by Isla Morley
In addition to the assortment of teas, a canister of coffee, sugar and powdered creamer, there is also a box of freshly baked hot cross buns. I lift the lid and offer Delia one just so I might have her company a few minutes longer. She grins as she takes one and positions it to the side of her mouth, where she still has teeth.
“Do you mind if I ask you why your front teeth are missing?”
“Ow.” She chuckles, then covers her mouth with her hand. “That was for when I was young, for keeping the boys very happy.”
I laugh too. “Aren’t you glad we get older?”
“Ewe! Now I tell them all to voetsek; I don’t want to see their snake or I will chop it off!” We laugh and it seems as though we might be able to stave off a suffering Africa yet.
Until a voice says, “Nobody wants to show an old lady his snake.”
In the doorway stands an African warrior. Naked above the waist, he might as well have an assegai in his hand and not a rake. His broad, gleaming smile and the cocky tilt of his head does nothing to soften Delia’s temper. “Pepsi! Ndiya kubetha!”
Undeterred by the old woman’s hostility, he locks his eyes on me and raises his chin. “Howzit.”
“You must be Pepsi,” I say, extending my hand, which he shakes as though he were tugging a weed. “I am Abbe Spenser, pleased to meet you.”
“Go back to work, Pepsi!” Delia barks.
“Haai, the madam is looking for you, old lady. Teatime,” he mocks, pretending to ring a dinner bell at his ear. As she hurries off, he makes no attempt to leave and the tiny hut fills with the smell of sweat. His, and now mine. He sees the buns. “Can I have one?” he says, more a demand than a question. The smile has left his face now and he patrols the room, crumbs dropping in his wake, examining my things. I want him to leave, but there is a voice telling me that this is Pepsi’s country now. He eats another bun although I have not offered, and then from the nightstand, with a sticky hand, he picks up the picture of Cleo. Somewhere near my knees a panic is mounting.
“Your daughter?” he asks as though he might sniff at her.
“Yes.”
“She is a beautiful girl.”
“Yes, she was. She died last year.” Why did I say that?
He shakes his head, and then wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “That’s good,” he says, and leaves me thinking he surely meant the buns.
“SUNUP?” Delia asks, setting down a tray of dinner Susannah has insisted on sharing. It will be dark soon, and after Pepsi’s visit I am glad to have Delia back in my quarters for a few minutes.
“Do you know it?” I have told her about selling my grandmother’s farm and how I hope to help some of the orphans through a scholarship program.
She nods. “Ewe. I know the maid who used to work there a long, long time ago.”
“Beauty?”
“Beauty Masinama, that is her,” Delia replies.
Beauty, who has been haunting my thoughts for a year with her chants and spells, with her sjambok. Beauty, who I had imagined died in a prison like so many of the others, who stands beside my mother and grandmother in almost every memory, still cannot be this side of the Jordan, can she? “Is she still alive?”
“Ewe.” She nods. “She is living in Langa with her sister’s daughter.” Langa is the oldest township in Cape Town, saddled between Jan Smuts Drive and Settler’s Way. Although it is now popular for air-conditioned coaches to transport their paying European clientele through the streets for the requisite pictures of corrugated iron lean-tos, trash-strewn dirt streets, and litters of dog-eared children, Langa still evokes for me the old fears. The sum of Africa’s darkness was supposed to be fenced in in places like Langa, even as we waited for when it would spill over into an orderly suburb or a tidy farmyard. Waited for the Stompies of the world, with their bloodshot eyes and vengeful stares, to bang on the back doors of our burglarproof houses.
“Do you think Beauty would see me?”
“You can go to her, yes. But Beauty doesn’t see anything anymore, only her dreams.”
She moves to the door; it must surely be past the time for her to go home.
“Delia?” She looks at me as tenderly as a shepherd. “Would you sit with me a little longer? I would like to tell you about my girl.”
NINETEEN
All but two of the eleven people spill out of the eight-seater taxi van after it has skidded to a stop in front of Bessie’s Cash ’n’ Carry Store, decorated with burglar bars and Coca-Cola signs. Next to it is the local butchery—a “smiley” stand where severed sheep heads hang upside down, grinning madly with old-people dentures. An assortment of trash and cans collects at the curb where customers with handbags and shopping bags line up to take the warmed-up seats we have just vacated.
Langa was founded at the turn of the last century, when the bubonic plague first broke out in the Cape. Tourists might find it surprising that its name means “sun,” given the squalor, but so many things in this part of the world are disguised with misnomers. What I find surprising is how the sun that awakens urbane Cape Townians in their plush colonial duplexes is the same sun that shines through the boarded windows of this shantytown. The same sun, rising for us all.
And it is an obstinately shiny day, the sun high enough already that even the shadows cannot hide the corners of the view—mud shacks, unfinished brick houses with steps going nowhere, storefronts with their collapsing roofs. Along the unpaved ghost-town streets are hand-painted signs of the millenium’s new plague: COMMUNITY UNDERTAKERS: FUNERALS FOR PENSIONERS, FAMILIES, AND SINGLES. NO PROOF OF GOOD HEALTH, 4 EZ PAYMENTS.
A street sign leaning at a forty-five-degree angle confirms Delia’s carefully drawn map. I am on Washington Street. My instructions are to walk a block past the Tsoga Eco Center to the library on the corner of Mendi Street and turn left. She cannot remember how many blocks it is to the house, but it is the only one painted pink so I will not be able to miss it. At the very least I expect to be watched as I head in that direction, the only white person as far as the eye can see, but nobody bats an eye. The taxi driver assured me that times have changed: white people—especially the very white from Europe—pay good money to come to the Place of the Sun, more if their tour includes a beer at the local shebeen. “Nobody worries about the whities anymore.” He had laughed. “We just take their money and say ‘Enkosi kakuhla, thank you very much.’ ”
Pinched between the mud shacks are a few houses splattered with color: one green with a blue corner as though the painter changed his mind at the last minute, one General Motors white, another mustard yellow. The home of the niece of Beauty Masinama, though, is pleasing on the eye, the color of a nursery room, its window frames and doorways accented in powder blue. I have to duck beneath two rows of laundry to get to the front door, which, like all the others on this street, is propped open with a brick. There is no need to knock, because I have been spotted by someone I assume to be the niece. I wave an awkward greeting as she steps across the patch of cabbages the size of footstools, carrying her spade. Wrapped around her skirt is a brown and red plaid blanket, the fringe brushing the tops of her blue sneakers. On top she wears a striped rugby shirt, and a paisley doek is knotted behind her head, framing her face, which is both frowning and smiling.
“I am the one who called,” I explain. “I have come to see Beauty.”
“Yes,” she replies, laying the spade against the side of the house so she can shake my hand. “She is expecting you.”
The room into which I step, lit by a single window, is no bigger than a bathroom. Its walls are papered with Sunday Times comics, and hanging from them are two framed certificates, one a high school diploma. In one corner is a table covered with a green plastic sheet, the orange crates just visible beneath it. On top is a portable TV, a kerosene lamp, a flask, and two cups. Next to the table is a wheelchair. On the opposite side is a cot with a gray blanket folded at the foot of it, and the entry to the kitchen. It is through this door and into the room be
yond that the cabbage-tender now goes.
My stomach is having that first-day-of-school feeling. The visit seemed like a good idea up until an hour ago, but could well now be the product of miscalculation. With nobody’s hand to hold, I glance back at the open doorway, tempted to flee, but the niece is back before I do, and bids me “come.”
Beauty’s eyes are eclipsed by a blue veil of cataracts and seem to bobble on little puddles on her lower lids. Her face, creased and collapsed where her teeth once were, is unmistakable. But will she recognize me? The niece bends over to her right ear and clicks away loudly in Xhosa, then briskly retreats.
“Many rains,” Beauty says, “many rains have come and gone since my madam died.” She seems not to address me but the draft blowing in through the small window at the foot of her bed. “And Miss Louise,” she says of my mother, shaking her head.
“Yes,” I manage. “They have all gone, Beauty.”
“But not the klein miss,” she says, swinging her head around to face me, gumming a smile, and extending her arms. I bow into them, and her grip, strong as a python, curls around me.
“Yamkele ikhaya umntwana, welcome home.”
“I’m not an umntwana anymore, Beauty. I am all grown up.” I smile.
“To me you will always be a girl; a strong, good girl,” she says. With one hand she feels my face to confirm what her eyes cannot see. “You have come back after all these years.”
“Only for a short visit, I’m afraid.”
She frowns. “You are not living at the farm?”
“Actually, we’re selling the farm; that’s why I am here.” Beauty is part of a generation who had been trained never to disagree with a white person. Contrary opinions, like chew tobacco, are best kept in the cheek, and matters of disagreement are best dealt with by changing the subject, which she does now.
“I hear there are children living in the madam’s house.”
“Orphans, yes.” Beauty seems to stare right into my soul, but her face registers neither judgment nor criticism. “Hopefully, they are going to find a better place to go to school.”
“You have children?” she asks.
“One child. A girl—Cleo.”
She brightens. “And where is she so I can meet her?”
After a pause I say, “She died a year ago.”
“That is very bad,” she tches.
Beauty is quiet for a while. Facing the breeze again, she closes her eyes. She is like that for so long I wonder if she has nodded off, but she opens them when I shift my weight on the folding chair. “My children are with the ancestors too. My boy and the girl; both gone. I am too old. In this day, it is the young who die and the old people who live.”
“Yes. It’s enough to make you wonder if you are being punished for something you did wrong.”
She wags her crooked finger. “The death of our babies is not our punishment, klein miss. No-no. We must carry our burden like the buckets of water the women carry on their heads. Most of them carry small buckets because their necks are not strong enough. But a few of the women, the strong ones, have to carry the big buckets. They have to carry more water; they have to walk a long way. Then, when the others have finished all their water and are thirsty again, the woman with the big bucket comes home. She puts it down and doesn’t have to carry it again for a long time.”
Before I can decipher her meaning, she calls out in Xhosa and the young woman enters with two steaming mugs. The one that is not chipped she gives to me. She helps Beauty sit up in bed, straightens her doek so that it covers the white tufts of hair, and smooths out her blanket. When the woman leaves the room and quickly reappears with two rusks on an enamel plate, I thank her. Beauty soaks her cookie in her tea before gnawing off a piece. “My body is going to the ancestors, piece by piece.” She laughs. “My teeth were the first to go, then my legs, and now my eyes are leaving me. But I am still remembering. I am remembering when I used to bake rusks for you and the madam’s teatime and you would sit on the stoep and leave one for your mother if she came.”
“I remember.” If my mother did not come to claim her rusk, none of us ate it. Instead, I would crumble it and feed it to the chickens.
“It was a good place, my madam’s farm.”
“Did you ever go back?” I ask. “After, you know . . .”
“They locked me up for a very long time,” she recalls, shaking her head. “Many seasons went by, till I thought the ancestors would come and fetch me from that place. And then one day the man with all the keys said I was free to go. So I went to the farm, but they told me the madam had died in the winter. I was very sad I did not say goodbye to her.”
Beauty tells me stories about my grandmother, mostly how she was after Oupa had left. The Christmas my grandmother bought Beauty a subscription to Fairlady, the country’s leading women’s magazine, and Beauty, in gratitude, covered each issue with brown paper to preserve it, but, as an illiterate, could not read a word of it. The time she had Beauty come into her bedroom and try on all her Sunday dresses that could no longer circumscribe her uncorseted waist. After Beauty had made her selection, my grandmother insisted she wear the prettiest and then drove her to the seaside village of Hermanus for afternoon tea in the poshest establishment. Even though the government had recently relaxed the Group Areas Act, everyone gave them harsh looks nonetheless, which my grandmother mulishly ignored.
“The madam was very good to me,” Beauty concludes.
“Yes, and you were very good to her. Actually, to all of us.” She shakes her head and I ask, “Tell me, do you still throw the bones?”
“Oh no, I cannot see where they land!” She laughs. “No, but I am teaching the one over there.” She flicks her head to where the niece is listening at the door. “She is going to be a better sangoma than me one of these days.”
Our tea gone, the rusks eaten, the reminiscing over, there seems nothing more to say. Beauty seems to recede, as though retrieving the memories has been a physically challenging act. If Delia asks, I will tell her it was a pleasant visit. I will not tell her I had hoped for something more, for Beauty to have somehow been the door through which I could revisit the last summer of my youth. I get up and carefully scoop the crumbs from my lap into my hand and dust them into the mug.
“I should be getting back and let you get your rest,” I announce.
“Be a good girl and hand me my knitting,” she says, pointing to the box in the corner. I can’t be sure, but when I lean over to pick up the ball of yarn, protruding from it appears to be the very same knitting needles my grandmother once bought for her. These same needles that had paused when my father insulted Beauty on the porch all those years ago. Suddenly I am breathless with shame at the memory of it.
“Beauty,” I say, placing the bundle on her lap, “I am so sorry for how he treated you.” And she knows exactly to whom I am referring.
“I am sorry for you, klein miss, and your mother.” She feels for the needles, and runs her hand over the stitches as though she were stroking a cat. “He was a bad man.”
“Yes, he was. My mother should have left him. I could never understand why she didn’t; why she left me and not him. Your children are your blood. You will do anything for them, even die for them, don’t you think?”
“You think your mother was weak. But your mother was a warrior, a clever warrior.” Slowly, deliberately, she spears the row of stitches with the point of one needle and winds the yarn around the other as if to throttle it. “The Boers were stupid; they always thought it was the assegai, Shaka’s spear, they needed to be afraid of,” she continues.
One purl.
Vaguely I recall a ninth-grade history lesson on the Anglo-Zulu War, but its relevance is lost on me now. “I don’t see what this has to do with my mother.”
Beauty nods to herself. “Your mother knew what the impi knew: the Boer cannot fight what he does not see.”
One plain.
“I’m sorry.” I frown. “I’m still not following
you.”
“Your father was a Boer, klein miss,” she says, looking up, “and your mother fed him from the tip of Shaka’s spear.”
One purl.
The niece, who has participated in the conversation thus far only by casting her shadow from the doorway, interjects harshly. “Aikona, Ma!” Although I do not understand what she goes on to say, the cautionary tone is unmistakable.
Beauty nods slowly. “Nontlé is telling me it is getting late, and my tongue is doing too much running. I am sorry. It is time for you to go.”
But Beauty has opened the door, has given me a look at a woman I barely recognize. “Beauty, please! Go on!” Around her wrist I wind my fingers as though she were a stubborn child I could drag to a place she does not wish to go. Pulsing from her wrist, through the vise of my hand, comes a tremor, shaking my memories like teacups from a toppling hutch.
“I am an old woman now. It has been many, many rains since I was living at Sunup; they have washed away my memories.”
“That’s not true! You do remember! Tell me! Tell me what you know about my mother that I don’t know. She talked to you; I saw it, every time she came to the farm. You and she had secrets.” Flashing in my mind is the money in the envelope my mother set aside for Beauty, the tins she said were for her nerves, the vial in the bread box. “What was she doing with that stuff you gave her? Was she getting high? Was my father getting high?” and as I say it comes the urge to scrub the idea, the way my mother had scrubbed my hands at the faucet behind the kaia. The way you scrub to get off germs, or blood. Or poison.
