She Would Be King

AUTHOR’S NOTE

When I was a child, my mother cautioned that I should always be kind to cats. She told me a story that took place in the West African village where my family and I hid during Liberia’s civil war in 1990. She said: In Lai, there was once an old woman who beat her cat to death. The cat resurrected and his ghost sat on her roof until her house fell down, killing her. Several years ago I attempted to write a short story about this woman and her notorious death. I did, and from that death, rather surprisingly, and thankfully, Gbessa was born.

{Gbessa is pronounced Bessah}

BOOK ONE

THE THREE

GBESSA

There were no Vai girls like Gbessa. The coastal village of Lai had seen only one woman as cursed—Ol’ Ma Famatta—who they say is sitting in the corner of the moon after her hammock flung her there on her 193rd birthday. But even Ol’ Ma Famatta’s misfortune was nothing compared to that of Gbessa, whose curse was not only her inability to die, but also the way death mocked her.

Lai was hidden in the middle of forests when the Vai people found it. There was evidence of earlier townsmen there, as ends of stoneware and crushed diamonds were found scattered on hilltops in the unexpected company of domestic cats. But when the Vai people arrived from war-ravaged Arabia through the Mandingo inland in the early eighteenth century, they found no inhabitants and decided to occupy the province with their spirits.

On a plot of land one mile long and one half mile wide, they used smelted iron to build their village—a vast circle of houses constructed of palm wood from nearby trees, zinc roofs, and mud bricks to keep them cool during the dry season.

During the day the Ol’ Pas sat together and drew lines and symbols in the dirt that represented how many moons it had been since the last rainfall, or the last eclipse or other wonders of the sky. They waited for the spirits to reveal themselves in nuances and uncover secrets of the land and its animals.

Among many things—like which Poro warrior would best lead upcoming defenses against local tribes so that the Vai army would return with cattle, harvest, and captives to help tend the village rice farms—the spirits also told the Ol’ Pas to take care of the sensitive animals of the province—specifically, cats. The Ol’ Pas then divulged to the villagers the news they gathered from the spirits.

Ol’ Ma Nyanpoo never listened.

Before Gbessa was born, Ol’ Ma Nyanpoo—old, bitter, widowed—was living only two houses down from Khati, Gbessa’s pregnant mother. Ol’ Ma Nyanpoo had a pudgy orange cat whom she beat regularly to numb her loneliness. The village elders warned Ol’ Ma Nyanpoo of what the spirits had told them about beating cats, but she disregarded them—she was powerless to her pride, and she hoped she would make the spirits angry enough to reunite her with her deceased love.

When Kano, Cholly the fisherman’s slave, knocked on Ol’ Ma Nyanpoo’s door to deliver to her the fish that her nets had caught, the pudgy cat stared hoggishly at the tin bucket. He hid behind the fire pit as Ol’ Ma Nyanpoo closed the door in Kano’s face and inspected the bucket for any sign of pilfering. When the cat’s head peeked around the pit, she grabbed a fish from the bucket and waved it at him.

You will not touch it! she yelled, shaking the fish. Scales, saltwater, and blood flew, and the cat dodged Ol’ Ma Nyanpoo’s warning. That night when Kano finished his chore of cleaning fish for Cholly’s wife, he blew the light from the last lantern away. The whistle his compressed lips made married the pungent smell of fish and journeyed through the village circle to Ol’ Ma Nyanpoo’s house, awakening the cat. The cat arose from the corner where he had been lying and probed the room. In the dark, his cold nose led a desperate search for Ol’ Ma Nyanpoo’s bucket of fish.

Ol’ Ma Nyanpoo’s leg twitched and she snored expletives into the night. Alarmed, the cat positioned himself to run in the event that she leaped from her sleep to beat him with the redwood handle of the porch broom. But she remained in abysmal slumber in the murky room. The cat proceeded toward Ol’ Ma Nyanpoo’s fish, disregarding the likely retribution on the following day, when she would discover that her fish were gone. When he finally reached it, he lifted himself up to the rim of the bucket, careful not to scrape the edge with his nails. His eyes were large, his mouth ready, when a hard blow threw him across the room.

I told you, enneh-so? Ol’ Ma Nyanpoo asked, lighting her lantern. The cat tried picking himself up, only to meet another hard slap to his head. He stretched his claws and hissed at the old woman. She struck his head once more and the cat shrieked, this time waking a neighbor, whose inquiring voice and lantern moved slowly toward the village circle.

The cat, determined to escape her fury, scurried over to the fire pit.

Oh no! Ol’ Ma Nyanpoo said. You’n going nowhere. She dragged him out from behind the fire pit by his tail. In the village circle, neighbors gathered outside of Ol’ Ma Nyanpoo’s door, baffled at what had made the old woman so angry that she had beat the poor cat in the middle of the night.

I will teach you! You will feel it! she said. The cat screeched, unable to escape the bitter widow. The neighbors’ tongues became sour, their ears warm, disgusted at the Ol’ Ma’s audacity in offending the spirits. Cholly knocked on Ol’ Ma Nyanpoo’s door, but she ignored him and continued beating the cat.

She will kill the thing, said Cholly’s son, Safua, an already-handsome five-year-old boy with skin the color of a coconut shell and eyes that were always asking a serious question.

Inside, the cat lay in the corner as Ol’ Ma Nyanpoo’s stout figure and broom became blurry. Tired of seeing her, he let his eyes close, and his heart stop, and his mouth open.

A frozen Ol’ Ma Nyanpoo stared down at his body. She had killed the last living thing whom she could call hers and was now absolutely alone. She walked to her door, out of breath. When she opened it her neighbors stood in the village circle holding lanterns that illuminated their overwrought faces. Cholly peeked into the house and noticed the dead cat lying against the wall.

Ay-yah! he said, astonished at Ol’ Ma Nyanpoo’s fearlessness. Upon seeing the dead animal, children scattered, returning to their houses. The spirits coming for you, Safua said, the only remaining child in the circle.

Bury it for me, Ol’ Ma Nyanpoo said as Cholly looked inside of her house at the cat. He said nothing else to her and avoided looking her in the face; he called Kano to retrieve the cat, and Kano minced out of the village and into the woods, while a curious Safua followed, to bury the departed animal.

In the morning, Ol’ Ma Nyanpoo’s house fell down while she was still inside. She died immediately. When they dug up her remains from a pile of palm wood, straw, and debris, Ol’ Ma Nyanpoo’s fish were nowhere to be found. Ol’ Pa Bondo, who woke up every morning to pray before the rooster crowed, who had slept through the night before and knew nothing of Ol’ Ma Nyanpoo’s wicked deed, said he saw the orange cat jump to the top of her house before it fell down.

But the cat dead, Cholly said, refuting Bondo’s claim.

When the elders heard of it they pronounced the day cursed, convinced that spirits had possessed the dead cat into coming back, avenging itself, and stealing the bucket of fish to quench his desire.

Because of the edict, on that day the drums outside of Khati’s window were amply pounded. Her husband was already fishing at the lake, and she lay moaning in pain on a rectangular pallet woven with large palm leaves and stuffed with straw. Khati would have her baby soon, so in recent weeks her husband had risen before the rooster’s song, and spent his hours at Lake Piso in hopes of catching enough fish to eat and trade in the village market. Neither Khati’s father nor her father’s father nor her husband or husband’s father were talented enough fishermen to afford his household any slaves, so Khati had inherited nothing.

At the moment she opened her eyes and heard the beating of drums, Khati pushed her aching body upward from where she lay. She was a dark brown woman with a slender nose and arms, whose breasts and hips had fully developed only in the later months of her pregnancy. She knew by the rhythm of the drums that either someone had died or someone had been cursed, both of which posed a gloomy birth for her unborn child. Khati’s stomach bent in distress. The gray of morning crawled from the opened window toward her sitting body, and exposed thin streams of sweat that descended her brown face and arms. Khati rubbed and patted her stomach, pleading for her unborn child to tarry just a little longer in her womb. She extended her hand to the floor from the pallet to drag herself to the window, but the uneven weight of her body made her baby’s fingers and toes flex inside of her.

No, no, Khati whispered to her extended belly. Wait, small small.

She pressed her hand on the floor beside her bed and tried again, this time successfully dragging her aching body off the pallet and across the room to the window, where she rested her back against the wall. Khati grabbed the frame, hoisting her body until her eyes uncovered the baroque drummers outside.

Salt and dust stained the drummers’ palms. The Ol’ Pas marched around the drummers as their necks sank into robed shoulders. Khati knew what it would mean to have her baby at that moment, and she crossed her legs. Frightened that she would be seen, Khati collapsed to the ground, her body simultaneously hot and cold, her thin lappa imbued with sweat. She rubbed her stomach in great panic as her eyes canvassed the room for a solution to her disaster. Her pursuit ended with the door closest to the bush garden that led to the entry to the woods.

Before Khati could move, a liquid stream of blood and water toddled down her thighs, chased by a more abundant outpouring that left her lappa and the floor around her drenched. To keep from screaming, Khati clamped her bottom lip with her teeth until she could taste her own blood. She could not risk them hearing her, could not bear the delivery of a child on this day, when she would be forbidden ever to offer another to her village. Khati finally resolved that she would crawl as far as she could into the woods behind her house. The baby kicked, ready to approach the dim light in the opening.

No, no, Khati said again, as the floor beneath her continued to dampen. Her legs quivered. She clutched her lappa and squeezed. It was no use. The child would come.

Khati dragged herself toward the door leading out to the woods. She used both of her hands and pulled her quavering body sideways. The child pushed. She squeezed her legs until her thighs ached from the resistance.

Please, my child, Khati repeated. Wait, small small.

The drummers pummeled away outside, and Khati pushed open her wooden back door and crawled toward a huddle of shrubs. She panted, drained, as she tried to stop the baby, first with an intermittent tapping of her stomach, then she reached one hand underneath her lappa to impede the liquid from where her child pushed its way out. When only several yards away from her house, at the end of a train of blood, with no more power to ignore the pain that pushed underneath her wet and sticky fingers, Khati fell onto her back against the waiting leaves. Unable to squeeze her slippery thighs together any longer, unable to constrain the willful head of her baby, Khati howled into the wind and sun.

The drumbeats ceased.

That was the day that Gbessa was born.

The elders declared that she was cursed.

In the dry season of 1831, there were no wars, and the fish and rice harvests were plenty. During the rainy seasons the children of the village sat with griots to learn the history of their people, as well as how to count and write, but in the dry season everyone older than five years worked. Vai boys went to Lake Piso to fish with their fathers, and Vai girls went to the rice farm.

The Ol’ Mas sat together and spun cotton and goatskin into lappas for Vai women to cover themselves with, so that grain flies would not rest on their legs as they gathered rice on the farms. For their favorite Vai girls, those who would gift small portions of their harvest to the old women or send their slaves across the village to mind the pepper gardens surrounding their homes, the Ol’ Mas soaked the goatskin in melted stone to change the colors to burgundy and sage. Although Khati was common, the Ol’ Mas had once favored her for her meekness and the horizontal wrinkles across her neck, the latter a sign of great beauty among Vai people. The Ol’ Mas never made Gbessa a lappa to cover herself with, and after Gbessa was born Khati no longer received burgundy cloths. Instead, Khati wrapped a wilted brown lappa made of rough pamkana cloth around her five-year-old daughter before taking her to the rice farm.

On the way to the farm, Khati and Gbessa passed through the village circle, where young children laughed wildly in a game of pebble throw.

Gbessa the witch! Gbessa the fat cat witch! the children sang as Gbessa passed them, several feet behind her mother. When she knew that she and her mother were passing Lake Piso, Gbessa searched past the breaks within the bushes in hopes that she would see her father. Gbessa’s father, a fisherman whose reputation was destroyed by her birth, had never spoken to or seen her. He reasoned that since he would not receive any honor from his child, he could salvage what was left of his family’s name by his hard work. He spent twenty-four hours a day at the lake fishing, cursing life under his breath, and nodding in and out of sleep.

Come! Khati called in front of Gbessa as she sensed her daughter stalling. When they reached the farm, Khati joined the women and instructed her daughter to sit on the outskirts of the field. Vai women, both wealthy and common, spent their mornings on the field closest to the village, collecting barely one sack of grain from the crops that grew on dry land, and gossiping among themselves, while their two dozen slave women and their daughters worked the outlying fields and swamps.

The women did not ask Gbessa to come into the field and chatter, unlike other young Vai girls who were invited to assist with farming and chores while eavesdropping on gossip about whose wolloh-and-rice dish was bitter. And since Gbessa was ignored by them, the sun took pleasure in having her all to itself, digging its impression into her pigment, making her skin the color of twilight. And since the sun did not have to share Gbessa with anyone or anything, her hair was also an object of its infatuation, and hung heavily down her back in a long and fiery red bush, further confirming the Vai ruling that she was cursed.

During Gbessa’s eighth year, the rainy season was three months delayed. The Vai women had gathered enough food for the coming months, but they worried they would not receive enough rain for the following harvest. Ma Eilsu, a clever woman who always had a single stem of straw wedged in the corner of her mouth, insisted the women take the matter to the elders. Together they ambled from the rice farm to the elders’ lodge. Khati pulled Gbessa’s hand behind the women when she noticed that the villagers had repudiated their daily chores and games, left the shade of the sloping coconut and mango trees, their weaving needles and animal skins.

In the lodge—a circular entrapment of coffee-tree trunks stacked atop one another—ten Ol’ Pas lifted their heads from a bound silence as the women and their daughters approached them. The chatters of the villagers were abruptly silenced when the lead elder extended his hand into the air.

Elder, Ma Groie, the leader of one of the lines, began upon notice of his nod. Everybody want know what happen to the rain. We scared for the rice farm, she said. The women in the line hummed and sighed mutually.

The girl come every day with Khati, Ma Eilsu, the leader of the other line, said, pointing to an unassuming Khati as she loitered with Gbessa in the back of the lodge. Afraid of the sudden charge, Khati squeezed her daughter’s shoulders. The women pivoted toward Khati and joined in chorus with yeh and the Ol’ Ma right against the small witch.

Why not have her farm near the swampland, then? Elder asked. That’s where most of the rice grows, enneh-so?

It’n matter if she farm near us or in swampland with the slaves them. You can’t hide from spirits. They see her, Ma Eilsu argued.

The room commenced an unending vibration of agreement until Elder clapped his furrowed hands for the racket to stop. He sank his head and the room grew silent during his refrain.

The girl getting too big, he finally said, nodding as his voice escaped him in sluggish and hoarse stanzas. Closer to her dong-sakpa and childbearing years. It’n good thing for her to be in the fields.

Yeh-oh. Yeh. The elders nodded in agreement.

Take the girl home. Do not take her to the rice farm. She will not come back out until her dong-sakpa. You hear? Elder told Khati.

Khati turned from the condemnatory faces of the lodge. She shuffled, with guilt, through the village circle back to her house. Gbessa nearly stumbled over her feet.

What—

Sh, girl, Khati interrupted her daughter and looked forward. The crowd of nosy villagers in the circle parted as Khati and Gbessa passed.

Ma— Gbessa said as her head bobbed up and down beside her mother.

Sh, Khati said and rushed inside, closing the door. Dazed, Khati stumbled toward a tall wooden pitcher and bowl that she kept near the pallet where they slept. Trembling, Khati tipped the pitcher and filled the bowl with water.

Sh, Khati said, although Gbessa motioned with neither her body nor her lips. Khati stared at Gbessa until her vision eventually blurred and she could see nothing in the room. She extended the bowl toward her daughter, who slowly approached her on the floor, her hair more red than Khati had ever noticed.

Gbessa gulped and crossed her eyes toward the bottom of the bowl. She finished and when she lowered the drink from her lips, Khati’s face was hidden in her palms and she wept into them until her fingers and arms were dripping wet.

It was a griot who told the village children of the woman in the lake, Mamy Wateh, whose bottom half was the body of a fish and who looked for people to drown so she would not be alone. She told them of the Gio people and their devils and how they danced day and night for one whole year to beckon rain to their village instead of walking to the neighboring village to ask for water.

Ol’ Ma Famatta was the first of them, the griot began one night, her voice as fine and cutting as barbed wire.

The first of who, Ol’ Ma? Cholly’s son, Safua, asked. He was nearly thirteen, dong-sakpa, but he still sat behind the young Vai children and listened to the storyteller’s tales every dry-season night.

Sh, child, the griot said, pressing her finger to her lips.

Ol’ Ma Famatta was the first of the Vai witches, she said.

Lai was young then, the griot explained, as young as them, and Ol’ Ma Famatta had walked through the desert with the first settlers of the old Lai. Her dog and four cats died before her and her husband and all the Ol’ Mas and Ol’ Pas of the old Lai. She lived for 193 dry seasons. In the Ol’ Ma’s later years, Lai was stricken by wars and lengthy dry seasons. The elders, unsure of why their fortune had so quickly turned, were convinced that Ol’ Ma Famatta’s age was offensive to the spirits. When Ol’ Ma Famatta heard through whispers that they were blaming Lai’s fate on her, she bolted the doors of her house and refused to see any villagers. It seemed to everyone that she had decided to spend the rest of her days alone, pendulum swinging in an old hammock in the back of her house. The villagers knocked for weeks, but all they heard were Ol’ Ma Famatta’s grunts.

One day, a fisherman forced open her front door for the Ol’ Pas. The men lumbered around the modest house in search of her, but Ol’ Ma Famatta was not inside. When they reached her back porch, her old hammock was empty, and swung in rapid circles between its posts.

The hammock threw her to the sky, enneh-so? a small child interrupted.

She stay too long. So the Ol’ Pas say anybody who cursed will spend their dong-sakpa away from Lai in the forest, the storyteller said.

I almost dong-sakpa, Safua said, remembering his age.

You’n cursed, the griot responded.

Ol’ Ma, who go to the forest? another child asked.

Coco, the fisherman son with hands like frog, the griot said, stretching her fingers. The children huddled together.

And Zolu, the small small girl born the day the sun go black, she said, pointing to the moon in the sky. Their eyes traveled upward toward the starry sky, where Ol’ Ma Famatta sat looking down on them from the white hole in the middle.

And Gbessa! a child shouted.

The storyteller nodded and looked to Gbessa’s house.

Gbessa peered through a peephole that had emerged from a crack on the wall behind the fire pit, as she did every time a griot appeared with a new tale, and a chill hummocked the unseen hairs of her skin.

Gbessa the witch, Safua said lowly. The children squealed.

Gbessa the witch! Gbessa the witch! some sang as they ran.

They chased one another in a playful skirmish before finally retreating to their homes. Gbessa crawled to the bundle of straw next to Khati’s pallet. She lay silently at first, before lightly tapping her mother’s shoulder. Khati was startled, and her eyes shot open.

Gbessa?!

Yeh, Ma, Gbessa answered.

What wrong?

They will take me to the forest, Ma? Gbessa asked.

A sigh broke Khati’s hesitation, only to fall to more stillness.

Sleep, child, Khati said. Sleep.

On the following day, when her mother left to go to the rice farm, Gbessa wriggled to the peephole to look out the thin opening onto the village circle, where she hoped to find remnants of the storyteller’s claim to her fate. When she pressed her eyes to the hole, she could see nothing.

She heard someone move on the other side. Who there? Gbessa asked, staggered by the prospective courtship. She crawled backward to regain her focus on the hole. Who there? Gbessa asked again, louder, and nearly choked with enthusiasm.

Safua, said the boy on the other side.

They were blinded by the closeness of each other’s eyes. Outside, other boyish voices called to Safua to hurry from the house before he was seen and punished.

Go away. Go from here, Gbessa said, surprising herself that she had found words despite the sudden heat that rushed to her skin and cheeks.

Or what? Safua asked, equally thrilled, amused by the daring witch. The developing muscles of his arms flexed and he waited to laugh, though his friends nervously giggled close by. I’n scared of you. I’n scared of nothing, Safua said.

You go from here, Gbessa said again after realizing from the laughter outside that he did not seek her as she sought him. She hissed at him. I a curse. You hear them, yeh? Gbessa crawled away from the hole. Safua caught a glimpse of her red hair against her haunting black face and gasped. He pressed his eye against the hole again.

I will come back, he said. He waited for Gbessa to respond but she said nothing.

Safua’s friends scrambled from Gbessa’s house; they made bulbul calls into the air as the dust that jumped from their heels stained their backs. Heeding their warning, Safua ran.

He turned around and shouted, Gbessa the witch, Gbessa the witch! before catching his outbraved friends.

During the next few days, Gbessa’s eyes were bound to the peephole. When the birds outside changed their song, her stomach dropped. When one of the children in the village circle laughed too loudly, she skipped a breath. Everything startled her: the rooster’s wings, footsteps too close to the house from neighbors exchanging secrets, a mewling wind, and the shriek of the coconut tree when a machete reached its crown.

Every morning, Khati left Gbessa with no words before she rushed through a starlit dawn to the rice farm. Gbessa was forbidden to leave her mother’s property, so Khati gave her daily chores to complete at home in her absence. First, Gbessa had to separate the rice grains, one by one, from the brown, scaly chaffs and lanky green stems on which they grew. On some days she stood two stems upright, facing each other, both drooping forward from the weight of their chaffs, and she pretended they were a father speaking gently to his daughter, two friends in conversation about the grebe bird’s songs, and other musings that softened her sleep. Papa, I want to go run in the rain, Gbessa whispered, moving one stem to the rhythm of her voice. But the rain is hard, fine geh, she responded with a more authoritative voice as she moved the other stem. Wait until the rain is softer. I will tell you when. Then you can go outside. The daughter would become upset and run away, falling onto the pallet and crying until her father came to console her. And he told her that she was beautiful and how much he missed her face, and he held her hand and went with her outside, protecting her tiny head from the hard and unforgiving rain.

After threshing the grain, Gbessa then separated the rice portions—some to eat, some to trade, and some to save for the rainy season. She saved most of the rice in a pamkana bag that was always half empty, then Khati traded a portion for the smallest fish and palm nuts, which Gbessa cooked daily with the remaining scant serving of rice, a meal that was enough to fill only a small child. She waited for Khati’s return to eat, every day, though she was always so hungry that on a few occasions she resorted to chewing on the rice stems, her make-believe father, her only friends.

When she finished cooking, Gbessa crawled to the hole and peered through. There she saw that some families in Lai, like Safua’s, ate throughout the day. These families had many people to send to the lake or farm, children and slaves alike. In the village market, when the warriors returned with tools or captives from newly acquired neighboring villages now part of the Vai kingdom, it was only families like Safua’s that had enough fish, rice, or lappas to trade. During those battles, after a village was defeated, those who did not want to return to Lai with the warriors were killed; others who surrendered willingly came as captives and were traded as slaves to families like Safua’s. Gbessa marveled at these families and their riches, their plenty children and food. Their houses had more than two openings, not just one door that faced the village circle and one that faced the woods. Some of their houses were two stories high. They had their fill of mangoes and oranges, of fish and plantains, cassava leaves and wolloh. They had many visitors—many villagers walked in and out of their plenty doors singing and drunk on palm wine. But common families, like Gbessa’s, with few people in the household to farm and few to fish, ate once a day. It was only during wedding celebrations and after battles, which she also watched from inside because she and Khati were never invited, that both common and wellborn families ate and drank palm wine