by J. L. Powers
Table of Contents
This Thing Called the Future
Title Page
Dedication
PART ONE - THE WITCH
CHAPTER ONE - NIGHTMARE
THIS YEAR, 100,000 CHILDREN WILL BE BORN WITH HIV!
CHAPTER TWO - ENCOUNTER
CHAPTER THREE - MAD CRUSH
CHAPTER FOUR - DREAMS
CHAPTER FIVE - VISIT TO THE SANGOMA
CHAPTER SIX - VISITING LITTLE MAN
CHAPTER SEVEN - MAMA’S GUMPTION
CHAPTER EIGHT - THE LIGHTNING BIRD
PART TWO - THE CROCODILE
CHAPTER NINE - GROWN-UP GIRL
CHAPTER TEN - BABA’S GIRL
CHAPTER ELEVEN - THANDI’S SUGAR DADDY
CHAPTER TWELVE - MARKED
CHAPTER THIRTEEN - HOMECOMING
CHAPTER FOURTEEN - TROUBLE BETWEEN US
CHAPTER FIFTEEN - MUTHI FOR MAMA
CHAPTER SIXTEEN - EYES DO NOT SEE ALL
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - PUNISHMENT
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - YOUR SINS WILL FIND YOU OUT
CHAPTER NINETEEN - LYING TO MAMA
CHAPTER TWENTY - LITTLE MAN’S PARTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - THIS WORLD AND THAT ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - VIRGINITY TESTING
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE - COUGHING
PART THREE - THIS THING CALLED THE FUTURE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR - SLAP
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE - THE CLINIC
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX - THE DAY MAMA GREW UP
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN - ZI’S BIRTHDAY
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT - PEOPLE KILL TO SURVIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE - CONFRONTATION
CHAPTER THIRTY - THE SPIRITS ARE FIGHTING EACH OTHER
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE - BLACK MUTHI
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO - THE FIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE - RED MUTHI
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR - PROMISES
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE - WANDERING
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX - BATTLE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN - MAMA JOINS THE ANCESTORS
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT - MAKING UP
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE - DREAMS ARE OUR EYES
CHAPTER FORTY - FEAR
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE - THIS THING CALLED THE FUTURE
Acknowledgements
GLOSSARY OF ZULU WORDS
OTHER GREAT YOUNG ADULT TITLES FROM
Copyright Page
This Thing Called the Future
A Novel
Akudlozi lingay’ ekhaya.
No spirit fails to go home.
Zulu proverb
For the Dubes—
Bukhosi, Bukekile, Dumisani, Leocardia, Phillip, and Tsepo.
With love.
PART ONE
THE WITCH
CHAPTER ONE
NIGHTMARE
A drumbeat wakes me. Ba-Boom. Ba-Boom. It is beating a funeral dirge.
When I was my little sister Zi’s age, we rarely heard those drums. Now they wake me so many Saturdays. It seems somebody is dying all the time. These drums are calling our next-door neighbor, Umnumzana Dudu, to leave this place and join the ancestors where they live, in the earth, the land of the shadows.
I get up and walk to the window, peeking through the curtain at the Dudus’ house in the faint pink light of dawn. Their house is small like ours, government built—a matchbox house made of crumbling cement and peeling peach-colored paint. It is partially obscured by the huge billboard the government put up some few weeks ago between our houses. This is what it announces in bold white lettering against a black background:
THIS YEAR, 100,000 CHILDREN WILL BE BORN WITH HIV!
Gogo, my grandmother, fretted like mad when that billboard went up. “People who can’t read, they will just see that symbol for AIDS right over our house, and they will say, ‘Those people, they are the ones spreading it.’”
I tried to soothe her. “People know better than that. Those billboards are everywhere.” It’s true, the government wants everyone to know about the disease of these days before we all die from it.
But Gogo shook her head. “You watch, we will have bad luck from this thing,” she predicted.
Ba-Boom. Ba-Boom. The drums next door continue and a dog across the street howls in response.
I look for movement in the Dudus’ yard but see nothing.
Like us, they have wrapped thick barbed wire around the top of their fence in order to keep tsotsis away. Only some few of us have anything that tsotsis would steal. But these days, things are so hard those gangsters will hold a gun to your head and steal crumbs of phuthu right out of your mouth even as you are chewing and swallowing.
Ba-Boom. Ba-Boom. Two women, walking down the dirt road that runs in front of our house and balancing heavy bags of mealie-meal on their heads, pause to stare at the Dudus’ house.
I look back at my sleeping family. Zi and Gogo share one bed, low snores erupting from Gogo’s open mouth, revealing reddened gums where her teeth have rotted and fallen out over the years. Mama looks peaceful in the bed that she and I share when she comes home.
During the week, Mama lives in Greytown, where she works as a schoolteacher. She doesn’t make enough money for us to live with her, so she rents a very tiny room there and sends the rest of the money home, which supplements Gogo’s government pension. My baba lives with his mother in Durban, another city an hour away. Unlike Mama, he doesn’t have a good job; there is hardly ever enough money to go see him.
All over South Africa, people struggle. Nobody has enough money. Anyway, we blacks don’t have money. Whites—maybe they are rich, but the rest of us suffer. There are poor whites, it’s true, but not so many as poor blacks.
Even the next door neighbor, Inkosikazi Dudu, she will suffer now that her husband has died. This week, Mama came home from her job some few days early to help with her husband’s insurance settlement. “Yo! it is sad, he left her very little money,” Mama said.
“What is she going to do?” I asked. “How is she going to live?”
“She has six grown children,” Mama said. “They will help her.”
“How?” Gogo asked. “They don’t have any education so they don’t even have good jobs.”
“She is old. She has a government pension,” Mama said.
Gogo clucked her tongue. “It is not enough. I don’t know how we would manage if you did not work. We will have to be very good to her and help her if she needs it.”
Gogo is always generous with what little we have. “If we don’t help others, what will happen to us when we are the ones needing help?” she asks.
Ba-boom. Ba-boom. I can’t believe my family is sleeping through the racket.
To me, the drumbeat is foreboding. After my uncle Jabulani died, my baba’s family was almost torn apart by the accusations until they called a sangoma in. She consulted the ancestors and told them that in this case, there had been no witchcraft, only the disease of these days. “It is just the sadness of today,” she said, “that the young people are dying and leaving their children without parents.”
“Leave the curtain and come back to bed, Khosi,” Mama murmurs. She pulls back the covers and pats the space beside her.
“The beating of the drums woke me,” I say. “Can’t you hear it?”
“It’s too much early,” Mama replies, yawning loud.
“It’s a funeral and you know what that means,” I say. “Trouble.”
“He was an old man and ready to die, Khosi,” she says. “Nobody is going to say his death was this thing of witchcraft. It isn’t like all these young people dying before it is their time. That is what worries everybody.”
It’s true, what she says. When a young person di
es, it is because their spirit was taken from them. But an old man’s death is natural and nothing to fear. He has lived his life and it is time for him to become an ancestor, to help his descendants through life.
“Woza, Khosi,” Mama says again.
So I let the curtain fall and crawl back into bed. Mama puts her arm around me and I cuddle up into her fat cocoa-brown warmth.
Her orange headscarf tickles my forehead as I drift back into the world of dreams, the drumbeat troubling me even in sleep. This one is a white dream, the color of the moon in the afternoon sky, so I know the ancestors sent it to me.
I’m sitting in hospital with Mama. Her skin is weeping underneath a white bandage. “They’re going to remove the burnt skin,” she explains when I wonder why we’re here, especially when I see all the bodies of dead people piled up in the corner.
We wait for a long time and finally they call her into a small room. The nurse comes to remove Mama’s bandages, her gloves bloody from the last patient.
Mama jerks her arm away. “No, Sisi, I do not want you to do this until you change your gloves.”
The nurse crosses her arms. “Listen here, I have been working at this hospital for fifteen years. Are you going to tell me how to do my job?”
“That last man you treated could have AIDS,” Mama says.
The nurse storms out of the room. Mama takes the nurse’s instruments and begins to scrape the dead skin off. “You see, this is why we need good nurses in South Africa,” she tells me. “Otherwise, they just do this thing of spreading HIV.”
The dream changes and now we’re sitting in church as the collection plate is being passed around. When it reaches us, Zi carefully places the five rands that Gogo gave her in the plate, looking proud and happy that she’s giving to the church.
I pass the collection plate to Mama and watch as she starts to put a twenty rand note inside, then stops, clutching the money before passing the plate on by.
“Mama?” I whisper, surprised. Mama always gives to the church. It is our duty and obligation as Christians, she has always said. If we fail to give to the church, which feeds our souls, it is stealing from God.
“Hush, Khosi, we need it to pay the medical bills,” Mama says, and I notice that her bandage is bloody and weeping a thick yellow substance. She sees the look on my face. “It is just a little thing, Khosi,” she says. “God understands we need the money.”
I wake, a taste in my mouth that comes only after dreaming. And my shoulders ache, like I have been lifting heavy bags all night long.
I know that dreams are not exactly what they seem. But I also know that to dream is to see the truth at night. You may think one thing during the day, but find out it’s a lie when you dream. Sangomas hear the voices of the ancestors all the time, but night is when their spirits speak to all of us, even we regular folks.
What are the ancestors trying to tell me?
CHAPTER TWO
ENCOUNTER
Gogo leaves the house for two things only: church and funerals. Today it’s Umnumzana Dudu’s funeral. While I cook phuthu for breakfast, she clucks around the house, grumbling. “Every Saturday, another funeral,” she says. “It is too much sadness.”
“Yes, another funeral and another day of listening to lies,” Mama says, as if she is agreeing with Gogo.
“What do you mean, Mama?” I am busy wiping the counter, even the parts where chunks are missing. When I’m done, I start to sweep the floor. It’s a difficult job. The floor is uneven, with ridges that make it hard to sweep dirt away.
“You watch, at the funeral, they will make Umnumzana Dudu out to be such a kind man,” Mama says. “But he’d get his paycheck, go to the shebeen, and come home drunk. Then he would beat his children and wife. We could hear the cries, every month. You remember? It is always that way at funerals, we say what we wish had been, not what really was. At my funeral-”
“Elizabeth!” Gogo hushes her, quick quick. “You are just talk talk talk. Don’t speak of your death; it’s bad luck.”
Mama laughs. “God already knows the day and hour of my death, Mama,” she says. “There is nothing anyone can do about it.”
Gogo shakes her head at Mama’s foolishness. “Witches might hear you,” she says. “They have the power to steal life before it is your time.”
“But that doesn’t bother me, hey,” Mama says. “I’m a Christian.” She sounds almost smug when she says this.
Mama and Gogo argue about this all the time. Mama believes in the things of white men, science and God only. She says the only power witches have over us is our fear. But Gogo says there is African science too, and the white man’s science knows nothing about these things.
Na mina? I agree with Gogo. All my life, I have seen and heard things I can’t explain. Like the dream the ancestors sent me last night.
“I’m a Christian too,” Gogo mumbles as Mama disappears into the bathroom to get ready for the funeral. “There are witches in the Bible,” she reminds me. “It is not only because I’m an old woman and foolish that I believe these things.”
“I know, Gogo,” I say, soothing her as I button her black funeral dress. She doesn’t like being helpless, as though she is just Zi’s age. She tries to help, fumbling with each button until I reach it. But her fingers are too gnarled and weak from arthritis.
When Mama and Gogo are dressed in their funeral finery, we set out to walk up the hill to the Zionist church where the Dudus worship. Mama looks so amazing in a lacy black dress and a black hat with roses attached, her bosom spilling out of her dress. I hope I am as beautiful as Mama when I dress up!
We walk up the dirt road, dodging chickens and khumbis that roar past, trickling loud kwaito music, the side door open and the fare collector looking at us with a question in his eyes. Do you need a ride? We shake our heads and each khumbi zooms by, seeking other customers, beats blaring—doof doof doof—through the township.
Ahead of us, Zi clings to Mama’s hand and looks up at her as she chatters away, wanting her attention one hundred percent.
I walk beside Gogo, towering over her. I’m not a tall girl but Gogo’s so short and bent over, the top of her head only reaches my chest. I put my arm around her as we walk, to help her up the hill.
“It is too much hard, this hill,” she puffs.
“Why don’t you rest just now?” I say. “There is no hurry.”
Gogo smiles, revealing her missing front teeth. She leans against a tree stump, catching her breath.
Halfway up the hill, we can look out over the dirt roads running up and down through Imbali’s hills. Smoke rises from thousands of small houses and shacks crowded together, as far as the eye can see. Just beyond is the city of Pietermaritzburg, shrouded in early morning smog. Imbali was created for we blacks by the government, during the time of apartheid. Only whites could live in the city during those days, so we lived in these sprawling townships hidden off the main roads and just outside the city limits. Now, of course, we can live wherever we want-but most of us can’t afford to live anywhere else.
When Gogo has stopped breathing so hard we start walking again. I try to talk so that Gogo doesn’t feel like she has to. I just let words fall out of my mouth while Gogo struggles the rest of the way up the hill.
But I fall silent as soon as we reach the witch’s house, a big house at the top of the hill. Gogo leans heavily on my arm. We both look at the dirt, hoping we won’t accidentally make eye contact with the old woman who lives there.
Ever since I was a child, Gogo has warned me about her. “Khosi, there are women in this world who want to hurt you,” she would say. And the woman who lived in this house was one of those women. “She is too much powerful. You must watch out, hey!”
Gogo always spoke in hushed tones when she talked about her. The dog lying in the sun, the chicken pecking in the dirt, the fly buzzing around your head—they could be her spies. And who knew what she would do if she heard you talking about her?
“She has a ma
ze of tunnels underneath her house,” Gogo would whisper. “They lead to gigantic gold mines. She kidnaps people on the street—men, women, even children. She turns those people into zombies. At night, she makes her zombies go deep into those tunnels to look for gold. That is how she makes all her money.”
Gogo had always warned me that you couldn’t recognize a witch by the way she dressed or even the way she behaved. Anybody can be a witch. Your own mother can be a witch and you won’t even know it!
Now that I am fourteen, I sometimes wonder if Gogo is right about everything she says. But I do know she’s right about this old woman. Whenever I’ve passed her on the streets, she cackles like she knows all my secrets. I don’t dare look at her, afraid if I do, I’ll be sucked in by her power and become one of her zombies.
Today as we hurry by, we’re both startled by a sudden rattling sound. Looking up, I see that old woman grabbing hold of her fence and shaking it to get our attention.
“Nomkhosi Zulu,” she calls.
How does she know my name? We look at each other. Her eyes grip and hold me firm, the way her fingers clutch the metal fence. There are gold flecks deep in her eyes, and a large gold tooth glints as she spreads her lips into a thin grin.
“I’ve been watching you, Nomkhosi Zulu.” Her voice is honey sweet. “Ever since you were a little girl.”
There’s a strange rhythm to her words. They echo in my mind, a song playing over and over—and oh, how I want to dance.
“Hey, wena Ntombi! Come here, sweet thing.” There’s something about her voice…Why, she sounds like she has stolen Gogo’s voice.
Gogo sucks in her breath and grabs my elbow, her wordless plea, Masihambe, Khosi. We must run.
But I’m drawn to the fence, an ant marching to sugar. The old woman reaches through the wire, seizing my arm in her wrinkled fingers, her grasp rough, her fingernails digging in until I gasp.
“This one’s spirit is strong,” she says.
