King Peggy Read online

  As she ate, she realized that something was bothering her. There was something almost forgotten, stuck uncomfortably in the back of her mind. She wanted to either spit it up into conscious thought or swallow it entirely so it left her alone. But try as she might, she couldn’t seem to dislodge it.

  Peggy pushed herself up from the sofa, walked over to the kitchen, and filled a glass with water. “Help me, Jesus,” she begged as she poured it onto her carpet. “Only God can make kings. Help me learn if God wants me to be a king.”

  She fell into another fitful sleep. The following morning, with deep bags under her eyes, she stumbled into her car to head for work. She entered Rock Creek Parkway and tensed up as she neared the stop sign. Would she hear anything?

  Nana, oye waeyimyam, nye biara na wobonde onye ohene, the voice rang out. Nana, it is your destiny. Not all human beings are born to be kings and queens.

  There was definitely an ancestor sitting in her car. Should she say something to it? What do you say to a ghost sitting next to you while you’re driving? What if you said the wrong thing? Peggy decided to just keep driving.

  A few seconds later, as she went over the little bridge, she heard it again. It is your destiny. Not all human beings are born to be kings and queens, the voice repeated, louder, as if to make sure she got the message.

  Peggy got it. “Okay,” she said to the voice. “All right, already. I’ll go for it.”

  She would go for it? She supposed she had to, now that she had told the voice she would. You couldn’t lie to an ancestor and get off easy; he would surely come back and punish you. The silence beside her seemed satisfied, but Peggy was trembling and wasn’t sure if it was from fear or excitement, or perhaps a mixture of both. Whatever her emotions, she knew the die had been cast. She would become king.

  That evening when she got home, she called Kwame Lumpopo and said, “Tell them that I have accepted it.”

  “Nana! That is wonderful! There will be great rejoicing in Otuam! To have a new king who is a woman and an American! Do not forget it was I who called you with the news. I would like to help you in Otuam when you are not there.”

  “Yes, all right,” Peggy said. Surely she would need someone to help her rule from Washington, and Kwame Lumpopo was her cousin. He had been there when the ancestors had chosen her, he had been the one to call her with the news—that would forever be a special bond between them.

  “Do the elders understand that I won’t be able to move there right away?” she asked. “I will go over once a year for as many days as I can, but for the next few years I will need to stay in D.C. and keep my job at the embassy. I will, however, call the elders several times a week.”

  “Yes! Uncle Moses said just that as soon as we saw the schnapps steam up. It’s no problem. Uncle Moses will help you, and I will help you, and you will come when you can.”

  “That is fine,” she said.

  “Very good. I will call you tomorrow once I have informed the elders and the people of Otuam of your decision.”

  “But I am worried about the late king who is in the fridge,” Peggy lamented. “I won’t be able to hold the funeral anytime soon. How long can we leave him there? ”

  “Oh, a long time,” Kwame Lumpopo replied. “He’s in a refrigerated room, in bed, tucked in next to all the kings and queens whose families can’t afford to bury them right now or are having some dispute. He’ll be fine in the fridge, except for when the electricity goes out. Maybe even then he’ll keep cool. They have a generator.”

  Ghana had rolling power outages, sometimes every day when the grid was overloaded. Peggy hoped the generator would work. Otherwise she might feel the hard slap of an icy hand from the fridge on the back of her neck. She shuddered.

  Suddenly Peggy remembered the thing that had been nipping at her memory for three days—it was the dream she had had repeatedly about fifteen years earlier. In it, she had been a little girl walking home from school behind the king’s palace in Kumasi, wanting to be inside. At the time, neither she nor anyone in her family had been able to interpret it. But now Peggy understood what it meant: the ancestors had been preparing her to be king.

  4

  The following morning before Peggy left for work she dialed Kwame Lumpopo’s cell phone. “Have you told them?” she asked when he picked up.

  “I have told them,” he said. “First I gathered the elders and let them know they had a new king. Then we sent the town crier to walk around the entire community banging on the old muffler he carries, announcing that since Nana Amuah Afenyi V had gone to the village for a cure and wouldn’t be coming back anytime soon, we had chosen a new king, an American, female king. You, Nana.”

  “How do the people feel about having a lady king?” she asked.

  “There is great joy in Otuam today!” he cried. “The people have gathered in front of the royal palace applauding, yelling, beating drums, and dancing for joy. They want to see their new king soon. Uncle Moses is leading the town’s celebrations.”

  How unexpected, Peggy thought, that the elders should be happy to have a lady king. She felt her spirits rise.

  “What will my royal name be?” she asked. The elders, she knew, chose the new king’s official name.

  “Nana Amuah Afenyi VI,” Kwame Lumpopo replied.

  The past four kings had been called Nana Amuah Afenyi after the town’s seventeenth-century founder, Nana Amuah Afenyi I. She was pleased to continue the tradition and take a male name: she would need all the male energy she could get.

  Kwame Lumpopo continued, “They want to have you enstooled right away.”

  Enstooled. There goes my freedom, she said to herself, the one thing I had. But then she quickly reminded herself, God alone makes kings.

  “I will talk to the ambassador about my schedule and let you know when I can come. What is the least amount of time I must stay for the rituals?”

  Kwame Lumpopo paused. “Well, I’d say at least ten days.”

  “Ten days. I think I can get that much. They owe me two months’ vacation so ten days shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “Nana,” he said, more seriously now. “There is something you must do before the enstoolment can take place. Your late uncle who is in the fridge had an argument with some townsfolk and threw them in jail for a long time, which he should not have done.”

  “Oh?” she said.

  “And to resolve the argument among the families, the late king agreed to pay them twelve million cedis.” Technically, Kwame Lumpopo should have said twelve thousand cedis, per the new Ghanaian currency system. After the rampant inflation of the 1970s and ’80s, the government had revalued the currency in 2007 by taking away two zeros. But he, like many Ghanaians, used the old currency out of decades of habit. Whatever the case, Peggy quickly did the math and realized he was talking about at least eight hundred dollars.

  “Yes?”

  “But he never did. He didn’t have it, and he got sick and went to the village for a cure. In order for you to be enstooled without any problems or disputes, you should wire the twelve million cedis to disburse to the families.”

  Peggy’s heart sank. Eight hundred dollars? Plus the airfare over there, which would be about $1,500, she figured. Together that $2,300 would have been enough money for her to take a trip to the Holy Land, to see Jerusalem and Bethlehem and Nazareth, which had always been her dream. But now, it seemed, she would use it to return to Ghana.

  “I will send it,” she promised.

  “All right,” he replied. “And remember, I was the one who told you the good news! ”

  “I will!” she agreed.

  “Oh, and there’s one other thing,” he added. “The council of elders and I will drive to Accra to call on your husband with the good news that his wife is a king.”

  “My husband?” Peggy asked sharply. She had never spoken to Kwame Lumpopo about William’s return to his family business in Accra, hadn’t even been back to Ghana in the six years since then, but obviously her
entire extended family knew all about it. And now they would tell William the wife he had left behind was a king?

  “Yes, we must do it according to our tradition,” he replied. “We will bring him bottles of beer and whiskey.”

  Peggy sighed. They would tell her husband.

  Until she was well into her thirties, Peggy hadn’t been sure she ever wanted to marry, given the sadness of her parents’ marriage. She had spent her first decade in Washington intentionally avoiding men and concentrating on improving her secretarial skills, obtaining a diploma in computer information systems from Strayer University. For a time, she even considered becoming a nun, though she wasn’t Catholic. She had always had a spiritual calling and felt that nuns, in their habits and veils, seemed to be shielded against all the violence and injustice of the world.

  She started visiting the Dominican convent on Sixteenth Street, where the kindly Sister Catherine offered to work with her to determine if she had a true vocation. There she learned that nuns fasted often and didn’t eat much at other times as they believed food took away from their closeness to God. That was when Peggy decided she wasn’t suited to being a nun.

  Shortly after that, a Ghanaian friend of hers in New York called her and said he had found the perfect man for her. She had laughed and told him he was being ridiculous. But on her next visit to New York she had met William Bartels and liked him. He wasn’t like most African men, and this was what impressed her. Instead of wielding swashbuckling bluster aimed at seducing women, William possessed an almost painful shyness, which was probably why he was still unmarried in his late thirties. Two years older than Peggy, he was of average height and had an athletic build. He had intelligent eyes and a full, pleasant face. He courted her slowly, politely. Here is a man of character and moral values, she thought. Here is a man who will never hurt me.

  For eight months they talked on the phone daily, visiting each other now and then, and in 1990 they married. They had a very small ceremony because William was uneasy in crowds, shy with people he didn’t know well. He moved to Washington and got a good job in the communications department of C&P Telephone.

  They would have been happy, so very happy, if she could have given him a child. Though she was thirty-seven when she married, Peggy knew that many African women had children later in life. Peggy had been born when her mother was forty, the seventh of ten children Mary Vormoah had delivered, most of them in her thirties and forties, including two sets of twins, though one set had died at birth. Peggy felt no need for concern because of her age.

  But the months, and then the years had come and gone with no sign of pregnancy. Peggy and William spent all their savings on fertility doctors. Three times after the treatments she became pregnant. Their hearts soared with hope, and their dream of the future became rich. Three times she started to bleed a few weeks afterward, shaking her head in denial, pushing on her abdomen to hold the child in. No, no, no, she had keened, curled up in a ball on the bathroom floor. Not this, not after all the money, and all the humiliating treatments, and the sudden burst of joy and hope. Not this.

  I failed, she often thought. I failed so miserably at doing the one thing expected of every woman. Even aided by the most sophisticated American science money could buy, I failed.

  After the third miscarriage she didn’t want William to touch her anymore and avoided intimacy as much as possible. During their rare lovemaking, she lay there thinking, What is the point of all this? Within a few days or weeks her period would come, proof in bright red blood of yet more failure.

  And all the time William’s family back home—especially his mother—was telling him that if Peggy couldn’t do something as basic as give him a child, he should leave her. It wasn’t that they were being cruel, Peggy knew. African families expected their sons’ wives to produce children, and many of them. Those women who failed to do so were usually discarded for the good of the family. After all, a woman’s main role in life was continuing the family line.

  Peggy knew that she was lucky she lived not in Ghana but in Washington, a place where many women chose not to have children, a decision incomprehensible to Africans. She knew that she was also lucky that William loved her and stayed.

  The strain on their relationship was heightened when he was laid off during a downsizing. He stayed home, with no child and no job and a wife who didn’t want him to touch her, despondently perusing the Washington Post classified section for a position, while Peggy worked to support the two of them. Such a situation would have been humiliating to any man, much more so to an African man whose self-esteem is measured in how well he can support his family. Sometimes she cajoled him into getting out of their apartment and attending an embassy reception, but he just sat with his back against the wall, shy because of all the people he didn’t know. Those were his good nights; on his bad ones he sat in the car, and she brought him a plate of food and a drink.

  In 2002 William’s brother in Accra received a large government contract to provide Ghana’s hospitals with beds. He invited William to come back for a while, join the family business, and make some good money. Peggy could join him later, or he could return to Washington. With Peggy’s blessing, William left, with a spring in his step and a twinkle in his eye. He would have a good job. Earn money. Be proud of himself again.

  But no sooner was William back in Ghana than his family set to work on him. He should stay there, they advised, and have children with a younger, fertile woman. When, in that terrible phone call consigning her to loneliness, he had sadly told her he would not be coming back, she had cried, “Have the child and bring it back to me! I will be its mother. You and I will raise the child together.”

  Such a solution was acceptable when a wife was infertile, and Peggy was willing to raise another woman’s child as long as it was also William’s child. At first he seemed to agree, but the years passed and eventually he had two children with two different women and never returned to Peggy. His hospital bed business was booming, and the mothers of his children seemed reluctant to part with them.

  Peggy wasn’t angry with her husband. The happy years they had lived together as man and wife were no match for the strong traditions of the African family. William Bartels had found himself in an impossible situation—choosing between disappointing his wife or his large family. She understood why he had chosen to jettison her rather than his mother, brother, sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins. She understood. She grieved every day for the companionship so rudely taken from her, and for the children she hadn’t been able to carry, those tiny clots of lost hope that she still cherished because they had had heartbeats for a few days, warm and nourished inside her, and no one could ever take that memory away from her. But despite her grief at loss upon loss, she loved her husband still, and always would.

  Peggy realized the great irony of her marriage. She had waited to marry until she had found a man who was moral and good and wouldn’t break her heart. She had been correct that William Bartels was moral and good. He was moral and good enough to make his family happy by following African tradition. And in so doing he had broken her heart.

  After he left, Peggy let her friendships slowly unravel. After all, if gentle William, who loved her, had hurt her this much, what would other people do to her? She needed to fill up her time so that she didn’t get to thinking about it. She could barely stand to have a day off from work and didn’t mind her long hours as the ambassador’s secretary. The best thing was to arrive home too exhausted to think.

  Yes, she thought, as she hung up after her conversation with Kwame Lumpopo, William has to be told. How would he feel about it? She supposed he would be happy for her. He was a kind person who still cared for her and felt guilty about leaving.

  Then another thought occurred to her: Maybe this is why I had no children despite all the fertility treatments, all the money, pain, and heartbreak. Now I will have seven thousand of them, and that’s enough for anybody.

  On her drive to work she tensed up as s
he approached the stop sign. But today there was no voice. Evidently the ancestors didn’t need to say a word now that she had accepted. She exhaled. She had been afraid that perhaps every day they would talk to her in her car on the way to work.

  Peggy knew it was time to tell the ambassador she was a king. What would he say? Well, it was usually best to be direct with unexpected news, and come to think of it, Peggy didn’t know how to be any other way. As soon as she arrived at her office she buzzed the ambassador. “Boss, I want to talk to you.”

  “What have you done now?” snapped the crisp voice over the intercom, cutting the air like a knife. “Have you argued with somebody in the embassy again?” The ambassador had heard about Peggy’s time in the consular section, and he knew that even among her embassy colleagues, if people stepped on her toes, she bit their legs.

  Fortunately for Peggy, Ambassador Bawuah-Edusei had many diplomatic talents. It was fortunate for Ghana, too. A medical doctor, he had convinced the World Bank, the U.S. Congress, and the State Department to provide medical assistance to poor areas in Ghana, areas where he himself had provided care at his own expense for nearly a decade. Appointed ambassador in 2006, he lobbied tirelessly to convince American corporations to open branches in Ghana, convincing the agricultural giants Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland to open cocoa processing plants, and Coca-Cola to expand its operations there.

  “Boss, I’m coming to see you now,” Peggy said, and hung up the phone.

  Bawuah-Edusei’s face was somber when she entered, and instead of remaining seated at his desk to talk to her as usual, he offered her a seat on the burgundy-colored leather sofa set against the wood-paneled wall. He sat down in the chair next to her.

  The ambassador was a distinguished man with a high round forehead that made him look like a brown egg. He had small, piercing dark eyes that glowed like embers behind his gold-rimmed glasses, and a pencil thin black mustache. He was always beautifully dressed, and his manners were impeccable. Peggy thoroughly enjoyed working for him and had always felt she could tell him anything. But now the words stuck in her throat. She opened her mouth, and a little croaking sound came out, and then she closed her mouth.