Many Sons

The women of the village had been preparing fufu, groundnut soup, roasted corn, and yams for a week and a half. The revival was coming. The biggest tent revival to hit the Ashanti Region since 1962, the year Abraham Osei was born blessed to Old Lady Mensah who, now at 91, was the oldest lady in the village.

Abraham’s mother was one of the few villagers who remembered the last revival well enough to tell the stories. Abraham had grown up with these memories. She told him how the Christians had flooded into Kumasi from Tepa and Mampong and even from the other Regions. There had been many preachers arriving from the United States, but everyone was there to see William York, the young Pentecostal minister who had baptized men in both water and Spirit. In the years preceding the last revival, all three of Old Lady’s children had died. Mefia during childbirth, Nana Kojo in a car accident. Papa Kwesi had lived the longest, but he too had died, swallowed by the hungry ocean during a trip to Cape Coast. Old Lady was six months pregnant with Abraham when she made the trip. She had sewn 200 cedis into the skirt of her outfit so she would not forget to make an offering. She was determined to meet Pastor York and have him pray for the spirit she carried in her womb.

Abraham had heard these things throughout childhood and into middle age. He’d heard how Pastor York had placed one hand on Old Lady’s swollen belly and the other hand on her sweating forehead. He’d heard how the man had prayed so loudly the white tents shook and shivered with the power of the Holy Spirit. Old Lady had been blessed, and it was into this blessing that Abraham was born. And at fifty, he still had not died, and so God’s people could see that he walked in that blessing to this day.

“Ey, chale, are you ready for the revival?” Fifi asked Abraham as he came up the road, dragging the lifeless body of a goat behind him. “I see we will be eating well-oh!”

Abraham nodded wordlessly and pushed past his cousin. Fifi had come up from Cape Coast two days before to help the local ministers prepare for their guests. In Cape Coast, Fifi was known as a hot shot Fanti preacher, but Abraham knew him best as the man who at fifteen years old had once drunk so much akpeteshie that his acid vomit had burned a hole in Old Lady’s rug.

“Don’t worry, my brother,” Fifi said, picking up the hind legs of the goat to help Abraham bring it into the compound. “We will pray for you again.”

They dropped the meat off to the women who were laboring over sweaty black cauldrons, conjuring up food for those whose bodies would be as hungry as their spirits.

“I can skin it for you,” Abraham offered, but the women clucked their tongues in skepticism. It was well known that Old Lady had prepared all of Abraham’s meals since the day he first took milk from her breasts. He had never so much as lifted a stick to pound fufu. Fifi threw his head back and laughed, sat down next to his stomach-swollen wife and began skinning the meat, first pulling the tufts of black and white fur from around the nearly severed neck and then moving down the animal’s body with careful technique inherited from his people and his people’s people—the Fanti, the Akan.

Abraham continued into his house and turned on the floor fan. The dust from the hard clay ground billowed around his body. His mother would be back soon from the market where she sold knickknacks to white tourists and Ghanaians alike. He hated that his mother still worked, but he could not convince her to stay home and let him take care of her. Abraham had been teaching history at an all-girls day school in Kumasi for nearly twenty-five years. The money was good...