Anansi's sons

At a Glance

• Central figures: Kwaku Anansi the spider; his six sons - See Trouble, Road Builder, River Drinker, Game Skinner, Stone Thrower, and Cushion - each named for his single extraordinary gift.
• Setting: Akan tradition (modern Ghana / Côte d’Ivoire); Anansi cycle, preserved in oral form and widely known across the African diaspora.
• The turn: Anansi falls into danger far from home, swallowed whole by a great fish in a distant river, and each of his six sons must use his one gift in sequence to bring him back alive.
• The outcome: Anansi is rescued through the chain of his sons’ abilities, but when he tries to reward the son most responsible, he cannot choose among them - the argument has no end.
• The legacy: Anansi takes the problem to Nyame, the sky god, who places the reward where no single son can claim it - up in the sky as the moon, which is why the moon belongs to no one and shines on everyone.

Anansi had six sons. Each one could do exactly one thing, and each one was named after the thing he could do. That was the way Anansi’s household worked. Nobody was good at everything. Nobody was good at two things. But each son, in his one skill, was beyond any person walking the earth.

The first son could see trouble before it arrived. Not just nearby trouble - trouble anywhere. If a man was drowning three rivers away, this son would sit up and say, Father is in danger. So Anansi called him See Trouble. The second son could build a road through anything - forest, mountain, swamp - and he could do it fast, faster than a person could walk the road he was building. Road Builder. The third could drink an entire river dry. River Drinker. The fourth could skin any game animal, no matter how large, in a single motion. Game Skinner. The fifth could throw a stone so far and so hard it could crack open anything it struck. Stone Thrower. The sixth was soft. His whole body was like a cushion, and anything that fell on him would land gently and take no harm. Cushion.

Six sons. Six gifts. Anansi was proud of all of them and did not think much about it until the day he went traveling and did not come home.

The Fish and the Falcon

Anansi went on a journey. He went far, past the villages he knew, past the markets, past the places where the traders stopped. He was looking for something - a story, a deal, a trick worth bringing home. Anansi was always looking.

He crossed a wide river on a log, and a great fish rose from the water and swallowed him whole. The fish sank to the bottom of the river, and Anansi was inside its belly in the dark.

Back home, See Trouble sat up straight.

Father is in danger. Something has swallowed him. He is inside a fish at the bottom of a river, far away.

The five other brothers gathered around him. See Trouble could see the problem but could not solve it. That was not his gift. Road Builder said, Show me where, and See Trouble pointed. Road Builder got down on the ground and began to build. The road stretched out from their compound, through the forest, over the hills, straight to the river where the fish lay on the muddy bottom. A road that would have taken days to walk was finished before the sun moved a hand’s width across the sky.

The six sons ran along the road.

The River Laid Bare

They reached the river. It was wide and brown and the fish was somewhere deep in it, and they could not see the bottom.

River Drinker knelt at the bank. He drank. He drank and drank and the waterline dropped. Fish flopped in the shallows. River Drinker kept going. He drank the river down to its muddy bed, and there, in the last pool of water, the great fish lay gasping with Anansi still inside it.

But the fish was enormous. Its scales were like shields and its mouth was clamped shut. Stone Thrower picked up a boulder - not a stone, a boulder, the kind that takes four men to roll - and hurled it. It struck the fish and the fish cracked open like a clay pot.

Anansi tumbled out, wet, alive, furious, covered in fish slime.

But the moment the fish split, a falcon dropped from the sky. The falcon was fast. It snatched Anansi in its talons and beat its wings upward, carrying the spider into the air. Anansi screamed. The sons watched their father shrink against the clouds.

Falling

Stone Thrower threw again. The stone caught the falcon in the wing. The bird tumbled. Anansi fell.

He fell from a terrible height, spinning, arms and legs spread, and the ground below was hard-packed earth and rock. He would have died on impact.

Cushion threw himself flat on the ground directly beneath the falling spider. Anansi hit his son’s body and bounced once, gently, and rolled off onto the grass. He lay there breathing. He was not hurt. Not a bone broken, not a scratch.

The six sons stood around their father. See Trouble had seen the danger. Road Builder had built the path. River Drinker had emptied the river. Stone Thrower had broken the fish and knocked down the falcon. Game Skinner - well, Game Skinner had skinned the great fish while the others were watching the falcon, because that was his gift and a fish that size should not go to waste. And Cushion had caught their father when he fell.

Anansi sat up and looked at his sons and for once in his life was quiet.

The Argument That Had No End

The problem came after. Anansi had found, on his journey, a bright and beautiful thing - a globe of white light, perfect, cool to the touch. He had been carrying it in his bag when the fish swallowed him, and it had survived the whole ordeal. He wanted to give it to the son who had done the most to save him.

But which son? See Trouble saw the danger first - without him, nobody would have known. Road Builder made the rescue possible - without the road, they could never have arrived in time. River Drinker exposed the fish. Stone Thrower broke it open and shot down the falcon. Cushion saved Anansi from the fall. Even Game Skinner had done his part, though nobody asked him to.

Anansi tried to choose. He could not. Every time he pointed to one son, the logic bent back toward another. The argument went around and around the compound. The sons did not fight - they were not angry sons - but each one quietly believed his gift had been the crucial one, and none of them was wrong.

Nyame’s Answer

Anansi took the bright globe to Nyame, the sky god.

I cannot decide which of my sons earned this, Anansi said. Every one of them saved me. I cannot split it and I cannot give it whole to any one of them.

Nyame held the globe of light in his hand. He looked at it, looked at Anansi, looked down at the six sons waiting below.

Then I will keep it for all of them, Nyame said.

He set the globe in the sky. It hung there, white and round and far above anyone’s reach. No single son could climb up and take it. No single son could say it was his.

It is still there. Every night it rises. The moon belongs to no one son of Anansi’s, so it belongs to everyone. The six brothers can all look up and see it shining, and none of them can say the others did not earn it too.

That is how the moon got into the sky. Anansi could not choose, Nyame would not choose, and the light went where light goes - up, out of reach, where it does the most good.