by Neely Tucker
He grunted.
Then, out of the blue, the birth certificate came through a few days later—but only, it turned out, because Stella happened to be traveling in the region where Chipo had been found and stopped in the local Social Welfare office on business. She saw several forms waiting to be mailed back to Harare, one of them with Chipo’s name on it. She drove all of the forms in personally.
The next week, our entire file went missing, and we began to understand what the theory of “actively discourage” meant in practice.
“Lost it?” I said to Munautsi. This time I was the angry one. “How can you lose the entire file? Don’t you keep a copy of anything?”
Munautsi said he had sent our case to the file room and now they couldn’t find it. Without the file, there was nothing he could do. He didn’t seem too upset about it.
When I asked him what I should do, he said, “Wait. Maybe we’ll find it.”
This was disaster, absolute pinwheeling disaster. Without a file, our case went back to square one. We had a notarized copy of our foster custody papers, and we had copies of the whole sheaf of papers we had submitted—marriage license, our birth certificates, proof of employment, work permit and so on—but the department was not bound to accept any of it. They had no copies of our home studies or of her birth certificate. Really, there wasn’t any legal proof that Chipo even existed.
We had to get that damn file back. We put Chipo to bed, as she could sleep through the night now, and sat up for hours, yet another bottle of wine on the table between us. The situation in the country was getting worse. The U.S. embassy was of no use with something like this; their involvement would only make things worse. I couldn’t ask friendly government officers in Zimbabwe to make a phone call for fear it would backfire. My source in the department couldn’t intervene, at risk of being charged with taking some sort of bribe.
We discussed strategy, even argued about it heatedly. We considered personalities within the department. We discussed the names, races, and genders of the best lawyers in town, and how those might come into play for or against us, should we choose to retain them in a lawsuit.
In the end, we cut to the chase. We hit ’em with Vita.
She walked into the building the next day, avoiding Munautsi’s office, and talked to the female clerical staff. It is a social stigma in Zimbabwean society for a woman not to be a mother. Vita, childless in her forties, was a figure of great pity. She wasn’t Zimbabwean, but with her short physique, full figure, and dark skin, she could have passed for Shona. When we had first moved to Harare, women would ask her about her children, and she would reply that she didn’t have any. They invariably sighed, dropped their eyes, and said, “Shame, shame.” So when she went into the office that day, she played the last card we had.
“I can’t have a baby,” she told the women quietly. “I only have Chipo. But now her file is lost.”
Moved, they took her behind the counter and down the aisle, where they threw open a door. The file room.
Some of it was organized. Most of it was not. Thousands of folders were dumped on the floor, strewn over shelves, stacked on counters. There were still file folders marked “Property of the Rhodesian Government.” They located the most recent years, sat down, and handed a stack to Vita. Together, they all started sorting through files. Hundreds of folders went by, then thousands. Vita was in jeans, on her hands and knees, going over stack after stack of files. They searched all morning with no success. They picked it up in the afternoon, and again wound up with nothing. Late in the afternoon of the next day, a woman called out, “Eh-Eh! Mama Chipo! Eh-eh!” She was smiling, delighted. She held Chipo’s file. Everyone let out a cheer. Vita hugged them all. Then she left.
One of the women waited to make sure Vita was gone, then took the file to Munautsi’s office. She placed it on his desk, front and center. The next day, I stopped in and asked, with a furrowed brow, if that darn file had ever turned up.
“Yeah,” he said.
He didn’t appear to be particularly thrilled. I didn’t particularly care.
I walked out of the office, turned the corner, and gave the air a double pump with a clenched fist. “Boom, baby!” I shouted.
It felt as though we were in some sort of tennis match, a duel of serve and volley, and we had just laced a cross-court winner. The bribery allegation, the delays in getting the emergency placement order, the lost references, the lost police clearance, the lost file—whop! bap! slice! We returned them all and were still in the match. Perhaps it sounds silly, but these sorts of battles consumed our lives, a roller coaster of political tension and bureaucratic drama. Getting that file back, whether Munautsi meant to lose it or just did, felt like we had just won a set point at center court. The resulting burst of energy sent us bouncing around town as though we were in some sort of pinball machine. Munautsi allowed me to make a copy of Chipo’s birth certificate, of which I again made five copies and had each notarized as a “true copy,” signed by the department head, Tony Mtero, himself. I returned one of those to Munautsi and kept the original. He didn’t notice, and we had one more point in our favor. With the original birth certificate I could apply for Chipo’s passport on my own. That office, in the same complex of buildings as the Social Welfare office, worked like a dream. If you paid the service fee of $75—a whopping amount in local terms—you could have your passport in forty-eight hours. Vita took Chipo to the photo studio, held her steady on a high stool, and ducked out of the way when the flash went off. I took that portrait of a startled Chipo, a completed application, and the cash to the passport office on a Friday morning. Monday afternoon, I was holding a green Zimbabwean passport, complete with a national identity number. Now we had the documents necessary to file a request over at the U.S. embassy, just a few blocks away, for her visa into the United States.
It was in the midst of this, when the Southern Hemisphere brings the midwinter chill of June and July, when the air grows cold after dark and you need a sweater to keep warm, that we got our biggest break yet. We heard of a foreign national, a Canadian, who had just adopted. Somebody mentioned this to Vita at one gathering or another, but all they knew was her first name and that she worked at the Canadian embassy. Vita was on the phone the next morning, asking at the switchboard for anybody named Beth. A moment later a woman’s voice came on the line and, after an apology for prying into her personal affairs, Vita asked if she was adopting a child. Yes, she said, a little startled to hear the question from a stranger. Vita explained our circumstance, and Beth agreed to meet her after work.
“You just wouldn’t believe the hassles,” Beth said when they sat down together. “They stonewall, stonewall, stonewall. They seemed to act like I was some sort of criminal. And then I just got sick of it. I told them my posting was coming to an end and that I was leaving. They got busy then, and actually started to do the paperwork. It just got approved. I’m out of here.”
Beth had a couple of advantages we didn’t—her status at the embassy gave her a diplomatic cachet we lacked, and she had not been declared to be an enemy of the state. Still, hers was the only success story we knew, and it greatly influenced us to push deadlines whenever possible.
The date for our scheduled home leave was within days, the one Munautsi had told us would be “no trouble” reaching, and we still had no approval letter from the department to make the trip. Morris Thompson, Knight Ridder’s foreign editor, wrote a letter to the department assuring them of our return to the country. It landed with a thud. The date for departure came and went. We rebooked the tickets and I went to see the provincial magistrate, Mr. Mano (I never knew his first name). I offered him my assurances that Chipo would be returned, handing him copies of the letters from my editors. I even offered to put up a cash bond.
He was slightly puzzled by my appearance in his office—the Social Welfare office had never put our request on his desk—but he said it all seemed reasonable to him. He was a man of his word. He signed the authorization
letter within days. I couldn’t help but marvel when I saw it. We had spent five months to get a plain sheet of paper with three lines typed on it. It said we could take Chipo out of the country for a trip, and it was signed, dated, and stamped. It wasn’t even on letterhead. I could knock off a copy in fifteen minutes or less.
That wasn’t going to be necessary, as it turned out. Vita came home from another trek to the U.S. embassy a few days later, honking the horn as she pulled in the driveway. She jumped out of the car and came in the house.
“Lookit this,” she said, tossing Chipo’s passport on the couch where I was sitting.
I flipped it open. There was Chipo’s visa. “Great, great,” I said.
“No,” she insisted, “look at it.”
I opened it again, perplexed. I looked it over carefully, reading it aloud, and then I nearly dropped it.
It was a multiple-entry visa, with an expiration date of 2008. Chipo could go back and forth into the United States, whenever she liked for as long as she liked, for the next nine years.
It took me a minute to get a word out. “How did you do it?” I finally managed.
Vita was laughing, dancing around the room.
“I didn’t,” she said. “I applied for a single entry. That’s what I got back.”
I smiled, then thew up both hands. “Touchdown!”
Either someone at the consular offices had just made a mistake—and it seemed unlikely they would make a nine-year error for a two-foot-high toddler—or someone in there knew of our situation and had just tossed us a valentine.
I never asked.
16
HOUSE OF ECHOES
IT WAS THREE days later that I called Peter Ndarowa, a taxi driver who had driven us around town so much that he was somewhere between a steady employee and a family friend, to give us a ride to the airport. There were heavy bags and packed suitcases, but none of them was mine. Vita and Chipo were going. I was staying behind. It wasn’t exactly a bait-and-switch operation, but it was in our best interest for Vita and Chipo to be out of the country as long as possible. I was going on home leave, just as I told the Department of Social Welfare, but I never said we were all traveling together. The fact was, my leave was finished, and I had to get back to work. I would take the trip home in two or three months on regular vacation time, as I was calling in every chit I had earned over the past six years.
Meanwhile, Vita and Chipo would be at my parents’ house in rural Mississippi, or at her sister Kathie’s in Detroit. Their lengthy stay was not quite the risk it might seem, for we long had noticed that while social workers had been poring over our files and records for a year—or just ignoring them—they had never asked to see Chipo. It was odd. There was no document about Vita or me that was too arcane for inspection—for example, they had our marriage certificate but demanded that Vita produce evidence that her first husband had actually died. Persuading Health Department workers in the city of Detroit to issue a death certificate for a citizen who had died years before, via a satellite telephone call from sub-Saharan Africa, and then convincing them to mail a certified copy of the same to Harare, Zimbabwe is not a task for the faint of heart. But it can be done, and was, and the document was placed on the appropriate desk. But nobody—and I mean nobody—ever asked to see the object of this whole process. They never asked us to bring Chipo in for an evaluation; they never checked to see if she was bonding to us or even if she might have been abused in some way. They did not ask to see her health card, her schedule of immunizations, or any proof that we were taking her for checkups. After the foster hearing, they didn’t ask to see her at all. How is Chipo? they would ask. Fine, we would say. Chipo could have been summering in St. Tropez for all anyone knew.
In fact, Chipo was summering on a farm near Starkville, Mississippi, not exactly what you would call tourist country. The series of plane flights was torturous for Vita and Chipo—Harare south to Johannesburg, then back north to London, then to Atlanta, then to Mississippi. By the time they boarded the transatlantic flight, Chipo was so sleepless and irritable, and Vita so visibly exhausted, that a couple of women in the row ahead of her insisted on holding Chipo for a few hours.
“You look exhausted, sister,” one of them said. “And we’re at thirty-five thousand feet. It’s not like we’re going anywhere with her.”
Vita conceded this was so, and slept.
The last leg of the trip, from Atlanta to northeast Mississippi, is an hourlong hop on a prop plane. After a brief stint in the clouds heading west, the plane glides down over a series of lakes and pastures just outside of a town called Columbus, turns south to pass over a four-lane highway, and lands on a runway next to a field of soybeans. The plane had not yet taxied to a stop when Vita, Miss Big City Girl, found herself wondering how she was going to spend a couple of months out here with white people she barely knew. She tried to imagine how many black women, in the entire history of Detroit, had married white men from Mississippi and spent two months down on the family farm, complete with African child in tow. She looked at her hand and figured she had plenty of fingers to spare.
Duane and Betty were waiting inside the tiny airport building, perhaps a little nervous about the visit too but delighted to see Chipo and Vita again. Driving into Starkville, past the long row of gas stations and fast-food restaurants that lined the main drag, Vita’s sense of unease returned. But by the time they got out to my parents’ small, quiet farm—they had sold off the livestock years ago—she began to find it peaceful. She and my mother chatted easily, and my old man was so enchanted with Chipo that he had built her a swing on the back porch even before she got there. He had been a stern to terrorizing figure when I was growing up, maybe five foot six and two hundred pounds, all muscle, bone, and gristle, gruff and demanding. He was still a solidly built, barrel-chested man, though his hair was graying and his knees were giving out on him, and he was a buttercup with his only grandchild. He helped her into the special seat, buckled her in, tickled her under the chin, and then pushed her back and forth in the shade of the late afternoon. Vita wasn’t sure who had the bigger smile, him or Chipo.
A couple of days after they arrived, Vita and my mother took Chipo to the doctor’s office for a rigorous exam. Chipo wobbled into the clinic in downtown Starkville like a trouper. She stepped on the scales, stuck her tongue out when she was supposed to, and howled like a banshee when they drew a small sample of blood. The tests confirmed our wildest hopes—she was just fine. She was twenty-three pounds and twenty-nine inches long, which was small for American children, but she was walking now, climbing over everything in the house.
She didn’t have much of a vocabulary, but one of her favorite things to say was “Hello,” usually blared out like a little foghorn. She was delighted at a word that always drew an identical response. She would call it out during breakfast, playing on the back porch, or eating ice cream after dinner. It was during these evenings, with no one but family for miles around, that she and my old man began to form their own relationship. She couldn’t say “Granddaddy,” so she called him “Big Daddy,” which came out sounding like one word, “Bidadn.”
Chipo would give an “oof!” or “unfh!” going up and down steps or picking up something in the living room after dinner. Pop would repeat those grunts each time she made them. “Oof,” Chipo would say, attempting to climb onto a chair. “Ooofff,” my old man would mimic from his chair. She would turn her head and look at him, suspiciously at first, then give another grunt. He did it again. She did it louder. He did it louder. And then she was giggling, and they would do it back and forth, nose to nose.
“Oofff!”
“Oooofffff!”
“Duane,” my exasperated mother called out from the kitchen, “don’t you teach my grandbaby to grunt.”
As the weeks passed, with Vita learning to watch rodeo on cable with my father after dinner (“It’s not like there are viewing options,” she would mutter over the phone), he noticed something odd about his dau
ghter-in-law: She stayed awfully close to the house. With the livestock gone and the fences pulled down, there was now a large, well-kept backyard, huge shade trees, some open pasture, and miles of woods stretching beyond them. With this freedom at her disposal, Vita would scarcely go off the back porch. And when she discovered there were deer that would come into the yard at night, eating flowers or the feed my father left out for them in a bucket, she became resolute—she wasn’t going anywhere out there.
My father thought this was a hoot, a grown-up who was frightened of deer. I confess I did too. “Honey,” I’d say in a phone call, “articulate to me what it is you think the deer are going to do. What, you come out of the house and they rush you? Push you in a corner and take your lunch money?”
She wasn’t moved, though she would laugh about it. “I’m not going out in those woods to mess around. They stay out there, I’ll stay in here.”
But she was also surprised to find how comfortable she felt in rural Mississippi. It was a different but familiar feel to black life, she said, sounding as though she couldn’t quite believe what she was saying. “A lot of white people in Mississippi are a lot more like black people than they realize,” she said. “Maybe it’s just country southern culture and I’m not used to it. But did you know your mama made greens and corn bread for dinner the other night? And fried catfish? That’s what my mother cooked. I didn’t know white people ate like that. And church is a lot different, but it’s still Baptist and everybody sits out front and talks and gossips afterward, and it seems to play the same sort of central role in everyone’s life. The respect people have for their grandparents, their elders, is like black people too, in an old-school way.”
