She thought about this for a moment, wiped her nose with the back of her hand, and answered, “I would have brought more water.”

Her father nodded. “Then next time bring more water, but don’t cry for this time. There should be no room in your life for regret. If in the moment of doing you felt clarity, you felt certainty, then why feel regret later?”

She nodded as he spoke to her even though she didn’t understand his words, because she knew, even then, that he was speaking more for himself.

But now, letting her head move in rhythm with Ohene Nyarko’s breath and heart, the slow trickle of combined sweat that slid between them, she remembered those words, and she regretted nothing.

*

The year Abena visited Kumasi, everyone in her village had a bad harvest. Then the year after. And for four more years on top of those. Villagers began to move away. Some were so desperate they even went to the dreaded North, crossing the Volta in search of unclaimed land, land that hadn’t forsaken them.

Abena’s father was so old he could no longer straighten his back or hands. He could no longer farm. So Abena did it for him, watching as the ruined land spit up death year after year. The villagers were not eating. They said it was an act of penance but knew it was their only choice.

Even Ohene Nyarko’s once lush lands had turned barren, and so his promise to marry Abena after the next good harvest had been set aside.

They continued to see each other. In the first year, before they knew what the harvest would bring, they had done so brazenly. “Abena, be careful,” her mother would say in the mornings after Ohene Nyarko snuck out of Abena’s hut. “This is bad juju.” But Abena didn’t care. So what if people knew? So what if she got pregnant? Soon enough she would be Ohene Nyarko’s wife, not just his oldest friend turned mistress.

But that year, Ohene Nyarko’s plants were the first to spoil, and people scratched their heads, wondering why. Until their own plants died, and they said there must be a witch among them. Had the trouble they thought Unlucky would bring them been so long delayed? It was a woman named Aba who first saw Ohene Nyarko walking the path back from Abena’s hut at the end of the second bad year.

“It’s Abena!” Aba cried at the next village meeting, bursting into the room full of old men, her hand clutching her heaving bosom. “She brought evil to Ohene Nyarko, and that evil is spreading to us all!”

The elders gathered accounts from Ohene Nyarko and Abena themselves, and then, for the next eight hours, they debated what to do. It was reasonable that Ohene Nyarko had promised to marry her after the next good harvest. They saw no harm in that, but they could not let the fornication go unpunished lest the children grow up to think such things were acceptable, lest the more superstitious among them continue to blame Abena for the faults of the land. All they knew was, the woman had to be as barren as the land itself for her to not have conceived, and they knew too that if they banished her from the village now, Ohene Nyarko would be too angry to help them get the earth to recover once she had left. Finally, they reached their decision and announced it to all. Abena would be removed from the village when she conceived a child or after seven bad years. If a good harvest came before either outcome, they would let her stay.

—

“Is your husband home?” Abena asked Ohene Nyarko’s wife on the third day of the sixth bad year. She had walked the short distance as the sky dropped around her, but by the time she got there, it had stopped.

Mefia didn’t look at her, nor did she speak. In fact, Ohene Nyarko’s first wife had not spoken to Abena since the night she fought with her husband, begging him to end his affair, to end their family’s shame, and he replied that he wouldn’t go back on his word. Still, Abena tried being nice to the woman any chance she could.

Finally, after the moment of silence grew too awkward for Abena to bear, she went into Ohene Nyarko’s hut. When she saw him, he was packing some things into a small kente cloth sack.

“Where are you going?” she asked, standing in the doorway.

“I’m going to Osu. They say someone there has brought over a new plant. They say it will grow well here.”

“And what will I do while you are in Osu? They’ll probably kick me out the second you’re gone,” Abena said.

Ohene Nyarko set down his things and lifted Abena into his arms so that their faces were level. “Then they will have to deal with me when I get back.”

He put her down again. Outside, his children were picking bark from the Tweapia trees so that they could make chewing sticks to take to Kumasi and sell for food. Abena knew this shamed Ohene Nyarko—not that his children had found something useful to do, but that they had done so because of his inability to feed them.

They made love quickly that day, and Ohene Nyarko set out shortly after. Abena went home to find her parents sitting in front of a fire, roasting groundnuts.

“Ohene Nyarko says there is a new plant in Osu that is growing very well. He has gone to get it and bring it back to us.”

Her mother nodded. Her father shrugged. Abena knew she had shamed them. When the pronouncement of her future exile was made, her parents had gone to the elders to try to reason with them, to make them reconsider. At that time, and still, Unlucky was the oldest man in the village. Deference was still owed, even if he wasn’t allowed to be an elder because he wasn’t originally from the village.

“We have only one child,” Old Man had said, but the elders just turned their heads.

“What have you done?” Abena’s mother asked her at dinner that night, crying into her hands before lifting them up to the heavens. “What have I done to deserve this child?”

But at that point, only two bad years had gone by, and Abena assured them that the plants would grow, and Ohene Nyarko would marry her. Now their only solace was the fact that it seemed Abena had inherited her mother’s supposed barrenness, or Old Man’s family’s curse, or whatever it was that kept her from conceiving a child.

“Nothing will grow here,” Old Man said. “This village is finished. No one can keep living like this. No one can take one more year eating nothing but nuts and tree bark. They think they are exiling just you, but really this land has condemned us all to exile. You watch. It’s only a matter of time.”

—

Ohene Nyarko came back a week later with the new seeds. The plant was called cocoa, and he said it would change everything. He said the Akuapem people in the Eastern Region were already reaping the benefits of the new plant, selling it to the white men overseas at a rate that was reminiscent of the old trade.

“You don’t know how much these little seeds cost me!” Ohene Nyarko said, holding them in his palm so that everyone around him could see and feel and smell them. “But it will be worth it for the village. Trust me. They will have to stop calling us the Gold Coast and start calling us the Cocoa Coast!”

And he was right. Within months Ohene Nyarko’s cocoa trees had sprouted, bearing their gold and green and orange fruit. The villagers had never seen anything like it, and they were so curious, so eager to touch and open the pods before they were ready, that Ohene Nyarko and his sons had taken to sleeping outside so that they could keep watch.