by J. L. Powers
“No, no, you mustn’t stay here in South Africa,” she says. “As a nurse, you can go to England. You can take Zi with you and escape this place.”
“I don’t want to go to England!” I protest. “Everybody I love is here.”
But Mama has it all planned out. “Hush, Khosi,” she says. “It’s a good place to live. You can go to England and escape this thing of AIDS.”
“You want me to leave Gogo?” I ask.
“Yes!” she cries. “Leave before the whole country goes up in flames, before everybody dies of this thing, before only the old people and the children are left.”
“But I love South Africa,” I say. “I want to help my country.”
“You think I don’t love South Africa?” she asks, and the tears roll down her sunken black cheeks, once so fat and round and lovely. “I’ve lived here all my life and I’ll die here without ever leaving. But you and Zi can escape if you’re smart and get training that they need in England. Hey, Khosi? Hey?”
“Let me think about it,” I say, the words sour in my mouth.
“Promise me you won’t tell anybody about the money,” she insists, and her voice is urgent now. “They’ll want to use it for my funeral, to make a feast for the ancestors. They’ll spend all of it on my death. They’ll waste it honoring me and sending me to the other side when the best way to honor me is to use it for your education. Promise me you’ll keep it a secret, Khosi.”
What else can I say? I break down, crying. “I’ll keep it secret, Mama.”
“You won’t spend a single rand on making a feast for me after I die,” she says.
“No,” I sob.
“And you’ll become a nurse,” she prompts.
I’ve never thought about becoming a nurse. But now it feels like this is the one thing Mama’s asking me, like I’m making a death-bed promise while she grips my hand. “Yes, Mama.”
“I see a healing gift in you, Khosi,” she says.
“If I have some kind of healing gift, why can’t I help you?” I cry. “That’s all I want. To see you well again. That’s it. Nothing else. Anyway, why do you think I’m doing this stupid purification?”
“That’s exactly what I mean,” she says. “See, Khosi? You have a fierce desire to help people. You’ll make a wonderful nurse.”
I sigh, wondering if I have what it takes.
“Promise me something else, Khosi,” Mama says. “Before you go to England, you won’t get involved with men here.”
I think about Little Man. Does he count? He’s not a man…yet. “I’ll try.”
“As a nurse, you’ll be able to pay for Zi’s college,” she says.
“Mama, why are you asking me all these questions? Why are you asking me to make all these promises? Are you—?” Even I can hear the pleading in my voice. I stop just short of begging to know.
And of course, Mama doesn’t answer my questions, just as she hasn’t talked to anybody about what is making her so sick.
Instead, she reaches out her hand, stopping before it touches me. Her hand hovers in the air. “Khosi, it’s just a matter of time before Baba also—” She chokes and stops. She speaks in a very low voice. “You’ll always take care of Zi, won’t you?”
“Of course!” I almost shout the words. How could Mama think I wouldn’t take care of Zi? I’m her second mother. She’s my heart, my blood.
She relaxes back, the pillows sighing with a poof of air as she sinks into them. She looks almost peaceful now, like she’s settled something in her mind, something she hasn’t wanted to talk about for so long but now she’s finally broken the silence.
As for me? I feel like a ghost, wandering through the house, not even sure anymore what is real and what is a dream.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
WANDERING
I try to embrace what Mama has told me. I try to understand it. I try to pretend that the nagging doubts aren’t there.
But they are.
I lie down on the sofa, closing my eyes, trying to get rid of a headache. Gogo sits beside me, rubbing my forehead with her soft, wrinkled hands.
“Gogo,” I say, keeping my eyes closed, “you need to call the priest.”
“For what, Khosi?” she asks. I can hear the worry in her voice, and I can interpret it easily. She thinks something is wrong with me.
“For Mama,” I say. “He needs to come to our house to see Mama.”
Gogo’s voice drops to a whisper. “I can’t tell the priest we are doing this thing of purification.”
“He doesn’t need to know,” I say. “But Mama needs to give confession.”
Through a haze of sleepiness and waves of pain in my head, I hear Gogo on the phone, chattering in rapid Zulu, inviting the priest to come. Rolling over so my face is to the sofa’s back, I let my body sink into sleep.
I stagger to the bathroom, the voices in my head thumping and throbbing. Passing the bedroom, I peek through the open crack. Mama is inside, murmuring, her voice low. The priest, Baba Mkhize, is kneeling at her bedside, holding her hand.
I stumble back to the sofa and lay there until I see the priest come back into the dining room. Even though I feel terrible, I sit up to greet him.
“Sawubona, Baba,” I say.
“Yebo, Khosi.” The look in his eyes. Sad and thoughtful. Like he knows more than he should know about the world, and about my mother, and about this family.
Gogo hobbles out of the kitchen. “Baba, Khosi isn’t well,” she says. “Can you pray for her?”
He kneels beside my head, withdrawing a small jug of holy water and a small jar of anointed oil from his pants pocket. He sprinkles me with water and makes the sign of the cross with oil on my forehead.
“We pray that you will heal this little one, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” he murmurs.
For just a minute, the babbling in my head ceases. Reaching out my hand to touch his, I look at him, the questions in my eyes, wondering what Mama told him, wondering what I need to know.
“Shhh, Khosi,” he says. “God forgives. And I know you will do the right thing.”
My head bumps back into the pillows as he leaves. I close my eyes to an image of Gogo’s large hips as she disappears back into the kitchen.
Thandi comes over. Her right eye is bruised and puffy, and she has scabs and ugly bruises on her neck and arms. She sits beside me on the sofa in the sitting room and begins to whisper her story to me. “You can’t tell anyone.”
“You’re in trouble,” I murmur, but it feels like my voice is coming out of my body from far away, like I’m speaking from the kitchen or even farther, from the back yard, almost like the voice isn’t mine, just an echo I hear speaking in my head.
“Yes, but not like that,” she says and then she starts to cry.
Her story comes through in pieces, broken apart in the fog that separates us, then reassembled together in a way that doesn’t make sense. Something about falling pregnant, Honest, and a love potion.
“Wait, wait,” I say. The weight of her words is pressing me down. I lie back on the sofa. “Let me get this story again.”
“It didn’t work, that’s what I’m telling you,” she sobs. “I told Honest I had fallen pregnant and asked if he thought he could get lobolo so we could marry, not immediately but in some few years. He just laughed because he’s already got a wife. So I went to get a love potion. I thought he might leave his wife if he really loved me.”
“Where did you get a love potion? From your grandmother?”
“No, no, Gogo doesn’t make love potions. I went to one of her friends, another sangoma. But now Honest claims it wasn’t a love potion at all—that I made him sick instead, that I poisoned him.”
“So he beat you,” I say, pointing to her face.
She nods and begins to weep again.
“Honest is sick?”
“Yes.”
“You should go to the clinic,” I say, crawling into that place of sleep that seems overwhelming. �
�You need to find out the truth.”
“Oh, but Khosi, I’m so afraid,” she wails. “He thinks his problem is the love potion, but what if they tell me I have this thing of AIDS?”
“You should find out before it’s too late, before you get sick.”
“I’d rather not know,” Thandi says. Her words come at me slow and thick.
I don’t have the heart to send her into Mama’s room, to say, Look, see what comes of not getting tested? Of not getting the help you need?
“Just go home, Thandi,” I tell her. “I don’t feel well.”
She keeps talking and worrying but I can’t listen anymore. I’m too tired. Too sick. I cover myself with a blanket and let her words float right over my head and out the door.
Some few minutes—or days—later, I stumble out the door, only a few rands in my pocket and an unclear destination in my mind. The city center—that’s where I’m going, but I don’t even know why.
My head is still pounding with the babbling of voices.
I pass Inkosikazi Dudu. She opens her mouth to speak, but I drift by. There is nothing she can say to me right now to compete with what I am already hearing inside my head.
I pass the drunk man who likes to bother me. “I haven’t seen you for a long time, Ntombi,” he grins, the teeth in his mouth shifting and rearranging until his face doesn’t make sense anymore, a long snout growing out of his throat and his nose floating off near his face somewhere. “I’m coming back for you.” He clicks his finger at me and winks. “Today. Just you wait for me. You’ll be mine.” He breathes, whispering one last lush word, “Tonight.”
I brush past him like he’s a fly but even as I do it, I know better. His eye winks over and over and over in front of me as I step onto a khumbi. The man who takes money looks at my pale face and gestures for me to go to the back seat. The people scoot over to make room. They scoot far away, leaving me lots of space.
The man’s eye winks at me. His rotten tooth wavers in the middle of his mouth, shimmering…like gold. He clicks his finger at me. He clicks his finger. He clicks.
I shake my head but the visions glisten in front of me, flickering in and out like a bad television connection. They refuse to go away.
I get off at Freedom Square. The ladies selling toys and candy wave at me. “Where’s your little sister?” one of them asks as I pass.
“Ekhaya,” I say. “At home.”
I wander here and there, down arcades where clothing is heaped in piles just outside the store, people picking through, looking for just the right skirt.
The drunk man’s eye winking.
The witch’s gold tooth glimmering in the air, right in front of me.
I want to hit that man’s eye, the witch’s mouth—but it’s all an illusion. I run my fingers through the vision and it breaks up. I realize there’s nothing there but air.
I’m so thirsty. I ask a store owner for something to drink and she brings me cold water from her tap. I drink it and then ask for some more.
“When was the last time you had something to drink?” she asks.
I shrug. I can’t remember. I can’t even remember my name.
I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know…I don’t know where… I drift with the wind…until I’m standing in front of Standard Bank of South Africa. People are streaming in and out, like water, their faces a blur of rearranging cells and bits of dark flesh.
I push the door open and wander inside, not sure what to do now. I get into one of the queues, then stare at the tile floor as it inches forward. My heart is beating. What am I doing? What am I doing?
And the voices in my head, wordless, but responding to my question with a chorus of approval. My head lightens, clears.
Whatever I’m doing, it’s the right thing.
I get in line and wait with everybody else.
Something snaps in place when the teller looks at me expectantly. The drunk man’s winking disappears and the woman’s face shines, luminous, in front of me. Who am I? Nomkhosi Zulu. What am I doing here? Finding out just how much money my mother is leaving me.
I pull out my ID. “I have a bank account here,” I say. “I’m wondering how much money is in it.” I’m surprised at the amount she names. “Is that enough to go to college?” I ask.
“If you’re careful,” she reassures me.
“How did my mother save that much money?” I ask.
“She must love you very much,” she says, smiling at me.
“Yes,” I say, looking at the slip of paper with the amount written on it. “I guess she does.” Then I ask the question that I’ve been dreading to ask. “How long has she been saving money?”
The lady ruffles through the papers, looking. “She made only one deposit. It was on the 30th of March, earlier this year.”
When she says this, I suddenly feel like Mama has died, even though I know she’s still back in the house, spitting up blood on a cloth and sweating her way through the sores pockmarking her body.
“One deposit? What do you mean?”
The lady explains, patiently, “I mean that she put all that money, the entire amount, in the bank at the same time.”
“Hawu!”I say. “How is that possible? That much money?”
“Maybe she saved it in her mattress for a long time,” the lady jokes.
I walk out the door and down the street, not quite sure where I’m going. I sit on a bench in Freedom Square, in the center of the city, looking at the women sitting on the ground near me, their goods spread out on the blanket in front of them. I’m surrounded by people working so hard just to feed their kids. None of them had the opportunity Mama has handed to me.
I look at the paper the bank printed out for me. The amount is staggering. Enough to go to college, if I’m careful, as the woman said.
Mama told me she had been saving a long time. But she lied to me. There is no way Mama would have left that much money in the house or at her room in Greytown, not for so many years.
And if she lied to me…then…how did she get the money?
And at what cost?
I think about our next-door neighbor, all her many accusations. I think about how her husband died early this year and it was in March that Mama helped Inkosikazi Dudu get the money from his insurance.
Oh, Mama, what have you done?
A sudden image of her before she got sick, her face healthy and whole again, swims in front of my eyes. “I’m sorry, Khosi. I’m sorry.” I hear her voice in my head again. And I see her, clear as day, before me.
Are those tears in her eyes?
Yes, Mama will weep. She’ll weep when she realizes that her dreams are dead, now that I know she has done this thing. I can’t use stolen money for college. I know this. And she’ll weep when she realizes that her sin has opened the door of evil in our lives. I hope I can close it before it’s too late.
When my khumbi arrives, I just sit there. I know I need to go home but I can’t face anybody yet, especially Mama. What am I going to say to her? And how am I going to say it?
I wait for a long time. I wait while the air grows damp around me and my fingers grow numb with cold and the sun starts to set and I’m shivering in my skirt.
It feels like a dream as I step inside the taxi and move to the back seat. The three women shift to make room for me.
I sit next to the window and stare at my reflection mirrored back, cracking up into a million tiny pieces, dissolving into a vision of the woman on the hill, her gold tooth shining like a tiny sun in the window’s reflection. Her face, hovering like a ghost’s just outside the moving vehicle. Her mouth gnarled and twisted like old tree trunks.
She’s smiling.
And that’s when I know.
She’s come back for me. She’s finally come back for me.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
BATTLE
Imbali is swallowed up in darkness when the khumbi spits me out in front of the tuck shop, my body hurtling like a rocket from the vehicle,
the witch behind me, faster, her voice crackling in my ear. Did you think I’d forget?
Stumbling falling the rough gravel the stones cutting.
Blood on my hands, my knees.
And I’m staring up into another face, the cool stale beer breath stinging tears to my eyes.
“If it isn’t my own little sugar girl,” he croons, grabbing me by the hair, yanking me forward until I fall at his feet, a crumpled heap. “The one who wouldn’t let me come inside.”
“She’s my sugar girl,” the witch snaps.
“Please,” I beg. “I’m just a little girl. Don’t do this.”
The witch’s hand snatches out, shoves my face in the dirt, tiny stones and soil snarling their way up my nose as I gasp for air.
“What do you want with her, anyway?” the drunk man asks. He leans over and whispers in my ear, “I’ll treat you like a queen, sugar girl.”
“Please,” I moan. “Please leave me alone.”
“I claimed her first,” he tells the witch.
But she laughs, a laugh that quickly tangles up into a growl. “You exist because I created you. She belongs to me.”
“We can share her then,” he whispers, wanting me that bad, the starved look on his face.
I lift my head. “Let me go!”
“Shut up, stupid girl,” the witch says, smashing my face back into the dirt. She grabs my arm and begins to drag me, the drunk man running alongside us, panting as he tries to keep up.
I feel dizzy, something thumping in my chest and making it hard to breathe. The echoes of the ancestors’ whispers beating in rhythm with my heart. And that’s when I begin to pray, to call on the ancestor whose protection is so strong—Babamkhulu.
