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Hustling is Not Stealing: Stories of an African Bar Girl
By John Miller Chernoff University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2003 John Miller Chernoff
All right reserved. ISBN: 0226103528
1 NOT BAD AS SUCH : KUMASI : Like a Letter You know, I'm not bad as such. But when I was little, I thought my way was very bad. My mother died when I was three years old, and my father had no other wife. He had children with other women, but my mother was the first wife of my father. I had brothers and sisters, and we all had to leave. We didn't live together. This one lived with the grandmother, and another one lived at the family of my father. You know, my family: they are very many. My mother's side is a big family; my father's is big, too. So all my brothers and sisters who were with my father, they just shared us like that. We didn't go together. So I had to be handed there, there, and there, to the families. And no one could hold me.
Yeah, when my mother died and my father didn't have a wife, they sent the children around, but when my father married again, they came back. We were many children. The time I stayed in our house in Kumasi, we were about eighteen. But four were big girls, and they married, so we were fourteen children in the house. All of us were there in the house. The other children didn't stay with people. No, no, no, no, no! All my father's children stayed with my father.
Only me. I was not a good one, so I had to go around all the family. Only me! I used to go around. First I stayed with my grandmother in our village in Upper Volta. She was my mother's mother. I was there until I was about four or five. Then I went back to my father in Kumasi. I was there for some time, and then I went back to Upper Volta. I was about six when I went to my village again, to my grandmother. I was a small girl.
Then they sent me back to Ghana, and I was staying with my aunts in Kumasi. My father was also working in the cocoa farms, in Brong Ahafo. I stayed with him in the village there. I was always going around. And always: my aunts and uncles. Sometimes I would go to stay with them, and they would do me something, and then I would say that they didn't look after me well, so I would make a palaver to go and ask for myself to find another place.
And they thought, all of them - they
knew!- that I was a bad girl. I could not live in one place for one month: they had to send me back. And I thought it was because I was bad. Yeah, they said I was very bad.
But I didn't know why I was bad. I asked many questions. And anything I saw, when they said, "We don't do this," I wanted to do it and see what would happen. And all this was trouble for the families. So they had to send me like a letter. They would just post me: there and there and there. Yeah, this is how they were.
It was only one good family I found in my family - my aunt. She was very good. She didn't mind anything. She was in Kumasi, at Fanti Newtown. That was the last place which I got to grow up.
My family was not all in Kumasi. They were in different places. I stayed in a village near Kumasi with my father's brother, with his wife. I stayed there for one month. They sent me home at twelve o'clock in the night! This woman had no baby, and every time she liked to beat me. She wanted to force me to do things I didn't want, and one night she forced me to do something, and I said I wouldn't do it. Then she started to beat me. And I said, "Yeah. God knows. That's why you don't have babies."
Yes!
Hey! She was very annoyed that night! She told my father's brother, "If you don't send this girl away, I must go away." So he could not let his wife go away like that because of me: they must send me to my father, in the night.
I had to stand on the car road in the village. I was crying, and she started abusing me that I was the last one my mother gave birth to before she died - and because I was bad luck, that was why my mother died and left me-because I am a witch, and I am a bad-luck girl-and that and this-I killed my mother.
Ha! I was about nine years old. And so when they sent me, we had to stand there up to one o'clock or two o'clock in the night before we got a taxi. Before we reached Kumasi, it was about two or three o'clock in the night.
It was my father's brother who sent me to my father, and he knocked the door. My father was sleeping. "Who?" he said.
"It's me."
"Yes?"
"I'm bringing Hawa."
"Who!? You don't call your name; you say you are bringing Hawa."
"It's me, Adamu."
Then my father opened the door. "What do you want in this night?"
"No, no, no, no! We can't help it! Hawa had some bad talks against my wife, and my wife is packing her things." Then: "You know, we are together for a long time; she shouldn't pack her things in this night time because of Hawa. So I must bring Hawa."
Then my father said, "OK. Thank you. You are a nice guy. I thought you are of the same father with me, and a different mother. But if you choose your own, it's OK. For me, I'm all right. I cannot kill her. I have already borne her. I cannot kill her: she's not a chicken. If she's good, or she's bad: I like my thing." And so my father said OK.
Then this man wanted to sleep. My father said, "No, no, no, no, no. How she cannot sleep with you because your wife is going to pack away, I think if you sleep here, too, before you go home, maybe your wife will go away. So, bye-bye. See you!!"
Still, up to now, this man doesn't talk to my father because of this case. They had the same father but not the same mother. Since I was nine years old, up to now, they are alive, but they don't talk to each other.
Then I went to live with another aunt, and it was very funny. I lived with her for three weeks, then she sacked me. She sacked me like a thief!
Ha-ha. She had plenty of children, OK? But every time she used to beat
fufu by herself. She didn't want somebody to turn it for her; she didn't want somebody to pound it for her either. The fufu she will eat, she will beat it by herself. As for the rest, your own, you people can make it for yourselves. She would say, "Maybe you will sweat and your sweat will go inside." Or "Your hands are too dirty to turn it for me." So what she will eat, nobody will do it for her.
This woman was a very
old woman. Every time when she beat her fufu and finished, she would relax for some time. Then I wouldn't say anything. I would put all her food for her in the room. When we beat our own and finished, then we would also put it in the room. So after resting, then she would wake up 2 before she would come to the kitchen to put the soup on the fufu.
And all this used to make me annoyed. You think you are neat. OK, we are going to see who is going to eat this one. So from there, before she would wake up to go and put the soup, I would change her own fufu to our plate, and I would put our own on her plate.
Ha-ha.
So I think she had some sense, you know. About one week, when she beat the fufu, when I wanted to put it all inside the room, then she said, "Oh. Leave my own here." Then I left hers; I took our own inside. Then one day we took the same type of plate - the same color, the same size. She put her own inside one, then she put our own in the other one. Then she took her hand and rolled it on the fufu to press it down - down, down, down-with small marks on top of the fufu, because the plates were the same color. Then she told me to pack them 3 inside the room, and I packed them inside. Then I went and took a little of our fufu and put in the holes, and then I changed it to give her. I didn't know that she didn't put cassava in her own but she had put cassava in ours. This was the way she was going to catch me, no? So, when she put her hand and started eating, then she felt that this one is cassava, and she called us to bring our plate. So I took it there.
Every time she used to make two balls of fufu, big ones, for the children. And every time, when we put the soup, I know the one from her. I will start with that one, and we will eat that first and finish before we are all going to start on the next one. So the time she called us, her own was already finished. Then she said, "Let me see." Then we brought it; we brought only one ball of fufu, the second. Then she said, "Where's the first?"
We said, "We have eaten it."
Then she said, "
He-ey! You people eat like dogs."
So she just cut a little bit and tasted it, and it was the same like what she was eating. Then she said, "Oh." Then we went out. She didn't say anything. She didn't ask me anything, either.
Then the next day, I thought in my mind that, hey, this woman is going to get my way and catch me, so I must stop for two or three days. So from that time, I didn't do it. Every day like that, I didn't do it. Then, one day I did it again. She didn't find out. The second day I did it again. The third day, she found out.
When she said we should bring our food for her to see, I said, "But why?! If you don't want us to eat, why are you calling us to bring the food to you again? I don't like this kind of living. If you don't want us to eat, don't give us! Every time we are eating, and then you have to get us up from the food to bring it for you to look at it. You know, if you are eating and you wake up and leave the food, then when you come back to eat it, you won't feel it again. In my father's place, they don't do that. Why?! Because-because you think you are neat past everybody. You are eating this fufu every day. You didn't die, no? Every time, I used to change your food, too, and we eat it. You eat what we pound, but you don't die. If you were going to die, you would have already died a long time."
Haa-hee! Then she said, "Go! Go! Go! Go to your father! Fucking girl! Fucking girl! That's why you cannot - to - to - to live with people. You don't respect. Go! Go! Go! Go! Go!"
Then I went out like that, you know. I didn't even take my things. I just went out, because from that place to my father's place was not far. I said, "OK. I will go to my father's house."
And you know, every time when I would do something like this, and they would sack me and I would come home, I used to be serious. Then my father would say, "Hey, Hawa, are you dead?"
"I don't want to talk. Nobody should talk to me. I don't want to talk today."
And my sisters, you know, and my brothers, when they saw me like this, they used to shout, "Eh! Hawa?"
Then I would say, "
Tsk! I don't want that! Today I am serious." Then I would say, "
Tsk, tsk. How they say that if your mother dies and leaves you, you will suffer, it's true. If suppose my mother was there, will I suffer like this?"
Then my father would say, "Who is talking there? Is it Mama?" You know, my grandmother's name was Hawa, so my father used to call me like that.
Then I said, "Yes. It's me."
"What is wrong? Did your auntie say something bad?"
Then I said, "Eh-h. If my mother didn't die, do you think every fucking old woman that you say she is your sister, then I'll go and live with her? A fucking old woman!? I wanted to pound fufu for her, and she said, 'No!' She has to pound it by herself. If somebody is passing and sees this, it's a disgrace for us who are living with her. They will say that we don't know how to do anything. Our grandmother is old like that, and we let her to be pounding fufu. It's not good. I tried to change her food, and then she too, she wanted to bluff. She just sacked me like a chicken! 'Go, go, go, go to your father!'"
Then my father said, "Don't mind her. So where are your things?"
I said, "I didn't take anything. I dash them to her. Let her keep them."
Ha!
Then my father said, "Mama, I don't believe these words. You did something bad."
"I didn't do anything bad! Because every time she thinks she's very neat. And then, me, I used to change her food, that's all that I did. But I didn't do anything bad."
Hee-hee-hee. Continues...
Excerpted from Hustling is Not Stealing: Stories of an African Bar Girl by John Miller Chernoff Copyright © 2003 by John Miller Chernoff. Excerpted by permission.
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