Come on a Sunday

Chapter 1: Five Clocks

In Katy, Texas, October is a rumor. The calendar says fall and the pumpkins come out on the porches of our subdivision, orange against the brick, but the air at four in the afternoon still sits on you like a wet towel, and the retention pond behind our street gives off the smell of warm mud and cut Bermuda grass. The egrets stand in the shallows on one leg as if they are waiting for the weather to make up its mind. Every few minutes a pickup goes by on the feeder road beyond the sound wall, and the cicadas, which should have quit by now, keep going anyway.

I was twenty-four that October. I had a job editing sound for a production company in a converted warehouse off Washington Avenue, where I spent my days inside other people's voices, cutting out the breaths and the lip clicks and the refrigerators humming in the background of interviews. I lived in a one-bedroom apartment near the Galleria and drove out to my parents' house every Sunday, forty minutes west on I-10, past the outlet mall and the megachurch and the water tower painted like a football, because my mother cooked on Sundays and did not accept excuses.

That Sunday, the twenty-fifth, she met me at the door with flour on her hands and said, "Your grandmother is going to be ninety."

"I know, Ma."

"In Kumasi. On the nineteenth of December. You are coming."

"I know."

"You say you know. You said you knew last year about Auntie Adwoa's sixtieth, and where were you?"

"In Austin. At a wedding. You were there when I told you."

She did not answer that, because it was true, and went back into the kitchen. My mother has been a nurse at a hospital in the Medical Center for twenty-nine years. She can draw blood from a vein you would need a map to find, and she can end an argument by walking away from it.

The kitchen smelled of ginger and onions and the palm oil she bought in clear plastic bottles from the African grocery on Bellaire. On the stove a pot of light soup was going, red and peppery, and on the counter she was kneading dough for bofrot, the little fried puff-puffs my father ate four at a time and then pretended he had eaten one. My father was in the den with the Texans game on mute and his reading glasses on, doing the crossword in pen. He was born in Cape Coast, on the sea, and he has never once in thirty years forgiven Houston for not having one worth the name.

On the wall above the kitchen table, where for most of my childhood there had been a calendar from the Ghanaian association with photographs of waterfalls, there was a screen now. My brother Kwame had mounted it in July before he left for college, drilling into the drywall while my mother stood under him saying "carefully, carefully" in a voice that suggested he was performing surgery. It showed the family's own page, the one only we could see, and along the top of it ran a row of five clocks.

KUMASI. LONDON. KATY. TORONTO. And the newest, which Kwame had added himself in August from his dorm room, labeled in his handwriting font with no capital letters: kwame (here).

It was a quarter past four in Katy. In Kumasi it was a quarter past nine at night, and under that clock was a small round photograph of my grandmother, Nana Serwaa, in a green headwrap, squinting at whoever had held the phone. In London, where the clocks had gone back an hour that morning, it was a quarter past nine as well, under my Auntie Adwoa and my cousin Efua. In Toronto, a quarter past five, under Auntie Yaa and my cousin Kojo, who had grown up there and sent us photographs of snow in September to make us feel sorry for him. Kwame's clock said a quarter past five as well, because he was a thousand miles from us in horse country, at a university so big it had its own bus lines, and the time zone there ran an hour ahead of ours.

My mother had learned to read the clocks before she read the messages. It was a kind of arithmetic she did without thinking now. If it was nine at night in Kumasi, Nana would be in her chair on the veranda with the radio on. If it was after ten in London, though, Auntie Adwoa would not answer, because she was a retired midwife and believed sleep was the only medicine that worked.

"Come and look," my mother said, wiping her hands. "Look what Wɔfa Kofi has done."

Wɔfa means uncle. It means a particular uncle, the brother of your mother, and in our family, which counts itself through the women, that matters more than I understood as a child. My Wɔfa Kofi was my mother's eldest brother, a retired history teacher in Kumasi, sixty-eight years old, tall and narrow, with large square glasses he had worn since the 1980s and a voice like a radio announcer. He was the head of the family on my grandmother's side, which in Twi is the abusua, and he took the job seriously in a way that made the cousins abroad laugh and then, later, when they needed something, call him first.

My mother touched the screen and the family tree opened.

I had seen it before, of course. Kwame had built most of it in high school, the summer he was sixteen and grounded, and my mother had added to it in bursts, late at night after a shift. It started at the bottom with all of us, the young ones, and grew upward. My name. Kwame's. Kojo's in Toronto. Efua's in London. Abena's in Kumasi, my cousin who was finishing her degree in pharmacy and who sent me voice notes I could only understand half of. Above us were our parents, and above them Nana Serwaa, with her husband beside her, my grandfather, who had died before I was born. Above her, her mother. And above that the tree had always stopped, with a few faint boxes that said only "unknown."

Now it went on.

Wɔfa Kofi had been busy. Above Nana's mother there were five more generations, each one a name and sometimes a town, with small notes in his careful English: *From the old town in the Adansi hills. Moved to Kumasi after the fighting of 1900.* *Market woman, cloth and salt.* *Recited by my mother, Nana Serwaa, March 2026.* The boxes climbed up the screen in a narrow column, one woman over another, because that was how he had traced it, mother to mother to mother, until the topmost one, Afrakoma, a name I tripped over twice, with a date that was only a guess: *about 1740s.*

Beside that topmost woman there was a small mark I had not seen before, a ring drawn around seven empty boxes, connected to her by a thin line. Under the ring, Wɔfa Kofi had written: *The seven who were taken. See my notes.*

"What does that mean?" I said.

My mother looked at it. "You know the story."

"I don't know the story."

"You know it. Every funeral, the old people say the names."

I tried to remember. I had been to exactly one funeral in Ghana, when I was eleven, for my grandfather's brother, and I remembered it as heat and red cloth and a brass band and a cousin giving me a Fanta, and an old man with a cane standing up near the end of a long day and saying a list of names into the microphone in a voice like someone reading out a roll call. I had thought it was the list of donors. The donors are also read out, at Ghanaian funerals, with the amounts. It is a long afternoon.

"The ones taken from the old town," my mother said. "In the time of the wars. Before the British. Seven children of the family. They went to the coast and they did not come back." She said it plainly, the way she would say a patient's blood pressure. "Your Wɔfa says they must be on the tree. He says if we put everybody else and leave them off, it is like they were taken twice."

My father had come to the kitchen door, the crossword folded in his hand. He did not join in. His family were from the coast, from Cape Coast itself, and they had grown up in the shadow of the castle, the big white one on the rocks. He had told me once that as boys they played football on the beach below its walls and never once went inside, and that he did not go inside until he was forty, and then only once.

"Kofi is right," he said, and went to check on the bofrot.

I stood in front of the screen and looked at the ring of seven empty boxes. They had no names in them yet. Wɔfa Kofi had written beside each one only a small question mark, and on the side of the screen a note that said *names to be entered after Nana approves the spellings.*

There was one more thing on the family page that Sunday, pinned at the top above the clocks, with a photograph of Nana Serwaa in kente at somebody's wedding, laughing with her whole face. It said, in Abena's typing: *Nana is 90 on 19 December. Everyone home.* Under it, one by one, people had written their flight numbers. Auntie Adwoa and Efua, London to Accra, the eleventh. Kojo, Toronto to Accra through Amsterdam, the fifteenth. My mother and father, Houston to Accra through London, the twelfth.

There was a blank where my name should have been.

I took out my phone and booked it at the kitchen table, while the oil spat and my mother watched me over her shoulder, pretending she was not. Houston to London on the tenth. Two nights with Auntie Adwoa in Peckham. London to Accra with Efua on the twelfth. Then the road up to Kumasi.

When I had done it, I wrote the flight number under the others, and under that, because I was in a good mood and the kitchen smelled like my childhood, I added: *Somebody teach me the words before I get there.*

Within the hour, from the clock that said nine-forty at night in Kumasi, a reply came, from Wɔfa Kofi, in his radio-announcer English even in writing.

*Esi. Good. I will make you a list. You will learn it. I will test you on arrival.*

My mother read it over my shoulder and laughed, and the egrets on the pond outside lifted off all at once into the white sky, the way they do when somebody's dog gets out.

Chapter 2: The Arches at Peckham

The call came on Halloween, while I was standing in my parents' driveway with a mixing bowl full of fun-size candy and a neighbor's toddler dressed as a crawfish holding out his bag.

My phone buzzed against the bowl. It was the ring the family page made, a soft double chime, and on the screen was Efua's face in a square, and behind her face a gray London sky through a window, and her mouth was already moving before I had pressed anything.

I gave the crawfish two Snickers and went inside.

"It's Wɔfa Kwabena," Efua said. She was twenty-six, a year and a half older than me, a paralegal at a firm in Holborn, the cousin who had always known everything first. She had been crying and was now not crying, in the way of someone who has decided she will have to make several more of these calls. "At the garage. This afternoon. He was under a Corolla and he said his arm felt funny and he came out and sat on the crate, and Mr. Boateng called the ambulance, and by the time they got to King's he was gone. A stroke, they think. Esi, he was gone before it was dark."

Behind me in the kitchen my mother had stopped moving. She must have heard his name.

Wɔfa Kwabena was the second of Nana Serwaa's five children, after Wɔfa Kofi, before Auntie Adwoa, Auntie Yaa in Toronto, who was Kojo's mother, and my mother, the baby. He had left Kumasi at eighteen with a mechanic's certificate and gone to Lagos and then, in 1982, to London, and for thirty-four years he had run a garage in a railway arch in Peckham, one of those brick caves under the lines where the trains to Victoria shake the dust out of the ceiling every four minutes. He had a painted sign over the door, KB MOTORS, GOD'S TIME IS THE BEST, which every Ghanaian in south London understood and every other customer took for a promise about how long the repairs would take. He had fixed Auntie Adwoa's cars for nothing her whole life and charged her for the parts, at cost, with a receipt, out of principle. He was sixty-four, a widower since Auntie Comfort died in 2015, with no children of his own, and perhaps that was why he paid such attention to ours. He sent me a birthday text every year, on the right day, the only one of my uncles who did, and the text always said the same thing: *Esi. Sunday born. You are older. Be wise.*

My mother took the phone from me. She held it with both hands and looked into it and said, "Efua. Where is your mother," and then the two of them were speaking in Twi, fast and low, and I stood next to them understanding perhaps one word in five, *Maame,* and *Kofi,* and *hospital,* and a word I did not know that my mother said three times, the way you press on a bruise to see if it still hurts.

Then my father came in from the garage, and saw her face, and took off his reading glasses.

---

There is a thing that happens in Ghanaian families when someone dies, and I had never been close enough to see it work. It is like watching a hive. Within an hour, every phone in the family is lit. Within a day, someone has called the family head, and the family head has called the elders, and a date has been set to set a date.

Wɔfa Kofi called that night from Kumasi, at what the clock above the kitchen table said was two in the morning there, and he did it on the family's own video line, so that all of them, Wɔfa Kofi in Kumasi, Auntie Adwoa in Peckham, Auntie Yaa in Toronto, my mother in Katy, and Abena holding the phone up for Nana Serwaa on her bed, could all be in the same small grid of faces. I sat on the stairs where I could hear and not be seen, the way I used to as a child when the adults talked about money.

Nana Serwaa did not cry. She was eighty-nine and had buried a husband, two sisters, and, before any of us were born, a baby girl who lived nine days. She lay propped against her pillows in a white nightdress with her headwrap off, which I had never seen, her hair cropped close and silver, and listened while her eldest son explained. When he finished she said something short in Twi, and Wɔfa Kofi bowed his head as if she had laid her hand on it.

Later my mother told me what it was. *Bring him home. Bring my son home.*

---

They decided it in pieces over the next three days.

He would be brought home to Kumasi to be buried in the family's ground, beside his father, in the cemetery on the hill at the edge of town where the earth is red as brick dust. In London there would be a gathering at the church hall on Rye Lane for the people who had known him there, and Auntie Adwoa would arrange it. The body would be flown to Accra with family on the same plane. The funeral in Kumasi would be on Saturday the twelfth of December, a week before Nana's birthday.

"A funeral and a birthday in one week," my father said, at our kitchen table, on the second night. "Your mother's family does nothing small."

"It's practical," my mother said. "Everyone is coming anyway. Kofi says we do not ask people to fly twice."

That was true, and it was also how it was done. Funerals at home are planned for the weekends when the people abroad can come, sometimes months after a death. It is not unkind. It is the opposite. A funeral that nobody can reach is not a funeral; it is a burial. A funeral is when the whole family comes, and the town, and the town's cousins, and everyone who ever owed the dead man a favor or a fan belt.

So we rebooked. My mother and father would fly on the seventh, through Amsterdam. I would go earlier, on the third, to London, to help Auntie Adwoa, and fly with her and Efua and the coffin on the seventh. I changed my flight on the kitchen laptop while my mother stood behind me, and this time she did not pretend to be doing anything else.

---

On the family page, the morning after, there was a new page.

It sat below the clocks, quieter than everything else, with a plain dark border. It had his name at the top, *Kwabena Owusu,* and his dates, *1962 to 2026,* and a line that said *Kumasi, Lagos, London.* And then it had nothing else. No photograph. A gray square where the photograph would go.

I asked my mother about it on the phone at work, sitting in my edit bay with my headphones around my neck and an interview with a petroleum engineer frozen on the screen.

"Your Wɔfa Kofi set it that way," she said. "Only the family can see it, but even so. No photograph before the burial. That is how we do it in our house. After he is in the ground and the rites are done, then we show his face, and anybody in the family can put a picture, a story, whatever they have. Not before."

"Why not before?"

She was quiet on the line, the kind of quiet that is not about not knowing. "Because before, he is still traveling," she said. "You don't take a picture of someone while they are on the road."

The page had a small line at the bottom, below the gray square, set there by Wɔfa Kofi: *Photographs and tributes will open after the burial, 12 December. Elders' decision.* Somebody, Efua I guessed, had already tried to add one, because under it there was a note that said *1 item waiting.* I could imagine her doing it, at three in the morning in Peckham, unable to sleep, holding the phone over her face in the dark, and then the gentle refusal coming back to her, and her lying there in the glow of it.

On the family map, the one that showed where all of us were, Wɔfa Kwabena's small dot in south London had not been removed. It had gone hollow, a ring instead of a point. When I tapped it, the line of his life drew itself across the screen the way it had been entered years ago: Kumasi south to the coast, along the shore to Lagos, then the long jump north over the desert and the sea to London. Someone had added a dotted segment that afternoon, not yet a line, from London back down to Kumasi, with a date at the end of it. *12 December.*

---

The other message came on Sunday, the first of November, in the middle of all of that, and at first nobody had time to read it.

It was from my cousin Kojo in Toronto. He was twenty-nine, the oldest of the grandchildren, the one who had done everything right: the engineering degree, the job, the condominium overlooking a highway, and, two Christmases before, a DNA kit he had bought on sale, out of what he called professional curiosity. He worked in risk. He liked to know the odds.

He posted it to the family page under the photograph of Nana, where everyone would see it.

*I know this is not the time. I am sorry. But Wɔfa Kofi asked me in March to tell him if anything came up on the DNA side, and something has. A man in South Carolina, 71, shows up as a distant match to me. Very distant. The company says it could be eight or nine generations, or it could be noise. He wrote to me through the site. He says his family has a story that their first ancestor in America was a girl called Juba, who came with her brother Cudjoe, from "the hill country by the gold." He asked if those names mean anything to anyone. I told him Cudjoe is what the English made of Kwadwo. Which is my name. I told him I would ask my uncle. I am asking.*

Nobody answered it for a day. Then, late on Monday night, from the clock that said Kumasi, after the funeral committee had met and the date had been confirmed and the elders had gone home, there was one line from Wɔfa Kofi.

*Give him my number. Tell him to call me in the family's own line, not on the telephone. Tell him we are in mourning and he is welcome.*

I read it in bed in my apartment, with the air conditioner rattling and the lights of the Galleria towers turning the ceiling orange. I read it again. *He is welcome.* I did not know then that a grieving family in Kumasi opening its door to a stranger from South Carolina on the same night it set the date for its son's burial was not a contradiction. I thought it was. I lay awake thinking it was.

Chapter 3: Recording One, Johns Island

[Transcriber's note. This is the first of five recordings Mr. Harold Deas made for the family between November 2026 and January 2027. Wɔfa Kofi asked him to make them, and asked me to clean the audio and type them out, because cleaning other people's voices is what I do for a living. I have taken out nothing he said. I have taken out a dog barking, two passing trucks, and a kettle. Where he paused, I have left the pause. My own notes are in brackets. — Esi Arthur]

Narrator: Harold Lee Deas, age 71. Recorded 14 November 2026, on the screened porch of the narrator's house off River Road, Johns Island, South Carolina. Language: English. Consent: the narrator agreed to be recorded, to the keeping of the recording and this transcript with the family, and to listening by family members only; he may withdraw it at any time. Recorded by the narrator's daughter, Denise Deas Whitfield, on her phone.

Is it on? Denise says it's on. The little red light. All right.

My name is Harold Lee Deas. I was born in 1955 in this house, in the front room, because the hospital in Charleston was across two bridges and my mother didn't trust either one. I'm seventy-one years old. I taught chemistry at a high school in this county for thirty-four years, and I still can't walk past a kitchen sink without telling somebody why the water beads up on the spoon. My wife was Bernice. She passed in 2022, in March. She'd have been the one to do this. She was the talker. I'm the one who checks the numbers.

Mr. Owusu, Kofi, you asked me to tell you where I'm sitting. I'm on my porch. It's November, but this is the Lowcountry, so it's sixty-eight degrees and the mosquitoes haven't gotten the news. In front of me there's a live oak that my grandmother said was old when her grandmother was a child, and it's got Spanish moss hanging off it like gray laundry, and when the wind comes up off the river the whole tree moves like it's breathing. Past the tree is the road, and past the road is the marsh. You can smell it from here. Pluff mud. That's what we call it. When the tide goes out it smells like sulfur and salt and something rotting and something being born, all at the same time, and if you grew up here it smells like home and if you didn't it smells like a problem.

The grass on the marsh is going gold now. In summer it's green as a pool table. Out past it there's the river, the Stono, and past that, more marsh, more water, all the way to the ocean. Everything on this island runs to water eventually.

[Pause, about six seconds. A boat motor, faint, which I have left in.]

You asked me to tell you the story the way my family tells it. I'll do that first. Then I'll tell you the paper, because I'm a chemistry teacher, and I don't trust a story I can't titrate. Denise is laughing at me. Go on and laugh.

The story is this. My grandmother was Phoebe Deas. She was born in 1896. She raised me, mostly, because my mother worked in the city and my father worked on the shrimp boats out of Shem Creek and was gone more than he was here. Grandmama Phoebe sat right where I'm sitting now, in a chair that was in this exact spot, and she shelled butter beans into a pan in her lap, and when she was in a certain mood, she would say a thing.

She'd say, "Juba come over with Cudjoe."

That's all. Like you'd say the weather. "Juba come over with Cudjoe." And if you asked her who Juba was, she'd say, "First mother." And if you asked who Cudjoe was, she'd say, "Her brother. Born the same day." And if you asked where they came over from, she'd say, "From the hill country by the gold." And if you asked her anything else, she'd say, "Hush and shell."

[He laughs here. So does Denise, off the microphone.]

I didn't think much about it when I was a boy. Everybody's grandmother had sayings. But there were things I noticed later. My great-granddaddy, Grandmama Phoebe's father, was called Cudjoe. Cudjoe Deas. There's a stone for him behind the old church out on Bohicket Road, sunk down crooked in the sand under the cedars. And she had an aunt named Juba, who died young. And Grandmama Phoebe called me, when I was little, not Harold. She called me Cuffee.

I asked her why one time. She said, "Because you came on a Friday, and that's your Friday name." I was maybe ten. I said, "Grandmama, nobody has a Friday name." And she said, "You do," and gave me the pan.

It was in college that a professor told me about day names. That in some part of West Africa, a child is named for the day he's born. That Cudjoe and Juba and Cuffee and Quash and Phibbah were English spellings of those names, and that they turn up all through the old records of Carolina and Jamaica and everywhere the ships went. I went home that Christmas and I told Grandmama Phoebe. I said, "Grandmama, do you know what Cuffee means?" And she said, "I told you what it means. It means you came on a Friday." She'd known all along. She didn't need a professor.

[Pause. The tree, the wind. About ten seconds.]

Now the paper.

After Bernice passed, I had some time. More than I wanted. Denise said, "Daddy, do the DNA thing. You love a test." So I did. That was 2023. It came back mostly what you'd expect for somebody from here. A lot of West and Central Africa, a fair amount of Europe, which every Black family in this county understands and doesn't need explained. And a lot of cousins in Charleston and Savannah and Philadelphia I already knew, and a lot I didn't, and some of them wrote to me and we traded pictures.

And then this summer, a new one. Kojo, in Toronto. Very distant. The company said maybe seven or eight generations back, maybe more. Said the match was small enough that it might not mean a thing. I would have let it go. I let a lot of them go. But his name was Kojo. And on his page, where it says where your family is from, he'd written Kumasi, Ghana. And one evening in October I sat right here and I thought about Grandmama Phoebe saying Cudjoe, and I wrote him. I asked him did the name Juba or the name Cudjoe mean anything. I figured he'd never answer.

He answered in two days. He said Cudjoe was what the English made of Kwadwo, which was his own name, a boy born on Monday. And he said Juba was likely what the English made of Adwoa, a girl born on Monday. He said, Mr. Deas, if your grandmother said they were born the same day, then it sounds like your Juba and your Cudjoe were twins.

[Pause, longer, about fifteen seconds. I left it whole.]

Excuse me.

So that's the first thing. The second is Denise's. She'd already been working the paper side for two years, because Denise works at a foundation in Atlanta and she knows how to write a letter that gets answered. She'd written to the state archives in Columbia, and to the historical society in Charleston, and asked for whatever they had on the Deas family and the land on this island, back as far as it went. And she found it. In a probate record, an inventory of an estate on Johns Island, dated 1772. A man died, and somebody wrote down everything he owned. His cattle, his tools, his rice. And the people.

I'm going to read you the line. I copied it out by hand. I didn't want to read it off a screen.

"Juba, a girl, and Cudjo, a boy, twins, about ten years, Gold Coast. Forty pounds."

That's the line.

[Pause. I could hear him fold the paper.]

I'm a chemistry teacher, Mr. Owusu. I know what a match is and I know what a coincidence is. I know there were a lot of children named Juba and Cudjoe in this colony, because there were a lot of Mondays. I'm not telling you I've proved anything. I'm telling you what my grandmother said, and what that piece of paper says, and what your nephew's blood and mine say, very quietly, to each other. That's three. In my classroom, three readings that agree is where you start, not where you finish.

And then your nephew told me there's a story in your family about seven children taken from your old town to the coast in the time of the wars. And I want to say to you, first, that I'm sorry for the death of your brother. Kojo told me. I don't want to come into your house on the week of a funeral talking about myself. My mother used to say, when somebody's grieving you bring a dish and you leave. So I'm bringing the dish.

That's it. That's all I've got for today. Denise, how do you turn it off.

[End of recording. Length 31 minutes, 40 seconds. A note in the family record, added by Wɔfa Kofi the same evening: "Received. Listened twice. Mr. Deas is invited to the funeral of Kwabena Owusu, Kumasi, 12 December, as a guest of the family. Ticket arranged by Kojo. Room at my house."]

Chapter 4: What We Call Each Other

The list arrived on a Tuesday in the middle of November, and it came with a condition.

It sat on the family page under a small heading Wɔfa Kofi had given it, *Our Words for Our People,* and beside the heading was a line in gray: *Checked by Nana Serwaa, 17 November 2026.* Wɔfa Kofi had written the list in the last week of October and then, as he explained in a note to all of us, held it back for three weeks, because he would not put a word in front of the grandchildren that his mother had not heard him say aloud and agreed was right. She had sat with him on the veranda in the evenings while he read each one to her. Twice she had corrected his tones. Once she had struck a word out entirely, saying it was what people in Accra called an uncle, not what we called one, and that if the children were going to learn a word they might as well learn ours.

So the list was not long. It was not meant to be a dictionary. It was meant, Wɔfa Kofi wrote, to be the words you would need to walk into the house in Bantama and greet everyone correctly and not embarrass your mother.

*Nana.* Grandparent, and also an elder, and also a chief, and also, he noted, the respectful way to address any old person whose name you do not know. *When in doubt, Nana.*

*Maame.* Mother. Also how you address a woman of your mother's age.

*Wɔfa.* Your mother's brother. *In our abusua, which runs through the mothers, the wɔfa is not a minor relative. He is the one who answers for you. Ask your mothers.*

*Abusua.* The family that comes down through the women. Those of us born from Nana Serwaa's daughters were in it. Those born from her sons, he added carefully, belonged to their mothers' abusua, which was no less a family, only a different line.

*Abusuapanin.* Head of the family. *That is me. Do not laugh.*

*Nua.* Brother or sister. Also a cousin, if you are close. *All of you are nua to each other. That is the point of this list.*

*Akwaaba.* Welcome.

*Medaase.* Thank you.

*Ɛte sɛn?* How are you? Answered with *Ɛyɛ.* It is fine.

And at the bottom, set apart, under a line he had drawn himself:

*Ayie.* Funeral.

*Damirifa due.* What you say to the bereaved. *You will hear it said to us many times in December. You may say it to your Auntie Adwoa. She is the one who lost a brother. So did your mother. So did I.*

Each word had a little speaker beside it, and when I tapped it, I heard Nana Serwaa saying it. Not Wɔfa Kofi. Her. He had recorded her voice on the veranda, and in some of them I could hear the radio behind her, and once a rooster, and once, after *Medaase,* her laughing at something someone had said off to the side.

I listened to the list in my car on the way to work, in traffic on the Southwest Freeway, with the refinery flares far off to the east and the brake lights of four lanes stretching red in front of me to the downtown towers. I repeated after her. *Wɔfa. Abusua. Ɛte sɛn.* At a red light on Kirby a man in the next car looked over and saw me talking to nobody, and I raised a hand to him, and he raised one back, the way Houston drivers do when they have decided you are not a threat.

---

There was something else on the family page that month, and it was Abena's doing.

Abena, Wɔfa Kofi's daughter, was in her last year of pharmacy at the university in Kumasi and lived in the family house with Nana, and she had taken on, without being asked, the job of keeping Nana's days full. Nana was ninety in a month, nearly blind in one eye and slow on her feet, and since Wɔfa Kwabena's death she had begun to sleep in the afternoons, which she had never done, and to ask for the radio less.

So in October, before any of it, Abena had started asking her the questions.

They came in small cards, one a day, gentle things. Wɔfa Kofi had chosen many of them, and Abena some, and my mother two or three, sent in from Katy at two in the morning after night shifts. *What did your mother cook when it rained? Who taught you to tie a headwrap? What was the first thing you bought with your own money? What did Kumasi smell like when you were a girl?* Abena would read the card to Nana on the veranda after supper and hold the phone while Nana answered, in Twi, as long or as short as she liked. Then Abena would type it out in English beneath, carefully, and Wɔfa Kofi would read it over, and it would go up on Nana's own page for all of us.

I read them at night in my apartment, in bed, the way some people read news. There were thirty-one by the middle of November.

*What did Kumasi smell like when you were a girl?*

*Woodsmoke in the morning. Everyone cooked on fire then. Then, by ten o'clock, the market. Kejetia was smaller. You could walk across it. Dried fish, and the smell of new cloth, which is like starch. When the rain came, the red earth smelled like a pot that has just come off the fire. You do not have that smell in London, Adwoa tells me. I am sorry for London.*

*Who taught you to tie a headwrap?*

*My aunt, my mother's sister, Akua Mansah. She tied it so tight you could not frown. She said a woman who goes out with a loose headwrap will come home with loose children.*

*What do you remember about your first son being born?*

That one was from my mother. Abena had written under Nana's answer: *Nana asked for this one to be recorded again the week after Wɔfa Kwabena died. This is the second one.*

*Kofi came in the rainy season. The midwife was the one from Adum, who rode a bicycle. He came very quickly, like a man who has an appointment. He was a serious baby. Kwabena was the opposite. Kwabena came slowly, on a Tuesday, and laughed from the day he could. When he was three he took the radio apart to see the men inside. That is the son I sent to London. That is the son who has come home first.*

I read that one three times, and then I turned off the phone and lay there in the orange dark with the air conditioner going, and thought about the radio in pieces on a floor in Kumasi sixty years ago, a small boy looking for the men inside.

---

Kwame called me the Sunday before Thanksgiving, from the kitchen at the end of his dormitory floor, where something was frying.

He was eighteen and a freshman, and I had not seen him since August, and he had grown a mustache that he wanted me to comment on, so I did not. Behind him I could see a narrow room with two burners and a window over a dark parking lot, a smoke alarm on the ceiling that he kept glancing up at, and a crowd of people his age crammed in around a counter.

"Sunday night," he said. "It's a whole thing here. Everybody cooks something from home. It started in September, nobody planned it. I'm making jollof. In a pot I borrowed from a guy from Mongolia."

"You don't know how to make jollof."

"I'm learning. Ma talked me through it on the phone. She's very angry about the rice." He turned the screen. A girl with dark hair pulled back, in a barn jacket that looked like it had been slept in, was leaning over his pot with a wooden spoon. "This is Ishita. She's the one who started the lights thing in the window. Ish, this is my sister. She's going to Ghana for my grandmother's ninetieth."

"Hi," Ishita said, and lifted the spoon in greeting. "His rice is fine. He keeps saying it's a disaster."

"It is a disaster," Kwame said. "It's supposed to be orange. This is beige."

"It's the tomato paste," I said. "You need more and you need to fry it longer."

"That's what Ma said."

"Then do what Ma said."

Ishita laughed and went back to the pot. Kwame took me out into the hallway so we could talk, and leaned against a cinderblock wall covered in flyers for a clothing swap and a bus to a football game, and told me in a low voice that he could not afford the ticket home in December and that he was not going to ask Ma and Pa because they were already paying for three, mine included, though I had tried to stop them.

"So I'll be on the screen," he said. "For the birthday. And for the funeral, they're going to stream it, Wɔfa Kofi said, just for the family. I'll watch it here."

"That's not the same."

"I know it's not the same." He looked down the hall, toward the light coming from the kitchen. "Ishita said something. About her grandfather. She built this place for him to write his stories down. She said when you're far away you get to keep the one thing everybody else forgets to keep." He shrugged, embarrassed. "I thought that was smart."

"What's the thing?"

"The record. Everybody at home is going to be too busy dancing. Somebody has to be the one writing it down."

---

The next morning, before work, I went back to the family tree. I don't know why I did it then, except that the list of words had been in my ears all week, and Kwame's beige rice, and Nana's answer about the radio.

I scrolled up past my own name, past my mother and Auntie Adwoa and Wɔfa Kofi and the hollow ring of Wɔfa Kwabena, past Nana Serwaa and her mother and her mother's mother, up the narrow column of women Wɔfa Kofi had recovered, to the topmost one. Beside her, the ring of seven empty boxes, each with its question mark.

Below the ring, in the last few days, he had added a line. *The names are known to Nana. She will recite them in December, in the presence of the family, at the house. They will be entered after that, in the spellings she approves. Not before.*

I sat at my kitchen counter with my coffee going cold and the sun coming up pink over the parking garage across the street, and I understood that the seven names were also a kind of word the family had for its own, and that they were being held back the way his photograph was being held back, until the right people were in the room.

Chapter 5: Rye Lane

London in December gets dark at four, and it does it without warning, like a shop pulling down its shutter.

I landed at Heathrow on the morning of the fourth, a Friday, after nine hours of not sleeping over the Atlantic, and took the train and then the Overground across the city with my suitcase banging against my knees. By the time I came up out of Peckham Rye station it was barely past three, and the sky over the rooftops was already the color of dishwater going cold. Rye Lane was a river of people. Buses nosed through them, red and enormous, their windows steamed. There were shops selling wigs and phone cases and suitcases big enough to hold a child, and a butcher with goat legs hanging in the window, and a grocery with plantains stacked outside in green and yellow pyramids under a plastic awning, and the smell of jerk chicken from a takeaway, and of wet pavement, and of diesel, and somewhere, faint and sweet, of roasting chestnuts from a cart by the bridge. A man outside the station was preaching into a microphone that did not work, and nobody was listening, and he did not seem to mind.

Auntie Adwoa met me at the top of the steps. She was sixty-one, short and round in a long black wool coat with a red scarf over her hair, and she took my face in both her gloved hands and looked at it as if she were checking a newborn for jaundice.

"You are tired," she said. "And you are thin. Your mother does not feed you. Come."

I said, "Damirifa due, Auntie."

She stopped on the steps with people flowing around us on both sides and looked at me, and something in her face gave way and came back. "Medaase," she said, very quietly. "Where did you learn to say that?"

"Wɔfa Kofi. And Nana. On the list."

"Ah," she said. "The list." She took my suitcase from me, though I was a foot taller, and wheeled it down Rye Lane at a speed that made me trot.

---

Her flat was on the third floor of a brick council block off Bellenden Road, with a balcony full of potted geraniums she brought inside every November and a view across the railway to the backs of other houses, and in the evenings you could see straight into a dozen kitchens, each one lit yellow, each one with somebody standing at a sink. The flat was warm in the way that only flats run by Ghanaian women over sixty are warm. The radiators were turned up past what seemed possible. There were plastic covers on the good chairs. On every flat surface there were photographs in frames, and on the wall in the hallway hung a calendar from a Ghanaian church in Camberwell, three years out of date, kept for the picture of the Volta at sunrise.

Efua was in the kitchen making tea, in a gray hoodie with her hair under a satin scarf, and she hugged me so hard my glasses went sideways. Her eyes were swollen. She had been taking calls for a month.

"Come and see," she said, before I had taken off my coat. "You need to see what's been happening. You won't believe it."

She opened her laptop on the kitchen table, between a stack of printed programs for the London service and a bag of oranges, and showed me the page for Nana's birthday.

Abena had made it in Kumasi, three weeks before, while everyone else was arranging the funeral. It had a photograph of Nana Serwaa at the top, the one in green kente, laughing. And below it, in rows like windows in a building, were faces. Videos. People had been sending them from everywhere, one at a time, each a minute or two long, recorded on phones in kitchens and cars and offices. Each one began paused on its first frame, someone just about to speak.

"Forty-one," Efua said. "And it's still a fortnight to go."

There was Kojo in Toronto, in a parka on a balcony with the lake behind him gray and choppy and full of ice. There was my mother in her scrubs in a hospital break room, clearly between patients, holding the phone too close. There was a woman I didn't know at all, standing in front of a shop in Amsterdam with a bicycle behind her, who turned out to be the daughter of Nana's late sister's daughter, and who said in Dutch-accented Twi that she had not seen Nana since she was six and remembered only that Nana had given her a piece of sugar cane to chew and told her it was medicine. There was an old man in the Bronx, who had grown up next door to Nana in Bantama in the 1950s and sang her a whole hymn in a cracked tenor and then said, in English, "Serwaa, you still owe me a shilling." There was a little girl in a school uniform in Kumasi holding a drawing of a birthday cake with ninety candles, so many that they made a solid wall of yellow crayon.

And there was Wɔfa Kwabena.

He had sent his in October, before Halloween. Abena had asked everyone early. Efua tapped it, and there he was, sitting on an upturned crate in the mouth of his railway arch in Peckham, in blue overalls with his name embroidered over the pocket, a Toyota up on the lift behind him with its wheels off. A train went over while he talked, and the whole picture shook, and dust came down through the light, and he waited for it to pass with a patient look up at the ceiling, as if the train were a relative who always interrupted.

"Maame," he said. "Ninety years. When I was a boy you told me if I took the radio apart I would never get it back together, and I did, and it worked, and you said it was luck. So I am telling you now. Ninety years is not luck. Happy birthday. I am coming in December. Keep me some fufu. Not the one from the machine. The one from the mortar." He grinned and reached toward the phone and the picture went black.

Efua and I sat at the kitchen table. Neither of us touched the laptop. In the next room, Auntie Adwoa was on the phone with the undertaker in a voice like a sergeant major.

"She doesn't know yet," Efua said. "Nana. Abena's keeping the page closed to her until the nineteenth. So she'll see this one on her birthday." She looked at me. "Wɔfa Kofi says we leave it. That it's his wish to her, and he sent it, and it's not ours to take back."

"Is that the right thing?"

"I don't know," she said. "I think it's the only thing."

---

The service for the London people was on Saturday at the church hall on Rye Lane, a low brick building behind a carpet warehouse, with a car park full of Mercedes and Toyotas and one pink Vespa. I had never seen so many people in black and red. The women wore cloth, black with red, or red with black, or a dark rusty brown, cut in a hundred different ways, and the men wore cloth over one shoulder like a toga, or black suits with red ties, and a group of old men from the Ghanaian mechanics' association, whom Wɔfa Kwabena had apparently been treasurer of for twenty years, all wore the same black polo shirts with KB MOTORS printed on the back in gold.

There was a choir, a dozen women in white blouses and black skirts, who sang in Twi and English and Ga, and a keyboard player with a drum machine, and a man who stood at the front with a list and read out, for nearly an hour, the names of everyone who had given money to the family for the funeral, and how much, while people in the hall clapped or called out or murmured depending on the amount. When he read "Mr. Boateng, Peckham, five hundred pounds," a cheer went up, and Mr. Boateng, a small bald man in the third row who had called the ambulance, put his face in his hands.

Auntie Adwoa sat in the front row with her back very straight and accepted everyone. They came to her in a line that went out the door. They bent and took her hand and said *damirifa due,* and she said *medaase,* over and over, a hundred times, two hundred, and I sat beside her and said it too, and by the end of the afternoon my mouth was shaping it without me.

Afterward there was jollof and fried chicken and kelewele in foil trays, and the mechanics stood together outside in the drizzle by the pink Vespa and told stories about him. How he once fixed a bishop's car with a coat hanger and refused payment and then sent the bishop a bill for the coat hanger. How he had kept a bed in the back of the arch for a year for a boy from Tema who had nowhere to sleep, and the boy now owned two garages in Croydon. How he sang to engines.

One of them, a tall man with a gray beard, came over to me and asked who I was, and I told him, and he said, "Ah. The one in Texas. The Sunday one. He talked about you." Then he went back to the others and did not explain.

---

On Sunday night, the night before we flew, Efua and I sat up in her bedroom with the radiator ticking and the trains going over the arches outside every few minutes, a long rumble and then a silence and then another.

She had a cardboard box on her bed that Auntie Adwoa had brought back from the garage. Things he'd kept. A set of spanners with the handles worn smooth. A framed photograph of Nana Serwaa as a young woman. A transistor radio, very old, its case cracked and taped, its back held on with a rubber band.

"Is that it?" I said. "Is that the one?"

Efua turned it over in her hands. "Wɔfa Kofi thinks so. He's asked for it." She opened her laptop and showed me. In the family's collection, where Wɔfa Kofi had been listing things for a year, a carved stool that had been in the family since the 1930s, a pair of brass weights for measuring gold dust, a length of old cloth, a cooking pot, each with a photograph and a few lines of where it came from and whose hands it had passed through, there was a new entry with no photograph yet. *Radio, Philips, about 1958. Taken apart by Kwabena Owusu, aged 3, in Bantama. Carried by him to Lagos and London. Kept in his garage, Peckham, until 2026. Returning to Kumasi with his sister Adwoa, December 2026.*

Efua took a picture of it on her bed, on the white quilt, and added it, and the empty square filled in.

"He'd hate this," she said. "Being a museum."

"He'd love it."

She laughed, the first time all weekend, a small sound. "Yeah," she said. "He'd love it."

We packed it into my carry-on, wrapped in one of her sweaters, between my laptop and my headphones, and I slept that night with the case against my bed, as though somebody might come for it.

Chapter 6: The Road North

Heat met us at the aircraft door like a hand laid flat on the chest.

It was a little after six on the evening of Monday the seventh, and below the steps at Kotoka the tarmac was still giving back the day. The air smelled of jet fuel and dust and, under those, something green and enormous and wet, as though the whole country were exhaling. The sky had no color I had a word for. It was not blue and not gray but a pale bronze, hazed from one edge to the other, the sun sinking into it like a coin into honey. "Harmattan," Auntie Adwoa said, behind me on the steps, in the satisfied voice of a woman announcing a relative she had expected. "It has come early. The wind from the desert. Everything will be dust until February."

The coffin had flown with us, in the hold. Auntie Adwoa had known that the whole way, and so had Efua and I, and none of us had slept. Now, inside the terminal, under ceiling fans turning slowly over long lines of people in coats they no longer needed, an undertaker's man in a white shirt was waiting for us with a folder of forms and a face arranged for grief. He took Auntie Adwoa's hand in both of his. Behind him stood two of the cousins I had only ever seen as squares on a screen, Nana Serwaa's grandnephews from Accra, broad young men in black T-shirts who embraced Auntie Adwoa one after the other and then embraced me, without asking, as though I had been gone a week.

"Esi," said the elder one. "The one from Texas. Akwaaba."

"Medaase," I said, and he looked delighted, and told the other one in Twi something that made him laugh, and I caught the word for list.

---

We slept that night in Accra at the cousins' house in Dansoman, a concrete villa behind a high wall with broken bottle glass set along the top, a mango tree in the yard, and a generator that came on twice during the night with a cough and a roar. I lay under a mosquito net in a room that smelled of camphor and listened to the city. Car horns. A goat. Music from somewhere far off, highlife with a slow guitar, which stopped at two. The sound of the generator, and then, when it quit, a silence so deep I could hear the fan in the next room ticking as it slowed.

The body went north ahead of us at dawn, in the undertaker's van, to the mortuary in Kumasi where it would wait until Friday. We followed at nine, in the cousins' Land Cruiser, with Auntie Adwoa in front and Efua and me in the back with our bags under our feet and the radio from Peckham in my lap, still in its sweater.

I had been on that road once before, when I was eleven, and remembered nothing of it but sleeping. This time I did not sleep. I don't think I blinked.

Accra let us go slowly. The traffic out through the edges of the city was a single slow animal, and at every stop the hawkers came down the lines of cars with their wares on their heads: plastic bags of water, phone chargers, a stack of bread loaves as tall as a child, a tray of hard-boiled eggs with a twist of pepper, a framed print of a lion. The billboards gave way to cement-block houses and then to half-built ones, rebar sticking up from their roofs like the stubble on a man who has been away, waiting for the next floor, the next year, the next remittance from Hamburg or the Bronx.

Then the country opened.

The road climbed into green. Not the clipped green of Katy lawns, but a green that grew over itself and up itself and out into the road wherever it could, banana and cocoa and teak and oil palms with their heavy heads, and enormous trees I could not name with buttressed roots like the walls of rooms. The harmattan lay over all of it, so that the hills went from green to blue to a pale, ghostly gray, each ridge fainter than the last, as though somebody had drawn them in pencil and begun to erase them. The sun was a white disc you could look straight at.

At Nkawkaw the road went up the Kwahu scarp in long switchbacks, and the cousin slowed, and below us the plain spread out flat and hazed to the end of the world. Lorries ground up the hill in first gear, painted with mottos across their tailgates: SEE ME AND SUFFER, NO KING AS GOD, ALL DIE BE DIE, and one I photographed and sent to Kwame, ENJOY YOUR LIFE, BECAUSE NOBODY WILL. At the top, in a lay-by, women sold plantain chips in clear plastic bags and roasted corn and oranges peeled in a spiral so that only the white pith was left and you sucked them through a hole cut in the top. Efua bought four. We stood in the dust beside the car with the juice running down our wrists, looking out over the plain, and for the first time in five weeks she laughed out loud at nothing.

On my phone, in the family's map, I watched our three small dots move up the road toward the larger cluster at Kumasi. On the other side of the ocean, my mother's dot and my father's dot were somewhere over the Sahara, a line drawing itself south from Amsterdam toward Accra. They would land at dark and come up in the morning.

---

We came down into Kumasi in the late afternoon.

The red earth is the first thing, and it is everywhere. It is in the cuts along the road where they are widening it, raw as a wound, and in the dust that coats every leaf of every tree beside the road, so that the trees look rusted. It is on the hems of the women's cloth and on the bare feet of children and on the white walls of the houses, splashed up to knee height by every rain for fifty years. The harmattan picks it up and puts it in the air, and the low sun shines through it, and the whole city goes the color of a clay pot that has just come out of the fire.

Nana had been right about that. I had read it on the screen in Houston and it had not meant anything, and now it meant everything.

Then the city itself, all at once. Hills, and the roads winding over them, and on every hill houses, and on every road people. The roundabout at Kejetia, with the new market rising over it in white concrete, and around and below it the old one spilling out anyway, unstoppable: stalls under umbrellas, under tarps, under nothing, down every lane and alley, women sitting among pyramids of tomatoes and onions and garden eggs, mountains of yams, smoked fish stacked like firewood, bolts of cloth in a hundred colors hung from poles. Trotros nosed through it all with their sliding doors open and their mates hanging out of them shouting destinations. Someone was frying something that smelled of ginger and pepper and hot oil. A man on a bicycle with a tower of egg trays balanced on the carrier rode straight through the middle of everything without slowing, and nobody so much as looked up.

"Kejetia," said Auntie Adwoa, to no one, in the voice of a woman greeting a sister.

---

The family house was in Bantama, up a red dirt lane off the main road, a long low house painted cream with a green tin roof and a veranda along the front, a frangipani tree by the gate, and a courtyard behind with a mortar and pestle by the kitchen door as tall as my hip. Canopies were already going up in the lane, white and blue, for the wake on Friday. Plastic chairs were stacked against the wall in towers. Somebody's goats were watching from the top of a pile of sand.

And there were people. They came out of the house and the courtyard and the neighbors' houses all at once, as if the car were a stone dropped in a pond. Women in black and red, men in shorts, children running ahead to look. Abena came first, in a black T-shirt and a cloth wrapped at her waist, and threw her arms around Auntie Adwoa and held on.

Wɔfa Kofi came behind her, slowly. He was taller than he looked on the screen and thinner, in a black cloth worn over one shoulder, with his big square glasses and a face that seemed, close up, to have been carefully folded and put away. He held his sister close without a word, until she was the one who let go. Then he turned to me.

"Esi," he said, in the radio-announcer voice. "You have arrived. The test."

"Now?"

"Now. I do not wait."

So I stood in the red dust of the lane, in front of half my mother's family and several goats, with the sun going down orange through the haze behind the frangipani, and said it. "Wɔfa. Ɛte sɛn?"

For a breath, nobody in the lane made a sound. Then a great many people laughed, and an old woman I did not know clapped twice, and Wɔfa Kofi, with no change of expression, said, "Ɛyɛ. You pass. Your tones are American. We will work on them."

Then he took my arm and led me up the steps of the veranda to where Nana Serwaa was waiting.

She sat in a wooden armchair with a cushion behind her back and her feet on a low stool, in a black cloth with a pattern of small red combs, her headwrap tied tight. She was tiny. In Houston, on the screen above our kitchen table, she had seemed the size of the screen. In person she was smaller than Kwame had been at twelve. Her good eye found me, and she held out both her hands.

I knelt by the stool and gave her the radio.

I had not known I was going to do it first. But I unwrapped it from Efua's sweater and put it into her hands, the cracked case, the tape, the rubber band, and she turned it over very slowly, feeling it with her fingers more than looking at it. She found the back. She found the rubber band, and slid it off, and opened the back, and looked inside, where there were no men and never had been.

"Kwabena," she said. Just the name.

Then she closed it, and put the rubber band back, and held it in her lap with both hands as if it were warm, and looked at me.

"Esi," she said, and then something in Twi, slowly, so I could follow, and I could. *You came on a Sunday, and you came home.*

Chapter 7: Recording Two, The Reading Room

[Narrator: Harold Lee Deas. Recorded 10 December 2026, in the evening, in a guest room in Osu, Accra, with a phone propped against a water glass. Language: English. Consent: as before, family listening only, confirmed by the narrator at the start of the recording. Present: Denise Deas Whitfield, his daughter, who traveled with him. The ceiling fan is audible throughout. I have left it in, because he asked me to. "That's the sound of the room," he said. "Don't you dare take that out." — E.A.]

All right. It's the tenth of December, it's about eight-thirty at night, and I'm in Accra. I'm going to say that again, because I don't believe it yet. I'm in Accra.

We landed yesterday afternoon. Denise says I should describe things, so I'm going to describe things. The first thing is the air. I've lived my whole life in the Lowcountry in August, so I thought I knew what humid was, and it turns out the Lowcountry has been holding back. And there's a haze over everything. The young man who drove us from the airport called it harmattan and said it was dust blown all the way from the Sahara Desert, two thousand miles, and I said, "You mean that's sand from the Sahara on my windshield," and he said yes, and I asked him to stop the car so I could touch it. He did. He was very patient with me. It's fine as talc. It's the color of a paper bag. I've got some in a film canister in my bag. Denise thinks I'm crazy.

Osu is noisy at night and it smells like grilled meat, from a man on the corner with a grill made out of half an oil drum. Beef on sticks with pepper. Chichinga, he called it. I had three.

All right. Today. The archives.

The way this happened, for the record: back in November, Kojo in Toronto, and Denise, and Mr. Owusu in Kumasi, they put together a request. A written request to the national archives here in Accra. It had my name on it and Kofi Owusu's name on it, as the head of the family, and it asked for anything from the 1760s and 1770s about children taken from the inland country, the Adansi side, toward the coast, through the forts. It said who we were, and why we wanted to see it, and how we'd use it. It said we'd keep anything we copied within our families and not publish it. Denise wrote it, and Kofi made it better, and Kojo sent it.

And ten days later, an answer came back, and it said yes. It had a reference number on it, and it said: access granted, reading room, the ninth and tenth of December 2026, two readers, Mr. Harold Deas and Ms. Denise Whitfield, with photographs permitted of specified items for private family use only. And it had the name of the archivist who would meet us. Mrs. Naa Dedei Quaye.

I'm going to tell you about Mrs. Quaye, because I've known a lot of teachers and she's the best kind.

She's maybe sixty. Small, very straight, gray hair cut short, reading glasses on a beaded chain. She met us at the front desk at nine yesterday morning, shook my hand, and before I'd said a word she said, "Mr. Deas, I'm going to tell you something first, so that you are not disappointed. People come here from America every year looking for a name. Usually there is no name. The people who wrote these papers did not write down the names of the people they sold. They wrote numbers. I want you to know that before you sit down." And I said, "Mrs. Quaye, I'm a chemistry teacher. I'm used to working with what's in the beaker, not what I wish was in it." And she looked at me over her glasses for about two seconds and said, "Good. Then we will get along."

[Pause, the fan.]

The reading room is on the second floor. It's long and plain, with tall windows that open onto trees, and the light comes through the harmattan all yellow, like old newspaper. There are big wooden tables, and green-shaded lamps, and a wall clock that ticks loud enough you can hear it from the door. It was cool in there. The windows have shutters. The fans move slow. People were working at three other tables, a young man with a laptop, two women with a stack of land records. Nobody spoke above a whisper the whole two days. It felt like church. It felt like my classroom during a test.

Mrs. Quaye brought us what she had found ahead of time. She'd read the request and gone looking. Some of it was copies of records the British kept in the forts, the merchants' company letters from Cape Coast Castle, copied onto film a long time ago, and some was old letters from traders, and some was a book somebody wrote in the 1800s collecting what the elders said. She sat with us and showed us how to read the handwriting, which was very small and full of abbreviations, and she told us which ones to trust and which ones to read sideways.

And she said a thing I want on this record, because I've been thinking about it all day. She said, "Paper is one kind of memory. It is the memory of the people who were holding the pen. The families inland kept another kind. They kept the names. When you go to Kumasi, you must listen to the second kind as carefully as you read the first. One is not more true. They were written by different hands, for different reasons."

[Pause, about eight seconds.]

Here's what we found. I'm going to read it off my notes, because I want to get it right.

There's a letter from 1771, from a man at the castle at Cape Coast, writing to his superiors in London. He's complaining. He's complaining about trade, which is what they all did. He says the paths from the interior have been closed by war between the inland states, and the traders from the Adansi country have been coming down a different way, through Assin, and they've brought, and I'm reading, "a parcel of young people, chiefly boys and girls, the war having broke up several of their towns." He doesn't say how many. He doesn't say any names. He says they were sold to the captain of a vessel lying at Anomabu, bound for Carolina.

That's one.

The second is in a register of ships, which Denise found in a database from home before we came and Mrs. Quaye helped us match. A ship cleared Anomabu in early 1772 and arrived in Charleston that summer. The ship's name is in the record. I'm not going to say it on here. I don't want that ship's name in my family's mouth. But the dates fit. They fit with the probate inventory on Johns Island in 1772. They fit with Grandmama Phoebe.

And there's a third, and it's not about us at all, and it's the one I can't stop thinking about. In the book of elders' testimony from the 1800s, there's a passage, an old man from the Adansi country telling a visitor that when he was a boy, in his grandfather's time, a whole town in the hills had its children taken, and the town afterward kept a custom: that at every funeral, when the names of the dead were called, they would call the names of the taken children too, so that they would be counted among those who had gone home. Even though they did not come home.

I read that, and I had to put my hand on the table. Mrs. Quaye kept her peace. She just reached over and moved the lamp a little, so the light was better. That's all. Moved the lamp.

[Pause, long. About twenty seconds. A car horn outside, far off.]

Now. I'm going to be careful. I said I would be. Here's what I know. I know that in 1771 children were brought down from the hills behind the coast, from towns broken up by war, and sold at Anomabu onto a ship bound for Carolina. I know a ship from Anomabu came into Charleston in 1772. I know that the same year, on Johns Island, a man's estate listed a girl named Juba and a boy named Cudjo, twins, from the Gold Coast. I know a boy in Toronto named Kwadwo carries a very small piece of the same blood I do. And I know that a family in Kumasi, which came out of the Adansi hills, keeps the names of seven of its children who were taken to the coast and calls those names at funerals.

None of that's proof. Mrs. Quaye said it to me at the end, at the door, in the yellow light. She said, "Mr. Deas, I cannot tell you that it is them. Nobody can. The paper cannot. But the paper does not say it is not." And then she said, "Go to Kumasi. Sit with the family. Let them decide what they know."

And then she wrote down for us, in pencil, the reference numbers for everything we'd seen, and the date and time, and her initials, and gave it to Denise. Denise is going to give it to Kofi, so it goes into the family's record alongside the request and the answer, so anybody later on can find exactly what we found and check our work.

I've been a teacher a long time. That's the best thing anybody can do for you. Leave the trail.

[Pause.]

Tomorrow, early, we drive north with Kojo. He landed yesterday from Toronto, and he came straight to the reading room from the airport with his suitcase and sat at the end of our table for three hours without saying a word, just reading over my shoulder. We go up to Kumasi for the wake tomorrow night, and Saturday is the funeral. Kofi says the coast can wait for after the birthday. He says we go to the castle as a family or not at all. I've got a black cloth Kofi had sent down from Kumasi for me, so I won't be the only man in a gray suit. I tried it on tonight. Denise had to show me how to wear it over the shoulder. She learned off a video. I look like a Roman senator who lost a bet.

[Laughter.]

Denise, turn it off.

[End of recording. Length 38 minutes, 12 seconds.]

Chapter 8: Red and Black

By Friday the lane had become a village of its own.

The canopies ran from the frangipani at our gate all the way down to the main road, white and blue tents laced together at the corners with rope, and under them, in long rows, stood perhaps six hundred plastic chairs, red ones in front for the family and white ones behind. A sound system as tall as a refrigerator had arrived on a pickup that morning with two young men who spent the afternoon saying "check, check, one two" into a microphone while the goats watched from the sand pile. Women from the neighborhood had taken over the courtyard and were cooking in pots big enough to bathe in, over fires of split wood, jollof and light soup and palm nut soup, and the smoke drifted up through the frangipani and hung in the harmattan haze over the roof. Under all of it the red dust rose from every footstep and settled again on everything, so that by noon my black dress had a hem the color of brick.

My mother had arrived on Wednesday with my father, gray-faced from the flight. She went straight into the courtyard and did not come out except to sleep. My father found a chair on the veranda next to Nana, and the two of them sat there together through the whole preparation like a pair of judges, Nana with the Peckham radio in her lap and my father with his crossword, which he had carried four thousand miles and did not open once.

Kojo came up from Accra in the late afternoon in a hired car with Mr. Deas and his daughter.

I had heard Harold Deas's voice for so many hours by then, through my headphones, cutting the trucks and the dog and the kettle out from around it, that I had built a whole face for him, and the face was wrong. He was taller than I'd pictured and heavier, a big slope-shouldered man with a close gray beard and a straw hat, in a pale blue shirt that the heat had already turned dark down the spine. He got out of the car slowly, the way men his age get out of cars after five hours on a road, and stood in the lane looking at the canopies and the chairs and the six hundred people beginning to arrive, and took off his hat.

Denise came around the car and stood beside him. She was perhaps forty-five, in a black linen dress and flat sandals, with her hair in short locs and a canvas tote over one shoulder with a laptop in it, and she had the look of a woman who has spent five hours in a car making sure her father drank water.

Wɔfa Kofi came down the steps to meet them. He took his time. He crossed the lane in his black cloth with the whole street watching, and stopped in front of Mr. Deas, and the two of them stood there a moment, two old schoolteachers sizing each other up.

"Mr. Deas," said Wɔfa Kofi. "Akwaaba."

"Mr. Owusu," said Mr. Deas. "I'm sorry for your loss."

Wɔfa Kofi took his hand in both of his. "Medaase. Come. You will sit with the family."

---

The wake went all night, as they do.

The body came home from the mortuary at dusk, in the undertaker's van, and was laid in state in the front room of the house, which had been emptied of furniture and hung all around with white cloth and red. Wɔfa Kwabena lay in a coffin lined with kente, in a black suit and a white shirt, with his hands folded and his face very calm, and he looked, I thought, like a man who had been interrupted in the middle of a joke and was waiting politely to finish it. People filed past him from seven in the evening until dawn. Some wept aloud. Some sang. Old women stood at the foot of the coffin and spoke to him directly, telling him things, scolding him for leaving, and then turned away with their hands on their heads.

Outside, under the canopies, a highlife band played until midnight and then a choir took over, a dozen women in white from a congregation in Bantama where Nana had sung for fifty years, and they sang slow songs in Twi with the whole lane joining in on the choruses, and the sound went up into the dark over the tin roofs and the frangipani. Children slept on chairs pushed together. Men played cards on a table under a lightbulb strung from a branch. Every hour or so someone brought round trays of tea and bread.

I sat with Kojo and Efua and Abena in the second row, in the red chairs, and at some point after two Kojo said, low, without looking at me, "Kwame's on."

He showed me his phone. On it, in a small window inside the family's own space, I could see the canopies from above, from the camera Abena had fixed to a pole by the gate, and in another window Kwame's face, lit blue in a dark dorm room a world away, where it was nine at night. He waved. Behind him I could see a string of small lamps along a window, and somebody's paper flower taped among them.

"He's been on since six," Kojo said. "He's in a girl's room down the hall from his, the one with the lamps in her window. She's watching with him. He says she keeps asking what everything means and he keeps not knowing."

---

Saturday, the burial, was red and black from one end to the other.

By nine the lane was full. People came in black and red cloth, in rust brown and dark gray, in cloth stamped all over with the old symbols in black ink, combs and ladders and hearts and knots, so that the crowd from above, on Kwame's screen, must have looked like a field of dark flowers. Men came with their cloths over one shoulder and their feet in sandals. Women came with their heads tied in red. The old men from the family's hometown in the hills came in a minibus that had left at four in the morning, and walked up the lane together, slowly, nine of them, and everyone stood.

A brass band in white uniforms played a dirge that turned, halfway through, into something like a march, and then something like a dance, and nobody seemed to find this strange. The pastor of Nana's congregation said a few words in Twi and a few in English. My mother's family stood together in front, the four of her children who were left: Wɔfa Kofi tall and folded in his cloth, Auntie Adwoa with her back very straight, Auntie Yaa, who had flown in from Toronto with Kojo and cried from the first hymn to the last, my mother with her face set the way it must be set at three in the morning in an emergency room, and beside them Nana Serwaa in her chair, which two of the cousins carried from the veranda and set down beside the coffin, and she sat there with her hand on its lid.

Then the donations. A man with a microphone and a ledger read for an hour and a half the names of everyone who had given, and the amounts, and the crowd responded to each one. Mr. Boateng from Peckham had wired money. So had the mechanics' association. So had the boy from Tema who now owned two garages in Croydon. Each time the man read a name from London, someone in the crowd called "London!" and someone else clapped. When he read "Mr. Harold Deas, South Carolina, United States," there was a moment of silence, because nobody knew who that was, and then a great murmur, and people turned in their seats to look at the big man in the black cloth in the front row among the family, and Mr. Deas, who had clearly not expected his name to be read aloud, looked at his knees.

At noon they took the coffin to the cemetery.

It was on a hill at the edge of town, and the road there was red dust and the cemetery was red dust, with the graves set close among scrubby trees and the tombs painted white and blue and pink, and the harmattan lay over it so that the city below was only a suggestion, roofs and towers in a pale bronze fog. The grave was beside my grandfather's. The pallbearers carried the coffin up the last slope on their shoulders and, at the top, before they lowered it, they turned it slowly around three times, and then they danced it, rocking it side to side to the brass band, so that Wɔfa Kwabena went into the ground the way he had gone everywhere, moving.

Nana did not come up the hill. She stayed in the car with the door open and the radio in her lap, and watched.

---

That evening, when the burial was done and the crowd had mostly gone back into the lane to eat, the family gathered on the veranda.

It was not a large gathering. Wɔfa Kofi. Auntie Adwoa. My mother and father. The nine old men from the hills, in a row of white chairs. The grandchildren on the steps. And at Wɔfa Kofi's invitation, Mr. Deas and Denise, on a bench by the wall. The sun was going down orange through the frangipani, and the light came in sideways across the veranda floor, and in the courtyard behind the house the women were scraping out the pots.

Nana sat in her armchair. The radio was in her lap.

Abena had set her phone on the low table in front of her, and on it, I saw, she had opened a new recording, with Nana's name as the speaker, and the date, and *Bantama, Kumasi,* and *Twi,* and a line that Nana had answered aloud that morning, with Wɔfa Kofi beside her to hear it: yes, it could be kept, and yes, the family could hear it.

Then Nana began to speak.

She said the names of the dead. She started with Wɔfa Kwabena, and her voice did not change when she said it. Then her husband. Then her sisters. Then her mother, and her mother's mother, and back, name after name, the way you would read down a page, each one followed by a beat of silence in which the old men from the hills said something soft together, a single word I could not catch. Twenty names. Thirty. It got dark. Someone turned on the bulb over the steps.

And then, at the end, she stopped, and drew breath, and said seven more.

I did not understand the words, but I knew the shape of them. They were day names. I heard Akua, and Yaw, and Ama. And then two together, said very close, as one: Adwoa, Kwadwo.

The old men said their word.

On the bench by the wall, Harold Deas had taken off his hat and was holding it with both hands, and he was not moving at all.

Chapter 9: Recording Three, The Veranda in Bantama

[Roosters throughout, and someone sweeping; I have left both. Narrator: Harold Lee Deas. Recorded 13 December 2026, about 6:15 a.m., on the veranda of the family house in Bantama, Kumasi, on the morning of the thanksgiving service. Language: English, with some Twi spoken by Wɔfa Kofi, who was present for the last part and whose words are translated in brackets by him. Consent: confirmed by the narrator and by Wɔfa Kofi on the recording. — E.A.]

It's the thirteenth of December. Sunday. I'm the only one up. Well, I'm the only one up except a woman sweeping the lane with a broom made of palm ribs, no handle, bent over double, and she's been at it since before it was light. Swish, swish. She did the whole length of the canopies. Every day it's the same, Kofi says. She sweeps it and the wind brings it back. She looked at me when I came out on the veranda and said something, and I said "Medaase," because that's my one word, and she laughed so loud a rooster answered her.

[Laughter. Sweeping.]

The light here before the sun comes up is the color of weak tea. The haze is thick this morning. I can see the roofs going down the hill, all that tin, rust red and silver, and smoke coming up from the courtyards where people are lighting their fires, and past that, nothing. The city just dissolves. I can hear it, though. Car horns down on the main road. A radio. Somebody singing, a long way off.

I want to talk about last night while I still have it.

When the old lady started saying the names, I didn't know what it was. Denise leaned over and told me it was the names of the dead. I could hear them going back. You could hear that they were going back, the way you can hear a train going away from you. And the old men from the hills said a word after every one. Kofi told me later it's a word that means something like "they are with us." I'm not going to try to say it. I'll ruin it.

And then she stopped. And I thought she was finished. And she took a breath and said seven more.

[Pause. About twelve seconds. Sweeping, which stops.]

Kofi came and sat by me after. He sat there a good while first, with his hands on his knees. Then he told me what they were. Seven children of the family, from the old town in the Adansi hills, taken in the time of the wars, seven generations back from him. He counted it out on his fingers. Taken to the coast and sold. He said they're called at every funeral in the family, at the end, after the dead, so they won't be forgotten. He said the family's always believed that if their names stopped being called, they'd be lost twice.

Akua. Yaw. Ama. Kwaku. Afua. And two together, at the end. Adwoa and Kwadwo. The twins. The children of the same mother, the topmost woman on that tree, the one whose name was Afrakoma.

I asked him how he knew they were twins. He said, "Because she says them together. Her mother said them together. Her mother's mother said them together. In two hundred and fifty years, nobody has said one without the other."

[Pause. Long. Twenty seconds or more. A rooster.]

I'm a chemistry teacher. I'm going to say it again because I need to hear it. I am a chemistry teacher, and I don't know it's them. I've got a line on a piece of paper from Johns Island and a letter from a castle and a ship and a very small piece of blood. And they've got a name said together for two hundred and fifty years on a veranda in the hills and then on a veranda in Kumasi. That's all anybody's got.

But Grandmama Phoebe used to say "Juba come over with Cudjoe." Like the weather. Every time. Not "Juba came over," and then later, "and her brother." Juba come over with Cudjoe. In one breath.

Two families. Four thousand miles. Saying the same two names together, in one breath, for two and a half centuries, and neither one knowing the other was doing it.

[Pause. A door opens. Footsteps. Wɔfa Kofi's voice, off the microphone at first.]

Wɔfa Kofi: You are up early, Mr. Deas.

Mr. Deas: I'm recording. For your niece. Sit down if you want.

Wɔfa Kofi: I will sit. [A chair, scraping.] Is it on?

Mr. Deas: It's on. Say good morning to Esi.

Wɔfa Kofi: Esi, good morning. Your tones are still American. [Laughter.] Mr. Deas, I have spoken with my mother. And with the elders from the hills, last night after you went to sleep. I want to tell you what was decided, so that it is in the record, in your voice and mine.

Mr. Deas: Go ahead.

Wɔfa Kofi: We do not know. The archivist was right. The paper cannot tell us, and our memory cannot tell us, and the blood is only a whisper. So we will not say that you are the child of Adwoa. We have no right to say that, and you have no right to ask us to. But my mother said this. She said: a man came from across the sea with two names that we say together, and he says them together too, and he came to my son's funeral and put money on the table for a man he never met, and sat with the family, and stood when the names were said. [He says something in Twi.] That means, he is ours. He is of this house. Whatever the paper says. That is not a matter for the archive. That is a matter for the abusua, and the abusua has decided.

[Pause.]

Mr. Deas: I don't know what to say to that.

Wɔfa Kofi: You say medaase.

Mr. Deas: Medaase.

Wɔfa Kofi: Your tones are also American.

[Both laugh. Then quiet.]

Wɔfa Kofi: There is one more thing. The seven names. They have never been written in the family's record. Only spoken. My mother has agreed to let them be written now. She will check each one. How it is spelled, and how it sounds, and she will record her voice saying each one beside it, and then they will go into the seven empty places on the tree. Today, after the thanksgiving. And beside Adwoa and Kwadwo, if you agree, we will draw a line, a broken line, to Juba and Cudjo on your family's side. A broken line is a line that says, we believe this, we cannot prove it, we are keeping it open. Esi's brother will know how to draw it.

Mr. Deas: A dotted line.

Wɔfa Kofi: A dotted line.

Mr. Deas: My grandmama would've liked that. She liked things left open. She'd never shut a door all the way. Said you never know who's coming.

Wɔfa Kofi: She was a wise woman.

Mr. Deas: She was a pain in the neck.

Wɔfa Kofi: Those are often the same woman.

[Laughter. The sweeping starts again in the lane.]

Mr. Deas: The sun's coming up. Look at that. It's coming up red. Like the ground.

Wɔfa Kofi: In the harmattan it always comes up red. Come. My sister is making tea, and there is bread. And then we must dress. The thanksgiving is at nine, and my mother does not wait.

[End of recording. Length 24 minutes, 50 seconds.]

Chapter 10: Seven Places

The photographs came in on Saturday night, after the burial, like rain after a long dry spell.

Wɔfa Kofi had opened his brother's page at nine, when the old men from the hills had gone to their beds and the last of the chairs were being stacked in the lane. I was sitting on the veranda steps with Efua when our phones chimed together, and we looked down, and the gray square at the top of Wɔfa Kwabena's page had filled with his face. It was a photograph none of us had seen: a young man in his twenties, in Lagos probably, in flared trousers and a printed shirt, leaning against the bonnet of a white Peugeot with his arms folded and an expression of enormous satisfaction, as if he had just been told the car was his.

Below it, within the hour, there were sixty more. Auntie Adwoa had sent a whole album she must have scanned in the weeks before the funeral and kept back, waiting for the elders. Wɔfa Kwabena at his wedding in Brixton in 1987. Wɔfa Kwabena holding baby Efua like a cake he had been asked to carry. Wɔfa Kwabena in the arch, younger, the sign over the door freshly painted, KB MOTORS, GOD'S TIME IS THE BEST. The mechanics sent pictures from twenty years of Christmas parties. The boy from Tema, now a man with gray at his temples, sent one of a camp bed in the back of the arch under a calendar of the Black Stars, and wrote under it only: *Where I slept. Thank you, Uncle.*

And Efua's photograph, the one she had tried to add at three in the morning in November and been gently turned away, came through at last, the note that had said *1 item waiting* vanishing from the bottom of the page. It was a selfie, the two of them, her and her uncle, in the arch, both with grease on their faces, both laughing.

She sat on the step beside me and scrolled through them in the light of the bulb over our heads, and did not cry, and then did.

---

The thanksgiving service on Sunday was short, by Kumasi standards, which is to say three hours, and afterward Wɔfa Kofi took his mother into the front room, where the coffin had stood, and shut the door, and sat with her for the whole afternoon. Abena went in with her phone. Nobody else was allowed.

When they came out, the seven places on the tree were full.

I looked at it that evening in the courtyard, sitting on an upturned mortar with Kojo, the cooking fires down to embers around us and the women's voices coming from the kitchen. Above Nana's mother, above the narrow column of women, at the top, *Nana Afrakoma, of the old town in the Adansi hills, about 1740s, mother.* And around her the ring of seven, no longer empty. *Akua. Yaw. Ama. Kwaku. Afua.* And two set side by side, in one box that Kwame, from his dorm room, had drawn wider than the others, with a line between them: *Adwoa and Kwadwo.*

Beside each name was a small speaker, and when I touched it, I heard Nana say it.

At the bottom of each, in gray: *Spelling and pronunciation checked by Nana Serwaa, 13 December 2026. Recited at the funeral of Kwabena Owusu, 12 December 2026.*

And from the twins' box, running off sideways to the edge of the screen, a dotted line. Kojo touched it, and the tree slid, and there was the other family. *Juba, a girl,* and *Cudjo, a boy, twins, about ten years, Gold Coast, Johns Island, 1772.* Above them nothing. Below them, a long line descending. Cudjoe Deas, under the crooked stone behind the church on Bohicket Road. Phoebe Deas, 1896 to 1979. Harold Lee Deas, 1955. Denise Deas Whitfield. Her two sons, in Atlanta, fourteen and nine.

On the dotted line itself, in very small type, Wɔfa Kofi had written: *Held by the family as belonging. Not proven. Kept open. Decided by the abusua, 13 December 2026.*

"He's going to be insufferable about this," Kojo said.

"Who?"

"Kwame. He's going to say he connected the continents."

"He did draw it."

"He drew a dotted line," Kojo said, and then, after a moment, quieter, looking at it, "Yeah. I guess he did."

---

There was a week then, between the burial and the birthday, and Kumasi let me have it.

On Monday Abena took Denise and me to Kejetia to buy cloth for the nineteenth. We went at seven, before the heat, in a trotro from the main road, ten of us wedged on benches meant for eight, with a mate hanging from the open door shouting the route and a woman beside me holding a live chicken in a basket on her knees, which watched me with one orange eye the whole way.

Abena said the new market building was very fine and nobody she knew bought anything in it. The real market was all around it and under it and through it, the way it had always been, and we went in by a lane where the stalls were so close their tarps overlapped and the light came through them green and blue and orange, like being inside a stained glass window that had been folded up. The smell was every smell at once. Dried fish and smoked fish and fish still alive in basins. Onions, in sacks, and shallots, and ginger, and the sharp musk of shea butter in great pale blocks on enamel trays. Charcoal smoke. Sweat. Frying dough. The sweet rot of overripe mangoes. A woman was pounding something in a mortar at the mouth of an alley, her whole body rising and falling with the pestle, and the thud of it came up through my feet.

The cloth sellers were in a lane of their own, deep in. Bolts stacked to the ceiling of every stall, waxprint in a thousand patterns, and kente, the real kind, folded in long strips on tables, the colors so loud in that dim light they almost hummed. Abena bargained in Twi for twenty minutes with a woman twice her size over a length of yellow and green, and they both seemed to enjoy it enormously, and at the end the woman threw in a headwrap for free and told Abena she would make a terrible husband for someone, which Abena took as a compliment.

Denise stood in the middle of the lane and turned slowly around.

"My mother would have lost her mind in here," she said. "She'd have bought one of everything."

"Do you want something?" Abena said.

Denise touched a strip of kente on the table, gold and black and green, very lightly, the way you would touch something in a museum. "I don't know if I'm allowed."

The cloth woman, who had understood the tone if not the words, said something in Twi to Abena, and Abena translated. "She says, are you the one from America? The one at the funeral?"

"I guess I am."

The woman said something else, longer.

"She says her grandmother's sister was taken too," Abena said, quietly. "From near Bekwai. She says everybody in Asante has one. She says, choose. It is a gift."

Denise chose a strip of gold and green. The woman wrapped it in newspaper and tied it with a strand of raffia and pressed it into her hands, and would not take money, and when Denise tried to insist, the woman laughed and shooed us out of her stall like chickens.

---

On Wednesday, in the evening, Wɔfa Kofi asked me to sit with him on the veranda and help him write.

He had begun, he said, a page about Nana Afrakoma. The family kept pages like it for the important ones of the past, the people the children should know: a great-grandfather who had been a court linguist; a woman who had walked salt from the coast to the hills for forty years; my grandfather, who had taught the first science class at a secondary school outside the city. Each page said what was known and how it was known. Wɔfa Kofi was a historian by training and would not let a page say more than it could carry.

So the page for Afrakoma was short. He read it to me in the dusk, with the bats beginning to come out of the frangipani and the cooking smoke drifting over the wall.

*Nana Afrakoma. Born in the old town in the Adansi hills, about the 1740s. Mother of at least nine children, of whom seven were taken in the wars of about 1770, among them the twins Adwoa and Kwadwo. Her daughter Akosua, who was not taken, is the line from which this family descends. Source: the family's oral record, recited at funerals; held by Nana Serwaa, who learned it from her mother, who learned it from hers. See also: the request to the national archives in Accra, granted November 2026, and the notes of the archivist, Mrs. N. D. Quaye. See also: the family of Harold Lee Deas, Johns Island, South Carolina.*

"Akosua," I said.

"Akosua," he said. "Sunday born. In your father's Fante it is Esi, in our Twi it is Akosua, and it is the same day. You did not know?"

"No."

"Now it is in the record," he said, and saved the page, and took off his glasses and pressed his fingers into his eyes, and said that his mother had asked whether the American man would be staying for the birthday, and that he had told her yes, and that she had said good, because she wanted to see if he could dance.

Chapter 11: Ninety

At four in the afternoon on the nineteenth, five drummers pulled up in a minibus with the drums roped to the roof, and before they had even untied them a small crowd of children had gathered in the lane to watch.

Overnight the canopies had changed color. The white and blue of the funeral had gone, folded away into the pickup that brought them, and in their place were canopies striped yellow and green, and under them the chairs were white again, and someone had tied balloons to the frangipani, gold ones, which bobbed in the hot wind and kept snagging on the flowers. The red earth of the lane had been swept and then watered down so the dust would stay put, and it had gone dark and smelled the way Nana had said it would, like a pot just off the fire. In the courtyard the women were cooking again, but different food now: fufu pounded in the big mortar, two women on the pestle and one turning the dough between strokes with quick wet hands that never once got caught; groundnut soup; grilled tilapia; kelewele frying in a pan as wide as a bicycle wheel; and, on a table under a sheet, a cake from a bakery in Adum with ninety candles in it, which Kojo had counted twice because he did not trust the baker.

Nana Serwaa had been dressed since noon. She sat in her armchair on the veranda in the yellow and green cloth Abena had bargained for in Kejetia, with a matching headwrap tied so tight she could not have frowned if she tried, and a necklace of old gold beads that her own mother had worn, and she received people. They came up the steps one by one, as they had for the funeral, but now they bent and said happy birthday in English and in Twi, and some of them knelt, and she gave each one her hand and a word, and they went away looking pleased, the way people do when an old woman remembers their mother's name.

At five, Abena brought the laptop out.

---

We had kept the birthday page closed to her for three weeks. By that afternoon it held sixty-three videos.

Abena set the laptop on the low table in front of Nana's chair, and the family gathered on the veranda around it, and in the lane below, people who were not family stood on chairs to see. Nana leaned forward. Her good eye was close to the screen. Abena pressed the first one.

They ran one after another, for nearly an hour. Kojo on his frozen balcony in Toronto. The woman in Amsterdam with her bicycle, remembering the sugar cane. The old man in the Bronx who sang his hymn and asked for his shilling, at which Nana laughed out loud and said something to the screen in Twi that made Wɔfa Kofi put his hand over his eyes. The little girl in the school uniform with her drawing of ninety candles. My mother in her scrubs. My father, whom I had not known had recorded anything, sitting in his car in the hospital parking garage in the Medical Center, saying in his careful Fante that in thirty years she had never once failed to ask after his mother, and that he was grateful.

Each time a face came on, Nana said the name, before the person could say it themselves, as if to prove she still could.

And then Wɔfa Kwabena, on his crate in the mouth of the arch in Peckham, with the Toyota up on the lift behind him.

Nobody had warned her. Wɔfa Kofi had said not to. He had said she would know what to do with it better than any of us would know what to do for her.

The train went over in the video, and the picture shook, and the dust came down through the light, and Wɔfa Kwabena looked up at the ceiling with his patient face. Nana put out one hand and laid it flat on the edge of the table, as if the train were shaking the veranda too. Then he spoke. *Ninety years is not luck. Keep me some fufu. Not the one from the machine.*

When it ended, Nana sat back in her chair.

The whole veranda waited. In the lane, a child said something and was hushed.

Then Nana said, quite clearly, in Twi, to the courtyard, where the women had stopped pounding to listen, *Keep him some fufu.* And the woman on the pestle laughed, a short, startled, wet sound, and lifted it, and brought it down, and the other woman turned the dough, and the thud began again, steady as a heart.

---

Kwame came on at six, Kumasi time, which was one in the afternoon for him.

He had arranged it with Abena, and she propped the phone against the cake so that his face, in its window inside the family's own space, sat among the ninety candles, a small bright square. Around him on the screen were other windows, opening one by one as people joined: Auntie Adwoa's neighbor in Peckham, who had known Nana for thirty years from visits; Kojo's father in Toronto, who had stayed home with a bad knee; Denise's two boys in Atlanta, with their father, all three in matching T-shirts that said NANA 90 that Denise had ordered online from her hotel room in Accra and had delivered to Atlanta. Along the top of the screen the little clocks sat in a row, each under its face. KUMASI 6:02 P.M. LONDON 6:02 P.M. ATLANTA 1:02 P.M. TORONTO 1:02 P.M. And kwame (here), 1:02 P.M., in his lowercase letters.

"Nana," Kwame said. "Happy birthday. I'm sorry I'm not there."

"You are there," said Nana, in English, and pointed at the cake.

Kwame laughed. Behind him in the dorm kitchen, at the edge of his window, a young man in a fleece was holding up a pot.

"This is Batbayar," Kwame said. "From my floor. He's staying over the break too. Everybody else went home, so I made jollof for the two of us. Ishita made me promise to send her a picture of it before she flew home. He lent me the pot."

Nana leaned close to the phone and examined the pot.

"Is it orange?" she said.

"It's orange, Nana."

"Good. Your mother told me about the beige."

Ninety candles take a long time to light. Kojo and Efua and I did it with three lighters from three sides, and by the time the last ones were lit the first ones were guttering and the wax was running in yellow rivers down the icing and the heat coming off the cake made the air above it shimmer. The whole lane sang, in English, then in Twi, then something else that might have been both. Nana did not try to blow them out. She looked at them burning, close to her face, the light moving on the gold beads at her throat, and then she said to Abena, "You do it," and Abena did, with Efua and me and Kojo all leaning in, and Kwame blowing too from inside the phone, which did nothing at all, and everyone cheered him for it anyway.

---

The drummers began at dark.

They set up in the lane in a half circle under a lightbulb, the big drums at the back, the talking drum in front, and a man with a bell made of two iron cones beating a pattern on it with a stick, over and over, that seemed simple and was not, and the drums came in under it one by one until the lane was full of a sound that you did not hear so much as stand inside. The women danced first. Adowa. Slow, close to the ground, all in the hands and the shoulders, each gesture meaning something I could not read and everyone around me could, and the old women danced it best, and people came forward and pressed money to their foreheads while they danced.

Then Wɔfa Kofi danced, which nobody expected, in his cloth, tall and narrow and grave, with his glasses on, his hands making shapes in the air that made the old men from the hills shout.

And then he went to the bench by the wall where Harold Deas was sitting with Denise, and held out his hand.

"My mother," said Wɔfa Kofi, "wants to see if you can dance."

Mr. Deas looked at him. He looked at the drummers. He looked at Nana, on the veranda in her chair, who was looking straight at him with her good eye and an expression I can only describe as a dare.

He stood up. He took off his straw hat and gave it to Denise. He went out into the lane in his black cloth, which Denise had re-tied for him that morning over his left shoulder, and stood in front of the drums, a big slope-shouldered seventy-one-year-old chemistry teacher from Johns Island, and he did not know a single step.

He moved anyway. It was not adowa. It was something from somewhere else, from a church basement in Charleston or a cousin's wedding on the island, a little shuffle, a little shoulder, his hands loose at his sides. The drummers watched him for a measure and then the man on the talking drum leaned forward, grinning, and started to play to him, a phrase and then a pause, a phrase and then a pause, and Mr. Deas, without understanding a word of it, answered with his feet.

The lane went up like a fire. People ran forward with money. Somebody put a note on his forehead and it stuck there in the sweat. Auntie Adwoa came out and danced beside him, showing him the hands, and he copied her, badly, and the old men from the hills stood up from their chairs.

On the veranda, Nana Serwaa clapped twice, the way the old woman had clapped when I passed my test in the lane, and said something to Wɔfa Kofi, and Wɔfa Kofi bent to hear.

Later, I asked him what she said.

"She said, he dances like a man from the coast," Wɔfa Kofi told me. "Which is to say, badly. And then she said, but with his heart."

Chapter 12: The Door on the Sea

My father had not been home to Cape Coast in nine years, and on the morning of the twenty-second he was up before anyone, standing in the lane in Bantama with his car keys in his hand, though it was not his car.

We went in two vehicles, the cousins' Land Cruiser and a borrowed Toyota van, south out of Kumasi on the road through the Adansi hills, past Fomena. Wɔfa Kofi rode in front of the van with his window down and pointed, as we passed through the hills, at a ridge to the east, gray-green under the haze, with a line of tall trees along its spine. "There," he said. "Behind that. The old town." From the road it was only green. A footpath going up through cocoa trees, a woman with a basin on her head walking down it, a ridge. Mr. Deas, in the seat behind him, leaned across Denise to look until the road bent and the ridge was gone.

Then down out of the hills through Assin, where the forest closed over the road in a green tunnel and the light came through the leaves as if through water, and on, south, toward the sea.

You smell the coast before you see it. Somewhere before Yamoransa junction the air changed through the open windows, from leaf and red dust to salt and smoke and fish, and the land flattened out and turned sandy, with coconut palms leaning every which way and cassava growing in the yards, and then the road came over a rise and there was the Atlantic, gray-blue under the white sky, with the surf breaking long and slow along a beach full of canoes.

My father said a word in Fante that I did not know, and then, in English, "There it is."

---

Cape Coast is a town of hills running down to the water, painted houses crowded on them in faded blue and yellow and pink, laundry on every balcony, goats on every wall, and at the bottom of the hills, on a spur of black rock over the sea, the castle.

It is white. That was the first thing, and I had not been ready for it. In photographs it had looked like a fortress, and it is one, but in the morning sun it was white as a wedding cake, whitewashed, with square towers and long walls and a row of black cannons along the battlements pointing out to sea, and below it the canoes were pulled up on the sand in rows, painted in every color with names and mottos, and the fishermen were mending nets in the shade of the walls and children were playing football on the beach. Far down the shore to the west, seven or eight miles off, a second white shape sat on its own point in the haze, faint as a thumbprint: Elmina, older still, where the trade on this coast began. My father stopped on the road above and looked down at the beach.

"That's where we played," he said. "Right there. Under the cannons. Every day after school."

"Did you think about it?" Kojo asked him. "When you were playing."

My father considered the question with great care, the way he did the crossword. "No," he said. "And then, when I was older, I thought about nothing else. And then I moved to Houston and tried not to think about it, and that worked for twenty years, and then it stopped working." He pushed his hands deep into his trouser pockets. "Children play where they are. That is not a crime. It is only a beginning."

---

I will not say much about the inside, because I do not think I can say it right.

There was a guide, a young man named Ebo with a clipboard and a quiet voice, who walked us across the courtyard in the white glare and down a ramp, and then we were underground, in the dark.

The dungeons are long vaulted rooms of brick and stone, low, with a channel cut in the floor and a few small openings high in the wall where light comes in at an angle and lies on the ground in a narrow bar. The floor is not the original floor. Ebo said so. He said the original floor is under it, many inches down, and that it is made of what was left by the people who were held there, and then he did not say any more about it, and none of us asked. It was cooler than outside, and the air was thick and still, and it smelled of stone and damp and something older underneath that I will not try to name. Somebody had laid wreaths on the floor near the far wall, and ribbons, and a photograph in a plastic sleeve, and a bunch of flowers so fresh it must have come that morning.

We stood there. Wɔfa Kofi, in his cloth. Mr. Deas, with his hat in his hands. Denise beside him, holding his elbow. My father. My mother, who had once told me she had seen everything a body can do and had not seen this. Kojo. Efua. Me. Ebo stood by the door and waited, and did not hurry us, and did not explain.

Somewhere above us, through the stone, I could hear the surf.

---

Then the door.

It is at the end of a passage, a narrow opening in the seaward wall, and through it, so bright after the dark that I had to shut my eyes, the sea. Above it someone had painted the words that everyone who has ever read about this place knows, and I will not repeat them here. Through it, people walked out onto the rocks and into boats and out to the ships at anchor, and did not come back.

Ebo said that on the other side, now, there is a sign that faces the other way, facing in, for those who come back through it.

Mr. Deas stood in the doorway with the light on his face, and did not move. Then he turned and looked at Wɔfa Kofi, and Wɔfa Kofi came and stood beside him, and they stood there together, the two old teachers, framed in the stone, with the Atlantic going on beyond them to the edge of the world. There was nothing either of them needed to say.

Then Mr. Deas did something I did not expect. He turned around and walked back in through the door, into the passage, toward us. Slowly. On purpose. All the way back to where we were standing in the half dark. And he put his hat on.

"That's the direction," he said. "I wanted to do it once in that direction."

---

Before we turned north for home, we drove east along the coast to Anomabu.

It is a fishing town a short drive east, smaller and quieter, with its own old fort on a low rise above a long beach. Kojo had found it on the family map the night before and drawn on it, as Wɔfa Kofi had asked, a new route: a dotted line from the old town in the Adansi hills south through Assin to the shore at Anomabu, then out across the whole width of the Atlantic to Charleston, and from there a short hop to Johns Island. Beside it, solid, ran the line of Harold Deas's own family as Denise had entered it in November: Johns Island to Charleston, Charleston to Atlanta, Atlanta, the two boys. The dotted line and the solid one met at a single point, 1772, on the island, and went on together from there.

The beach at Anomabu in the late afternoon was gold and nearly empty, the tide out, the sand packed hard and wet and shining like a mirror, with the canoes drawn up above the tide line and gulls standing in the shallows. The harmattan had thinned near the water, and the sun was going down orange behind the fort. Mr. Deas walked down to the edge of the water by himself. Denise started to follow and then did not.

He took something out of his pocket. It was the little film canister, the one he had filled with Sahara dust off a windshield on his first day in Accra. He emptied it, the dust blowing away off his palm in a pale thread. Then he bent down, slowly, with a hand on his knee, and filled it with wet sand from the edge of the sea, and snapped the lid on, and put it back in his pocket.

When he came back up the beach his trousers were wet to the shin and he did not seem to notice.

"For Grandmama Phoebe," he said, to nobody in particular. "Her stone's on Bohicket Road. She'll want to know where they left from."

Wɔfa Kofi put his hand on his shoulder, and we walked back up through the canoes to the cars.

That night, in the van going north in the dark, Mr. Deas made his fourth recording. He asked me to keep it exactly as it was, with no transcript, and I have. It is seven minutes long. Most of it is the road.

Chapter 13: What Nana Wanted Them to Know

The stamps on the padded envelope had kingfishers on them, which told my mother where it was from before she read the address. It arrived in the third week of January, and she opened it at the kitchen table in Katy with a butter knife, as if it might be fragile.

Abena had made it. Before I left Kumasi she had told me she was going to, and then she had gone silent for three weeks, which I had learned was Abena for working. She had taken Nana's answers, all of them, forty-four by the end of December, and set them out a page at a time, the question at the top in English and Twi, the answer below in Nana's Twi and Abena's English side by side, with a photograph on each page. Nana as a girl in a school uniform. Nana at her wedding. The veranda. The radio. The red lane with the canopies, yellow and green. On the back page, the tree, printed small, with the seven names at the top in their ring, and the dotted line running off the edge of the paper.

She had printed it from the family's own pages at a copy shop near the university, on thick cream paper, and had it bound with a cloth spine. Eleven copies. One for each household, and one for the house on Johns Island.

My mother read it standing up. Then she sat down and read it again. Then she propped it open on the windowsill above the sink, against the glass, where the light from the retention pond came through the blinds, at the page that said *What did Kumasi smell like when you were a girl?* and left it there.

---

Kwame read his on the floor of his dorm room, on the phone with me, with the sound of sleet on his window. He had been home for one week at New Year's, on a ticket that our parents had bought after all, and had flown back with a suitcase full of shito and a cloth from Kejetia that Abena had picked out for him, and he was now, he said, a different person, and also more tired.

"Did you read the one about her first job?" he said.

"Which one?"

"She sold kenkey at the lorry station at Kejetia when she was nine. Before school. She says she made enough in a year to buy her mother a cooking pot. A big one. She says it's still in the courtyard." He paused. "Is it?"

I thought about the courtyard. The fires, the women, the mortar. "There's a big black pot by the kitchen door," I said. "Nobody cooks in it. They keep water in it."

"It's in the collection," he said. "Wɔfa Kofi added it yesterday. It's got her name on it now. Bought by Serwaa, aged ten, 1946. I didn't know any of this. I've been at this school five months and I know the name of every dining hall and I didn't know my grandmother had a job when she was nine."

"Well, now it's written down."

"Now it's written down," he said, and I could hear him turning the page.

---

[The fifth recording arrived on the ninth of January. It is the shortest, and I have transcribed it last. — E.A.]

Narrator: Harold Lee Deas. Recorded 9 January 2027, late afternoon, in the churchyard of the old church on Bohicket Road, Johns Island, South Carolina. Language: English. Consent: as before. Present: Denise Deas Whitfield and her two sons. Wind in the cedars throughout.

It's cold today. For here. Forty-eight degrees and the wind off the marsh, and the boys are complaining about it, which is how you know they're mine.

We're behind the church. There's an old graveyard back here under the cedars, sand and moss and roots, and a lot of the stones are sunk down crooked, some you can't read anymore. Cudjoe Deas is over by the fence. His stone leans east. It's always leaned east. I used to think it was the roots. Grandmama Phoebe is next to him, with Granddaddy, under a newer stone, granite, that my father paid for.

I brought the sand.

[Pause. Wind. A boy's voice, close, asking something, and Denise answering.]

I'm going to pour a little on Cudjoe and a little on Grandmama. Keep the rest. Denise says she wants some for the boys, for when they're old enough to care.

[Pause, about fifteen seconds. Something being unscrewed. The wind drops.]

There.

[Pause.]

Kofi called me on New Year's Day, from the veranda. He showed me the lane. The sweeping lady was out. He said his mother asked about the dancing American. He said she said to tell me I'm improving in her memory. I told him that's the only place I'm likely to.

I want to put one more thing on here before I forget it. Denise has something she wants to say. Come here, baby.

Denise Deas Whitfield: It's not much. I work at a family foundation in Atlanta. One of our program officers was in Lisbon in October, at a heritage weekend, and she came back talking about a young man there, Gabriel Mohan, who'd gotten four old families to put money together for language and heritage work. Elders' recordings, word lists, that kind of thing, held by the communities themselves. She said they'd set up a way for other communities to ask whether they might apply someday. So I wrote to them this week. Just a question. Whether a town in the Adansi hills, with Mr. Owusu's family and the elders there, might one day record its old people saying the names, in their own voices, and keep them. I don't know if anything will come of it. Daddy says I should say on here that I wrote it, so there's a record.

Mr. Deas: There's a record now. Thank you, baby.

[Pause. The boys, laughing at something, farther off.]

That's it, Esi. That's my five. I told you I'm not the talker. Bernice was.

But I'll tell you what I'm going to do. Kofi's coming in April. He's never been to America. Denise is fixing it. He's going to come out to this island, and I'm going to take him down to the marsh at low tide, and he's going to smell the pluff mud and make a face, and then I'm going to bring him here, to this fence, and he's going to say the names. Afrakoma's children. All seven. Here, where two of them ended up. Out loud, the way his mother does. And the old men won't be here to say their word after, so I'm going to say it. Kofi's going to teach me. My tones are going to be terrible.

[Laughter.]

All right. The boys are cold. Denise, turn it off.

[End of recording. Length 11 minutes, 3 seconds.]

---

I finished the transcripts on a Sunday night at the end of January, in my apartment, with the air conditioner off for once and the window open on a cold front that had come down from the plains and scoured the sky over Houston clean and blue. All five went into the family's own space, each with its date and place and language and Mr. Deas's voice saying yes at the beginning, kept beside Nana's answers and the names and the photographs of a man laughing in a railway arch. Anyone in either family could hear them. No one else.

Then I opened the last of Nana's question cards. Abena had sent it the week before, with a note: *She asked for this one herself. She said it was the last she would answer this year, because at ninety a woman is allowed to rest.*

The question was in Nana's own words, Abena wrote, not ours.

*What do I want the children across the sea to know?*

And the answer, in Twi, and Abena's English beside it.

*That they were never forgotten. Not one day. We said their names when we had nothing else to give them. Now some of them have come back, and some of them are only beginning to come. Tell them the door is open. Tell them we are still on the veranda. Tell them to come on a Sunday, if they can, because that is when the cooking is best. But any day is good. Any day, they are ours.*

On the screen above the tree, along the top of the family page, the row of clocks had grown by one. Kwame had added it in January, beside his own. It had a small photograph under it of a big man in a straw hat, and a label in Kwame's lowercase letters.

johns island.

It was a quarter to ten at night there, the same as on Kwame's clock, an hour ahead of me and five hours behind Kumasi, where it was nearly three in the morning and Nana would be asleep with the radio on the table beside her bed, its back held on with a rubber band.