Maame and Esi went into their hut and found Abronoma, curled up on a bamboo cot, living up to her name of a little bird. Maame woke her and had her stand before them. She pulled out a switch that Big Man had given her, a switch she had never used. She then looked at Esi with tears in her eyes. “Please, leave us.”

Esi left the hut and for minutes after could hear the sound of the switch and the harmonizing pitch of two separate cries.

The next day Big Man called everyone in his compound out to see if Abronoma could carry a bucket of water on her head from the yard to the tree without spilling a drop. Esi and her whole family, her four stepmothers and nine half siblings, scattered around their large yard, waiting for the girl to first fetch water from the stream into a large black bucket. From there, Big Man had her stand before all of them and bow before starting the journey to the tree. He would walk beside her to be certain there was no error.

Esi could see Little Dove shaking as she lifted the bucket onto her head. Maame clutched Esi against her chest and smiled at the girl when she bowed at them, but the look Abronoma returned was fearful and then vacant. When the bucket touched her head, the family began to jeer.

“She’ll never make it!” Amma, Big Man’s first wife, said.

“Watch, she will spill it all and drown herself in the process,” Kojo, the eldest son, said.

Little Dove took her first step and Esi let out the breath she had been holding. She herself had never been able to carry so much as a single plank of wood on her head, but she had watched her mother carry a perfectly round coconut without it ever rolling off, steady as a second head. “Where did you learn to do that?” Esi had asked Maame then, and the woman replied, “You can learn anything when you have to learn it. You could learn to fly if it meant you would live another day.”

Abronoma steadied her legs and kept walking, her head facing forward. Big Man walked beside her, whispering insults in her ear. She reached the tree at the forest’s edge and pivoted, making her way back to the audience that awaited her. By the time she got close enough that Esi could make out her features again, there was sweat dripping off the ledge of her nose and her eyes were brimming with tears. Even the bucket on her head seemed to be crying, condensation working its way down the outside of it. As she lifted the bucket off of her head, she started to smile triumphantly. Maybe it was a small gust of wind, maybe an insect looking for a bath, or maybe the Dove’s hand slipped, but before the bucket reached the ground, two drops sloshed out.

Esi looked at Maame, who had turned her sad, pleading eyes to Big Man, but by that point, the rest of the family was already shouting for punishment.

Kojo began to lead them into a song:

The Dove has failed. Oh, what to do? Make her to suffer or you’ll fail too!

Big Man reached for his switch, and soon the song gained its accompaniment: the percussion of reed to flesh, the woodwind of reed to air. This time, Abronoma did not cry.

—

“If he didn’t beat her, everyone would think he was weak,” Esi said. After the event, Maame had been inconsolable, crying to Esi that Big Man should not have beaten Little Dove for so small a mistake. Esi was licking soup off of her fingers, her lips stained orange. Her mother had taken Abronoma into their hut and made a salve for her wounds, and now the girl lay on a cot sleeping.

“Weak, eh?” Maame said. She glared at her daughter with malice that Esi had never before seen.

“Yes,” Esi whispered.

“That I should live to hear my own daughter speak like this. You want to know what weakness is? Weakness is treating someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves.”

Esi was hurt. She had only said what anyone else in her village would have said, and for this Maame yelled at her. Esi wanted to cry, to hug her mother, something, but Maame left the room then to finish the chores that Abronoma could not perform that night.

Just as she left, Little Dove began to stir. Esi fetched her water, and helped tilt her head back so that she could drink it. The wounds on her back were still fresh, and the salve that Maame had made stank of the forest. Esi wiped the corners of Abronoma’s lips with her fingers, but the girl pushed her away.

“Leave me,” she said.

“I—I’m sorry for what happened. He is a good man.”

Abronoma spit onto the clay in front of her. “Your father is Big Man, eh?” she asked, and Esi nodded, proud despite what she had just seen her father do. The Dove let out a mirthless laugh. “My father too is Big Man, and now look at what I am. Look at what your mother was.”

“What my mother was?”

Little Dove’s eyes shot toward Esi. “You don’t know?”

Esi, who had not spent more than an hour away from her mother’s sight in her life, couldn’t imagine any secrets. She knew the feel of her and the smell of her. She knew how many colors were in her irises and she knew each crooked tooth. Esi looked at Abronoma, but Abronoma shook her head and continued her laugh.

“Your mother was once a slave for a Fante family. She was raped by her master because he too was a Big Man and big men can do what they please, lest they appear weak, eh?” Esi looked away, and Abronoma continued in a whisper. “You are not your mother’s first daughter. There was one before you. And in my village we have a saying about separated sisters. They are like a woman and her reflection, doomed to stay on opposite sides of the pond.”

Esi wanted to hear more, but there was no time to ask the Dove. Maame came back into the room, and saw the two girls sitting beside each other.

“Esi, come here and let Abronoma sleep. Tomorrow you will wake up early and help me clean.”

Esi left Abronoma to her rest. She looked at her mother. The way her shoulders always seemed to droop, the way her eyes were always shifting. Suddenly, Esi was filled with a horrible shame. She remembered the first time she’d seen an elder spit on the captives in the town square. The man had said, “Northerners, they are not even people. They are the dirt that begs for spit.” Esi was five years old then. His words had felt like a lesson, and the next time she passed, she timidly gathered her own spit and launched it at a little boy who stood huddled with his mother. The boy had cried out, speaking a language that Esi didn’t understand, and Esi had felt bad, not for having spit, but for knowing how angry her mother would have been to see her do it.

Now all Esi could picture was her own mother behind the dull metal of the cages. Her own mother, huddled with a sister she would never know.

—

In the months that followed, Esi tried to befriend Abronoma. Her heart had started to ache for the little bird who had now perfected her role as house girl. Since the beating, no crumb was dropped, no water spilled. In the evenings, after Abronoma’s work was done, Esi would try to coax more information from her about her mother’s past.

“I don’t know any more,” Abronoma said, taking the bundle of palm branches to sweep the floor, or straining used oil through leaves. “Don’t worry me!” she screamed once she’d reached the height of her annoyance.

Still, Esi tried to make amends. “What can I do?” she asked. “What can I do?”

After weeks of asking, Esi finally received an answer. “Send word to my father,” Abronoma said. “Tell him where I am. Tell him where I am and there will be no bad blood between us.”

That night, Esi couldn’t sleep. She wanted to make peace with Abronoma, but if her father knew what she had been asked to do, surely there would be war in her hut. She could hear her father now, yelling at Maame, telling her that she was raising Esi to be a small woman, weak. On the floor of her hut, Esi turned and turned and turned, until finally her mother hushed her.

“Please,” Maame said. “I’m tired.”