King Peggy Page 8

  She stood up straight and squared her shoulders. She was a king. She had lived alone in America for decades, no easy thing for an African woman. She had the strength to do this. She touched her mother’s little gold bracelet, and suddenly her spirits soared.

  Taking a deep breath, she glided down the corridor, ready to meet her elders, and found them already seated in the parlor on the comfortable chairs and sofas, leaving a chair for her between Tsiami and Kwame Lumpopo.

  “Akwaaba,” she said, smiling cordially and nodding at each one as she took her seat. Welcome. The elders greeted her and smiled back. Were they, too, just a little bit nervous to meet their new king? The thought calmed her rapidly beating heart as the aunties trudged in carrying in the handmade wooden bench from the dining room and set it against the wall. Jostling one another, they sat down.

  Peggy recognized some of the royal council from her mother’s funeral and her previous visits to Otuam. A few years earlier, there had been fifteen in all, Kwame Lumpopo had told her, but several had died, moved away, or become too old and ill to attend council meetings. Today there were six of them, all members of the royal Ebiradze family.

  Peggy’s priest, Tsiami, was sitting at her right hand, the proper place for her chief elder. Now he stood and bellowed in a reedy voice, “Nana! Akwaaba to Otuam. In the name of the ancestors who chose you and of your royal council, I welcome you.”

  Peggy had inherited her late uncle’s tsiami, seventy-six-year-old Kweku Mensah, who had held the post for about forty years. Tsiami, as everybody called him, was a lithe man, all bones and sinews. His face was intense, his dark skin stretched taut over angular bones. He had a large square forehead, a snub nose, and perfect white teeth despite a lifelong absence from a dental chair. While most men his age were bald, Tsiami still had a full head of black hair, graying at the temples.

  Like so many elderly men in the villages, Tsiami had never learned to read or write because he had started fishing full-time as a child. He had fished for more than sixty years, but at the age of seventy decided the sea was too dangerous for an old man. The riptides in Otuam’s Atlantic waters were so strong that even young fishermen who fell overboard in rough seas were swept away and never found. Usually Otuam lost several fishermen a year, good swimmers all.

  Tsiami had bought a large plantation not far from the palace with several acres of pineapples, papayas, and cassava, which he tilled with his strapping sons. They were building a new house near his fields for the expanding family, which now included numerous grandchildren. The decades of fishing and farming had left Tsiami with the slender muscular arms and shoulders of an athlete in his twenties.

  Also known as a “linguist,” a tsiami was the king’s official spokesman. On grand official occasions, such as royal funerals, the king whispered into the tsiami’s ear and it was the tsiami who spoke, holding the royal speaking staff, while the king sat silently and serenely, too majestic to utter a word out loud.

  Tsiamis were chosen from the royal family for their eloquence and were often called upon to polish and edit the king’s words. They handled money in public for the king, to pay the royal drummers, for instance, as kings weren’t allowed to be seen in public with demeaning wads of cash in their hands.

  Most importantly, tsiamis were the bridge between the living and the dead and conducted all of the rituals to keep God and the ancestors happy. Peggy’s tsiami could actually talk to the royal stools and understand when they talked back. Many tsiamis performed the rituals for decades but never developed this enviable ability. Sometimes these less talented tsiamis received messages in dreams, which was almost as good. As a person who could hold conversations with ancestors and gods, Tsiami didn’t believe in Christianity at all. He felt that white European religions detracted from the ancestral beliefs, pulling Africans away from their own culture and wasting their time in bad singing and useless clapping.

  Watching him take his seat, Peggy felt there was something stiff and prickly about her tsiami. She remembered from her earlier trips to Otuam that he rarely smiled and usually stared straight ahead or at his lap, even when he was speaking or listening to someone. He could sit for hours as still as a statue, as still as one of the pineapples he grew.

  “It is indeed very good to have you back with us, my daughter,” Uncle Moses Acquah said enthusiastically, waving his hands about. Uncle Moses was the walrus who had consulted the genealogical records to compile the list of candidates for king, and he now proudly took credit for having put Peggy on the stool. “I can’t tell you how happy we are that the ancestors chose a Ghanaian-American lady king! It is so very exciting. You are like a bird that has flown far away and has now returned to its nest.” His emotional manner and wild gestures contrasted sharply with Tsiami’s stony coolness.

  Uncle Moses was considered the most educated of her elders because he had finished ninth grade and could read and write in both Fante and English. He had been a military policeman for twenty-two years, but after his retirement returned to his roots in Otuam and joined the royal council. Because of Uncle Moses’s literacy, the late king had put him in charge of the fishermen to settle disputes that arose from the tangled nets of competing canoes and such matters.

  The aunties had mentioned that Uncle Moses worked as a part-time security guard at one of the cell phone towers located a few hundred yards from the royal palace. There were two of them right next to each other, white with red lights at the top, which was why Otuam, which didn’t have a drop of running water, had some of the best cell phone coverage in Africa. The town had been thrilled when Tigo and MTN had built the towers there as part of their new networks along Ghana’s Atlantic coast.

  Cell phones had first come to Ghana in 1992, and they took off like wildfire because few people had land lines. Until then, whenever someone needed to contact a relative in another village they would take a message to the local radio station, which would transmit it to the radio station in the broadcast area of the intended recipient. There, during the message hour, the announcer might say, “Would Auntie Dorothy Mensah of Mankessim please contact her cousin Martha Boateng in Kumasi, as she has important news for you.” Even if Auntie Dorothy wasn’t listening to the radio at that moment, one of her friends or relatives would surely hear it and give her the message.

  Given the clumsiness of this form of communication, it wasn’t surprising that nineteen thousand Ghanaians bought cell phones the first year they were introduced. By 2008, more than six million people had cell phones, a quarter of the population. Cell phones themselves were cheap, and even in the most remote village cell phone users could buy a prepaid phone card for a set amount, scratch off the waxy coating over the long code on the back of it, and type it into the phone. Prepaid cards were efficient, as many Ghanaians didn’t have addresses or postal service for bills to arrive, nor did they have bank accounts from which to pay the bills.

  Otuam’s Tigo cell phone tower needed security guards because the little concrete block station at its base contained a lot of wire, and several years earlier some enterprising thieves had broken in, stolen all of it, and twisted it into beautiful necklaces and earrings, which they sold on Main Street. After that the cell phone company hired elderly men to lounge on a bench under a shade tree outside the station in shifts, twenty-four hours a day. No one had broken in since. Several days a week Uncle Moses put on his brown security guard uniform and lay down on the bench under the popo tree to guard the wire.

  Next to Uncle Moses sat his good friend, Isaiah the Treasurer. At sixty-eight, he was the youngest of the Otuam elders and eschewed traditional robes for high-waisted pants, held up well above his trim waist by a large belt. He was considered highly educated as he, too, could read and write quite well, and he was very active in the Methodist church on Main Street. He had flashing, intense, deep-set eyes, full cheeks, and a pointed chin, which made him look something like a turnip. Peggy remembered him well for his polished flattery.

  “Nana,” he said now, smiling w
idely, “we are so happy you are our new king, indeed, truly delighted. Speaking on behalf of your entire council, may I say that we will do our best to help you, and when you are in Washington, we will take care of everything for you. Uncle Moses and I are, you know, very well educated.” Peggy thanked him for his kind words.

  Across from Peggy, Uncle Eshun reclined on the overstuffed sofa. She had heard about Uncle Eshun’s stroke a few years back; one side of his body was lame, but he could shuffle around well enough on his cane and still had a kindly, gentle air. He had Bambi eyes, large and dark and widely spaced, fringed with curly eyelashes. Beneath his wide cheekbones, his cheeks had sunken in since there were so few teeth to hold them out. “Nana, I, too, can read and write. I am in charge of recording all funerals in Otuam,” he said proudly in a voice shredding with age, “and issuing death certificates.”

  Sharing the sofa with Uncle Eshun, Baba Kobena was heavier than the others, with an energetic face and a square jaw sporting an underbite. When he smiled he flashed a full row of lower teeth. He wore a lozenge-shaped black hat, which he kept taking off, playing with, and putting back on his head. He, too, had been a fisherman for more than half a century, and like Tsiami was completely illiterate. Peggy was taking notes in a little notebook on her lap (a habit she had picked up as recording secretary at countless embassy meetings), and when she asked him how he spelled his name, he merely shook his head. Uncle Moses and Isaiah the Treasurer tried to spell it for her, arguing over which vowels to use in Kobena.

  As they exchanged small talk about her journey, Peggy decided she would give it to them straight. She was never one for beating about the bush, and her elders needed to know what they were getting themselves into with her as their new king.

  She took a deep breath and said, “You may be the men and I the woman, but you really have to be ready for me. I am not going to take nonsense from anybody. You are also much older than I am, but you have given me the power to rule. And I will do the best I can for you, but don’t think that you are putting me there for you to rule me. I will be ruling you. I am your king, and the king rules. God put these people in my charge, and I am going to do great things for the sake of the coming generations.”

  They nodded, smiling. Peggy couldn’t tell whether they were taking her seriously. Well, if they didn’t now, she was pretty sure they would later.

  Aggie served the elders “minerals,” the Ghanaian term for soft drinks, as at five a.m. it was still a bit early for beer—and Peggy looked carefully to see that all of them drank something. In Ghana, if someone comes to your house and doesn’t touch his drink, not even a sip, it means he doesn’t like you. Had all these elderly men approved of her, a woman, becoming their new king? One by one, they all sipped their Cokes and Fantas. Yes, they had approved.

  Peggy noticed that Aggie, having served the elders drinks, was standing at the door, one hand on her hip, the other holding a spatula. Evidently she wanted to watch the council meeting, perhaps so she could take drink orders or perhaps because she was nosy. And her spatula, which she could just as easily have left in the kitchen, seemed to be a weapon that she held at the ready to defend Peggy, if need be. Well, Peggy thought, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have another woman from a big city keeping an eye on these men.

  Periodically, Peggy heard a strange sound coming from the other room, like a deep groan. She realized it was the fridge, an ancient machine whose spirit was exhausted and in pain. Perhaps no one here talked to it, encouraged it, and complimented it, the way she did the tired spirit of her 1992 Honda.

  “So what is there that I need to know about ruling Otuam?” she asked.

  Silence. A few elders shrugged their shoulders. “Surely there is something?” she prodded. “What does the king do?”

  Silence again. Then Uncle Moses began to speak. “You meet with us to resolve various disputes in families and between neighbors. You are present for rituals at shrines and the pouring of libations at the stool room in the palace. You attend the funerals of kings in the region.”

  That didn’t sound like very much. That’s all the king did?

  “What about my queen mother?” Peggy asked. She remembered from her visit to Otuam in 1995 that the position of queen mother had been vacant for years, and the late king who was in the fridge hadn’t bothered to fill it. But at the start of a new reign the elders would have selected a new queen mother as well as a king, probably using the same methods. “Who is she? ”

  “Your cousin Elizabeth’s oldest daughter, Paulina Nyamekyeh,” Tsiami replied. “She has taken the royal name of Nana Kodzia III.”

  Peggy made a face. “Isn’t she a little girl?”

  “She is fifteen.”

  It was unfortunate that the queen mother was so young. Usually a more mature woman was chosen, one who could provide the king with advice to help the women and children, based on decades of experience as a woman and mother herself. Paulina was a child, still in school. And it suddenly struck Peggy as very odd, the selection of the new king and queen mother of Otuam: a lady king living thousands of miles away, and a little girl who didn’t know anything. How was anybody going to rule Otuam?

  “And the ancestors also selected Paulina’s ten-year-old cousin, Faustina, to be your Soul,” Tsiami told Peggy.

  “My soul?” she asked. She could have sworn she already had one.

  “Jealous evil spirits like to zoom in on kings like vengeful wasps,” he explained, staring into space, “but they can be deflected by the innocence of a little girl sitting directly in front of the king, a kind of human shield. For all your official events, you must have the Soul in front of you or the evil spirits might make trouble for you.”

  Peggy hadn’t heard about this tradition, but she knew it was best to avoid evil spirits at all cost. “What happens when the innocent little girl grows up?” she asked. “They do grow up, you know.” Lots of them got pregnant, and then she wouldn’t be any good at all diverting evil spirits.

  “When your Soul is sixteen, we go to the shrine and pour libations to choose another one and wait for the schnapps to steam up. But Faustina will always have the honor of having been the king’s Soul.”

  The next topic was the stool Peggy would choose for her enstoolment, which would sit on a shelf in the stool room near all of the male kings’ stools going back for generations. Royal stools were carved from the wood of one of three trees—tweneboa, nyameduah, or sese—which were known to have very vindictive spirits that stayed in the stools even after the souls of the kings and ancestors had been put inside. These trees had the power to walk through the forests, and their roots could turn into venomous serpents. Some of them became so angry at being cut down, that no matter how strategically the carver placed the cuts, the tree would fall over right on top of him, crushing him, unless he sacrificed eggs, chickens, and sheep to the tree before cutting it down.

  Peggy had thought long and hard about the important question of her stool. She wanted something different, something to stand out from the rest, the kind of stool that would proclaim to the big masculine stools, I contain the spirit of a lady king.

  “I want a small stool,” she said, “a white one.”

  Once Peggy’s royal stool had been purchased, Tsiami would conduct the rituals to put her soul into it, along with the souls of the kings who had gone to the village for good, the souls of all the ancestors of Otuam, and of those yet to be born. Then he would ask her stool what libations it would like to drink; though almost all stools liked schnapps, once in a blue moon a new stool said that it wanted something else. She would not be present for these rituals but would first see her stool on her enstoolment day.

  The conversation drifted to her enstoolment celebrations. Tsiami said, “You will need to buy many crates of beer and Coke, Fanta, and other minerals for the party we are going to have here after your enstoolment, some whiskey, too, for the most honored guests, as well as fish, chicken, and rice to feed all the guests.”

  Peggy had to
pay for her own food and drinks? She hadn’t expected this. “Are there no funds that can be used to pay for it?” she asked.

  She turned to Isaiah the Treasurer. If he was the treasurer, that must mean that money went through his hands, right?

  “Isaiah, is there no money at all?”

  Isaiah the Treasurer shook his head. “Not a penny, I’m afraid,” he said, smiling apologetically. “Nana, having lived in the United States for so many years, you are probably not aware that in African villages the king usually spends his own funds for celebrations, as well as providing any assistance to the people.”

  Peggy had stuffed a few hundred-dollar bills from her last paycheck into her bra, which she figured was a very safe place because nobody had any reason to go messing around in there. She had assumed there weren’t enough royal funds to repair the palace, or the road, or the water pipes. But she had also assumed there would be at least enough cedis in the treasury to pay for her food, the enstoolment reception, and any other small costs that might arise, and the money in her bra, which she had brought for an emergency, would accompany her back to Washington. But now she was beginning to fear it wouldn’t even last her the nine days in Otuam if unexpected expenses kept popping up.

  Seeing her concern, Uncle Moses said, “During your enstoolment, we will set up a table under a tent next to the royal palace. The distinguished guests you invited, the chiefs and others, will go there to make donations to help you pay for the costs. Some of them will give chickens or goats, and some will give cash.”

  Peggy was hoping for cash. She looked around the room at her elderly elders and sighed. Being king looked like it was going to be a very expensive proposition.

  Outside the parlor, the spirit of the ancient fridge must have sensed her thoughts, because it uttered a loud, shuddering groan.