King Peggy Read online

  She went into the bedroom, took off her pantsuit and blouse, slipped on a pink cotton nightgown, and sank into her bed. Then she wrapped her head in her blanket, a cocoon of safety that somehow made her feel warm and cozy and loved.

  Though Peggy enjoyed her work in the ambassador’s office, the best part of her day was her sleep. When she was asleep she didn’t have to worry about unpaid bills, or office politics, or undeliverable letters. Nor did she have to ponder how to lose the weight she had been gaining due to a slowing metabolism forced to sit in a chair twelve hours a day. She didn’t have to miss William, her husband who had returned to Ghana, or resent her body, which had failed to bear them children. She didn’t have to question whether her life had a purpose.

  Peggy had never had problems sleeping in her life, and she usually slept deeply. It was as if she went to another world, a world where everything was beautiful and there were no worries at all, a place where she was never lonely or aching for her mother.

  2

  Peggy’s sleep was disturbed by the phone ringing. She pulled the blanket closer around her head. Maybe if she ignored it the noise would go away. It didn’t.

  She flung off the blanket and sat up, turned on her light and looked at the clock. It was a few minutes past four a.m. Peggy hated it when people called her that early. Sometimes her brother, Papa Warrior, who lived in Australia, got the time confused and called at that hour, but usually it was relatives in Ghana who got up at four a.m. every day because the chickens woke them. If they wanted to talk to her, they would wait patiently the five hours until it was four a.m. in Washington and then call her, thinking perhaps the chickens would be getting her up, too.

  She stood up, walked to the dresser, and stared at the phone. The caller ID said “unavailable.” It was an overseas call all right.

  Peggy picked it up. “Hello!” she barked.

  “Hello, Nana!” said a male voice on the other end. It added in Fante, “This is your uncle, Kwame Lumpopo.”

  Kwame Lumpopo. She remembered him. He was her mother’s sister’s son, so technically her cousin. But Africans weren’t too technical about family relationships. They called their great-aunts mother, and their nieces and nephews children, and their distant cousins brothers and sisters. For some reason, Kwame Lumpopo always referred to himself as Peggy’s uncle, even though he was about her age. He was a tall, good-looking man with a wide white grin who lived near her mother’s old home in Takoradi. She had seen him at family gatherings at her mother’s, and he had been on her uncle’s royal council in Otuam.

  “What do you mean, Nana?” she asked groggily. Nana literally meant “ancestor” and was an honorary title reserved for royalty and people of stature. Children might call their grandparents nana, but Peggy had no grandchildren. And she certainly wasn’t royalty or a person of stature.

  “Congratulations!” Kwame Lumpopo boomed. “You are the new king of Otuam!”

  She rubbed her eyes. This had to be a joke.

  “Kwame Lumpopo, you’d better stop your nonsense because it is four a.m. in the United States, and you have woken me from a sound sleep,” she said briskly. “I have to go to work in a couple of hours to arrange the ambassador’s coffee cups, and I don’t appreciate this foolishness. Why are you bothering me? I’m going to hang up now.” She pulled the phone away from her ear.

  “No, no, please! Don’t hang up!” Peggy could hear Kwame Lumpopo’s loud protests hovering in the air. “Nana—I’m serious! This is no joke!”

  She put the phone back against her ear.

  “What is it that you want really?” she asked. “Tell it to me straight. I don’t talk nonsense before the sun is up.”

  “Your uncle, the king of Otuam, will not be coming back from the village anytime soon,” Kwame Lumpopo said quickly, before Peggy could hang up.

  Oh.

  Now she understood the returned letters and the disconnected phone. Hearing of her uncle’s death was like losing a part of her mother all over again. That generation was going, going, gone. All anger drained from her. Tears stung her eyes.

  “When did he die?” she asked quietly.

  “I don’t know,” Kwame Lumpopo replied. “He’s been in the hospital … er, in the village curing himself for a long time now. You know, they don’t tell you exactly when the king … when they know that the king isn’t coming back from the village.”

  That was true. If you weren’t in a king’s immediate circle, you wouldn’t learn the date of his death until the funeral program was printed.

  “Where is he now?”

  “His children have put him in the fridge at the Accra morgue. We will have to keep him there until his funeral, whenever the new king—you—decides to hold it.”

  The new king? In Ghana the king wielded executive power over the people. So yes, theoretically the person who held the office could be female, just as in the United States the president could be female. But a female king was a new phenomenon and very rare. Peggy had read about two lady kings in Ghana during her morning perusals of the national news website, Modernghana.com, but her royal family, the Ebiradze, had never had one.

  Was Kwame Lumpopo trying to scam her? African people scammed each other a lot, she knew, and while men around the world liked to take advantage of women, Peggy believed that Africans were the international experts.

  Long ago Peggy had decided that African men were aided and abetted in taking advantage of African women by African women themselves, who were usually too timid to stand up for themselves, put the men soundly in their place, whack them on the head, or whatever the situation required. Most African women wouldn’t even look a man in the eye when he spoke. Sometimes Peggy wondered how on earth she could be an African woman. She was much more like an American woman, always had been. When talking to a man she fixed her eyes on him with an unblinking stare, and the moment he disrespected her she let him have it with her big mouth.

  Maybe Kwame Lumpopo thought she was a rich American and a stupid woman, and he was trying to scam her by telling her she was the king and had to wire him funds for rituals or something. If so, he obviously didn’t know her well. Though right now the real problem was that she didn’t know him well. The few times she had seen him he had smiled and greeted her warmly and asked about her American life, and that was it. She racked her brain to remember what her mother had told her about him. His wife had left him because of something heinous he had done, though that happened to a lot of African men.

  “What do you mean that I’m the new king?” she asked sharply. “No woman has ever been king of Otuam. I haven’t even been there since we celebrated my mother’s birthday at the palace ages ago. I’m a U.S. citizen, living in Washington, D.C. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  Peggy wondered if perhaps Kwame Lumpopo was confused and the elders had actually chosen her queen mother. In Ghana the queen mother, who was usually not the king’s wife, looked after the affairs of women and children. She was supposed to be compassionate and patient, a diplomat smoothing over difficulties, gently persuading the king to follow her advice and calmly accepting it when he overruled her.

  Come to think of it, Peggy would make a lousy queen mother. She wouldn’t be able to kowtow to any man, even the king. She would be a big nuisance to him, yelling at him to do more for the women and children. Then she would scold the women for going to bed with ridiculous men and having so many babies they couldn’t afford. No, with her loud voice and strong sense of justice, she would be better as king. But how could she be king?

  “Your uncle always wanted you to be the next king,” Kwame Lumpopo said. “He was so proud of you. ‘My sister’s daughter is so sensible and strong,’ he would say, ‘stronger than I am. She has educated herself and lived in the USA for many years, which is no joke for an African woman. She has qualities that would really help Otuam.’ ”

  “Did my uncle pick me to be his successor then?” she asked.

  “No no, Nana. You were picked by the elders and ances
tors,” he explained. “Once we knew that the king would be in his village for a very long time, the king’s elders looked over the lists of his relatives. We chose twenty-five people who were healthy and under sixty years old, who had a good moral character, were not drunkards, and who were educated. Your name appeared on the list, Nana, the only woman among the twenty-five, because the king had always recommended you. Uncle Moses, in particular, wanted you on the list. He was the one who consulted the genealogy and insisted you be on it, even though you are a woman.”

  Uncle Moses. Yes, the bald-headed one with a broad nose and glasses, with full cheeks and a long mustache that made him look like a walrus.

  “What happened next?” she asked.

  “We took the list to the obosomfie, the sacred ancestral shrine where the spirit, the obosom, lives. All the elders went, along with some good citizens who were not relatives—to make sure there was no cheating, you know. The chief priest, Tsiami, said each person’s name and poured schnapps into the ground.”

  Peggy remembered Tsiami, a stiff, wiry little man who had an odd habit of avoiding eye contact.

  Kwame Lumpopo continued, “When the schnapps sank into the ground, it meant the ancestors did not want that person to be king. When the schnapps steamed up, it was a clear sign they wanted that person to rule.”

  “And when Tsiami said my name, the schnapps steamed up?” She had never heard of this custom before.

  “Ah-henh!” Kwame Lumpopo assured her, the henh coming straight from the deepest nasal passages. This was Ghanaian for “That’s it! You got it!”

  “You were the twenty-fifth person on the list,” he continued, “the last one. We were worried that maybe God and the ancestors didn’t like anybody we had put on the list, but then the schnapps steamed up when Tsiami said your name.”

  “It really steamed up?” She was having a hard time picturing this. What did steamed-up schnapps look like?

  “Yes. Not once but three times. Some of the elders were surprised because you were a woman. They wanted to be sure. So they made Tsiami perform the ritual two more times, and each time when he called your name the schnapps steamed up.”

  A shiver went down her spine. There was a long pause.

  “The ancestors picked you, Nana,” Kwame Lumpopo said earnestly. “Will you take it? ”

  Would she take it? Peggy had absolutely no idea. Here it was four o’clock in the morning and she was still groggy and this person was telling her that her uncle was dead and she was an African king because the schnapps had steamed up.

  “I’ll have to think about it,” she said. Peggy always said this when most other people would say I don’t know. It gave the impression of being in control rather than being indecisive, and at the moment she was feeling extremely indecisive. Panicked, even. “I’ll call you later.”

  “The rituals are done,” he replied. “The ancestors want you.”

  Peggy slowly hung up the phone. Clearly, she wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep. She walked out into her living room, sat down on the sofa, and looked at the empty space that should have been her dining room. How can a secretary be king? While she supposed there was no reason why a secretary couldn’t, it must still be highly unusual.

  If she accepted she would have to go over there soon for her enstoolment, the Ghanaian form of coronation. In Ghana, going back into the mists of time, hand-carved wooden stools were not just the symbol of royalty, they were also holy items, the focus of prayer and veneration. Each king was given a new stool, the ahengua, into which the tsiami put the king’s soul along with the souls of the previous kings, the ancestors, and the unborn. Royal stools were so holy that they were never allowed to touch the ground; no one, not even the king, could sit on them. For the enstoolment ceremony, the king’s tsiami held him above the stool, which was on a platform, and lowered him three times in a symbolic sitting. On official occasions, kings sat on their public stools, which contained no ancestral spirits.

  The spirits in the royal stool could see and hear everything everyone did within the borders of the kingdom and often cried when they were upset. Peggy recalled a story her mother had told her about Otuam’s sacred stools; long ago, enemies had broken into the stool room and stolen them. Fortunately for Otuam, the stools made such a ruckus—angry voices, the sound of breaking crockery, and the slamming of doors—that the thieves brought them back, eager to get rid of them.

  If Peggy became king, her behavior in public would have to be regal, in order to honor the stool spirits. She wouldn’t be allowed to dance in a club, though she hadn’t done that since before she was married. But kings weren’t supposed to eat or drink, joke or argue in public either. Peggy loved to laugh, and sometimes she did get in arguments if someone tried to push her around, or butt in front of her in the checkout line at the grocery store. And if she saw an injustice, a man yelling at a woman, or a big kid picking on a little one, or somebody kicking a dog, she would scold the malefactor without fear, shaking her finger in his face. Somebody had to tell people when their behavior was disgraceful.

  If she became king, she would have to watch herself, certainly when she was in Ghana, and probably in the United States as well. She would hate to see her picture under a headline in The Washington Post, “Ghanaian King Caught Behaving Badly in Silver Spring Supermarket.” No, it wouldn’t matter if she was here in America, or in Otuam, or in Timbuktu, for that matter. Once she was king, she would have to become a king.

  As king, Peggy would be the personification of government to her people, more so even than the president of Ghana, who was democratically elected but, like most presidents around the world, lived surrounded by layers of impenetrable security in a palace. Though they were different in many ways, Peggy knew that tribal kings and government officials lived in easy camaraderie. When the British colonized Ghana in the nineteenth century, they had relied on local kings to support them. In return the British government had brought a variety of benefits to the tribes—jobs, roads, churches, schools, and other improvements. The kings themselves had often received income from the British to rule their kingdoms and keep their subjects in line with British law.

  When Ghana declared independence from Great Britain on March 6, 1957—the eve of Peggy’s fourth birthday—many questioned whether kings were necessary anymore. Were they simply a colorful relic of the past that should be put aside like a curio inside a cabinet? But no, the ancient tradition remained too strong. For one thing, kings were the custodians of Ghana’s vibrant cultural heritage. Getting rid of them would obliterate most of Ghana’s rich history, leaving only the sterile, Western, white part. Kings and all they stood for were what made Ghana Ghana, rather than just another former British colony like, say, Canada.

  And there were real advantages to having a king. Citizens could easily obtain justice by simply marching up to the palace and asking to speak to him. Resolving disputes through the king was far easier than hiring a lawyer and taking an opponent to civil court. For one thing, it was inexpensive, costing the plaintiff perhaps a few bottles of beer or a chicken, and for another, the king or his advisors usually knew the characters of all the people involved in a case, their parents, their childhoods, their habitual misbehaviors or exemplary virtues. Such knowledge helped a king decide a dispute fairly, with no lawyers involved.

  Lawyers, it was well known, were people professionally trained to meddle in the affairs of others by concealing the truth. Certainly a defendant knew the facts of a case better than his lawyer, who had not been present when the disputed event occurred. Therefore, in Ghana, a defendant who refused to speak for himself and was prepared to hide behind the dazzling verbal legerdemain of a lawyer was felt to be guilty before the trial even began.

  Kings knew who was telling the truth simply by looking into the eyes of the person speaking, an ability that came from the wisdom of the stool, which gave the king special powers. Therefore it was useless, even dangerous, for anyone to lie to a king. Moreover, when a king settled an ar
gument, he usually guided both parties to an amicable consensus, using his charm and diplomacy to settle a contentious matter once and for all.

  Similarly, kings put their diplomatic skills to work when dealing with elected officials, whom they accepted with regal grace, regardless of party affiliation, and whom they often asked to help their communities build schools, pave roads, or run water lines. Politicians, on the other hand, respected kings for keeping their people in line, keeping civil court dockets clear, and working with government authorities to help their communities. As king of Otuam, Peggy would straddle the worlds of modern democratic politics and ancient tribal traditions.

  She tried to remember what she could of Otuam. There was one paved road, she recalled, Main Street, lined with little shops and rambling concrete block houses. There were few cars—taxis, mainly, which residents took to the nearby market towns of Mankessim or Agona Swedru to shop or sell their wares—so the chickens and goats usually had free run of the road. The chickens, Peggy recalled, were painted different colors so their owners could identify them. During her last visit, she had seen chickens with big yellow stripes on their backs, and others with blue or red.

  The little blue and white police station was on Main Street, along with the most impressive building in town, the salmon-colored Methodist church with its tall spire that the British missionaries had built a century ago. Between Main Street and the sea was the fishing village of mud huts with thatched roofs, and on the beach the fishermen kept their long, handmade canoes.

  On the other side of Main Street, a bit farther afield, was the royal palace. It was a T-shaped, two-story whitewashed building constructed in the early 1960s by her mother’s first cousin, Nana Amuah Afenyi IV, whom she had always known as Uncle Rockson. He had been a wealthy man, educated in London, who had brought the first razor blade factory to Ghana. The palace courtyard was flanked by two long rows of housing for the king’s relatives called “the boys’ quarters,” though families lived there. And beyond that were dozens and dozens of small farms, with tin-roofed concrete block houses.