Ch. 4: The Doll Who Would Not Answer

The mmoatia are the little people of the forest. They are no taller than a child's knee. Their feet point backwards, so that if you try to follow their tracks you will walk away from them instead of towards them. They speak in whistles, and they are quick, so quick that most people who say they have seen one have only seen a flicker at the edge of their eye, and a bush still swaying where no wind has been.

The mmoatia do not like to be caught. In all the history of the world, nobody had caught one.

“So,” said Ananse, sitting down heavily on his stool. “Aso. My wife. My clever, beautiful wife. What do I do now?”

And Aso, who had been waiting for this question for three days, put down her pestle and smiled.

“What do the mmoatia like best in all the world?” she asked.

Ananse thought about it. “Mischief?”

“Besides mischief.”

“Eto,” said Ananse suddenly. “Mashed yam with palm oil. Everybody knows it. They creep into farms at night and steal the yam, and in the morning you find little backwards footprints all around the pot.”

“Then,” said Aso, “you are going to make a doll.”

Ananse went into the forest and cut a piece of soft wood, and he sat in the shade for a whole day and carved it. He carved a little figure, about as tall as a child's knee, with a round head and round eyes and two arms held out in front. It was a good doll. Ananse was surprised by how good it was.

Then he went to the tree that the old people call the gum tree, the one that weeps a thick white sap when its bark is cut. He cut the bark and collected the sap in a little pot. He painted the doll all over with it, from its round head to its little wooden feet, until it shone.

Meanwhile Aso was in the kitchen boiling yams. She peeled them and pounded them and mixed them with red palm oil and a little salt, and she made eto, the good mashed yam that the mmoatia love. She put some in a brass basin, and the rest she pressed into the doll's two hands, so that it looked as though the doll was holding out a meal to share.

Last of all, Ananse took a long thread, one of his own, very fine, and tied one end of it around the doll's head.

He carried everything into the forest, to the foot of a great odum tree where everybody said the mmoatia came to play. He set the doll down at the roots, with the basin of eto in front of it. He ran his thread up and over a low branch and back down to a thick bush nearby. And he crawled into the bush, holding the end of the thread, and waited.

He waited a long time. Long enough for the light to turn gold, and then orange, and then grey. Long enough for him to start thinking that perhaps the mmoatia had heard about him, and the python, and the hornets, and the leopard, and had decided to play somewhere else for a year or two.

And then he heard a whistle.

It was a small whistle, high and sweet, and it was answered by another. Out from the roots of the odum tree, where a moment ago there had been nothing at all, came two little people, no taller than a child's knee, with their feet turned backwards. Two sisters, laughing, who nearly tripped over the doll.

They stopped.

They looked at the doll. They looked at the basin of eto. They looked at each other.

The first fairy stepped forward. She was the bolder of the two, you could tell, the way she put her hands on her hips. “Akua,” she said to the doll, for that is a polite name to call a little girl you do not know, “Akua, may I have some of your eto?”

In the bush, Ananse gave his thread the gentlest little tug. And at the foot of the odum tree, the doll's round head nodded. Yes.

“She says yes!” said the fairy, delighted. And she took the basin and ate.

Then she wiped her mouth and stood up and said, very correctly, “Thank you, Akua.”

The doll said nothing.

The fairy‘s sister giggled behind her hand. “She doesn’t think much of you,” she said.

The fairy frowned. “Akua. I have thanked you. When somebody thanks you, you answer them. Didn't your mother teach you anything?”

The doll said nothing at all.

“Slap her,” said the sister, who was not very helpful. “That will teach her manners.”

So the fairy, in a temper, reached out and smacked the doll on the cheek. Not hard. Just a little, the way a cross child does.

And her hand stuck.

She pulled. It did not come away. “Let go!” she cried. “Let go of my hand, or I'll slap you with the other one!” The doll did not let go, because the doll was not holding on; it was the gum that was holding on. So the fairy slapped it with her other hand, and that stuck too.

“Let go!” She pushed against the doll with her stomach to get some leverage, and her stomach stuck. She kicked, and her backwards foot stuck. Now she was hugging the doll from head to toe, held fast as a fly in honey, and shrieking and whistling fit to wake the whole forest.

Her sister was no longer giggling. She was running away round the odum tree as fast as her backwards feet would carry her, which, since they were backwards, meant she ran straight into the bush, straight into Kwaku Ananse, who was coming out of it.

“Good evening,” said Ananse politely, and caught her by the arm. “Your sister seems to be stuck. Shall we help her?”

So it was that Kwaku Ananse climbed his thread for the last time with a load on his back. He carried the little doll with a fairy still stuck to it, and her sister bound gently by the wrist with a thread so fine you could hardly see it, the both of them whistling indignantly the whole way up. And behind him, slowly but surely, came his old mother, Ya Nsia, the sixth child of her mother, who had always wanted to see the sky. She looked around her at the clouds with bright, curious eyes, and when they reached the top she said, “Well. It is bigger than I thought.”

Nyankonpon was waiting. All his elders were waiting with him: the chiefs of the Kontire and the Akwamu, of the Adonten and the Gyaase, the Oyoko and the Ankobea and the Kyidom. The old man with very few teeth was there, sitting right at the front this time.

Nyankonpon rose from his golden stool. The drums began to talk.

“Elders,” he said. “Listen. But Kwaku Ananse, the spider, who is so small, has paid the price. He has brought me Onini, and Osebo, and Mmoboro, and Mmoatia. He has even brought his own mother. He has done what nobody could do.”

The elders nodded. Even the old man with very few teeth nodded.

“Therefore,” said the Sky God, “from today and going forward, my stories belong to Ananse. We shall not call them the stories of the Sky God any longer. We shall call them Anansesem: spider stories.”

And he blessed Ananse, three times, crying “Kose! Kose! Kose!” And the elders cried it with him, and the drums rolled like thunder all across the sky.

Then Nyankonpon opened the great carved box beside his stool, and every story in it came out, all at once, all of them. And Ananse gathered them up in his many arms, more than he could carry, and they spilled down over the edge of the sky like rain, and fell into every village on the earth below.

That night, by every fire in Asante, somebody cleared his throat and said, “We do not really mean, we do not really mean, that what we are going to say is true.” And everybody leaned in to listen.

That is why, to this day, the stories are called Anansesem. And that is why, in so many of them, you will find a small, clever, greedy spider somewhere near the middle of things, talking very fast.

This is my story, which I have told. If it be sweet, or if it be not sweet, take some elsewhere, and let some come back to me.