King Peggy Page 13

  She had rented a van, which now drove her and the aunties through town to a school where the women would adorn her as a king. It was at the far end of Main Street, beyond the little blue and white police station and the salmon-colored church.

  The queen mother, Paulina, was already there, along with her cousin, Peggy’s Soul, ten-year-old Faustina. Paulina was a strikingly beautiful girl with the startling bone structure of Nefertiti and a lovely figure. Faustina was quiet and patient, qualities required of a Soul, who had to sit still in front of the king for hours at a time, deflecting evil spirits.

  As her official dresser, Peggy had chosen Grace Bentil, a plump seamstress in her forties who also worked as a makeup artist, helping women prepare for weddings and funerals and making dead bodies look better for the viewing. Kneeling, Grace clasped golden anklets around Peggy’s ankles, then adorned her with heavy beaded necklaces, thick gold bracelets, and large gold rings. She placed a heavy crown on her head, solid gold, which had been in the family for generations and was only used for enstoolments. As the final touches, she lined Peggy’s eyes with black kohl, and put bright red lipstick on her lips.

  Holding a hand mirror, Peggy studied herself, moving her face right and left. I look tough, Peggy thought, like a man, and she nodded in approval. Grace then ground a rock onto a smooth stone palette and added a bit of water to make a paste.

  “What is that?” Peggy asked.

  “Myrrh,” Grace explained as she took the top of a perfume bottle with a perfectly round edge, dipped it in the paste, and applied it to Peggy’s arms, chest, and shoulders, leaving pale circular shapes. “We put it on kings and queens to keep the evil spirits away.” Peggy nodded. What with her Soul sitting in front of her, and all the eyeliner, and now the myrrh, she couldn’t imagine she would have any evil spirits attack her today.

  Once Peggy was ready, they all stepped outside so that Tsiami could pour a libation to the ancestors. Before he opened the bottle of schnapps, she thought she got a whiff of alcohol as she neared him and wondered if he had already started pouring some of the ancestral libations down his own throat. It would be the perfect job for an alcoholic, she thought. People gave you bottles and bottles of liquor to pour, and they couldn’t always be sure exactly where you poured it. She made a mental note of this and filed it away for further use.

  The enstoolment was a holiday for the entire town and the streets were jammed with people, which delighted Peggy after the meager turnout for the town meeting. A group of young men had brought the late king’s palanquin, a large wooden cradle covered with black and white kente cloth and attached to long poles. In Africa, palanquins were used to lift a king high so all the people could see him and he could get a good view of his people. Before Peggy and the Soul climbed in, Tsiami poured schnapps again outside the school entrance, praying the ancestors to give strength to the men who would carry the palanquin. If they dropped the king, it would mean the ancestors were angry, and bad luck would come to all of Otuam, a drought perhaps, or a flood or epidemic, and several cows would have to be slaughtered to appease the angry spirits.

  Peggy sat down in the back of the palanquin, and her Soul sat in front of her. Several strong young men picked them up. Peggy clung to both sides as they lurched forward, and then she settled back as the men started carrying her through town so the people could see their new king. Cousin Charles carried the massive red umbrella, the symbol of royalty, to shield her from the sun. The queen mother was hoisted aloft alone in her own palanquin behind Peggy. Uncle Moses was blowing the cow horn, other men were banging drums, and Peggy’s subjects were bowing before her and dancing wildly in the street.

  Peggy had mixed emotions as she was carried forward. On the one hand, she was giddy with excitement. This can’t be happening, she said to herself. This must be a dream. Here I am, a king, with hundreds of people bowing down before me. I have power over all these people!

  Then she thought, What am I going to do with it? Can I really help such a backward place? With power comes responsibility. Maybe I should think about that instead of getting puffed up with my own importance. She continued to smile broadly at her people and wave regally, but she heaved a sigh. Lord help me, she said to herself.

  She scanned the crowd, wondering where William was, and then told herself she was being foolish. William would never be standing in the middle of such a crowd. Perhaps he was waiting for her back at the house.

  The circles of myrrh on her arms and chest had melted, Peggy noticed, and a delightful fragrance rose up. That, and the lemons she had rubbed on her skin that morning, kept her smelling sweet in the unbearable heat.

  Peggy was carried up and down Main Street for about two hours, though her palanquin bearers were switched out every five or ten minutes, new ones sliding beneath to shoulder the weight as the old ones slipped out of the way. The bearers were all exhilarated at the honor of carrying the new king. As one was relieved of his burden, he wiped his brow with a handkerchief, looked up at Peggy, and said, “You are the heaviest Nana we ever carried.”

  Yes, she thought, I really must go on a diet.

  But her crown also was heavy; the dense gold seemed to dig through her scalp and into her brain, setting her head throbbing. Finally, the royal bearers carefully put the palanquin down, and Peggy, preceded by her Soul, walked under the red umbrella down Main Street and over to the royal palace. Peggy and her elders made their way through the courtyard thronged with people and through the main door of the palace. This was the crucial moment of her enstoolment.

  There, in the little hallway at the foot of the stairs, Tsiami unlocked the stool room. Those stools that had belonged to the kings who were in the village for good were laid reverently on shelves. There, too, was Peggy’s new stool. She gazed at it in wonder. My stool, she said silently, you are my stool. It was as if she were seeing her own child for the first time: she had known for some time it was on the way but was overwhelmed with emotion now that it was right in front of her. I never thought I would have a stool, but there you are.

  Now Tsiami, begging the ancestors in all the stools to hear his words, took the oldest one, the centuries-old stool of Nana Amuah Afenyi I, off its shelf and carefully placed it on a low, wide table as it would have been a desecration for it to touch the ground. “We have a king!” he cried in ringing tones. “You have chosen her for us, and we have accepted her as ruler of Otuam. We beseech you to give her the wisdom and justice to lead her people, to bring them health and prosperity! ”

  He turned to Peggy, “Nana,” he said, “do you promise the ancestors to be available to your people whenever they need you, to meet with them, guide them, advise them, and judge them, except in the case of your serious illness? ”

  “I do,” Peggy said solemnly. This was the most sacred vow anyone could ever make in their lives. If she forsook it, the ancestors would probably kill her horribly.

  Tsiami put his scrawny arms around Peggy and grasped her elbows, lowering her to within a few inches of the seat of the stool. It was important that no part of the new king’s nether regions touched the stool because it had such intense spiritual energy that it burned away sexual potency in an instant. It was well known that men whose penises had dangled onto it were rendered immediately and eternally impotent, which was why they generally held these parts up and out of the way during this ceremony. Similarly, a female king whose reproductive parts touched the stool would be hopelessly barren and frigid as an iceberg forever.

  Peggy wasn’t afraid of being barren or frigid, but she made sure to cling tightly on to Tsiami as she was terrified of touching the stool with her rear end. She suspected that the initial searing pain might be followed by lifelong hemorrhoids or constipation. She hadn’t asked Tsiami about it for fear she might not have the nerve to go through with the ritual. It was particularly unfortunate that Tsiami was so skinny, and Peggy was not skinny, and at first it seemed as if he would drop her. But Tsiami was surprisingly strong for his size, each thin arm a brai
d of long muscles toughened by nearly seventy years of fishing and farming.

  “Give her the wisdom that your ancestors acquired here on earth! ” Tsiami cried, lifting her back up. “Help her to be strong and compassionate! Give her the power to reconcile enemies!” With great ease he lowered her and hoisted her up a second time, all the while calling loudly on the ancestors.

  After the third symbolic sitting, Peggy stood up, grateful that no part of her had touched the stool, while Tsiami carefully put the stool back on its shelf and took down another one. Finally, when the ceremony had been done for all the ancestral stools, Tsiami brought forward her small, plain stool. He had taken her at her word, Peggy realized. It was quite tiny, something a small child might sit on, with no special symbols on its central section, just two smooth pieces of wood holding up the curved seat.

  “This stool is your sister,” Tsiami said to her. “Its spirit will travel with you when the big stools cannot. It will be with you always.” He turned to the stool. “Oh, stool of Nana Amuah Afenyi VI, you have received her spirit inside you. Give her wisdom. Protect her on all her voyages. Help her to rule with justice for all her people.”

  Peggy would not be lifted over her own stool, but she was expected to speak to it. And suddenly the gravity of the moment almost crushed her. Her soul had been placed inside that stool, along with the souls of all the kings of Otuam who had gone to the village for good, and all her ancestors going back thousands of years, and all the unborn of Otuam. She suddenly found herself trembling before it. What was she supposed to say at a time like this?

  “Help me,” she said softly, her timid whisper a stark contrast to Tsiami’s loud cries. “I want …” She tried to collect her thoughts. What do I want? she asked herself. “I want to be a good king. I want to use all my advantages as an American citizen to help these people.”

  She paused as Tsiami waited respectfully. “But there are so many problems here, and so many obstacles to solving them, that I don’t know yet what I can do.” She took a deep breath. “You had a purpose in choosing me king,” she said, her voice louder now. “Give me strength and show me the way! Never leave me alone to face all these problems! Stay with me every minute, guide and comfort me!” Now she was practically shouting. “I will honor Otuam and the late king by fixing the royal palace and holding the most magnificent funeral this place has ever seen! I will bring water! Education! Medical care! I want to be a good king! I want to help these people! I will always put them first, before myself. I swear it, but I need your help! ”

  She bent over at the waist, suddenly exhausted. Tsiami took her by the arm in case she was going to faint. But she didn’t. She stood up and smiled. She was truly king now.

  When Peggy returned to the house, the party was well under way. Aggie was serving beer and whiskey, and many of the guests, who had been drinking since sunrise, were in serious states of inebriation. As king, the aunties had told her, Peggy had to watch carefully how much she drank because the ancestors would be angry if she became inebriated and shamed the stool. Luckily, Peggy never drank more than a glass of wine at a meal or a beer to cut the heat.

  The house was overflowing with relatives—aunts, uncles, cousins—as well as the leading townspeople and neighbors. Everyone greeted Peggy warmly as if they were old friends. She smiled and said hello, though she didn’t think she had ever met most of them before. She looked around, scrutinizing every face, but couldn’t find William.

  At one point, when she was sitting at the head of the dining room table, Nana Kwesi sat down beside her. “Well, Nana,” he said, “as I promised you, I have been walking around town and talking to people about how things are run here.”

  Peggy smiled. Nana Kwesi was taking his responsibilities as her newest elder very seriously.

  He leaned forward in a confidential pose. “I spoke with one person who had bought land this year, and another one whose cousin bought land, and they gave the money to your elders. Which elders they couldn’t say as they don’t remember their names, and although the elders gave them signed contracts, the buyers can’t read. Also, every year all those who own land are supposed to pay a small real estate tax to the stool. It’s not much for each parcel, but it adds up with seven thousand people, and it was collected last month.”

  “Don’t tell me—by my elders.”

  Nana Kwesi nodded. “I also hear that there’s a land records book, where all land sales are registered, that you should ask for.”

  Peggy shook her head. “If Uncle Joseph was in the hospital or dead, then that money should have been given to Isaiah the Treasurer to hold for town needs, such as my enstoolment party. Yet he told me there was nothing in the treasury. And when I asked about town income, my elders told me there wasn’t any.”

  “Ah-henh,” Nana Kwesi said, leaning in even closer. “And that’s not all. The fishermen are supposed to pay the king a daily tax on their catch for the right to live on your land, fish in your waters, and store their canoes on your beaches.”

  Peggy’s eyes opened wide. Uncle Joseph had probably died in May, when his cell phone stopped working and her first letter had come bouncing back undeliverable. And she knew for a fact that he had gone into the hospital back in January. “Who has been collecting the fees since January when he had the stroke?” she asked.

  Nana Kwesi said solemnly, “Your elders have always collected them, even when the king was in good health. That’s the tradition, as the king can’t be seen handling money. The elders are supposed to collect it and turn it over to him. But your elders collected it right up until last week. The fishermen I talked to couldn’t name the elders but said they would recognize them.”

  The hope flitted across Peggy’s mind that perhaps the elders had collected the fishing tax, the real estate tax, and the land sales and spent it on legitimate purposes: buying coffins for the destitute, medicine for the aged, school fees for bright but impoverished kids. In the severe illness or absence of a king, that is what his council of elders should do with town funds. But in that case, they would have informed her of the money and given her a written accounting of where it had gone. Instead, they had just told her there was nothing.

  Peggy had a feeling that even before he got sick, Uncle Joseph hadn’t seen much of the town’s income. Gentle and forgiving, he probably wouldn’t have insisted too strenuously that the elders turn it over. That must have been why he let his palace run down; he didn’t even have enough money for a patch on the roof or a bucket of paint, and he hadn’t felt like fighting his elders to get it. And his pride had prevented him from accepting help from Uncle James.

  Then another thought hit Peggy right between the eyes: had the elders selected her not despite but because she was a woman? Did they assume she would be weak? At the very least, she lived five thousand miles away, so she couldn’t keep her eyes on them most of the time, couldn’t insist on a daily turnover of fishing fees. They would be free to keep on stealing the town’s funds with impunity. It had been Uncle Moses who insisted her name be on the list. Why? Did he have anything to do with town finances? It had been Uncle Moses who jumped for joy when the schnapps steamed up. It had been Uncle Moses who said it was fine that she wouldn’t spend much time in Otuam.

  A shiver ran through her. There she was, a king, with a crown on her head, sitting at her own coronation party, and maybe they had chosen her just to cheat the town. Could that be possible? And they had chosen a girl as queen mother, practically a child, who wouldn’t even dare to look them in the eye, much less question men sixty years her senior about finances.

  No, Peggy said to herself. It wasn’t the elders who chose me. It was God and the ancestors. Nobody but God and the ancestors could make the schnapps steam up. And even if the elders lied about that, manipulated the steaming schnapps somehow, I had the dream fifteen years ago, again and again, about walking up to the royal palace. And I heard the ancestral voice three times in Washington and one time here. And I saw the ancestor sitting by my bed.
<
br />   Peggy had been staring into nothingness. When she looked up she saw Nana Kwesi thoughtfully sipping his Coke.

  “You don’t want any beer or whiskey?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “I don’t drink alcohol.”

  Peggy looked around and noticed that most of her elders were very drunk. Tsiami was tipped sideways on the couch, though his eyes were still open and blinking, and Uncle Moses had collapsed in a chair in the corner with his glasses askew, next to Uncle Eshun, who seemed to be asleep and whose cane had fallen to the floor unnoticed. Baba Kobena, devout Muslim, was drinking Fanta and talking sensibly to Cousin Comfort, Peggy saw. But Isaiah the Treasurer, devout and abstemious Methodist though he proclaimed himself to be, was swaying like a tree in a violent wind and arguing with a relative.

  And here was Nana Kwesi sipping Coke. Of all of her elders, only Nana Kwesi had looked into the financial issues of her realm and provided her with necessary information. Peggy had noticed that he was a quiet person and opened his mouth only when he had something important to say. He impressed her much more than Kwame Lumpopo, she realized, as she watched her cousin gulping down whiskey and flirting outrageously with a young townswoman. Nana Kwesi had brought her crates of beer and minerals for the party. Kwame Lumpopo hadn’t brought her anything.

  As if in answer to her thoughts, a distant cousin, Kwadwo Boateng from Takoradi, came up to the table with interesting news about Kwame Lumpopo. Kwadwo was a short, plump man in his forties who owned a prosperous furniture store. “Nana,” he said sharply, “I was going to the tent in front of the royal palace early this morning to make a donation to you, but Kwame Lumpopo was waiting on the path and said I should give my donation to him, and not to the person under the tent. Did you get the two million cedis I gave him? ”

  Two million cedis was about $140, and Kwame Lumpopo had never mentioned it to her or given her a dime. Perhaps with all the commotion and celebration, he hadn’t gotten around to it. Perhaps.