taken one of their own.
Ngoni flipped through a loose stack of pictures of home I didn’t know he’d stowed in his carry-on, and I was eager to see, too. I leaned closer and looked first at a picture of a house made of red bricks painted white. Then one of large grassy grounds that I would call a lawn, but when he pointed at it, he said, “I miss that garden.” There was a banana tree ripe with fruit, a bed of pink and yellow and maroon flowers circling it, a swimming pool in the background. Next I saw a wide-angle shot of the whole grounds and noticed two small buildings near the main house and tall corn plants growing in a plot behind, a cement-colored wall surrounding the property.
As the plane got closer to the ground, I shifted my focus to where I was going and gazed out the window at a patchwork of fields and farmland cut into squares and rectangles and trapezoids. It wasn’t as tidy as those in the Midwest I’d flown over, but each plot seemed monstrous from here, bigger than any land I could imagine. There were clusters of trees in some spots and brown lines long across the land marking roads. It was all so flat and extended out so far.
When we landed and were allowed to stand and pull our bags onto our backs, my legs felt weak underneath me. Like they might not know how to carry me through the exit tunnel and into the airport. A wave of exhaustion and fear of everything I did not know almost took me under, but I clapped my eyes on Ngoni’s back and followed, and once through I saw high glass walls and a sharp dark carpet on the floor and tourist booths advertising adventure trips. The customs lines were separate, and Ngoni with his Zimbabwean passport went one way while I went the other. I was supposed to be ready for this but still worried that one of us wouldn’t come out the other end. I counted and recounted the cash in my wallet, certain I would be wrong about the expectations and not have the exact change I’d heard was required for the entry visa. But the customs agent was polite and didn’t stumble on the contradiction of my Shona surname and white skin, and when he stamped my book and told me to enjoy my stay in Zimbabwe, I walked out and there was Ngoni, waiting.
“We have nothing to declare,” he said as we passed through a wide, open door with our luggage piled onto a cart, and I thought of the different ways to interpret that phrase. Ngoni just meant we weren’t carrying anything valuable, but I wanted him to mean that I didn’t need to explain my presence in this country. I wanted him to mean I would fit here.
On the other side of the doorway was a woman in a business suit who knew Ngoni. I watched him greet her as though they saw each other every day. I waited to be introduced, but instead he just stopped talking for a moment and in the empty space she said, “Hello, Julia.”
“Hi,” I said, confused. Who was this? No one was offering hands to shake, so I took a moment to watch, to see if I could figure this out on my own. This woman who knew my name wore her hair in long, neat braids pulled back into a bun. Her skin was darker than Ngoni’s, and she had high cheekbones and sparkling, almond-shaped eyes. Her laugh was loud and inviting, and I wanted so much to know her, to know who she was. But we hadn’t been introduced, and I didn’t know enough about Shona culture yet to understand the reason for that. I just assumed that if she knew me, I should know her. So when they walked toward the large open doorway and the bustle beyond, I grabbed the handle of my suitcase and followed. Outside, I was surprised by the bright sun and how fast I had to walk to keep up, searching in my handbag for sunglasses I knew were packed in my suitcase. My winter skin was tight in the heat.
When we got to a car and the woman climbed into the driver’s seat and Ngoni into the passenger’s, I realized this must be his aunt. She was just a couple of years older than we were, but her confidence and her connection with my husband intimidated me. As we drove out of the parking lot, they spoke to each other in Shona, and I tried to push aside the worry that this was how it would feel here. Tried to push aside that familiar fear of being left alone. I felt around in the backseat of the dusty old sedan for a seatbelt, and when I couldn’t find one I looked up front to see Ngoni wasn’t wearing one either. Decided to stop looking. The windows were down and the hot air pushed into my face and blew my hair back, and soon we were driving fast enough that I couldn’t hear the sounds from the front seat, so I distracted myself with what was out the window, this landscape like nothing I knew.
Ngoni had told me what to expect. He’d warned me about American stereotypes of thatched-roof huts, pervasive poverty, AIDS everywhere. He’d told me instead about swimming pools and large houses on large grounds, about beautiful suburban streets lined with jacaranda trees and a modern city center. He wanted to help me shake out the images of Africa I’d grown up hearing, but the result was a different kind of surprise. When we left the multiple-lane highway that led away from the airport and entered the outskirts of the city, I saw townships lining the street, wooden slabs of wall hitched together, canvas roofs, house after house after house lined up and falling down. Crowds of people walking along the sides of the road, their feet bare even when they wore business suits.
The road from the airport took us straight through downtown, and I gazed up at tall buildings and into shopping centers curled around parking lots filled with people. Soon we passed rows of white clapboard apartment buildings lined along side streets, then into suburban neighborhoods with houses I couldn’t see because they sat behind cement-colored walls like those in the photos, wide gates at each driveway. Now there were fewer pedestrians, fewer cars, and I thought it looked like a dusty Santa Barbara without the mountains or the sea. Though the jacaranda trees lining the roads weren’t in bloom, I could imagine their lacy lavender petals shading our drive if they were. And there were all kinds of other flowers exploding out of their leaves and lining the streets despite the dry heat, light yellow blossoms that looked like cowbells and bright red bursts that sat on bushes otherwise plain. It looked tropical and felt like a desert, the abundance of color tamped down by the dust tracks on the road.
I knew we’d arrived at the house on Marlborough Drive when we turned off a quiet, winding road and idled before a large black metal gate. Ngoni’s aunt tooted the horn and I looked at my husband’s face for signs that he was home, that I would finally see him in his place. But he wasn’t smiling. He was waiting.
Soon there was a loud rumble and clatter and the metal wall in front of us began to move, though I couldn’t see by whose hands. As the gate yawned open, it revealed the wide lawn I recognized from the pictures, the banana tree and the flowers, and a metal cage exactly the size of a sedan in the middle of the driveway. It looked like a birdcage, and it took me a moment to realize that the need to protect a car from the elements is a luxury, but protecting it from thieves, a necessity.
As I climbed out of the backseat of the car, I thought that the house seemed smaller than it had in the photos. The swimming pool was empty and cracked and filled with dust from disuse. I tried not to look at it for too long, tried not to reveal my disappointment or ask if we could get it fixed before we left. It was so hot here, and a pool would give me a place to be if I started to feel unsteady. Water has always connected me back to myself. Instead I turned back to the gate to see who’d let us in, and there was a tall man, skinny in his jeans and sweatshirt. Ngoni’s uncle Dakarai.
I wanted to introduce myself, thank him for letting us in, but he was making himself busy relocking the gate. He stayed apart from the group and looked down at the plants that lined the driveway as though the red and green leaves might hold a message. His hand reached up to his mouth and I thought I saw his lips moving behind it.
When I turned back toward the house, there was Gogo walking with her arms outstretched. She sang to herself, unable to contain her excitement. She was bold and glittering in a pink-and-gold-patterned dress and matching headscarf, bracelets tinkling on her arms, skin shining, lips pursed in ululation. She walked past her grandson as though he wasn’t standing there and grabbed me up into herself. Rocked me back and forth, back and forth, in the same welcoming dance she’d led me in at JFK the day we met. She said into my ear in her deep soothing voice, “Julia! Julia! You are finally here,” and this was a welcome so big and bright I didn’t know how to respond. I surrendered
