When the Ground Is Hard

by Malla Nunn

  Don’t stray from the road, Mother warns me when we leave our house in Manzini, and I never have. Till now.

  “That’s Mama Khumalo’s place.” Lottie jerks her chin in the direction of a hut built in a clearing. A tall, dark-skinned Swazi woman with angular features and a wide, smiling mouth stirs a pot of maize beer in the dirt yard. She greets Lottie in a familiar way and points to a grass mat under the shade of a corrugated iron lean-to attached to the hut. The lean-to is made from rusted iron sheets and wooden planks held together with mud.

  A group of Swazi children dressed in traditional animal skins and cast-off Western clothing stand outside the stones that mark the boundaries of Mama’s yard. They point and whisper at the stranger in their village: me. Lottie they already know. Far off in the distance, a woman sings in a field, and the sound tugs at my insides. The song reminds me of a favorite doll that I lost on the trek home from the markets in Manzini when I was little.

  Mama beams at Lottie, and they talk in Zulu, easy in each other’s company. I sit with my legs tucked to the side, as Lottie instructed, and wonder what they’re saying. I know just enough Zulu to tell the maid to wash the dishes and scrub the floor, but even then, I mime the actions so she understands.

  “Darnell comes and goes from the village, but Mama hasn’t seen him for days.” Lottie translates Mama’s words into English for me. “He’s not here.”

  Mama leans closer and becomes animated. She makes the shape of a gun with her fingers and pulls the trigger. Boom. One of the children, a girl with cornrowed hair, clutches her chest and falls to the ground, where she twitches her arms and legs while the other children shriek with laughter. Mama smiles, amused by their antics.

  “There was trouble on Bosman’s farm last night,” Lottie tells me after the girl gets up and dusts herself off. “Mama doesn’t know what started it, but they heard a gunshot blast and the dogs barked all night. She’s not worried for Darnell. Bosman and his sons shoot at shadows and Darnell knows every inch of these hills so he’s probably fine. We should go back to school, where it’s safe. She says to stay away from Bosman’s farm.”

  Good advice. It’s time to rejoin the main search before Mr. Moses discovers us missing and sends out a second wave of students to call our names into the wind.

  “That’s that.” I tell Lottie. “Time to go back.”

  “We can’t pick up and leave the moment we get what we want!” My suggestion horrifies her, as does my ignorance of the niceties of Swazi society. “It’s bad manners. We have to stay and talk. Take our time.”

  Mother says that our maid works on “Swazi time,” which has no relation to the chime of the hours on our clock in the lounge room. Swazi time is fluid. It shifts and flows, and often stops altogether. That’s why ordinary tasks take so long. It’s not the maid’s fault, Mother says. It’s how life unfolds in the country.

  “All right . . .” I tuck my legs close to my bottom so the soles of my feet don’t face Mama, which, Lottie earlier explained, would be an insult that implies the person sitting across the mat from me is a patch of dirt for me to walk over.

  Mama Khumalo stares at me a long time, and I smile to show that I’m comfortable in her presence and not a little bit afraid of being here. She makes a comment, and Lottie throws me a sharp look.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “She says you have your mother’s eyes,” Lottie says.

  Mama adds something else, and Lottie translates again: “A darker green but the same shape.”

  “What?” I either misheard Lottie or she got the translation wrong. Even Lottie is surprised. “How does she know my mother?”

  Lottie relays my question, and I hold my breath while I wait for the answer. Lottie and Mama have an animated exchange. Then Lottie turns to me.

  “Your mother’s mother was Agnes Dlamini from near the ‘Cross of Nazareth’ school,” Lottie tells me. “Your grandmother and Mama Khumalo’s mother were cousins. You’re related!”

  Years of training my face to hold the right expression fail me. The muscles in my face go slack. Heat stings my cheeks, and the tension in my throat makes it difficult to swallow. I’m shocked, and it shows. Mother is, in her own way, as mysterious to me as Father. I have never heard the name Agnes Dlamini before in my life.

  “My grandmother died a long time ago,” I say. Then I think about the information parceled out to me in isolated fragments over sixteen years: throwaway sentences on long walks into town, vague references to the place I was born, and how nothing is too big a word to describe how little we had, Adele. Our mixed blood was never a secret, but whenever I showed an interest in digging up our family history, Mother would say, My parents are dead, Adele. There’s nothing left to tell. Eventually, I stopped asking. Mother’s silence kept me silent.

  “Mama says, one day your granny Agnes was hoeing the cornfields, and the next day she was too sick to get out of bed. Your mother paid a doctor from the Norwegian hospital in Mahamba to come to the hut, but it was too late. That was fourteen years ago.” Lottie plucks at the hem of her school uniform, uncomfortable with giving me my own family history. “You were at your grandmother’s funeral.”

  That can’t be true. Mother would have said. I would have remembered. I am surprised to feel tears sting my eyes.

  Mama Khumalo shakes her head and makes a soft sound of apology for causing me distress. She can’t have imagined the depth of my ignorance, the ocean of not knowing that she’s thrown me into without warning.

  Mama continues her story, and Lottie tells me, “She says she’s sorry. Of course you don’t remember . . . You were young when Granny Agnes died, and your mother never returned to visit after the funeral. She chose to leave her cousins and the land. Now you are here, and it makes her happy.”

  Mama is pleased to see me, a long-lost relative, but I’m still reeling. Mother, Mummy . . . how many secrets have you hidden from me? How many memories have you kept bottled inside you? And why?

  “Are you all right?” Lottie asks, and it takes a long moment for me to answer.

  Polite Adele finds me. I smile and say, “I’m fine. I’m fine, really. I’m just . . . Tell Mama that I didn’t know about the funeral or Granny Agnes. Mother doesn’t talk about the past.”

  Lottie speaks for me and then gives me back Mama’s words. “She wants to know . . . is your mother still beautiful?”

  “She is,” I say. “And she sings beautifully.”

  Mama nods yes—she remembers Mother’s lovely voice—and I see in my mind’s eye a vision of my mother, young and barefoot under the same bright sky I sit under now. Mother, who now walks in high heels and wears short skirts, belongs to this valley and these hills, to this mat pulled into the shade of a lean-to.

  If I’d listened to my mother and stayed inside Keziah’s boundaries, her secrets would have remained hidden. Perhaps that’s why she warned me to never stray from the marked roads. I know a secret now, and the knowledge has shifted something deep inside of me.

  “Is your mother well?” Mama asks through Lottie.

  She’s done well, I want to say. We have carpet on the floors, and curtains on the windows, and when the bills come due, Mother has the money to pay them. No begging the landlord for an extension or fighting the hypermarket for a discount. When Father visits us, he walks through the front door as if he made promises to Mother in front of a preacher. That’s why the church ladies hate her. She sins boldly, and if those matrons “closer to the Lord” throw her a sour look across the pavement in town, she tells them to their faces, See what I have? Two lovely children and a man who comes back to me rain or shine. God doesn’t take sides. He loves you and me the same.

  Instead of saying all that, which is complicated, I tell Mama Khumalo that, “Mother lives well.”

  That makes Mama happy, and my smile relaxes, becomes more natural. Mother left her Swazi family behind, but Mam
a is, I think, proud of her cousin’s rise from deep in the country to the big town.

  “Of course, yes,” Lottie says, translating. “Mbali always had her eyes on the hills and what lay beyond them. And by God’s good grace she has arrived safe at that other place.”

  “Mbali?”

  “It means ‘flower.’ That was your mother’s Swazi name.”

  Manzini is eighty miles or so from where we sit in the shade, but the journey from a grass hut to a house with running water and porcelain angels on the shelf is much greater than any number of miles on a map. Some days, when the sun hides behind the clouds, Mother, who goes by the English name Rose, stays in bed till afternoon. Now I think I know why. How hard must the journey have been from here to there?

  “Mama has oranges.” Lottie’s happy to change the subject. “Will you stay a while and eat with her?”

  “Of course.” Seen from inside the window of a car or bus, Swazi compounds are remote, alien places that I thought I’d never visit and, if God be good, never eat a single mouthful of food in because breaking bread with native Swazis is the fastest way to backslide into blackness. Now I am here, face-to-face with the ghost of my mother’s past, and the new information has thrown me off balance.

  “I didn’t know. About your grandmother.” Lottie apologizes when Mama disappears into her hut to fetch the oranges. The children on the edge of the yard sense the appearance of food and inch closer.

  “I didn’t know about her either,” I say, and Lottie laughs.

  It’s funny. Me, stumbling into a Swazi relative two miles from a school that only enrolls mixed-race children who refuse to stand up for natives on the bus. Swaziland, a speck on the map of the British Empire, is not one country, but many, and even I have to laugh at how neatly each world excludes the other.

  “Here.” Mama Khumalo places a bowl of oranges in front of us, and a plate of “fat cakes,” glistening balls of deep-fried dough that children, including me, love to devour. “Eat.”

  I fall on a fat cake: a favorite food of bus drivers and maids, and white ladies with skinny lips and thick waists. Food is a bridge between worlds: it connects all Swazis. The fat cake is gone in two bites, and I lick my fingers, satisfied. Lottie peels an orange and asks Mama a question. Mama’s answer—a brisk nod—brings the children running to the mat.

  They swarm over us, hands out for pieces of orange and greasy fat cakes. A girl reaches over my shoulder, her warm body pressed against my back. Two boys slot between Lottie and me while another leans a hip against Lottie’s arm. The children eat and laugh, and brush against us like eels. Together, we are one hungry animal with speckled brown, black, and white skin.

  Mother left this closeness behind and I wonder if she’s tried to reproduce it in her own small way with Rian and me. When I’m home for the holidays, she combs and braids my hair every morning and tucks Rian and me into our beds every night. The tips of her fingers trace the line of an eyebrow and the tip of a nose before she kisses us good night. And when Father visits, she straightens his collar and keeps a hand on his knee or brushed lightly against his shoulder— always in physical contact.

  In the morning, Rian and I bring them breakfast in bed and climb under the warm sheets with them. Our clumsy movements lap the milk tea over the sides of the mugs and spill sugar from the bowl. Mother says that Father loves the way we all squash in together, with crumbs on the blankets and jammy fingerprints on the cutlery.

  Now, sitting in Mama Khumalo’s crowded yard, I realize that our family breakfasts in bed might be the closest thing that mother has to being back in her village.

  In Manzini, she has Rian and me and the weekly sound of Father’s voice on the end of the long-distance telephone line. Here, in the bush, she was part of a tribe.

  But it’s the wrong tribe if you live in Swaziland.

  22

  Deep Valley

  Covered in curious children and filled with fat cakes and oranges, I momentarily forget about Darnell and the shotgun blast on a strange man’s farm. This is my first proper visit to a Swazi village, and Mother would die to see my glorious backslide from an almost-European girl to a very-nearly-Swazi girl. I imagine Mother sprawled in the shade of the lean-to. My mother . . . who ate cold porridge with her fingers and washed in rivers. My mother . . . who now brings light into our house with the flick of a switch.

  “We can go now,” Lottie says when the last piece of orange is gone and the afternoon sun is high overhead. “If we get into trouble, we’ll say that we got lost.”

  “All right.” No one will believe that Lottie Diamond got lost in the bush, but they’ll believe it of Adele Joubert, who hates flies and mud, and always stays on the path.

  The children run to their games, and Mama holds both my hands in hers. I look at where we touch, her skin dark and mine lighter.

  “Hamba kahle.” Go well, she says in Zulu, and I mumble, “Sala kahle, Mama,” which means “Stay well,” and is one of the few non-English expressions that I’m able to speak with any confidence.

  Lottie takes us on a different path out of the village, and steep hills bank against the horizon in every direction. I swear that we came from the far side of the cornfields.

  “School’s the other way, isn’t it?”

  “This is a shortcut.” Lottie veers right onto an overgrown path that’s two hands wide. I hesitate, and she grins at me over her shoulder. “Trust me, Adele. We’ll be back at Keziah in fifteen minutes.”

  I don’t trust her. That’s the problem. She lacks my inbred fear of what might be hiding behind the rocks and in the tall grass. The land dips sharply, and I slip and slide behind Lottie, who is, like Darnell, part mountain goat. Stones kick from under my shoes, and the sun beats down on our heads. I keep my eyes on the ground, careful of snake holes and grass roots that might trip me and send me rolling down the incline into a narrow gorge. Time ticks by, and I lose track of it.

  “Almost there,” Lottie says. I don’t believe her. We’re in the boonies.

  The land evens out, and a grove of banana plants heavy with bunches of green fruit appears ahead of us. Lottie slips into the shade of the banana field and drops into a crouch. My jaw goes slack. I suddenly know exactly where we are. From the map. We are in danger.

  “Get out,” I snap. “Get out of there right now!”

  “Shh . . . the whole valley will hear you squealing.” Lottie holds out her hand to me like we’re at a church picnic and she has the only shady spot left for us to sit in. “Quick, before someone sees you.”

  I’m furious. Mama said that Darnell knows every inch of these hills and that he is probably fine. She told us to stay away from Bosman’s farm. The red lines on the food map in the cave also warned us, yet here we are, exactly where we are not supposed to be. Typical Lottie. And typical Adele . . . always the follower, never the leader. Just like when I was in Delia’s group. I am ignorant and gullible, and other choice words that Lottie read aloud to me from The Oxford Dictionary.

  “Come on, Adele.” She pours sugar on my name. “It’s safer in here. We won’t stay long. Just a quick look for Darnell. Cross my heart.”

  I snort in disbelief. What a liar.

  “And what happens if we find that Bosman has shot Darnell? Have you thought about that?”

  “We tell Mr. Vincent and Mr. Vincent will call the police constable.”

  “That is the stupidest plan in the world! I’m going back to school right this minute. I’ll tell Mr. Vincent about the gunshot blast and he’ll get the constable to check Bosman’s farm. You can do what you like.” I turn and show her my back, which is held stiff and tall in an effort to reclaim my dignity. Enough is enough. There are limits to my stupidity. Lottie Diamond can stay and reap the whirlwind of her own mischief. One of the children from the village will show me the fast way back to Keziah.

  I take quick steps on the craggy path, fur
ious at Lottie and furious at myself. New Adele is brave but not foolish. Grass roots catch my right shoe, and I throw my arms out to keep my balance. Too late. The sky tilts at a strange angle and I tumble off the path and down the incline. The world spins in violent circles. Dirt. Mountains. Bright-orange aloe flowers. Yellowed grass. I flip head over heels and come to a hard and painful stop. I taste blood in my mouth.

  * * *

  • • •

  It hurts to breathe, to move, to do anything but stare up at the perfect blue sky above me. No clouds or wind break the stillness of the valley floor. It is eerily quiet. Then noises return. The thump of my heartbeat. A cricket’s chirp. Birdsong and the muffled sound of Lottie calling my name from far away.

  “Adele. Adele. Say something, Adele.”

  My back aches, and I pray to heaven.

  Please, Jesus. Let me be whole or walk with a limp, but no more than that. I beg you.

  Mrs. Button’s niece, Charlotte Button, survived a head-on collision outside of Lavumisa two years ago. A miracle, the preacher said, except that now Charlotte’s a cripple. Now Charlotte sits on the front porch of her daddy’s house in her wheelchair and watches people walk to wherever their two legs wish to carry them. Mother has Rian and his asthma to take care of. I’d rather die than add to her burden.

  Stay with me, Jesus. The sky remains still, pale blue, and empty. Mother is right. Jesus is in London, working on more important matters.

  I turn my head from one side to the other, anticipating a cracking sound, or worse still, no movement at all. The sun beats down. Sweat stings my eyes. I’m in a narrow valley, surrounded by wild grass and smooth stones. Aloes stand sentinel on the ridge above me. My tongue swells in my mouth, but I’m alive: hurt, but all here.