Praise Song for the Butterflies Read online

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Akashic Books

  ©2018 by Bernice L. McFadden

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-61775-575-0

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-61775-626-9

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017956559

  All rights reserved

  First printing

  This novel appeared in an earlier form as an e-book in 2009 under the title My Name Is Butterfly.

  First printing

  Akashic Books

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  E-mail: [email protected]

  Website: www.akashicbooks.com

  Table of Contents

  ___________________

  A Brief Bistory of Ukemby

  After

  Before

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  Wife of the Gods

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  Eden Rehabilitation Center

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  New York City

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  After

  E-Book Extras

  Excerpt: The Book of Harlan

  Also by Bernice L. McFadden

  About Bernice L. McFadden

  Copyright & Credits

  About Akashic Books

  For all of those little black girls and little black boys.

  For those delicate butterflies, those beautiful innocents.

  The word trokosi comes from the Ewe words tro, meaning deity or fetish, and kosi, meaning female slave.

  I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.

  —Charles Dickens

  a brief history of ukemby

  Shaped like a kinked index finger, confined between Ghana and Togo, Ukemby is a nation about which very little is known before the seventeenth century when the first Portuguese colonist arrived. That said, there are signs of an early British presence, possibly explorers who succumbed to malaria and/or were murdered by the inhabitants who were, in fact, explorers in their own right, having trekked to Ukemby from regions that are now part of Ghana, Benin, Namibia to the south, and as far east as Tanzania.

  The Portuguese used Ukemby as a slave-trading post for Europe and the Americas until the Slave Trade Act of 1807, at which point the Portuguese all but abandoned the colony, save for the criminals and undesirables they deserted upon their departure.

  The Portuguese withdrawal left the region vulnerable, ultimately making way for the German Empire to invade Ukemby in 1875 and place it under military rule. Many Ukembans were subject to forced labor, building infrastructure and mining diamonds and bauxite.

  Following World War I, the Germans relinquished control of the territory, and the US swooped in to fill the void. The Bureau of Ukemby Affairs was soon established and charged with creating schools to educate and assimilate the children to US standards.

  Christianity was deemed the new American territory’s official religion; the worship of African gods and deities was outlawed and made punishable by flogging.

  Children were forbidden to speak Wele, their native language. If discovered doing so, the parents of those children were flogged. If the infraction happened a second time, the tongues of the violators were removed. A third infraction was punishable by death.

  Even so, many defiant elders continued to secretly pass on the language, customs, and traditions of their ancestors.

  The American trusteeship was dissolved after World War II and Ukemby finally became an independent nation. A new constitution was adopted by referendum, and a democratic election was held in 1949, installing the country’s first African prime minister.

  In his first official act upon taking office, Prime Minister Mbeke Kjodle abolished all of the assimilation laws and policies that had been put in place by the Americans, freeing the Ukemban people to openly practice their own customs and traditions. Shrine slavery was one of the traditions that ascended from the darkness back into the light.

  After

  New York City

  Summer 2009

  On the morning of the day she killed him, the sun sat high and white in a sky washed clean of clouds by an early-morning downpour. A faint rainbow hovered just beyond the abandoned PS 186. The damp air hummed with hip-hop music, car horns, and courting dragonflies.

  Wide hips swaying beneath the sweeping, multicolored skirt, flip-flops smacking musically against the wet pavement, Abeo marched down 145th Street with her head held high.

  A gold-and-purple straw purse hung in the crook of her elbow, weighed down with four bottles of homemade hair oils, a magazine, a letter from her aunt Thema, a cell phone, and the rusted screwdriver she carried for protection. In all the years Abeo had been working in and around Harlem, she’d only had to brandish the weapon once, and that was when a drunkard threatened to toss his beer can at her because she had not returned his hello.

  When Abeo reached Lenox Avenue, she turned the corner and joined two other women waiting at the bus stop. Abeo nodded in greeting. One woman mumbled good morning; the other diverted her eyes to her hands, pretending to examine her perfectly polished fingernails. A bus approached, thick with passengers, and Abeo and the other women climbed aboard, inserted their MetroCards into the slot, and pushed their way to the center of the mass.

  Lenox Avenue was already bustling with activity—people traveled the sidewalks, clutching coffee cups from Dunkin’ Donuts, hauling plastic bags crammed with groceries, pushing baby carriages.

  She exited the bus at 127th Street and continued on foot toward her place of employment—the Queens of Africa Braiding Salon, located on the corner of 125th and Lenox.

  She stepped swiftly past the Nigerian, Sudanese, and Guinean hawkers who stood alongside black and sapphire velveteen blankets displaying items for sale: bootlegged CDs, DVDs, East African soaps, oils, incense, and trashy novels.

  As she hurried past them, they called out to her: “Something for you today, mama?” Abeo waved her hand and kept walking. Up ahead she could see the hair shop’s sign—a gaudy gold-and-green monstrosity illuminated with red lights. Standing beneath the sign was Mohammed, an elderly man the color of black sand, with a beard as white as cotton. His back was bent, but his eyes were as effervescent as a newborn. Mohammed sold roasted peanuts from a silver pushcart, and he and Abeo were passing acquaintances. Abeo knew that he was a widower, had three children and eight grandchildren, and that he had been in these United States for half a century, never once returning to his homeland of Ukemby. Mohammed knew that Abeo was married with two children and that she worked as a braider and had not been back to Ukemby since she’d arrived in New York in the winter of 2003. Those were the things they knew about each other and not much else.

  When Abeo spotted him, she raised her ha
nd in greeting, and in that moment she realized with great horror that she knew something else about Mohammed; she knew the man standing beside him. Her heart jumped into her throat and her bladder let go, streaming urine down her legs.

  His name was Duma and she’d known him as intimately as a man of the cloth knew his god—or more appropriately, the way a sinner knows The Evil One.

  Abeo watched frozen as Duma tossed a roasted peanut into the air, tilted his head back, and opened his mouth. The nut bounced off his bottom lip, fell to the ground, and rolled across the pavement toward Abeo. When it bumped the rounded rubber toe of her flip-flop, she uttered a strangled cry and sprung into the air.

  Mohammed gave her a curious look. The smile on his lips faded to a frown when he saw the frightened expression on her face. His eyes swung to Duma and then back to Abeo, just as she started her charge. Teeth bared she barreled toward them with the screwdriver raised high above her head.

  BEFORE

  Port Masi, Ukemby

  1978–1985

  1

  Abeo’s first memory was from a Saturday in 1978. She was two years, eight months, and twenty-three days old the morning she awoke in her parents’ large mahogany bed. The room was shrouded in the gray haze of early morning. Outside, a car engine roared to life, the rusty hinges of a wrought-iron gate squealed open, and a choir of roosters began to crow.

  Abeo rubbed the sleep from her eyes, searched the room for signs of her parents, and in her quest caught sight of her dark face and button nose in the oblong mirror that hung over the chest of drawers.

  Abeo yawned before calling out, “Mama!” over and over until her mother, Ismae Kata, appeared in the doorway.

  “What is all this noise, little one, heh?” Ismae cooed. Abeo grinned and raised her chubby arms.

  Ismae was slight in build, with the fingers of a pianist—long, thin, and elegant. Her cocoa-colored skin was unblemished, and fragrant with gardenia-scented soap. She lifted Abeo from the bed, set her on her hip, and carried her into the dining room where she placed the little girl into a chair directly across the table from her father, Wasik Kata.

  Wasik was reading the Daily Mirror newspaper. Abeo could see his shiny, creased forehead floating above the top of the page.

  “Good morning, Papa!” she sang.

  Wasik lowered the paper to reveal a square chin and a wide, flat nose that barely supported his thick black-framed glasses. He flashed a gap-toothed smile. “Is that little Abeo?”

  She nodded her head vigorously. “Yes, Papa, it’s me!”

  “No, you cannot be Abeo,” he teased. “Abeo is a sleepyhead who never rises this early.”

  “It’s me, Papa, it’s me!”

  Ismae laughed and placed a loving hand on her husband’s shoulder. “Hurry now, you don’t want to be late.”

  The Kata family lived in an affluent section of Port Masi known as the Palm Tree Residential Area. It was a neighborhood comprising expensive homes shaded by the fronds of towering palm trees. They lived in a lovely one-level, mahogany-shingled home with sweeping front and back verandas, tiled floors, and louvered windows. The kitchen was spacious and fitted with all manner of modern conveniences, including a refrigerator that dispensed water from the door and made ice cubes in the freezer.

  Wasik and Ismae were from Prama, a rural village located in the Zolta region of Ukemby. Wasik left Prama as a young man, traveling to Port Masi to live with an older brother who, recognizing the intelligence and potential of his younger sibling, eventually sent him off to England to receive a formal education. After graduating from university, Wasik returned to Ukemby and found employment as an accountant in the government’s treasury department. He and Ismae had played together as children, but had not seen each other since he’d left Prama. The next time he laid eyes on her, he was reading the Daily Mirror and there she was in the newspaper, smiling seductively from the passenger seat of a luxury automobile.

  He called the paper and they connected him with the talent agency of which Ismae was a client. Three days later, they had dinner. Four months after that, he proposed and she agreed to become his wife.

  That was some years ago, and with the arrival of Abeo, Ismae had exchanged her modeling career for that of a primary school teacher. Wasik was concerned that this new domesticated life was too boring and unfulfilling for a woman whose face had graced advertising billboards, fashion magazines, and who was once rumored to be keeping romantic company with an English nobleman.

  Whenever he asked, “Do you miss your other life?” Ismae understood this to mean: Are Abeo and I enough for you? Ismae’s response was always the same—she’d take Wasik’s face tenderly in her hands, press a gentle kiss to his lips, and say: “There is nothing to miss. You and Abeo are the life I’ve always dreamed of having.”

  This would quell Wasik’s insecurities for the moment. Though for the life of their union, Wasik would continue to raise the question.

  They were a privileged family. Wasik drove a silver Mercedes and had his eye on a piece of beachfront property in Tako, where he hoped to build a second home where his family could spend their holidays. Eventually, of course, he and Ismae would retire there, enjoying their golden years by the ocean and spoiling the many grandchildren he imagined they’d have.

  They were practicing Catholics, having converted when missionaries came to their village and warned them that they would be damned to hell if they refused to accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.

  Wasik’s parents had balked at a religion that only recognized one supreme being and ignored the spirits, ancestors, and minor gods who tended to the sun, river, moon, and animal and plant kingdoms—and so would not allow Wasik to discard his traditional religion for a white god with blond hair and blue eyes. Wasik had to wait until he was out from under his parents’ influence before he could convert. Ismae’s parents, however, bought in hook, line, and crucifix.

  2

  The summer Ismae’s sister came to visit, Abeo was an impressionable five-year-old. Serafine Vinga was six years younger than Ismae and possessed the same cocoa-colored complexion and lush hair. But unlike Ismae, Serafine was curvy—bottom- and top-heavy. She favored clothing that accentuated those attributes: miniskirts, low-cut blouses, tight jeans, and high heels. Serafine drank and smoked and had a wantonness about her that made other women—including Ismae—uncomfortable. Her years of living in America had imparted in Serafine a twang that made her sound like a buckruh—a white person.

  She loved music—Ghanaian highlife, Ukemban pop, American R&B, and disco. That year, she came to Ukemby with a black case full of cassettes which she played one after the other, raising the volume on Wasik’s stereo higher and higher until the sound filled all the rooms of the house and could be heard out on the street. During those times, Serafine would grab Abeo by the hands and the two would dance until their limbs ached.

  Abeo was enchanted with her aunt.

  “One day, Abeo,” Serafine tweaked her nose and announced, “I am going to send for you to come and spend a vacation with me in America.”

  “Really?”

  “Uh-huh, and I’ll take you to McDonald’s and Burger King—”

  “What is that?”

  “You don’t know?”

  Abeo shook her head.

  “Well, they’re wonderful restaurants that make delicious hamburgers and milkshakes!”

  Abeo licked her lips.

  Ismae snorted. “That food is garbage. It’s American trash and I won’t have my child eating it.”

  Serafine and Ismae looked at each other and something passed between them sharp enough to cut the air.Finally, Serafine returned her gaze to Abeo. “So, tell me, do you have a boyfriend?”

  Abeo made a face. “Yuck!”

  Serafine laughed. “So you don’t like boys?”

  Abeo shook her head.

  “Don’t worry, one day you will. One day you will love them.”

  * * *

  Months after Serafine
had returned to her life in America, Ismae realized that she was feeling more drained and lethargic than usual. She was severely anemic and the disorder had always played havoc with her menstrual cycle, so she didn’t think anything was wrong—or in this case, right—when two months passed and she still had not seen her period. It was the light-headedness and the nausea that washed over her whenever she smelled cooked meat—that and the unmistakable flutter deep down in the pit of her belly—that finally alerted her.

  Ismae had had so many false alarms in the past that she dared not say anything to Wasik before she was 100 percent sure. When Dr. Jozy confirmed that she was indeed with child, she sat blinking and mute for ten whole minutes.

  That evening, when she shared the news with Wasik, his face lit up like a candle.

  “Are you sure?”

  Nodding, Ismae wrapped her arms protectively around her midsection.

  Wasik pulled her into him, hugging her tightly. “I can’t believe it.” His words were choked with happiness. “After so many years, finally, God has answered our prayers.”

  “I always knew that He had not forsaken us,” Ismae said.

  “All in His time,” Wasik whispered into her neck.

  Agwe was born in the spring—a round brown boy with pink gums and sparkling eyes. Wasik finally had a son; he could not have been more proud. His family was complete.

  Abeo spent most of her free time staring at Agwe. He was the most wondrous thing she had ever seen. “I love him more than crisps,” she chanted joyfully. That said a lot, because crisps were Abeo’s absolute favorite treat.

  3

  It was dinnertime when the call came from a cousin who’d walked four miles from Prama to a pay phone. When Wasik answered, an angry evening wind whipped the palm trees surrounding the house, creating static on the line. “Hello?”

  “This is Djiimy.”

  “Djiimy?” Wasik moved the phone to his other ear. “Djiimy?” he echoed shakily, already sensing the bad news.

  “Your papa has passed away,” Djiimy stated thinly.