The funny thing was that at a king’s funeral, the embalmed body sitting stiffly on a royal chair, even then nobody talked about him as dead. People said, We hope the king is getting a good cure in the village, but we probably won’t see him for a good while.

  How had this strange custom started? Peggy wondered. Maybe kingship raised kings above mere mortals, rendering it disrespectful to talk about them as dead or dying like the rest of humanity, just as royalty wasn’t supposed to be seen eating and drinking in public or running off to the toilet. Perhaps it was because kings, even after death, were thought to still rule over their kingdoms from the Asamando, the place of good ancestors.

  Or maybe it was because the villagers, knowing the king was dead, would start to misbehave. Especially the men, she thought, because it was well known that men misbehaved a lot, drinking and fighting and beating their wives. So it was better if they didn’t know for sure where the king was, and whether he would be coming back to punish them for their bad behavior. This tradition kept misbehaving men in line, and in this world of misbehaving men anything that kept them in line was a good thing.

  Peggy roused herself from her reverie and walked to the elevator. The doors opened and she stepped inside, still staring at the letter. Well, she figured, if Uncle Joseph was in the village for good somebody would call her. She had dozens of close cousins in Ghana, and though none of them lived in Otuam they had an informal network of gossip and news that eventually reached everybody. Indeed, gossiping cousins seemed to be the liveliest form of communication throughout Africa.

  Stepping out on her floor, she walked down the long narrow corridor to her one-bedroom condo and unlocked the door. For years she had saved money for a down payment, for the chance to own property and have her slice of the American dream. She would never forget the enormous pride she felt at the settlement a year earlier when she realized she actually owned her own place. It was in an old building from about 1960 shaped like a giant block with hundreds of units and a laundry room in the basement. It wasn’t in Washington, D.C., but in the less expensive suburb of Silver Spring, just north of the Maryland line. Still, the condo was hers.

  The down payment, closing costs, renovations: Peggy knew before she made the deal that the costs would wipe her out. “Property values are rising rapidly,” the real estate agent had told her with a smooth smile. “Once you redo the kitchen and bathroom your unit will be worth more. Then you can refinance and get a load of cash back.”

  But as soon as she had bought the place and made the improvements real estate values plummeted. Almost immediately, Peggy owed more to the bank than the condo was worth. Then they raised her monthly condo fee by $150. Old buildings like hers, she was told, needed a lot of maintenance.

  Because she didn’t earn much working as a secretary at the Ghanaian embassy, for the past few years she had supplemented her income by working Saturdays and Sundays as a receptionist at a local nursing home. Working seven days a week also filled up the pockets of time that would otherwise have been empty.

  Periodically she asked someone to cover for her at the nursing home so she could sell Ghanaian art and handicrafts at weekend expos and church bazaars, which brought in much more money than her hourly wage. But as the U.S. economy began to tank, her African art customers became more careful in their spending. Sometimes she sat there all day and didn’t sell a single thing, and the booth space cost her hundreds of dollars. Soon she stopped going altogether.

  Peggy threw herself on her couch, still holding the stack of mail, looking at the empty space where her dining room table should have been. After all the expense of buying and renovating the condo, she had decided to build up a nest egg again before making any large purchases, and so the dining room set would have to wait. Oh well, she thought, I am an African. I’m not spoiled. I can sit on the floor and eat and be grateful for my food.

  But tonight she wasn’t hungry. It was too late to eat dinner—past ten. Her boss, Ambassador Kwame Bawuah-Edusei, had kept her late, typing letters and preparing his schedule for the following day. Peggy had worked at the Ghanaian embassy in Washington for twenty-nine years in a variety of administrative positions, but the two years in the ambassador’s office had been her favorite. She loved the busy excitement—meeting African heads of state and U.S. senators and planning glittering receptions.

  In Bawuah-Edusei’s office the people she dealt with were extremely polite, unlike some of the people she had come in contact with years earlier when she worked in the consular section. There, people had called her up and cussed her out when their visas weren’t ready, as if it had been her fault. But Peggy never let anyone disrespect her; she had yelled back at them, and in some cases hung up on them. “If you step on my toes,” she liked to say, “I will bite your leg.” She was transferred to the embassy’s administrative section.

  Growing up in Ghana, Peggy never imagined she would leave the country forever. She had been born to Joseph Ankomah Foster and Mary Vormoah in Cape Coast, a bustling city of eighty-three thousand. Her home name, or tribal name, was Amma, indicating that she had been born on a Saturday. For centuries, the southern people of Ghana had named their children after the day of the week on which they were born. Kwame was given to a boy born on Saturday; Kwesi, born on Sunday; and Kwadwo, born on Monday. Kofi Annan, the Ghanaian former secretary-general of the United Nations, was born on a Friday. Women, too, had day names: Adjoa for those born on a Monday, Abenaa for those born on Tuesday, etc. If more than one child in a family was born on the same day of the week, they were given an additional name referring to their birth order (Piesie for firstborn, Manu for second born, etc.). Sometimes extra names referred to the parents’ feelings for the child: Nyamekye meant “gift from God,” and Yempew meant “we don’t want you.”

  When Peggy was six, her family moved north to Kumasi, where her father had found an excellent position as a railroad engineer, which allowed the growing family to live fairly well by Ghanaian standards. After graduating from high school in 1971, she studied catering at Kumasi Polytechnic and at Southgate Technical College in London. Energized by living in the United Kingdom, Peggy wanted to experience a year or two in the United States, after which she planned to return to Ghana t
o become a gourmet chef at a fine restaurant or hotel. Her father’s old school chum, Alex Quaison-Sackey, was Ghana’s ambassador to Washington and arranged for her to work there as a receptionist. And so Peggielene Foster began her job at the embassy in 1979. Somehow the years had slipped by, and she never left.

  Peggy looked at the clock: 10:15. She had to be in the office by 7:30 the next morning to prepare for the ambassador’s visitors. She needed to make sure the coffee cups and trays were clean, and that there was sufficient cream and sugar. She hadn’t gotten around to doing that before she left for the day.

  Peggy set the undelivered letter and all the bills down on the little glass tea table next to her old white leather couch. She was too tired to bathe or even wash her face. But she went to the kitchen and filled a glass with water and poured it in front of her door. For many Africans, pouring libations was a way of showing respect to God and honoring the dead, who were always thirsty, and it helped her stay close to her mother in the spirit world.

  “Help me, Mother,” Peggy said, and tears came to her eyes as they always did when she spoke to her, because she would never get over the emptiness of a world that no longer held her mother. Even though Mother had been eighty-four when she died, Peggy had been so deeply distressed that she decided she would probably never return to live in Ghana, and after eighteen years in the United States she had finally become an American citizen. “Mother, I know that you are with God,” Peggy said. “Go to him and speak to him about me. Ask him to look out for me.”

  She poured water for her mother every night, and every morning she poured a little Gordon’s gin. In Ghana the ancestors liked schnapps, and the brand used was from the Netherlands—introduced by Dutch slave traders centuries earlier—packaged in square dark green glass bottles. But the only kind of schnapps Peggy could find in the American liquor stores was peppermint schnapps, and she didn’t think her mother would like that.

  Her relatives in Ghana told her that the closest thing to Ghanaian schnapps was Gordon’s gin, so that’s what she should use. You were supposed to pour it on the ground right outside your door. Since Peggy had a condo, she couldn’t very well pour it in the hallway—it would make the place smell like a saloon and leave a stain—so she poured it just inside the door on the cream-colored carpet. Though clear, the alcohol soaked through to the wood floor below, and the wood stain seeped up and discolored the carpet.