Diamond Boy

by Michael Williams

  Slowly he lifted his head. He stared through us, with a black hollowness in his eyes. Then he pulled Grace into his arms and hugged her fiercely. “It’s okay, Gracie. I’m fine. This is just temporary, just a temporary setback.”

  “That’s all you have in the end,” said the old woman, sipping the smelly broth from her pot. “Your children. Mmm. You’re a lucky man. All I got is a boy who’s dead already. Dying every day. The sickness. Mmm. But I’ve got food for him tonight. That’s good. You want a taste?”

  I lifted my father up off the floor, picked up his briefcase, and together we left the foyer, stepping into fresh air and blazing sunshine.

  “Who were those women, Baba?” asked Grace.

  “Washerwomen, Grace, washerwomen,” replied my father, loosening his tie and slipping off his jacket.

  “You forgot this,” I said, raising his briefcase, wanting to hand him back his dignity.

  “Yes, thank you. You are a good son,” he said. “I won’t need that anymore.”

  My world tilted. It was unimaginable that my father would give up his briefcase.

  “Baba?” prompted Grace, but our father was somewhere beyond hearing.

  We walked on in silence, Grace holding his hand, and me his briefcase. I didn’t want to ask the obvious question, but it tumbled out after the silence became unbearable.

  “What are we going to do now, Baba?”

  I dreaded he might say we would return to Bulawayo or that he would search for another job as a teacher. But my father’s answer, which came quietly, and in his characteristically calm manner, was completely unexpected. “We’re going to become diamond miners, son. That’s what you want, isn’t it? That’s what Sylvia and Uncle James want. Diamonds for everyone and when we have enough money, we’ll go to Harare. I’ll find a teaching job there. You can finish school, go to university. We’ll get us a nice house and all will be fine again. Yes, it will. All will be fine.” He gripped my hand far more tightly than I imagined he could. “This is only a temporary setback. We mustn’t be downhearted. No, not at all. There is opportunity here, for us all.”

  They might have been the words I wanted to hear, but somehow they sounded all wrong coming from my father.

  It cost my father a great deal of pride to ask Uncle James if he and his family could join the Banda syndicate. He must have known that in Uncle James’s eyes he was now no better than those who begged for work. Asking to join the syndicate was an admission that he had failed to provide for his family, a thing every Shona man saw as his duty as head of the household. I think my father must have felt that for a man who had been to university, worked in a professional occupation, digging in the dirt was a humiliating end to his career.

  When we returned to Kondozi Farm, my father sat on the edge of the couch, his back book-straight, his hands covering both his knees, while Uncle James drank beer and watched the television. He took a deep breath before he raised the issue, and true to character, used far too many words.

  “I was wondering, James, whether you might consider me useful in your mining operation. I don’t want to be an imposition, but if there was a role that I might be able to play, it would be greatly appreciated.” He should have stopped there, but instead he felt it necessary to display his book knowledge, which I knew counted for nothing in this family. “I have been reading extensively on the extraction methods of alluvial mining, which I would be happy to share with you and implement in the field. Or perhaps as a bookkeeper. I’m quite competent with figures.”

  I was embarrassed for him, ashamed too. Why couldn’t he ask straight-out what he wanted? He spoke so earnestly, like a schoolboy asking permission to leave the classroom. Kuda and Prisca exchanged knowing glances and I squirmed at how silent the room became as all eyes turned to Uncle James to see how he would respond.

  “You’d like to work for me?” Uncle James considered him blankly, giving nothing away.

  My father swallowed. “Yes. If you think there might be a place for me.”

  The Wife’s response was typical. “What took you so long to see what everyone else could, Joseph?” She raised her eyebrows and then added, with a glint of triumph in her eyes, “That’s what I always said you should do.”

  “That is the best decision you have ever made. You won’t be sorry, Mr. Teacher, and you can start demonstrating your extraction methods tomorrow,” Uncle James said, mocking my father’s words. “Now, Jamu and Patson, come here.” He gripped our forearms and pushed us together until our shoulders touched. “Do you want to become a miner, Patson?”

  I could see the stones back in my hand again but this time they were sparkling, bright with promise. Without thinking, I nodded. “Yes, Uncle James. I want to be a miner.”

  “Patson,” my father interrupted, and when I turned to him I saw his face was stricken, his brow furrowed.

  “And you will teach me in the evenings, Baba. I promise you I will not abandon my schoolwork.”

  “It’s a man’s work,” said Uncle James, ignoring my father’s interruption and gripping my arm.

  “I’m not afraid to be a man.”

  “We shall see, boy, we shall see. Jamu, I want you to show this prince-cousin of yours around the mines and teach him everything I taught you,” he commanded. “And, Patson, I’m expecting great things from you. I think you’ve got the eye. You will be proud of your son, Joseph, wait and see. Now you two will be friends. Yes?”

  Jamu smiled lamely at me as I offered him my hand. We shook solemnly. This was the way things worked in the Banda family. No one disobeyed James Banda.

  Marange

  Kondozi Farm

  20 February

  I’m in bed writing by the light of my phone. Jamu’s snoring. The farmhouse is quiet; outside crickets chirp. I don’t know if my father is disappointed or pleased with me. All day he listened to the Banda family, but didn’t say much. He seemed a hundred miles away, and then, after everyone had gone to bed, I heard the Wife telling him that he should be more grateful to Uncle James. She’s never satisfied.

  Today I held three thousand US dollars in my hand! I don’t understand why my father doesn’t want me to become a miner. If we had three thousand US dollars he could do whatever he liked. He wouldn’t have to sit in front of Uncle James like a schoolboy. If he had money he wouldn’t have his wife on his back the whole time. What is wrong with having plenty of money? Money makes things happen; money makes you feel good about yourself. It can buy you knowledge and respect; it can inspire you to do good things for others. When I leave the mines, I’m going to be rich and I will show my father that I can be a man.

  Tomorrow—the mines of Marange.

  MINING

  My introduction to the diamond fields began the very next morning. Jamu took his responsibility seriously, and I didn’t mind playing Wide-Eyed-Dumb-Pupil to his Mister Know-It-All Teacher. If I wanted to find diamonds, I would need to know everything I could about mining and I didn’t care who I learned it from.

  “There are three main mining areas in Marange—PaMbada, Mafukose Munda, and Banda Hill,” Jamu said as we struck out, running through the empty furrows of a long-forgotten tobacco field. “Let’s start at PaMbada. Yah, I know you don’t know what that means. But if you’re going to fit in here, Patson, you’re going to have to learn a bit of miners’ slang. We use a whole new language on the mines. The quicker you learn it, the sooner you’ll fit in. PaMbada means ‘where the leopard hunts’ and it was where the first girazi was found.”

  Ten minutes later we had scrambled up a small rise and looked down at another hill carved into chaos by a thousand pairs of hands.

  “PaMbada is run by the Mazezuru syndicate,” explained Jamu, clambering up a pile of gravel to get a better view. “The Banda and Mazezuru syndicates are the two biggest ones in Marange.”

  “How does a syndicate work?”

  “People who trust each other work together. They protect one another and they all share the profits.”

  It
wasn’t long before I saw a pattern emerging at the foot of the hill occupied by an army of ant-people: Pickaxes, shovels, and iron rods dug into the hill; sacks of ore went to small pools of water; sieves washed the ore and the waste was discarded on mounds.

  “You see that man down there?” Jamu pointed toward a stool with a red umbrella. “That is Alfred Mazezuru. The man next to him is a policeman. All the sacks of ore are sieved in front of them. Any ngodas they find are supposed to be shared with everyone working in the syndicate. If you find a girazi, you get a larger share than anyone else.”

  “Nobody steals them?”

  “Some people try but if they get caught they get beaten up.”

  “And the policeman?”

  “He gets his share. When the police started guarding the diamond fields they could easily be bribed with a pack of cigarettes or a can of beer, but now they want more. Mazezuru is lucky. His policeman is a family member. If he weren’t there, they would all be working at night.”

  “I thought the police were here to stop illegal diamond mining?”

  “Huh! That’s a joke. They’re making thousands of US dollars out of our work. My father says they’re supposed to guard the mines, but there are too many miners and too few of them. Remember, you can never trust a policeman; he will cut you open for a diamond. Where there’s a policeman’s boot, there’s always money,” he said, pursing his lips and sounding exactly like his father; then he lifted his hand against the glare to scan the hillside. There must have been more than two hundred miners—men, women, and children—working the side of the hill, yet Jamu spotted exactly the one he was looking for. “There’s Musi,” he said, pointing to a group of men violently pounding their iron bars into the side of the hill. “You’d better watch out for him. He’s got a mean temper. He said you ratted on him. Did you?”

  I studied the group of men working in rhythm, the chime of metal against rock echoing across the valley. I couldn’t pick out Musi. “No. I didn’t, but your brother did try to rob us.”

  Jamu’s face hardened. “I think he must have shat in his pants when he realized it was Boubacar with you. Nobody messes with him.”

  I wasn’t exactly sure if Jamu was talking about Boubacar or Musi, but it was clear that Jamu feared Musi as much as his father. Where Musi was tall and muscular, Jamu was short and plump. As the son of the junior wife, life must have been hard for him. His strategy for survival seemed to be to please everybody and most particularly anyone who could do him harm.

  “Come on, I want to take you to the Live Show,” he said as we skidded down the gravel heap.

  “What’s that?”

  “People who are brave enough to work the mines during the day. They don’t have enough money to bribe the police, so they have to take their chances. Come on, you’ll see.”

  “Are you really a prince?” Jamu asked as we walked through the blazing heat, trampling the tall grass on our way up another hill. Below us a brown river snaked around the bend, disappearing into the forest.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Auntie Sylvia says you’re a prince. She said she married into a royal family.”

  I had to laugh at the Wife’s ability to polish a half-truth into a gleaming lie. I climbed up the rock and sat down beside him. In the distance the valley was green and lush, but below us brown patches of barren, dry land marked the miners’ territory.

  “Well, I guess I’m sort of a prince but it doesn’t mean anything to anybody,” I said, wondering how to explain my complicated family.

  “She made it sound as if one day your father would inherit a kingdom,” he said, flinging a stone into the air.

  I watched it tumbling, bouncing, and skipping down the hillside. “That’s sort of true, but not really. My father is from the Lozi tribe. His father was a chief and had only one son. They were wealthy farmers, lots of cattle, with lots of land,” I explained. “If my father returned to his village, he would have to sit on the king’s council and be responsible for overseeing the traditional lands. But when he married my mother there was a problem. His family didn’t want him to move to the city to become a teacher and, more than that, I think, they didn’t want him to marry my mother.”

  I still wasn’t comfortable enough with Jamu to tell him about the trouble my mother’s totem had caused. When my mother was still alive, and I would ask my father why we never visited his family, he would only sigh, slide his glasses onto his head, and run his hand over his face. It was as if he were wiping away a bad memory.

  “You explain it to him this time,” my mother had said. “He wants to hear it from you, Joseph.”

  “Patson, come here,” said my father. “Now, what have you learned about how people came to this earth?”

  Like every other eight-year-old Shona boy, I knew the answer to that question. “All life came from the Great Pool,” I said, sitting on his lap. “And the Shona people divided themselves into clans, which are represented by totems. Some totems are animals and other totems are parts of the human body,” I recited.

  “Yes, that’s right. And what is the Moyo totem?”

  “The heart.”

  “Good. Moyo means emotion, soul, or spirit and—”

  “I know, Baba, you don’t need to tell me,” I had said, eager to impress him. “Moyo is also the title for kings or queens. A ruler.”

  “Literarily speaking, the Moyo is the soul and spirit of the palace, Patson. But you are correct and you get full marks. Now, who can a Moyo not marry?”

  “Those people belonging to the lion totem—the Shumba. That’s you, Amai. Right?”

  And my mother smiled at this conversation she had heard a hundred times and, reaching for me from my father’s lap, she folded me into her arms. “That’s right, my little lion. You are a half-and-half. And that’s a good thing,” she added cheerfully, kissing my father.

  “The best thing that ever happened to us,” said my father, stroking her cheek.

  I remember seeing them together, the two most important adults in my life, and feeling strangely excluded. It was as if I lacked the essential password to understand the secret smile that passed between them. I suppose like all children, I was having a hard time imagining them as independent people and not parents serving the needs of my universe.

  “Then I am a lion-heart,” I announced with pride, wriggling between them, jealous of their affection for each other. I remember so clearly how I’d made my father laugh and how he’d encircled us both with his long, strong arms.

  The memory hurt.

  It was sometime later I learned the other reason my father’s family disapproved of his marriage. My mother’s family was poor. How could a Moyo, a university graduate, a future chief, marry into a family that lived on the outskirts of a poor village? When my mother died, I stopped asking my father these questions, and he stopped talking about how much they had loved each other. There didn’t seem to be any point to it, especially when, just two years after my mother was laid in the ground, he married the Wife.

  I picked up a stone and stood to hurl it into the sky. I watched its trajectory as it looped downward and bounced off the rocks below, splintering into a hundred pieces.

  “How did your mother die?” asked Jamu.

  “In a road accident.”

  A head-on collision with a bus on a dark country road; a phone call that broke my father.

  “How old were you?”

  “Ten.”

  “So it wasn’t long ago?”

  I didn’t want to talk about my mother. Not here. Not now. And not to someone whom I had only known for a day or so.

  “Yah, I think I get it,” said Jamu after a moment.

  How could you? I thought. You’ve got two mothers. How could you possibly understand?

  “I didn’t know what to expect, from a prince. Auntie Sylvia said—”

  “She makes things up to impress people. Like how we got here. None of that stuff was true. Boubacar did it all. We would have been l
ost without him. She was peeing in her pants the whole way.”

  He looked sideways at me and I thought I had gone too far. The Wife, after all, was his aunt, but then he laughed. “Yah, she tells a good story, that one. I can imagine she must have smelled pretty awful when you got here,” he said, grinning.

  So the Wife hadn’t fooled Jamu, I thought, as we continued to climb to the summit.

  Jamu pointed at a large, barren stretch of land dotted with people working in the dirt. “That’s Mafukose Munda. Munda means a crop field, but down there, harvesting diamonds is the only crop they know. They say this place is as big as the township outside of Harare. Welcome to the field of dreams.”

  Mafukose Munda was crawling with people. Everywhere you looked, miners were sifting through sand, walking with sacks of ore on their shoulders, stepping out of craters and pits, or tunneling shallow trenches into the ground. The sun pounded down on a land stripped of all trees and bushes, and the heat was like being licked by the hot tongue of a fire. Every miner wore either a cap, head cloth, or floppy hat, and all were powdered in a fine gray dust. They looked like pilgrims of some religious sect searching for the stone that would change their lives forever.

  We walked freely through the open Mafukose mine and I stared at mothers cradling their nursing babies with one arm and sifting sand with their free hand, at small children crouched over baskets, raking their little fingers through stones, and at an old man scratching through a pile of gravel shaded by his sieving basket. The deep pits were all carved by these men and women, the ridges flattened and shaped by their feet, and the large mounds had grown from thousands of baskets of soil they had carried on their shoulders. For in every hole they dug, every pile of gravel they searched or sack they carried, was the promise of a very different future.

  I remembered those ghostly columns of miners rising out of the ground on the night we arrived in the fields: the zombielike creatures sifting through sand by candlelight. And to think I’d been so afraid of them that night, but now, in the harsh light of the day, they were nothing more than poor, desperate people.