“Uncle, we’ve been here a month already and yet, still, you haven’t discussed our trade agreements. The company has the money to buy more. Much more. But you have to let us. You have to stop trading with any other company.”
Quey had given this very speech or one like it many times before, but his uncle Fiifi always ignored him. The first night they were there, Quey had wanted to talk to Badu about the trade agreements straightaway. He thought the sooner he could get the chief to agree, the sooner he could leave. That night, Badu had invited all the men to drink at his compound. He brought them enough wine and akpeteshie to drown in. Timothy Hightower, an officer eager to impress the chief, drank half a caskful of the home brew before he passed out underneath a palm tree, shaking and vomiting and claiming to see spirits. Soon, the rest of the men also littered the forest of Badu’s front yard, vomiting or sleeping or searching for a local woman to sleep with. Quey waited for his chance to speak to Badu, sipping his drink all the while.
He had had only two cups of wine before Fiifi approached him. “Careful, Quey,” Fiifi said, pointing at the scene of men before them. “Stronger men than these have been brought down by too much drink.”
Quey looked at the cup in Fiifi’s hand, his eyebrow raised.
“Water,” Fiifi said. “One of us must be ready for anything.” He motioned to Badu, who had fallen asleep in his gold throne, his chin nestled down into the round flesh of his belly.
Quey laughed, and Fiifi cracked a smile, the first that Quey had seen since meeting him.
Quey never talked to Badu that night, but as the weeks went on he learned that it was not Badu he needed to please. While Abeeku Badu was the figurehead, the Omanhin who received gifts from the political leaders of London and Holland alike for his role in their trade, Fiifi was the authority. When he shook his head, the whole village stopped.
Now Fiifi was as silent as he was every other time Quey had brought up trade with the British. He looked out into the forest in front of them, and Quey followed his gaze. In the trees, two vibrant birds sang loudly, a discordant song.
“Uncle, the agreement Badu made with my father—”
“Do you hear that?” Fiifi asked, pointing to the birds.
Frustrated, Quey nodded.
“When one bird stops, the other one starts. Each time their song gets louder, shriller. Why do you think that is?”
“Uncle, trade is the only reason we’re here. If you want the British out of your village, you have to—”
“What you cannot hear, Quey, is the third bird. She is quiet, quiet, listening to the male birds get louder and louder and louder still. And when they have sung their voices out, then and only then will she speak up. Then and only then will she choose the man whose song she liked better. For now, she sits, and lets them argue: who will be the better partner, who will give her better seed, who will fight for her when times are difficult.
“Quey, this village must conduct its business like that female bird. You want to pay more for slaves, pay more, but know that the Dutch will also pay more, and the Portuguese and even the pirates will pay more too. And while you are all shouting about how much better you are than the others, I will be sitting quietly in my compound, eating my fufu and waiting for the price I think is right. Now, let us not speak of business anymore.”
Quey sighed. So he would be here forever. The birds had stopped singing. Perhaps they sensed his exasperation. He looked at them, their blue, yellow, orange wings, their hooked beaks.
“There were no birds like this in London,” Quey said softly. “There was no color. Everything was gray. The sky, the buildings, even the people looked gray.”
Fiifi shook his head. “I don’t know why Effia let James send you to that nonsense country.”
Quey nodded absently and returned to the porridge in his bowl.
—
Quey had been a lonely child. When he was born, his father built a hut close to the Castle so that he, Effia, and Quey could live more comfortably. In those days trade had been prosperous. Quey never saw the dungeons, and he had only the faintest idea of what went on in the lower levels of the Castle, but he knew that business was good because he rarely saw his father.
Every day was for him and Effia. She was the most patient mother in all of Cape Coast, in all of the Gold Coast. She spoke softly yet assuredly. She never hit him, even when the other mothers taunted her, telling her that she would spoil him and that he would never learn.
“Learn what?” Effia would answer. “What did I ever learn from Baaba?”
And yet Quey did learn. He sat in Effia’s lap as she taught him to speak, repeating a word in both Fante and English until Quey could hear in one language and answer in the other. She had only learned how to read and write herself in the first year of Quey’s life and yet she taught him with vigor, holding his small, fat fist in hers as they traced lines and lines and lines together.
“How smart you are!” she exclaimed when Quey learned to spell his name without her help.
In 1784, on Quey’s fifth birthday, Effia first told him about her own childhood in Badu’s village. He learned all of the names—Cobbe, Baaba, Fiifi. He learned there was another mother whose name they would never know, that the shimmering black stone Effia always wore about her neck had belonged to this woman, his true grandmother. Telling this story, Effia’s face darkened, but the storm passed when Quey reached up and touched her cheek.
“You are my own child,” she said. “Mine.”
And she was his. When he was young that had been enough, but as he grew older, he began to lament the fact that his family was so small, unlike all of the other families in the Gold Coast, where siblings piled on top of siblings in the steady stream of marriages each powerful man consummated. He wished that he could meet his father’s other children, those white Collinses who lived across the Atlantic, but he knew that it would never be. Quey had only himself, his books, the beach, the Castle, his mother.
“I’m worried because he has no friends,” Effia said to James one day. “He doesn’t play with the other Castle children.”
Quey had almost stepped in the door after a day of building sand castle replicas of the Cape Coast Castle when he heard Effia mention his name, and so he had remained outside to listen.
“What are we supposed to do about that? You’ve coddled him, Effia. He’s got to learn to do some things on his own.”
“He should be playing with other Fante children, village children, so that he can get away from here from time to time. Don’t you know anyone?”
“I’m home!” Quey announced, perhaps a bit too noisily, not wanting to hear what his father would say next. By the end of the day, he’d forgotten all about it, but weeks later, when Cudjo Sackee came with his father to visit the Castle, Quey remembered his parents’ conversation.
Cudjo’s father was the chief of a prominent Fante village. He was Abeeku Badu’s biggest competitor, and he had begun meeting with James Collins to discuss increasing trade when the governor asked him if he might bring his eldest son to one of their meetings.
“Quey, this is Cudjo,” James said, giving Quey a small push toward the boy. “You two play while we talk.”
Quey and Cudjo watched their fathers walk off to a different side of the Castle. Once they could hardly make them out anymore, Cudjo turned his attention to Quey.
“Are you white?” Cudjo had asked him, touching his hair.
Quey recoiled at Cudjo’s touch, though many others had done the same thing, asked him the same question. “I’m not white,” he said softly.
“What? Speak up!” Cudjo said, and so Quey had repeated himself, nearly shouting. From the distance, the boys’ fathers turned to observe the commotion.
“Not so loud, Quey,” James said.
Quey could feel color flood into his cheeks, but Cudjo had just looked on, clearly amused.
“So you’re not white. What are you?”
“I’m like you,” Quey said.
Cudjo held his hand out and demanded that Quey do the same, until they were standing arm to arm, skin touching skin. “Not like me,” Cudjo said.