King Peggy Page 4

  She looked at herself straight on. It was still a beautiful face, she realized, a face that in her younger years had made several men chase her around like the maniacs they were. But there was only one man she had ever wanted. Her husband. William.

  3

  Peggy walked through the long, dark basement corridor, past the laundry room and trash room, and out into the parking lot, the resting place of cars whose owners couldn’t afford spaces in the garage under the building. On this warm August morning, as she approached her green 1992 Honda she burst into laughter. A royal carriage, she thought. A chariot fit for a king. At least it had been paid for long ago, and that was a great advantage.

  “Good morning,” she said to the spirit of her car. “Thank you for taking me to work and back today. I know you are old and tired. I will get you a tune-up soon.”

  She drove to work through Rock Creek Parkway, as she always did. It was a lovely route that cut right through the heart of the nation’s capital, following a little stream. Huge old trees arched over the winding road, and elegant houses sat high on hills. It was a much nicer drive than the traffic lights and brake lights of Connecticut Avenue. Plus, her car tended to break down a lot, and if it broke down on the main road in rush hour traffic everyone would honk their horns and yell at her and flip her the finger. If she broke down on the parkway, no one would yell at her, and someone would eventually come by to help her. Her car was like an old person whose health you could determine depending on how she coughed and wheezed. On good days, her car made a noise like cha-cha-cha-choo, and on bad days it went pah-pong pah-pong.

  Today was evidently a good day, and her car’s spirit was happy. As Peggy rounded the bends, the car cried cha-cha-cha-choo. She came to a stop sign and flicked on her left blinker. And then she heard a voice, as if a person were sitting right beside her in the car.

  Nana, kofa wara wodzea, it said in Fante. Nana, go for it; it’s yours. The voice was very powerful and yet quiet. It was neither male nor female. Or maybe it was both.

  Peggy looked around, alarmed. What voice was this? She knew that many Africans heard voices, saw visions, and had dreams that came true, but she had never been one of them. Except … a memory of something struggled to reach the surface of her mind before falling back down. She brushed a hand over her forehead. Maybe she was so tired and shocked from the short sleep and strange phone call that she was imagining things.

  She arrived outside the Ghanaian embassy at seven thirty. To one side was the embassy of Bangladesh, which was usually quiet, and to the other, the embassy of Israel, with its cameras and steely eyed security guards who chased away any hapless non-Israeli trying to park in front. Sitting serenely alongside so much security, her building was made of cream-colored stone, and the front fence was decorated with large tribal symbols called adinkra.

  Peggy recognized some of the twelve adinkra symbols on the embassy wall. There was the large X-shaped symbol, Nyame Nnwu Na Mawu, which meant “God never dies, therefore I cannot die,” and stood for life after death. Another, shaped like an apple with a diamond in the middle, Nyame Biribi wo soro, meant “God is in the heavens,” a symbol of hope. And a square with knot-like loops in all four corners, Mpatapo, stood for reconciliation and pacification after strife.

  There were dozens of adinkra symbols, which long ago Peggy had had to learn in school. One suddenly sprang to mind: Nea Ope Se Obedi Hene, a V inside a circle inside a square, which meant “He who wants to be king in the future must first learn to serve.”

  Peggy chuckled. “This king served indeed,” she said to herself. “I served coffee, and I served tea.” Peggy pushed open the tall metal gate and greeted the security guard in his little kiosk.

  The block-shaped building was less than twenty years old, on International Drive, a horseshoe-shaped street lined with large, modern embassies. In the late 1980s several nations, including Ghana, fed up with the bad parking and dilapidated century-old mansions on Massachusetts Avenue and Sixteenth Street, had moved their embassies to this new neighborhood farther north. Ghana’s old embassy building had been a turreted stone castle, imbued with Old World elegance, which the new one, with its tinted windows and vast reception rooms, lacked. But the new embassy offered far more space; its heating and air-conditioning worked, and when it rained you didn’t have to put a bucket on the floor to catch the water dripping in from the leaky old roof.

  Ghanaian embassy staff in particular had had a special fondness for their original building, where Peggy had worked for a decade, because it had been purchased by Ghana’s independence leader and first president, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah himself. That building had always reminded them of their heroic struggle for freedom.

  Citizens of the Gold Coast had been agitating for greater rights from Great Britain for decades, but after World War II calls for outright independence became louder and stronger. Gold Coast men had fought and died bravely beside the British in both world wars, and after fighting for the freedom of others expected some freedom of their own. They were heartened to see India shake off its British shackles in 1947, and some of them rioted against colonial rule in 1948. Dr. Nkrumah, a bright young politician who had studied in Britain and the United States, organized strikes and nonviolent protests. When Britain granted independence in 1957, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. flew to Accra to attend the celebrations. President Nkrumah set up the new government according to the British parliamentary system, and the colonial name of Gold Coast was changed to Ghana in memory of a great African empire that had existed a thousand years earlier. As the first African colony to achieve independence, Ghana became a beacon of hope to other colonies struggling for self-determination in the 1960s and 1970s.

  Like many of the Ghanaians she knew, Peggy had no hard feelings toward the British, who had brought Ghana roads, railroads, schools, hospitals, and courts of law. She was proud that her country had been a colony of the well-organized British and not the French, who had colonized so many West African countries. Many Ghanaians saw the French as chaotic, greedy, and corrupt, qualities that continued unabated in their colonies long after the French themselves had packed up and left.

  Once inside the embassy, Peggy walked to the left of the vast sunken reception room with its floating spiral staircase and Ghanaian art and took the elevator up to her office on the third floor, where she went about preparing the coffee service for the ambassador’s visitors. She decided she wouldn’t tell the ambassador about this offer of kingship unless she decided to take it. She would continue to pray about it.

  It would have been an average day if she hadn’t received that phone call. The ambassador arrived, and his visitors came and went. Peggy took his messages and typed his letters. But as the day wore on, she thought she would burst if she didn’t talk to somebody about the life-changing choice that lay ahead of her.

  She didn’t have close friends in the embassy. But she was on friendly terms with many, and she decided she could certainly tell a couple of embassy staff about what had happened. Maybe they could advise her on what to do.

  Sighing, Peggy pushed back her swivel chair and took the elevator down to the second floor to see her friend Elizabeth, a lovely doe-eyed woman in her thirties with velvety dark skin. As Peggy told her the whole story, Elizabeth’s eyes opened wide. “Should I take it?” Peggy asked.

  “Yes, you have to take it!” Elizabeth replied, slapping her desk so hard a stack of visa applications fell over. “God alone makes kings. He must have chosen you.”

  “But I’m worried about all the money it requires, and the responsibility. And I will lose my freedom. I won’t be able to do whatever I want in public anymore.”

  “God will show you the way!” Elizabeth said, nodding vigorously.

  That made Peggy feel a lot better. Elizabeth was right. Still, in the interest of a second opinion Peggy took the elevator up to the fourth floor to talk to Gladys. Gladys was a heavyset woman with large glasses who liked to wear African dresses and lots of jewelry.

&nb
sp; “You would be a damned fool to take it!” cried Gladys, her huge gold earrings clacking as she shook her head. Then she waved her hands, and her countless gold bangle bracelets tinkled and clattered. “It will be a lot of responsibility and cost you a pile of money. And you would have to behave yourself in public and stop arguing with people. Tell them to forget it and choose someone else.”

  That made Peggy feel terrible. Gladys was right. What had she been thinking even to consider becoming king? Then Peggy looked into Gladys’s eyes and saw something there—was it jealousy? Perhaps Gladys was jealous because no one had asked her to be a king. As she trudged down the long corridor to the elevator, Peggy realized that this was a decision she would have to make on her own.

  After work she went home and ate dinner sitting on her sofa. She had picked up pea soup and roasted salmon with caper sauce from the Parthenon Restaurant near the embassy, and as she ate, ignoring the news playing on the TV, she pondered how her predictable average life had become quite strange: in the course of mere hours she had been chosen king of a faraway land, and she had heard a disembodied voice in her car.

  She finished eating and flipped through the stack of bills that had arrived in the mail that day, asking herself how she could afford to be a king with huge financial responsibilities when she could barely afford to be a secretary with modest expenses. The people of Otuam needed so much, and Peggy alone couldn’t provide it.

  She decided to call her brother and ask his opinion. Two years younger than Peggy, his Christian name was Peter but somehow everyone had always called him Papa. His middle name, Ankomah, meant “warrior.” As a child, Peggy took good care of Papa Warrior because he was smaller than she was and being a boy was sure to get into trouble. When their parents finally divorced—Father had slowly crushed the life out of the marriage with his unceasing adultery—Peggy and Papa Warrior had become even closer. They protected each other during forced visits to their father, when their new stepmother subjected them to violent beatings for the sin of not being her own blood.

  Papa Warrior was a slight, wiry man, bursting with ambition and energy. His voice was several times louder than what an observer might expect to bellow forth from his slender frame. At the age of eighteen, he had shaken the dust of Ghana from his shoes and gone into the world seeking adventure. He had worked as a sailor cruising the seven seas, lived in Greece and Sweden, and more recently owned a security consulting business in Sydney, where he had become an Australian citizen.

  A few months earlier, Papa Warrior had been finishing up his second university degree when his studies were interrupted by a terrible car accident. He was currently living in the hospital, undergoing numerous surgeries on his leg.

  When Peggy told him about Kwame Lumpopo’s phone call, Papa Warrior said with characteristic brusqueness, “Sounds like a joke to me.”

  “I don’t think so,” Peggy said. “They want me to come over soon for my enstoolment.”

  Papa Warrior paused. “In that case, you should accept it. Kingship is a destiny.”

  “It will be hard though, Papa. The town is a mess. The palace is a mess. I think my elders might prove difficult.”

  Papa Warrior chuckled. “You will keep them on a short leash, as you do me.”

  Even after they both became adults (and now they were in their fifties), Peggy couldn’t seem to stop telling Papa Warrior what to do. She badgered him to quit smoking, which he finally did, and to drink less and eat more, which he did not do. More disturbing to Peggy than his diet was that when Papa Warrior drank in pubs (which seemed to be the national sport of Australia), he wasn’t afraid of fighting if a bigger man insulted him.

  Peggy often called Papa Warrior several times a day to check up on him, something their mother had never done. “He’s an adult now,” Mother had said gently. “Maybe we should leave him be.”

  But Peggy couldn’t leave him be. If she wasn’t able to reach him, she pictured him in jail for causing a public disturbance, or even in the morgue, killed perhaps by an enormous Australian weight lifter who had crashed a bar stool over poor Papa Warrior’s head. She called his friends to see if they knew where he was. Papa Warrior often returned to his apartment to find yellow Post-it notes on his door with the message Urgent. Call your sister in the U.S. After all the drama, it was usually discovered that Papa Warrior had turned his phone off because he had been with a woman. Such frequent calls hadn’t been necessary lately, what with Papa Warrior in a hospital bed with his leg in the air, a position in which he couldn’t get into too much trouble.

  “Take it, Peggy,” Papa Warrior urged. “You can call your elders four or five times a day to check up on them, and stick your nose into everything they are doing, and tell them all that they are doing wrong, and check up on me less often. It will be a good thing for us all.”

  That night Peggy barely slept. She tossed and turned, thinking about her bizarre predicament. She saw Elizabeth’s lovely dark face rise before her, saying, “God alone makes kings!” and Gladys’s wide bespectacled face saying, “You would be a damned fool to take it!” and Papa Warrior’s impatient face saying, “Don’t call me so much! ”

  The next morning, on her way to work, it happened again. The voice. As soon as she hit the stop sign in Rock Creek Parkway, it said, Yafawo, Nana! We chose you, Nana!

  She looked around her car, decided to pretend it hadn’t happened, and kept driving. She was extremely tired, after all. Two nights with very little sleep.

  At the embassy the day was like any other, except for Elizabeth and Gladys stopping by to find out what she had decided and urging her in two different directions. The president of Ghana, John Kufuor, would be making a state visit to Washington in three weeks to visit President Bush, and Peggy worked with the ambassador on the schedule of events.

  Unfortunately, Ghana’s political fortunes hadn’t remained stable after independence in 1957. President Nkrumah, who would always be beloved for obtaining independence from Great Britain, veered toward dictatorship himself. He was proclaimed president for life in 1964. He dismissed judges whose decisions he disagreed with and appointed others to make decisions he liked. In 1966 a military coup overthrew President Nkrumah when he was visiting China, and he died in exile. Three years after the coup, democracy was ushered in again, only to be overthrown three years after that by another military coup. Sometimes the military coups themselves were overthrown by military coups.

  Ghanaians knew a coup was happening when the television stations stopped broadcasting. Since the first two or three weeks of a coup were dangerous—army men might shoot anyone in the street—schools, courts, and businesses were closed until the television came back on. That meant that the coup was successful, the new government had settled in, and the threat of violence was over. Peggy was in London or the United States when the worst coups took place, but she had heard of how the soldiers raped women—from small girls to great-grandmothers—as a matter of routine.

  Ironically, while the democratically elected first president of Ghana had dipped toward dictatorship, it was the leader of a military coup who brought democracy back to Ghana. In 1981 Air Force lieutenant Jerry Rawlings, a pivotal player in the 1979 coup, threw out the president he had helped install and installed himself in his place. He stabilized the government and put in motion constitutional changes to hold a democratic election. In 1992 he won by a landslide in what international observers hailed as a largely free and fair election. Four years later he was elected to another four-year term. John Kufuor won the presidential vote in 2000 and reelection in 2004. It seemed that finally the pandemonium at the pinnacle of Ghanaian power had settled down. Now elections, not coups, would decide who ruled.

  President Kufuor was admired for his efforts to improve the national economy and help entrepreneurs. He raised the diplomatic status of Ghana by helping to broker peace among neighboring countries—Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, and Guinea-Bissau. In 2007 he became chairman of the African Union, a kind of African Un
ited Nations, with representatives from all fifty-three African countries. The purpose of the African Union was to resolve conflicts and assist in economic and social development, though it was often referred to in the press as “the dictators’ club.”

  Despite their president’s accomplishments, many Ghanaians clucked in disapproval when he built a fifty-million-dollar presidential palace in Accra, shaped like an enormous five-story royal stool. One leg of the stool contained the president’s residence, the other leg the presidential offices. The long curved roof represented the seat upon which a gigantic ancestral rear end would, perhaps, emerge from the clouds and sit. Some Ghanaians laughed at it. Others angrily asserted that the palace money should have gone to digging boreholes for the many Ghanaians who had no water, or for buying beds for hospitals where patients still had to trudge in dragging their own mattresses.

  President Kufuor’s supporters pointed out that if the taste of the Golden Jubilee House was questionable, so was the history of the president’s current palace—a Danish slave castle in the port. True, the president and his staff worked in a breezy new wing built in the 1960s, but not far from the dungeons in which so many had suffered and died. The presidential palace, they argued, should be impressive, a symbol of national pride to all citizens, a sentiment with which Peggy agreed wholeheartedly.

  At the end of another day, Peggy ate dinner with a tray on her lap with the news on, though she wasn’t really watching it. She had stopped by the African supermarket and bought spicy fried fish and kenke, a favorite Ghanaian dish of hers, made from boiled cornmeal rolled into fist-sized balls. She ate it the African way, elegantly using the fingers of her right hand to pinch off a piece of food and sweep it into her mouth. Although the younger generation seemed to have forgotten it, Ghanaian etiquette considered it rude to use one’s left hand to point, wave, touch others, or, heaven forbid, eat, and while dining it was usually left limply on one’s lap.