usual but he was serious. The gravity of the situation was clear to him. ‘You better come, you’ll just make it worse if you don’t.’
Terrence took my hand and led me to the front. We stood, facing Tawona, who was a bloody mess by now. Someone handed her the tooth I had punched out of her mouth. It was dirty and very small and looking at it set her to wailing once more and it made my lip quiver too. I hadn’t meant to knock her tooth out. I was scared; terrified, really. Mama Tawona would have my head.
By the time we reached the top step, Mama Tawona was waiting. Tawona’s little brother had run up to tell his mother that his big sister had been beaten and that I was the culprit. She stood there with murder in her eyes. I didn’t wait for her to start shouting. I couldn’t. I committed an even worse sin: I bolted. I broke the cardinal rule of all African households and ran from an adult who was trying to discipline me. I pushed past her and ran down the hallway and into our house. I was desperate for Baba to be home.
He was. He was sitting at the dining room table with his books on the table and a few beetles spread out in front of him. Mummy hated it when he labelled his specimens on the table and under normal circumstances I would have told him this but this was an emergency and so I rushed forward and crawled into his lap, which I was getting too big to do, and I started to cry. In the chaos of those few moments he thought I was hurt and so he looked for the cut, searching my body for the place where the skin was broken.
‘Are you hurt?’ he asked, confused.
‘No,’ I cried. ‘No. But, but Tawona said you won’t love me because I’m a girl.’ The words were a jumbled tumble – a snotty rush. ‘She said that, that you only want boys and that we don’t belong here in Zambia, we are foreigners and we should go back where we came from, and then she said we don’t even belong to you, that only boys belong to fathers, girls are a curse.’
I wailed. Ruptured.
He said nothing and this calmed me because, as every child knows, silence is always the beginning of listening.
Baba bent into my hurt and pulled me close. His insides thumped a sonata, his heart thudding dully against my chest: ‘You are mine, you are mine, you are mine.’ Tawona’s words lost a bit of their edge. My own little heart thumped back: ‘I am yours, I am yours, I am yours.’
That night, after she came home from work and heard the story, Mummy made me apologise to Tawona. We went to her house together and knocked on the door. Mama Tawona peered out imperiously.
‘So you have come to say what?’ she said abruptly. Mummy didn’t let her continue. She was curt.
‘We have come to apologise,’ she said. ‘Sonke should not have hit Tawona.’
Mama Tawona began to interrupt her. ‘You think that just saying sorry will be enough—’
But Mummy cut her off. She was not finished.
‘But understand this: your bitterness needs to find another home. It is not welcome in mine. And if it doesn’t, if you insist on this nonsense, then you will see. You will see me and you will know me. That same curse you think has been put on me will be on you. You will be cursed in ways your people do not even understand. Do you know the Swazis? The Zulu people? If you want to see powers, you will see them.’
Mama Tawona’s hands had stayed on her hips in defiance as Mummy spoke, but her face was frozen. Mummy gave her a hard and thorough look and then asked, ‘Do you understand me?’
Mama Tawona remained silent. Ashamed.
‘Heh?’ Mummy repeated, sounding rougher than I had known she could be. ‘Do you understand me?’
Mama Tawona nodded. Then she looked down. She was not the type of woman who admitted she was wrong. That would have required the kind of introspection that women like Mama Tawona studiously avoided. Observing the rules of respectability, and policing the gates, requires a kind of hard-nosed vigilance that precludes sensitivity and thoughtfulness. My mother knew this so it is unlikely that she expected an apology.
But I was still young and so I did expect it. I thought we would wait for her to say, ‘I’m sorry too.’ It was obvious that both Tawona and her mother owed me an apology. That would not come. Mama Tawona shrank in the face of Mummy’s anger, but she was not convinced she was wrong; she had just been caught.
Mummy took my hand and we walked away. We entered our flat and I imagined Mama Tawona still standing at the door – rooted and, for once, speechless.
Baba put us to bed as usual. He told us a story about a girl who found a rock that turned into a star that shot across the sky and I was very tired but I knew that he intended me to know that I was that girl and also that rock that turned into a star and maybe also that sky. He wanted me to know that I belonged in his heart and in his imagination and that I was the centre of the universe.
-
S.E.X.
MY EARLIEST MEMORY of sex is bound up in pleasure and voyeurism. I was only six when I stumbled upon a man and a woman in flagrante, but I was old enough to know that she was having far too much fun. I knew this because I could hear it in the way she chuckled, which I knew she was not supposed to do because what she was doing was something only men were allowed to like. I knew it even though I wouldn’t have been able to tell you why. There was something off limits about the way men turned their heads whenever a plump-bummed woman passed them by. Women were supposed to pretend they hadn’t noticed, and other men were supposed to look as well.
I was very young when I realised men were supposed to like things to do with women’s bodies and women had to guard themselves against the things men liked. They had to not smile and pretend they didn’t notice. Men were fools over sex and women were silly about love.
The women around me must have talked about men and sex and pleasure but those discussions were never fit for children’s ears so I didn’t get to hear them in any detail. I heard only the talk about love and romance. I saw the looks exchanged, and sensed what it was they weren’t saying, but I never heard them talk about sex.
The men were different. They talked about everything in front of us: white settlers and ditched lovers and fallen women they had picked up. Often, they had drunk too much. They leered and laughed and didn’t mind their manners unless they were told by the women that there were children around and they should shush.
◆ ◆ ◆
My sisters and I spent a lot of time at Aunt Tutu’s house. Aunt Tutu was one of Mummy’s best friends. She had married a Zambian man, Uncle Ted, and they had three kids, the same ages as my sisters and me. We were a crew, a less raucous group than the Burley Court group, but only because we were fewer in number.
At seven, Masuzyo (Suzie) was a rotund dispenser of wisdom, a slit-eyed know-it-all whose spectacles made her seem far older than her meagre years. Wongani was five, only a year younger than me but she, too, seemed far older: she was her mother’s child. Tapelwa was only four, an age so inconsequential that he was relegated to shuffling around on his own, not small enough to be with the babies and not old enough to be with us big girls.
Mandla and Zeng were always toddling around in the background, oblivious to the ways in which they were being excluded, while Wongani, Suzie and I spent most of our time discussing the latest news, gossiping and arguing about episodes of
