“People think they are coming to me for advice,” Mampanyin said, “but really, they come to me for permission. If you want to do something, do it. The Asantes will be in Efutu soon, this I know.”

She was no longer looking at him. Instead, she focused on the contents of the pot. There was no way this woman could know what the plans of the Asantes were. Theirs was the most powerful army in all of Africa. It was said that when the white men first came upon the Asante warriors with their bare chests and their loose cloth wraps, they had laughed, saying, “Are these not the cloths our women would wear?” They had prided themselves on their guns and their uniforms: the button-down jackets and trousers. Then the Asantes had slaughtered them by the hundreds, cut out the hearts of their military leaders and eaten them for strength. After that, at least one British soldier could be seen wetting those trousers they once praised as he retreated from the men they once underestimated.

If all that they said about the Asante army was true, it was impossible that they would be poorly organized enough to let a Fante fetish woman know of their plans. James knew that her roving eye had found itself in Efutu, in the future, and had seen him there, just as it had seen his heart’s desire just then.

—

But still James did not go to Efutu. Amma was waiting for him when he went back home.

“What did Mampanyin say?” his wife asked.

“She said you must be patient with me,” he said, and his wife huffed, dissatisfied. James knew she would spend the rest of the day gossiping with her girlfriends about him.

For a week James was miserable. He started to have doubts about Akosua, about his wish to live a small life. Was his life now so bad? He could stay in the village. He could continue the work of his father.

James had all but decided to do this when his grandmother came over to eat one night.

Effia was an old lady, and yet it was still possible to see the youth that once was somewhere beneath the many lines of her face. She had insisted on living in Cape Coast, in the house her husband had built, even after Quey had grown prominent in her village. She said she would never again live in the village that evil had built.

As they all ate outside in Quey’s compound, James could feel his grandmother watching him, and after the house girls and boys had all come to collect their dishes, and James’s father and mother had retired for the evening, he could feel his grandmother watching him still.

“What’s wrong, my own child?” she asked when the two of them were finally alone.

James didn’t speak. The fufu they had eaten sat like a rock at the bottom of his belly, and he thought it would make him sick. He looked at his grandmother. They said she was once so beautiful that the Castle governor would have burned their whole village down just to get to her.

She touched the black stone necklace she wore at her neck and then reached for James’s hand. “You are not content?” she asked.

And James could feel the pressure build behind his eyes as tears threatened to break through. He squeezed his grandmother’s hand. “I’ve heard my mother call my father weak my whole life, but what if I’m just like him?” James said. He expected his grandmother to react, but she remained silent. “I want to be my own nation.” He knew she wouldn’t be able to understand what he said, and yet it seemed that she had heard him. Even though he spoke in a whisper, she heard him.

His grandmother didn’t speak at first, just watched him. “We are all weak most of the time,” she said finally. “Look at the baby. Born to his mother, he learns how to eat from her, how to walk, talk, hunt, run. He does not invent new ways. He just continues with the old. This is how we all come to the world, James. Weak and needy, desperate to learn how to be a person.” She smiled at him. “But if we do not like the person we have learned to be, should we just sit in front of our fufu, doing nothing? I think, James, that maybe it is possible to make a new way.”

She kept smiling. The sun was setting behind them, and James finally let himself cry in front of his grandmother.

And so, the next day, James told his family that he was going back to Cape Coast with Effia, but instead he went to Efutu. He found work with a doctor whom his grandmother knew, who had worked for the British when she lived in the Castle. All James had to do was tell him that he was James Collins’s grandson, and he immediately received work and a place to stay.

The doctor was Scottish and so old he could hardly walk upright, let alone heal illnesses without catching them. He had moved to Efutu after working for the company for only one year. He spoke fluent Fante, had built his compound himself from the ground up, and had remained unmarried, even though many of the local women had brought their young daughters to him as offerings. To the townspeople he was a mystery, but they had grown fond of him, affectionately calling him the White Doctor.

It was James’s job to help keep the medicine room clean. The White Doctor’s medical hut was next door to his living quarters, and it was small enough so that he didn’t really need James’s help at all. James swept, organized the medicines, washed the rags. Sometimes, in the evenings, he would cook a simple meal for the two of them, and they would sit in the yard, facing the dirt stretch of road, while the White Doctor told stories about his time in the Castle.

“You look just like your grandmother. What was that the locals used to call her?” He scratched his fine white hair. “The Beauty. Effia the Beauty, right?”

James nodded, trying to see her through the doctor’s eyes.

“Your grandfather was so excited to marry her. I remember the night before she was to come to the Castle, we took James over to the company store just as the sun was going down and drank up almost all of the new liquor shipment. James had to tell the bosses back in England that the ship that had transported the liquor had sunk or been taken over by pirates. Something like that. It was a great night for all of us. A little rabble-rousing in Africa.” A dreamy look came over his face, and James wondered if the old man had gotten the adventure he seemed to have been chasing here in the Gold Coast.

In a month, James would get what he had been chasing. The call came in the middle of the night. Fast-paced, high-pitched panting and shrieking as the watchmen of Efutu went from hut to hut, shouting that the Asantes were coming. The British and Fante armies stationed there sent out word for backup to join them, but the panic in the watchmen’s eyes told James that the Asantes were closer than any help could be. Already by that point, villages throughout Fanteland, Ga-land, and Denkyira had been living in fear of Asante raids. British soldiers had been stationed intermittently in the towns and villages surrounding Cape Coast. Their goal was to keep the Asantes from storming the Castle, lest they do it successfully, but Efutu, only a week’s journey from the Coast, was far too close for comfort.

“You must run!” James shouted at the White Doctor. The old man had lit a palm oil lamp next to his cot and pulled out a leather-bound book, reading with his spectacles perched at the tip of his nose. “They will kill you when they see you. They will not care that you are old.”

The White Doctor turned the page. He didn’t look up at James as he waved goodbye.

James shook his head and left the hut. Mampanyin had told him that he would know what to do when the time came, and yet here he was, so panicked that he could hardly breathe. He could feel the warm liquid traveling down his legs as he ran. He could not think. He could not think quickly enough to devise a plan, and before he knew it, shots were being fired all around him. The birds took flight, a black and red and blue and green cloud of wings, ascending. James wanted to hide. He couldn’t remember what had been so bad about his old life. He could learn to love Amma. He’d spent so much time seeing the bad in his parents’ marriage that he’d assumed there had to be something better. What if there wasn’t? He had trusted a witch with his happiness. With his life. Now he would surely die.

—