This Thing Called the Future (6 page)

“Men!” Mama rages. “They think they can just get away with anything.”

“But what are we going to do, Elizabeth?” Gogo rocks back and forth on her chair, one of the legs wobblier than the others. “There are drunk men everywhere.”

“That is true. But
this
drunk man attacked our daughter.”

“Do we know this man, Khosi?” Gogo asks. “Do we know his family?”

I shake my head. “But lately, he is always at the tuck shop around the corner.”

“What is happening to us?” Gogo sips her tea and looks out the open
door, her eyes distant, seeing nothing in front of her. “In the past, it was always the men who protected the community. And now, they are the ones we must fear.”

She reaches out and grabs my hand, her eyes focusing on mine. “You must be careful, Khosi,” she says. “Not just with this man, but with every man, especially if they are drunk.”

I nod even though this is something I already know.

“I am not going to sit here and scold my girls to be more careful.” All Mama's anger gives her sudden energy. “Come with me, Khosi! We're going to pay this little coward a visit.”

She grabs my hand and, like two determined crazy women, we march out the door and down the street. Actually, Mama's the mad woman and I'm lagging behind, wishing I hadn't told her who attacked and robbed me.

“Don't go so fast, Mama.” I hope maybe she'll turn around and we'll go back to the house and pretend this never happened.

She glances at me, quick quick, then turns back to the road. “Why didn't you fight him off?” Her voice, demanding.

“I tried.” Now the tears are spilling down my face. Why is Mama blaming me for something I couldn't help? “He surprised me. I wasn't prepared.”

“Izzit?” She slows down so that I'm beside her. She reaches out with a rough hand and wipes the tears from my face. It stings where she touches me. “You didn't try hard enough,” she says.

“He was stronger than me,” I protest. “He was choking me!” I point to the red marks on my neck, where he held me with the crook of his arm.

Now she gets up in my face, fierce and unrelenting. “And next time, he could rape you or kill you. Is that what you want?”

There's nothing to say. I can't tell Mama that he had animal strength. So I just look at the dirt, to avoid Mama's accusing gaze.

“You
must
learn to notice what's going on around you and defend yourself.”

I open my mouth to protest, then remember how I
wasn't
noticing anything when he attacked me. I was just too happy about Little Man.

“Very soon, you are going to need more courage than ever before,” she says. She reaches out again and wipes more tears from my face, her touch still harsh but this time, there's a gentleness behind it. “Don't
ever
let yourself be a victim, Khosi.”

I wonder why Mama thinks I'm going to need courage? I'm too afraid to ask. And why is she blaming
me
for getting attacked? This is a new side to Mama.

The man is sitting on his bucket in front of the tuck shop, his eyes closed, his head nodding as he sleeps.

“Is that the man?” she asks me.

“Yes, Mama.” I hope she doesn't make too much trouble for me. If she humiliates him publicly, what will he do to me the next time he catches me alone?

Mama snorts. “Him?” she asks again. “That tiny man?”

I nod, ashamed. He has surprising strength, I want to say, like a crocodile's.

Mama doesn't hesitate. She strides over, slapping him so hard, he falls off the bucket and lands in the dirt.

When he looks up, startled, Mama swoops down, grips his shirt, and shoves him back down.

Our eyes meet. His, coal-black and hard.
You'll regret this,
they say.

“Shame on you,” Mama screams.

His eyes dart around, looking for something. A weapon, perhaps? An escape? He grips the earth, his fingertips curling around a clod of dirt.

Mama's firm hand presses him down. “Are you such a big man, to go around preying on young girls? Do you think you're so tough?” she yells.

The old man flicks his gaze toward me. “Is she your little protector?” he asks, contemptuous, like I'm Zi's age and need an adult to fight my battles.

I guess he's right. He knows he can't say a thing to Mama, so he goes for the weak one here—me.

“Khosi doesn't need my protection,” Mama says. She lets go of him and wipes her hand on her skirt, as if his shirt made her hand dirty. “People will be watching you now. You won't bother her again.”

Maybe Mama's certain of that, but when she turns her head to look at the small crowd that's gathered to watch this crazy woman beat up a man, he winks at me.

I suck in my breath. I knew it. I
knew
this could create trouble for me. Mama's gone all week long, and that's when I will have to face this man.

“If I hear you've done anything to her—” Mama shakes her finger at him and gestures at me to leave. “Believe me, you will wish you hadn't.”

I
wish
that made me feel safe. But it doesn't.

As we walk away, I sneak a look backwards. The drunk man is just sitting on his bucket, laughing silently. At me.

If I were as strong and brave as my mother, he'd leave me alone. But I'm not. Even as Mama says, “He'll leave you alone now, Khosi,” fear splits my heart right down the middle.

I tell Gogo all about the
sangoma
visit as we take Mama's freshly washed clothes off the line in the backyard. The air is growing hot and heavy with rain that wants to fall but doesn't.

“Khosi, why does it rain?” Zi asks, interrupting my conversation with Gogo. She's tracing the cracks in the cement with her fingers.

“You see, the sky is a man,” I say. “And the earth is a woman. When it rains, he's sending his seed to the earth, so the earth can give birth to all the plants that feed us.”

“So the sky and the earth are married?” Zi screws up her face at me.

I laugh with her. “Yes. And when the sky is angry with his wife for something she said, he punishes her by withholding his seed. And then the earth grows cracked and dry and infertile and pleads with her husband, ‘I am a foolish woman, with a terrible temper. Please forgive me and send rain so I can be fertile and beautiful once again.'”

We hear the distant rumbles of thunder. It worries me. We never have lightning storms this time of year.

“And thunder?” Zi asks. “Why does it thunder?”

“Even God above has this thing of anger,” Gogo says as we hurry inside with the last basket of clothes.

Auntie Phumzile and her girls arrive just as I fold the last skirt. “You're lucky we finished so you don't have to help,” I tell my cousin Beauty.

Mama comes out of the bedroom and everybody crowds into the
dining room. Beauty and I go into the kitchen to cook
phuthu
and beef—a treat that Auntie has brought—and Beauty tells me all the secrets she's saved up since last week.

“I have a boyfriend,” she giggles.

“Izzit?” It seems sometimes that the whole world has a boyfriend, except
me
. I just want one, that's all. “Does Auntie know?”

The look she gives me makes me feel stupid. Of course, Auntie's just as ignorant about Beauty's boyfriend as Mama is about Little Man.

“I like someone too,” I confide, looking at the carrots I'm chopping instead of looking at Beauty.

“Does he know you like him?” Beauty asks

“He must,” I say. “I don't think I hide it very well.”

“Shame. You shouldn't let a man know you like him, not until he asks you out.” When Beauty shakes her head at me, her long lovely plaits linger on her shoulders, caressing her before they tumble down her back.

My own hair is just little tufts of curls sprouting all over my head like new plants shooting up through soil. We have the extensions, but nobody has time to plait my hair.

“Beauty, will you plait my hair today?” I ask. Maybe Little Man will notice if I come to school tomorrow with a new weave. Hair is important to him—it's taken him four years to grow his dreads.

“Of course,” she says. Then she adds, as if she knows so much more than I do, “Men really like it when you have plaits in your hair. You watch, Khosi, this boy you like will tell you just what he thinks when you come to school tomorrow.”

“I hope so.”

After we eat, we crowd into the sitting room watching
Generations
, our favorite soapie. I sit on a chair and Beauty begins to work on my hair, tugging and pulling at each tuft to add the extensions. My scalp is already beginning to itch and she hasn't even finished yet.

Halfway through
Generations
, the electric storm begins. First the TV crackles and the picture dies. Then the entire room lights up in black and white contrast, so that when I look at the faces of my family sitting opposite me, they are pale, pasty white, like they no longer belong to the living.

Zi squeals and runs to hide in the bedroom. The two younger girls, Beauty's little sisters, join her. Gogo's hands tremble as she totters to the back room, where the three girls are huddled together under the covers, on the bed Zi shares with Gogo. I used to do the same thing when I was Zi's age.

“What is this, a freak lightning storm?” Mama asks.

“I don't think it's safe for you to leave just yet,” she tells Auntie.

“No, I'll wait until this passes,” Auntie answers.

Mama steps over to the door and opens it. “Khosi.” She gestures for me to join her. “Come watch this thing, God having a temper tantrum.”

Because it's Mama, I swallow my fear. We stand together, watching as lightning strikes the ground like the tongue of an angry woman.

“Even though it's dangerous, there's something beautiful about it,” I say. Even the fact that a witch can control lightning, using it to kill somebody, doesn't change how beautiful it is, the way it lights up the whole world in a sea of black and white light.

“It's like the ocean,” Mama agrees. “Powerful.”

I shiver. Mama puts her arm around my shoulder.

Auntie's voice echoes from the back bedroom, where she's busy chiding the little girls. “How can you be frightened by such a little thing as this? A lightning storm? And Mama, you should be ashamed, encouraging it!”

“She sounds just like you, Mama,” I say.

“Neither one of us wants our daughters to be crippled by superstition.”

“Do you really think Gogo is so superstitious?” I ask, knowing what her answer will be, wondering what she would think if she knew that, every night, I leave food and drink out for the ancestors.

This is what
I
think: Both Gogo and Mama are right, and they're also both wrong. Science is important. So are the old ways. We can explain some things through science but not
everything
. But because Gogo and Mama are so stubborn, it makes it really difficult to navigate a path between them, to be my own person, to assert myself. I don't want to offend either one of them. No, I want them both to be pleased with the person I become. That's the difficulty of my life.

But Mama surprises me. “Sometimes, even I believe things that aren't true.” She laughs a little. “So perhaps I shouldn't judge your grandmother so harshly. Everybody has their own little superstition, heh, Khosi?”

It's not exactly a concession, but it's more than she's ever offered before.

We turn back to the open door, watching the play of light and dark dancing along the horizon.

It's so rare that we can be together like this, Mama and me. I stand there as long as she does, watching the sky light up with blue and white streaks of light before we close the door, then turn back to Beauty, who's waiting to finish plaiting my hair.

 

In my dreams that night, a bolt of lightning creeps into the house, sneaking in through the crack in the door. It knows my name, spoken by the witch. It skulks down the hallway, feeling from side to side, searching… searching…searching for me.

I wake up, bathed in sweat and unable to fall back to sleep. So I get up early to fix Mama a good breakfast before she leaves for Greytown.

While Mama bathes, I cook eggs and toast bread, placing them under a plate to keep warm. I even fry a small piece of fish I saved just for her sending-away breakfast.

But when I open the back door to empty the rubbish bin, there's a sudden fluttering of black wings, gigantic wings, wings as tall as I am. A man-sized bird. The wings flutter and flash, silver like lightning, quickly disappearing around the corner.

I run around the house, flinging rubbish to the side in my haste, but the bird is long gone, leaving only a streak of something like smoke lingering in the air.

It's nothing.
That's what I tell myself as I pick up rubbish and place it back in the bin.
It's nothing.
At least, that's what Mama would say. She would laugh. “Sho, it is just a bird, Khosi. You're scared of a little thing like that? A bird?”

And I would have to admit, “It wasn't just any old bird. It was the
impundulu
.” I'd feel stupid telling Mama that. She'd insist it couldn't be true.
I can hear her already, in my head. “Khosi, really! There's no such thing as a lightning bird. It's just something old people talk about. A folk tale, nothing more.”

And what would she say if I persisted and said, “But what if that's what I saw, Mama? What if a witch put a curse on one of us and that bird is the sign?”