Once I sang songs of my own dreams. Famous among the Kru, the Grebo, the Krahn, the Bassa, the Vai, even the Fanti fishermen sang my songs as their narrow canoes broke through the reefs to the ocean. Their voices would rise high above the noise of the tides and the whistles of the dolphins as they cast their nets and the fish would come, tuna and shark and mackerel, distending the nets so that the cod, attracted from the remote depths, would need to jump into the boats to hear the beauty of the music. Their fish dreams would swell the songs and the Fanti would shout, "Ayi, Aye," and turn their boats to shore, where the women had set up the flat stones and wooden frames ready to smoke the fish, and as the smoke drifted upward, the tangled branches of the cottonwoods would gather their piscean souls to join their ancestors, floating in sleep.

While I was a tiny fish like being myself, floating in my mother's womb, I would hear the rhythms of her mahogany mortar crush the cassava into fu-fu. She would sing with the rhythm of the pestle, a song that would turn the tubers into thick paste. I would rock in her rhythm and send my songs up through her body until she could sing notes so high and brilliant that the village would hush. The men would turn from thatching the hut roofs or brewing the palm wine and listen. Green mamba snakes would coil themselves around the branches of the cottonwoods guarding the palaver hut and sway to her music. She would pound faster and faster and sing higher and higher until the monkeys would flee into the thickest parts of the forest and the village dogs would burrow themselves under the huts and the children would dance around and around in circles until they fell to the ground and she, sweat drenching the ground under her into mud, would collapse senseless over the mortar. Her sisters would carry her into her hut to rest and the juju men would gather up the mud and form little clay dolls for childbirth magic.

The midwives would place their ears against my mother's belly to hear me humming. When the humming grew loud enough to be heard across the hut, the midwives decided it was time to break the threads that bound my mother's labia and crack the scar tissue from her circumcision. The midwife most skilled with a knife made a quick cut, but the blood still gushed and my mother still screamed with the agony of the fresh wound. I was silent. I couldn't move.

A bony arm invaded my moist place and hooked a finger around my ankle and dragged me out as my mother's shrieks made bats fly in the daytime. I didn't speak a word until I was nine years old.

A missionary had built a whitewashed church on the ridge above the village and a small two-room whitewashed house next door. He was a red-haired man with brown skin and blue eyes and a pentecostal way of speaking. Every word boomed out of him with force and energy. In the hottest of days, he had a white collar and black shirt and black jacket and pants and thick black shoes. He had a house boy from the village who did his washing in huge enamel pots and we would see black clothing hanging from the line behind his house at all times.

He would preach loud sermons about possession by devils and stare down at me and my mother on our third-row bench. He was fascinated by me. "Jesus wrestled with the devil—Praise the Lord—He wrestled with Beelzebub—that caster of spells—the enemy of the true Christ—the weaver of magic who gathers souls to take with him into his inferno of eternal hellfire. Yes, I'm telling you, Jesus, yes, Jesus, the Son of God himself, would wrestle that old devil until he had him on his knees, begging for mercy, and Jesus would not give Satan mercy, no he wouldn't, Praise the Lord, Blessed Be His Name, because that old Trickster shows no mercy to the Lord's People, but tempts them and even possesses them and casts all sorts of afflictions upon them. Come unto Me, He said, and Ye shall be healed. Come Unto Me—Come Forward—and Ye Shall be Healed and Washed in the Righteousness of the Lord." At this point of the sermon, he would be leaning so far forward that his spit would land on my mother's braids and glisten there like small jewels of salvation, but we never went forward and I never spoke.

He came to visit my mother in our hut. The juju men in the village were very angry. "Why do you provide him with courtesy?" they surrounded my mother. "Why do you serve him tea and give him biscuits?"

My mother would stand very tall and straight and stare at them.

"My son could sing while he was still in my womb. He has not forgotten his songs. This man may help—he may not. But I will not shut the door on him. But you, I know you think my son will never grow to manhood. I see you look at him when the cassava grows poorly or the rains come late. Women know why some boys never return from hunting for the softly-softly in the deep forests."

The juju men would leave, but they would mutter whenever the missionary entered our hut.

I would sit between my mother's feet and play with her brass anklets and listen to the two of them argue about me.

"Let me pull the devil from inside him. Let me pray over him. He will speak and his first words will be, Praise the Lord."

"He is listening. He is gathering in the music of the rice birds in the morning and the small wind in the mangoes at sunset. He will speak when he is ready and he will sing."

"He is possessed. Jesus unstopped the tongues of the dumb. Let me loosen his tongue. Let me save him. Give him to me and he can live in the Lord's house."

"He will never leave me. I drained my heart and liver giving birth to him. He will not leave."

"His father was probably the devil himself. He came to you in the night and tempted you, for women are weak and easily led astray. Did you smell the brimstone and smoke he carries in his hairy back? Did you feel his goatish muscles against your thighs? Did you cry as his metallic hooves scarred you?"

"His father was a Fanti fisherman lost in a typhoon. Forty men never came back and we can still hear their cries when the wind blows from the sea."

"They cry because they were not washed in the blood of the Lamb."

"They cry because they loved life and mourn their unborn children."

Their palaver continued until the day I entered the whitewashed church and saw a large crate, with the word "Hammond" stamped on its side. "Come here, boy, come here and help me with this thing," cried the missionary, a crowbar in his hand, and I added my small-boy strength to his and we were enough to split the wood. Small curls of sawdust flew through the air of the church as we uncovered a polished wooden object. " Do you know what this is? Have you ever seen anything like this? Left to me in a will, it was. A righteous woman, bless her soul, to help convert the heathen—do it with music so the angels can bend their ears closer to this lonely spot—and cover us with their graces—a pump organ. And you know what's so funny, boy, what's the rub of it all? I'm tone deaf—you could be singing the tune to 'The Star-Spangled Banner' or 'Onward Christian Soldiers' and I couldn't tell the difference. Can't play a note—and in this humidity, the wood'll rot before it ever plays a note. See, you press these with your feet and touch these keys—it is a beauty—better than what we had in Ephrata—still, clothing or Bibles or schoolbooks—or tools or a ham radio—all of those would've been a sight more useful. But, here it is...you want to try it? Can't see what's the harm."

So, I put my very dark fingers against the sand-white keys and what I heard was the sounds of the bulbul bird along the Dugbe River and mother elephants calling for their children playing in the Grebo Forest and the waters of the St. John Falls after the rainy season and the bamboos shrieking in the makore trees at the yellow-eyed leopard on the forest floor. The python spoke through me with his narrow tongue, and the palm- nut vulture perched in a spoke of an umbrella tree, and the crocodile rose above Jubo Creek and stretched his spiky mouth and begged me to sing his songs. I played as the missionary ran to the village, shouting my mother's name. I played as my people abandoned the swamp rice and yam fields. The village chief and his wives and the juju men and the people of the village filled the whitewashed church and listened to my song. Three lepers watched their feet grow toes and Kwame Peter's face, so scarred with smallpox pits that his eyes were the only sorrowless things in it, became as smooth as ebony wood. Barren women, tossed aside for younger wives, saw their bellies swell, and my mother sobbed and the missionary danced. "Thank You, Thank You, Jesus, for allowing me to witness Your wondrous ways."

My fame spread throughout the country. The missionary built a larger church with 40 villagers forming a church choir. The village expanded and became a town with a poured-concrete two-story green-painted government office building. The village chief became town mayor and his brother the chief of police and his oldest son the collector of taxes and his daughter the town clerk in charge of all licenses and permits and contracts and other money matters. The state senator built a plantation house on the edges of the town and donated a stained-glass window modeled after one in a famous French cathedral to the missionary's church. I played the organ every Sunday at four services, and even with four services the missionary had needed to hook up a simple loudspeaker system so that those who squatted in the dust outside could hear.

My mother would not leave her thatched hut so I built a small plaster house next door and gave music lessons to the small children. They surrounded me from the moment I stepped outside to fetch my morning water from the well to the time I turned the key of the kerosene lamp at night. I gave my music lessons under the branches of the village cottonwoods, praising the spirits resting inside, softening their sleep with pleasing melodies, as on Sundays I praised Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

The juju men, who made most of their money selling small cures for the many diseases of the village, were furious. They were cunning and waited to see if the magic of my music would cease. But, as I sang, I became stronger. All that I named became part of me, so I, myself, became a cottonwood. Cassava fish swam in my veins and the softly-softly curled up in my heart. The pygmy hippopotamus was my liver and the water buffalo my stomach. My penis was the black python and my fingers formed of mangrove trees. My music was the harmony of this place. It was of this place as I was of this place and it could not live beyond this place. But who knew that very thing except those whose own hearts could harbor a softly-softly? Who could believe?

The cleverest of the juju men went to the state senator. The senator came to town one month a year to check that his overseer and the town mayor were only stealing what was reasonable from his accounts. The senator left his country wife to watch over his 13 country children. Only five were hers. He felt more comfortable with his city wife, a woman who never wore country cloth or braided her hair, a woman who could speak English and French and who had a degree from an American university, as he himself did. His country wife cooked him peanut soup and cassava greens and palm-nut stew and annoyed him with her constant chewing on kola nuts and her hardened bare feet and her rough Bakwe accent. He was sitting on his porch, swatting at the termites hovering near his electric lights, blowing out the smoke from his Cuban cigar to keep them away from his face when the juju men approached him. "Who is that who approaches me without calling out his name?" the senator shouted. "I have five guards with rifles in my compound and seven hungry dogs." "Please, your Excellency, your most honorable self, it is just us, the juju men from the village, who beg most humbly to speak with you on a matter that could only bring you wealth and fame beyond your dreams." The senator was no greedier than other senators of his small country, no more gullible, no more venial; in other words, he was insatiable. "Come forward and tell me of this matter. But, do not waste the time of important men with small things or it will go badly for all of you," he said. The juju men spoke softly in his ears.

I was sleeping in the plaster house next to my mother's and did not hear the juju men enter my bedroom and drop, into my open mouth, the poison they distill from the cassava snake, which numbs the body but leaves the brain wakeful and aware. My mother did not awake when they carried me past her house and past the rice fields and into the elephant grass to the mangrove swamp bordering the sea. The cottonwood trees shook their leaves at us as we passed. Bats flew overhead and crickets trilled from the fields but the village slept. The state senator and the town mayor and his brother and the juju men were circling a small fire burning in the swamp clearing. As the numbness wore off, I felt the liana vines that tied me scrape my ankles and wrists and I felt the fire ants crawl into my ears and my eyes and bite and burrow with stinging pain. The juju men were passing palm wine in a gourd and chanting in a language older than Bakwe and I saw the senator sway and his eyes narrow until he looked like the mongoose that peers from the dead leaves of the forest. I saw the oldest juju man raise a knife made of bone and ivory and I heard the weeping of the elephant over the carcass of her wrinkled lover, slain for tusks and teeth, and I felt the tearing, evil pain as my liver was wrenched from my body, purple with blood, dripping into the mouth of the brother of the mayor, and snot ran from my nose and thin gruel-like bile dribbled from my mouth as my manhood was wrenched from its hiding place and sawed off my body, shredded and stained, stuffed into the mayor's mouth as he gagged it down his gullet and I started to sing, higher and higher my song rose, above the trees, and I could hear the bats bark, "Brother we hear you, have courage" and the leopards cried, "Be brave" and the liana vines holding my wrists loosened and the fire ants trilled, "Hang on" and the juju man pierced my tongue with his little finger with its long, curved nail and grasped my tongue by this hole and ripped it out of my mouth and still I sang as he chewed on my tongue and then he raised his knife for the last time and cracked my ribs and pulled them open, splitting the skin to bare my still-beating heart and the senator squeezed my heart in his filthy hand, as the juju man carved the veins and arteries and sinew that held it to my body and with each cut, I sang a new song, each more glorious and vivid. My songs became the dreams of all who slept and freed the sleepers from their pains. The senator ate my heart while it still beat, sucking at its muscular core, and only when he had swallowed the last blood-filled morsel did they no longer hear my song. "Will I become the ambassador to France?" he asked the juju men. "Will I become the senator?" asked the mayor. "Will I become the mayor?" asked the mayor's brother. "There is no more powerful magic in the world," answered the juju men. And they left my carcass in the mangrove swamp to be discovered by my mother.

The missionary buried my body behind his church and burned the organ as part of the village funeral pyre. My mother planted a cottonwood on the grave. Its roots grabbed my bones and drew them up to sprout as knobby branches and used my hair to weave its kapok nests. My skin became its leathery leaves and my heart was reborn in its pithy core. I grew taller than the church in three months and soon could be seen in neighboring Bong and Nimba counties. The president of the country himself watched as the senator and mayor and mayor's brother and the juju men were hanged from my femur branch for my murder. My mother watched as they were eviscerated and shown their own entrails before their eyes closed in death. And still I grew with the cottonwood and people of the village rested under its branches and would drift into sleep as I sang for them my songs and all the songs of those who had become a part of me, the very strongest magic, and who now lived with me within the heart of the cottonwood.