simple, everyday clothes, like Gogo requested—white, her favorite color.
My neighbor MaDudu walks alongside us and clucks her tongue. “Didn’t you and Zi buy new clothes for your grandmother’s funeral?”
“We didn’t have the money,” I explain. “Anyway, Gogo chose these dresses for us to wear to her funeral. They were her favorites. She said she lived an ordinary life and she wanted her real life honored in that way.”
I remember her smile as she told me, “You arrive Mr. Big Shot but leave Mr. Nobody. I don’t need an expensive funeral, eh, Khosi?”
“Shame,” MaDudu says, agreeing with my decision, and nods her chin at Auntie Phumzile. “But that one, she will say you aren’t showing proper respect.”
Of course MaDudu is right. Auntie will say these things, but she will be wrong. This is how I offer respect to Gogo—by following her wishes. And by keeping my promises to her, even though, only seventy-two hours after her death, it seems impossible.
We turn the corner to our street and I stop for a moment, just to look at the people coming to mourn Gogo.
In the past week, our yard was transformed so that we could host the neighborhood—a neighborhood Gogo has lived in for some forty years. We erected a large tent where neighbor women have been preparing the funeral meal. Already, the neighborhood is queuing, a line of people stretching from the gate to the spaza shop two doors down. The scent of fried chicken, rice, phuthu, and cooked kale hits my nose long before I reach the yard.
It feels like a betrayal to Gogo to be hungry but it’s true, my stomach is growling. I need to eat now now. I have had just one or two slabs of phuthu with a little bit of amasi since she died, three days ago, a fact that Little Man has pointed out, worried that I’m going to collapse. “You need to eat, Khosi,” he urged me. “To keep your strength up for all you must face.”
But how could I eat, hearing all the rumors and accusations?
I grip Zi’s hand even tighter. I can’t forget Auntie’s face, her lips curling, her nose twitching in sudden sneezes as she demanded the right to go through Gogo’s things and take what she wanted. “I am her daughter, I should have her clothes,” she claimed. “It is tradition.”
As a sangoma, everybody believes that I revere and respect tradition more than anything else. But I must tell you, sometimes tradition cloaks thievery. Not that I cared about Gogo’s clothes, but I would have liked to keep the simple beaded jewelry and headdress, just to remember her.
Instead, I have the house to remember her by, which presents a different problem.
For now, though, all I must think about is making it through the funeral.
Zi and I stop first at the washing station to clean our hands before we enter the house after having visited the gravesite. Inside, family members are already feasting. I scan the queue for Little Man and his parents. To me, and to Gogo, Little Man is family but I understand that nobody else recognizes that—yet—so he must stay outside with the others. Maybe someday the rest of my family will understand that even if we are only 17, we have been together for three years, ever since Mama’s death. He is much more than a boyfriend.
Inside, there are no places for us to sit except the floor, so we take a corner and wait for one of the ladies to bring us plates of food. I suppose we better get used to sitting on the floor. Auntie also claimed the sofa in the living room and the table in the kitchen. I’m hoping my uncle will step in and tell her no. No, no, you cannot leave Khosi and Zi with nothing. This is their home too… that is what I hope he will say.
Auntie flounces over to the floral sofa she wants. She sits with a big plate of food balanced on her lap, glancing at me from time to time as she chews the meat off a bone.
“Mm mm, I’m just saying, why did my mother die so suddenly after she made a will and left the house to Khosi?” She is talking to Gogo’s niece from the Free State, who drove all night to get here for the funeral.
“Sho, is it?” The niece bites into a hunk of meat.
I put my plate of food down on the floor, stomach churning. What’s going to happen after all the food is eaten and the neighbors go home? What will Auntie say then? Or do?
“I’m sure Elizabeth’s daughter would never harm a soul,” the niece says. “I know Khosi is a sangoma but she doesn’t practice this thing of witchcraft, does she?”
“I never thought so, not while Mama was alive.” Juice drips down Auntie’s wrists as she mixes gravy with phuthu and scoops it into her mouth. “But you never know with sangomas, not these days. It is very suspicious that my mother died so soon after she wrote that will.”
“What what what, you really believe she is umthakathi?”
I can’t listen to this. “Come, Zi,” I say, and we stand and walk out of the house. As we pass, my aunt cackles under her breath, knowing she’s scored a point against me.
I slink outside, an unwanted dog in my own house. The crowd of people waiting to eat is as long as ever and the yard is already festering with trash and flies. This is going to be some clean up job… I only hope my family members, the vultures who have descended for food and a chance to take all of Gogo’s things, will stay long enough to help me clean up.
I wait in the yard, saying goodbye to neighbors and friends as they leave. “Hamba kahle,” I tell yet another neighbor, who looks satisfied by his big meal.
“Sala kahle,” he responds.
The priest who spoke at the funeral takes my hands gently in his. Droplets of sweat glisten in his short, wiry hair. He must be sweltering in those dark priest’s robes.
“Baba,” I greet him.
The fact that I am a sangoma lays between us, unspoken. I have never felt that I couldn’t be both Catholic and a sangoma, I have never felt there was a contest between God and the amadlozi, but I am not sure that he—or other priests—feel the same way. And it is true that God is silent and the amadlozi speak to me all the time. Why would God choose to be quiet when I know he could speak? So perhaps there is some contest after all. I am not sure what to do with this split in my heart.
“Khosi,” he says. He lifts a hand and lays it on Zi’s head. “I trust that we will see you and Zi at mass on Sunday, like always. That you will be as faithful as your grandmother was all her life.”
“Yes, Baba.” I skirt his eyes to look at the sky.
Zi gives him a hug. He makes a rumbling noise in his throat, a little sound of love and affection, and perhaps some sorrow too.
“I’ll be praying for you,” he says.
“Hamba kahle,” I say, in return. I’m glad for his prayers. We need them more than ever.
After everyone is gone, Auntie sends her husband to borrow a friend’s bakkie so they can take Gogo’s sofa with them now now.
“It’s OK, Auntie Phumzi,” I say. “It is late. Come back tomorrow. The sofa will still be here. It is not going to disappear overnight.”
She laughs. “Oh, no, by then you will bewitch it. I must take it now, before you do something evil like you did to my mama.”
