AS ABENA MADE THE JOURNEY back to her village, new seeds in hand, she thought, yet again, about how old she was. An unmarried twenty-five-year-old woman was unheard of, in her village or any other on this continent or the next. But there were only a few men in her village, and none of them wanted to take a chance with Unlucky’s daughter. Abena’s father’s crops had never grown. Year after year, season after season, the earth spit up rotted plants or sometimes nothing at all. Who knew where this bad luck came from?

Abena felt the seeds in her hand—small, round, and hard. Who would suspect that they could turn into a whole field? She wondered if, this year, they would do so for her father. Abena was certain that she must have inherited the thing that had earned her father his nickname. They called him the man without a name. They called him Unlucky. And now his troubles had followed her. Even her childhood best friend, Ohene Nyarko, would not take her as his second wife. Though he would never say it, she knew what he was thinking: that she was not worth the loss of yams and wine a bride price would cost him. Sometimes, while sleeping in the private hut her father had built for her, she would wonder if she herself was a curse, not the untilled land that lay around them, but her own self.

“Old Man, I have brought you the seeds you were asking for,” Abena announced as she entered her parents’ hut. She had gone to the next village over because her father thought, yet again, that a change in seeds might bring about a change in luck.

“Thank you,” he said. Inside the hut, Abena’s mother was sweeping the floor, bent forward, one hand on the small of her back, the other gripped tightly around the palm bristles as she swayed to music that only she could hear.

Abena cleared her throat. “I would like to visit Kumasi,” she said. “I would like to see it just once before I die.”

Her father looked up sharply. He had been examining the seeds in his hands, turning them over, putting them to his ear as though he could hear them, putting them to his lips as though he could taste them. “No,” he said firmly.

Her mother didn’t stand up, but she stopped sweeping. Abena could no longer hear the bristles brushing the hard clay.

“It is time I make the journey,” Abena said, eyes level. “It is time I meet people from other villages. I will soon be an old lady with no children, and I will know nothing but this village and the next. I want to visit Kumasi. See what a large city is like, walk by the Asante king’s palace.”

Hearing the words “Asante king,” her father clenched his fists, crushing the seeds in his hands to a fine powder that slipped through the small spaces between his fingers. “See the Asante king’s palace for what?” he yelled.

“Am I not an Asante?” she asked, daring him to tell her the truth, to explain the Fante in his accent, the white in his skin. “Do my people not come from Kumasi? You have kept me here like a prisoner with your bad luck. Unlucky, they call you, but your name should be Shame, or Fearful, or Liar. Which is it, Old Man?”

With that, her father slapped her firmly across her left cheek, and the seeds in his hand powdered her face. She reached up to where the pain was. He had never hit her before. Every other child in their village had been beaten for something as small as dropping water from a bucket or as large as sleeping with someone before marriage. But her parents never hit her. Instead, they treated her as an equal, asking her opinion and discussing their plans with her. The only thing they had ever forbidden her from doing was going to Kumasi, land of the Asante king, or down into Fanteland. And while she had no use for the Coast, no respect for Fante people, her pride in the Asante was great. It was growing every day as word came of the Asante soldiers’ valiant battles against the British, their strength, their hope for a free kingdom.

For as long as she could remember her parents had made up one excuse after the other. She was too young. Her blood had not come. She was not married. She was never getting married. Abena had begun to believe that her parents had killed someone in Kumasi or were wanted by the king’s guards, maybe even by the king himself. She no longer cared.

Abena wiped the seed powder from her face and made her hand into a fist, but before she could use it, her mother came up behind her and snatched her arm.

“Enough,” she said.

Old Man had his head down as he walked out of their hut, and when the cool air from outside hit the exposed nape of her neck, Abena started to cry.

“Sit down,” her mother said, gesturing to the stool her father had just left. Abena did as she was told, and watched her mother, a woman of sixty-five, who looked no older than she herself did, still so beautiful that the village boys whispered and whistled when she bent down to lift water. “Your father and I are not welcome in Kumasi,” she said. She was speaking as one speaks to an old woman whose memories, those things that used to be hard-formed chrysalises, had turned into butterflies and flown away, never to return. “I am from Kumasi, and when I was young, I defied my parents to marry your father. He came to get me. He came all the way from Fanteland.”

Abena shook her head. “Why didn’t your parents want you to marry him?”

Akosua put one hand on top of hers and began stroking it. “Your father was a…” She stopped, searching for the right words. Abena knew her mother didn’t want to tell a secret that was not hers to tell. “He was the son of a Big Man, the grandson of two very Big Men, and he wanted to live a life for himself instead of a life that was chosen for him. He wanted his children to be able to do the same. That is all I can say. Go and visit Kumasi. Your father will not stop you.”

Her mother left the hut in search of her father, and Abena stared at the red clay walls around her. Her father should have been a Big Man, but he had chosen this: red clay formed in the shape of a circle, a packed straw roof, a hut so small it fit nothing more than a few tree stump stools. Outside, the ruined earth of a farm that had never earned its title as a farm. His decision had meant her shame, her unmarried, childless shame. She would go to Kumasi.

—

In the evening, once she was certain her parents had gone to sleep, Abena slipped away to Ohene Nyarko’s compound. His first wife, Mefia, was boiling water outside her hut, the steam from the air and the pot making her sweat.

“Sister Mefia, is your husband in?” Abena asked, and Mefia rolled her eyes and pointed toward the door.

Ohene Nyarko’s farms were fruitful every year. Though their village was no more than two miles by two miles, though there was no one to even call Chief or Big Man, so small were their land and their status, Ohene was well respected. A man who could have done well elsewhere, had he not been born here.

“Your wife hates me,” Abena said.

“She thinks I am still sleeping with you,” Ohene Nyarko said, his eyes twinkling with mischief. It made Abena want to hit him.

She cringed when she thought of what had happened between them. They were only children then. Inseparable and mischievous. Ohene had discovered that the stick between his legs could perform tricks, and while Abena’s father and mother were out begging for a share of the elders’ food, as they did every week, Ohene had showed Abena those tricks.

“See?” he said as they watched it lift when she touched it. They had both seen their fathers’ this way, Ohene on those days his father went from one wife’s hut to the next, and Abena in the days before she got her own hut. But they had never known Ohene’s to do the same.

“What does it feel like?” she had asked.

He shrugged, smiled, and she knew what he felt was a good thing. She was born to parents who let her speak her mind, go after what she wanted, even if that thing was limited to boys. Now she wanted this.