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probably expecting right now as we speak.”
    Effia shuddered. “But his stomach is so big!” she said, and Adwoa laughed until she choked on the groundnuts she was eating.
    “Eh, but the stomach is not the part you use to make the baby,” she said. “I will give you some roots from the woods. You put them under the bed when you lie with him. Tonight, you must be like an animal when he comes into the room. A lioness. She mates with her lion and he thinks the moment is about him when it is really about her,
her
children,
her
posterity. Her trick is to make him think that he is king of the bush, but what does a king matter? Really, she is king and queen and everything in between. Tonight, we will make you live up to your title, Beauty.”
    And so Adwoa came back with roots. They were no ordinary roots. They were large and swirled, and when you pulled back one strand, another would appear to take its place. Effia put them under the bed and they only seemed to multiply, spilling leg after leg out until it seemed the root would pick the bed up on its back and walk away, a strange new spider.
    “Your husband should not be able to see any of it,” Adwoa said, and they worked to push back the strands of root that insisted on peeking out, pushing and pulling until finally it was contained.
    Then Adwoa helped Effia prepare for James. She plaited and smoothed her hair and spread oil on her skin, and red clay on the apples of her cheeks and the curve of her lips. Effia made sure that when James came in that night the room smelled earthy and lush, like something there could bear fruit.
    “What’s all this?” James asked. He was still in his uniform, and Effia could tell that he’d had a long day by the way his lapel drooped. She helped him pull off his coat and shirt and she pressed her body against his, as Adwoa had taught her. Before he could register his surprise, she grabbed his arms and pushed him to the bed. Not since their first night together had he been this timid, afraid of her unfamiliar body, the full-figured flesh, so different from how he had described his wife. Excited now, he pushed into her, and she squeezed her eyes as tightly as she could, her tongue circling her lips. He pushed harder, his breathing heavy and labored. She scratched his back, and he cried out. She bit his ear and pulled his hair. He pushed against her as though he were trying to move through her. And when she opened her eyes to look at him, she saw something like pain written across his face and the ugliness of the act, the sweat and blood and wetness they produced, became illuminated, and she knew that if she was an animal tonight, then he was too.
    Once they had finished, Effia lay with her head on James’s shoulder.
    “What is that?” James asked, turning his head. They had moved the bed so that now three strands of the root were exposed.
    “Nothing,” Effia said.
    James jumped up and peered underneath the bed. “What is it, Effia?” he asked again, his voice more forceful than she had ever heard it before.
    “It’s nothing. A root that Adwoa gave me. For fertility.”
    His lips formed a thin line. “Now, Effia, I don’t want any voodoo or black magic in this place. My men can’t hear that I let my wench place strange roots under the bed. It’s not Christian.”
    Effia had heard him say this before. Christian. That was why they had been married in the chapel by the stern man in black who shook his head every time he looked at her. He’d spoken before, too, of the “voodoo” he thought all Africans participated in. She could not tell him the fables of Anansi the spider or stories that the old people from her village used to tell her without his growing wary. Since moving to the Castle, she’d discovered that only the white men talked of “black magic.” As though magic had a color. Effia had seen a traveling witch who carried a snake around her neck and shoulders. This woman had had a son. She’d sung lullabies to him at