Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi Page B

boast was also nervous. He paced, and his hand shook, as all the men of the Castle looked on.
    Cudjo stood across from his challenger. He looked him up and down, assessing him. Then his eyes found Quey’s in the audience. Quey nodded at him, and Cudjo smiled, a smile that Quey knew to mean “I will win this.”
    And he did. Only a minute after the match started, Cudjo had his arms wrapped around the soldier’s fat belly, flipping him over and pinning him down.
    The crowd roared with excitement. More challengers stepped in, soldiers whom Cudjo defeated with varying degrees of ease until, finally, all the men were drunk and spent, and Cudjo alone was unruffled.
    The soldiers started to leave. After congratulating Cudjo loudly and raucously, his own brothers and father also left. Cudjo was to spend the night in Cape Coast with Quey.
    “I’ll wrestle you,” Quey said when it looked like everyone had gone. The night air was starting to move into the Castle, cooling it, but only a bit.
    “Now that I’m too tired to win?” Cudjo asked.
    “You’ve never been too tired to win.”
    “Okay. You want to wrestle me? Come catch me first!” And with that Cudjo broke into a run. Quey was faster than he was in the early years of their friendship. He caught up to Cudjo at the cannons and dove toward him, locking his legs and pulling him down to the ground.
    Within seconds, Cudjo was on top of him, panting heavily while Quey struggled to turn him over.
    Quey knew he should tap the ground three times, the signal to end the match, but he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to. He didn’t want Cudjo to get up. He didn’t want to miss the weight of him.
    Slowly, Quey relaxed his body, and he felt Cudjo do the same. The boys drank in each other’s gazes; their breathing slowed; the feeling on Quey’s lips grew stronger, a tingling that threatened to draw his face up toward Cudjo’s.
    “Get up right now,” James said.
    Quey didn’t know how long his father had been standing there watching them, but he recognized a new tone in his father’s voice. It was the same measured control he used when he spoke to servants and, Quey knew though he’d never seen, to slaves before he struck them, but now there was fear mixed in.
    “Go home, Cudjo,” James said.
    Quey watched his friend leave. Cudjo didn’t even look back.
    The next month, just before Quey’s fourteenth birthday, while Effia cried and fought and fought some more, going so far, once, as to strike James across the face, Quey boarded a ship bound for England.
    *
    “I heard you’re back from London. Can I see you, old
friend?”
    Quey couldn’t stop thinking about the message he’d received from Cudjo. He stared into his bowl and saw that he’d hardly eaten any of the porridge. Fiifi had already finished one bowl and asked for another.
    “Maybe I should have stayed in London,” Quey said.
    His uncle looked up from his meal and gave him a funny look. “Stayed in London for what?”
    “It was safer there,” Quey said softly.
    “Safer? Why? Because the British don’t tramp through bushland finding slaves? Because they keep their hands clean while we work? Let me tell you, the work they do is the most dangerous of all.”
    Quey nodded, though it wasn’t what he’d meant. In England he’d gotten to see the way black people lived in white countries, Indians and Africans who were packed twenty or more to a room, who ate the slop the pigs left behind, who coughed and coughed and coughed endlessly, all together, a symphony of sickness. He knew the dangers that waited across the Atlantic, but he knew too the danger in himself.
    “Don’t be weak, Quey,” Fiifi said, staring at him intently, and for just a second Quey wondered if his uncle had understood him after all. But then Fiifi returned to his porridge and said. “Isn’t there work for you to do?”
    Quey shook his head, trying to collect himself. He smiled at his uncle and thanked him for the meal and then he