Dad shakes my shoulder. “Come on, Chookies.”
I startle awake, in the quick, gasping, suddenly alert way of all people who have lived in a war (and for which there is no cure, ever, not even now).
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” says Dad (who naturally suffers a more extreme version of this where’ s-the-danger response to being shaken awake).
Vanessa is awakened by my quiet panic. “What?” Her urgent hiss reaches across to the jumping black shadow of Dad against candlelight.
“Time to get up.”
“Oh.” She sinks back into her pillow.
“Here’s tea.” Dad props Vanessa up and hands her a cup of hot-milky-sweet tea.
“Come on, Bobo, tea.” But I am already out of bed and dressed.
I have slept with my pajamas pulled over my best-for-the-tobacco-sale-day clothes. All I have to do is drink my tea. I have already put several books into a bag, along with my toothbrush, a change of clothes, and a torch that has ceased to work (the batteries have leaked and killed it). I am sitting in the plastic, damp-dog-smelling car, eyes stinging with tiredness, long before the rest of my family. I kick my feet against the back of Dad’s seat with anticipation.
When we turn onto the main road, Mum will hand us a banana and a boiled egg and we will be allowed sips of tea from her steaming cup (just one sip at the bottom, so we don’t spill) and then we will sleep until we reach Rusape, where the high morning sun will stroke us alert.
Today, we will arrive at the tobacco floors in Salisbury in time for the free breakfast that is provided for all farmers and buyers and Tabex personnel. Today, I will eat until I feel sick. I will eat until my belly bloats with the joyful, unaccustomed nausea of too-much. And the food is egg (fried, scrambled, omelettes), sausage, fried tomatoes, chips, bacon, and dripping-butter toast. There are several varieties of boxed cereals: Cocoa Puffs, Honey Pops, Corn Flakes, Pronutro, muesli. There is Zambezi mud porridge, oats, and mealie meal porridge. There are huge bowls of fruit salad and silver trays of cheese and crackers. I eat some of everything and fill my plate again and I am still reluctant to leave the food but Dad says, “Come on, Chooks, leave it now. You’ll make yourself sick.”
And then we make our way onto the auction floors to our two or three lines of tobacco (soldiered between similar lines belonging to other farmers). The bitter-smelling, hessian-wrapped blocks of leaf-laid-upon-leaf have miraculously made the journey from Robandi to here. They have been graded, tied into hands, and packed: primings, lugs, tips, droughted, spotted, scrap. We stand, ill with food, next to our crop. Mum takes my shoulders in a fierce, ringless grip. She alone did not eat breakfast. She drank tea in quick, nervous gulps and glanced repeatedly at the clock that hangs above the door leading to the wide, airplane-hangar-sized auction floors.
The buyers walk the line of our tobacco.
Mum tightens her clutch. She whispers, “Here they come.”
Dad nonchalantly stands, resting on one leg, like a horse at rest. He looks away, as if the buyers are a common, bland species of bird on an otherwise more exciting safari.
Mum hisses, “Try and look hungry, kids.”
I suck in my belly as far as possible and open my eyes as wide as they will go, so that they will seem hollow and needy. Vanessa sinks her head to her chest and shrinks with not-wanting-to-be-here.
Mum turns a fierce, fixed, terrifying smile on the buyers. Her look says, “Give us a good price and you will be rewarded with my love for all time. Please give us a good price. Please.” Waves of her anxiety sink down into my belly and churn with the too-greasy excess of my recent breakfast.
None of us look at the other farmers and their families, who are also hovering with palpably jittering nerves over their bales.
The bales are torn open, leaves are pulled up and smelled; the thin-veined crop is rubbed between thick fingers (fingers flashing with gold bands, which are among the many things that tell the buyers from the farmers. No farmer I know wears rings). A price is scrawled on a ticket. Dad waits until the buyers are out of earshot and then whispers to Mum in a soft, warning voice, “Steady. Hold it,” in the way he would talk to a fretful animal.
Now Mum, Vanessa, and I watch Dad’s hands as he walks the line. If he agrees with the price we have been offered for each bale, he hesitates, fingers hovering briefly above the ticket, and then walks on, leaving the ticket intact. That tobacco will be taken away to cigarette factories: famous, well-traveled Rhodesian burley all the way from our lucky farm.
If Dad disagrees with the price the buyer has offered, he tears the ticket. Those bales will be rewrapped, loaded onto lorries, and brought back to unlucky Robandi. Dad will wait to sell them later in the season, when perhaps the buyers will be more hungry for tobacco. Those bales will sit in the grading shed, open to the air, where blasts of steam will keep the leaves in a fine balance between soft and moldy. They will anger Dad whenever he sees them. Mum will spend hours, until her fingers burn with the sticky yellowing residue of the leaves, re-sorting and re-baling the leaves in the superstitious belief that a new presentation might bring a healthier price.
If Dad starts tearing tickets and his face becomes folded and deep, we feel ourselves become quiet and wishing-we-weren’t-here. But if he is walking quickly over the line of tobacco, leaving the tickets pristine, beautiful whole rectangles of yellow, we are giddy. Vanessa and I start to run between the bales, exuberant, silly, loud, and Mum doesn’t say, “Shhh girls! Behave yourselves!” And then Dad has walked the line and, without looking at the other farmers, he takes Mum by the hand and he says, “Come on, Tub.” Vanessa and I fall into line behind Mum and Dad. His fingers are wrapped around hers. By the end of today Dad will have gone to see the fat man with the wet lips from Tabex and Mum will have her rings back, and when we get home to Robandi she will polish them in Silvo to remove the tarnish of shame and disuse.
Dad doesn’t smile, or concede any kind of victory in front of the buyers. He waits until we are in the car and then he says to Mum, “Fair price.”
Which means that, in addition to our yearly and unavoidable checkup at the dentist, there will be a new set of clothes, a new pair of shoes, a visit to the used-book store, tea and scones with strawberry jam and clotted cream at the tearoom in Meikles Department Store. We will spend the night in the delicious luxury of a friend’s town house with its irrigated garden, clipped lawn, tiled white shiny kitchen, properly flushing loos, and (most wondrous of all) television. When our tobacco sells well, we are rich for a day.
But whether the tobacco sells well or badly, when we arrive at Robandi it will be back to rations and rat packs.
Off to school
SCHOOL
Vanessa goes away to school when I am four. Packets come for me from the Correspondence School in Salisbury. Cloud makes me a small chair and table at the woodwork shop and paints them blue and the table sits next to Dad’s desk on the veranda. In the morning, after breakfast, I sit down with Mum and the wad of papers from Salisbury and I write my “Story of the Day” and I learn to color, count, paint. Once a week after lunch, Mum turns on the radio and we listen to School on the Air and I throw beanbags around the sitting room and pronounce (“Say after me”) the colors of the rainbow and the names of the shapes, and I walk like a giant and (“Now, then, very softly”) like a fairy and Mum lies on the sofa and reads her book.
But the afternoons are long and hot and buzzing with fat flies and lizards lying still on the windowsills, and Mum is resting, and my nanny—my nanny of the moment; they seem to change like the seasons—has gone off for lunch. So I recruit children (picanins, I call them) from the compound and force them to play “boss and boys” with me. Of course, I am always the boss and they are always the boys.
“Fetch mahutchi!”
“Yes, boss.”
“Quicker than that! Run. Boss up! Boss up! Come on, faga moto!”
The children run off and fetch an imaginary horse for me.
“Now brush him!” I
shout. “No, not like that. Like this. Hell man, you guys are a bunch of Dozy Arabs.” And I push the children away from the invisible horse to demonstrate the action of a currycomb, a body brush, hoof pick.
My nanny comes back from her lunch and she presses her lips at me. She claps her hands at my “boys” and shoos them away, like chickens. They run down the drive, holding their mouths with insolent laughter, and shout insults back to me in Shona.
“Why did you send my boys away?”
“They are not your boys. They are children like you. Girls and boys.”
I’ve told her that if she shouts at me I will fire her. But now I say, “I was only playing.”
“You were bossing.”
“So?”
She says, “Are you grown-up?”
I frown and push out my worm-pregnant belly.
She says, “When you can reach your hand over your head like this”—and she reaches a hand up, over the top of her head, and covers the opposite ear—“then it means you are grown. Then you can boss other children and you can fire me.”
“I can fire you if I like. Anytime I want, I can fire you.”
“Aiee.”
I reach my hand over the top of my head but it only reaches halfway down the other side.
“See?” she says.
In the later afternoon, after the laundry has been washed and hung up in bright flags at the back of the house, my nanny stands under the tap at the back of the house and rubs green soap on her legs. She doesn’t wash the soap off again, so her legs stay shiny and smooth and the color of light chocolate. If she leaves her legs without soap, I can draw pictures on her dry skin with the sharp end of a small stick and the picture shows up gray on her skin. If I fall, or hurt myself, or if I’m tired, my nanny lets me put my hand down her shirt onto her breast and I can suck my thumb and feel how soft she is, and her breasts are full and soft and smell of the way rain smells when it hits hot earth. I know, without knowing why, that Mum would smack me if she saw me doing this.
My nanny sings to me in Shona. “Eh, oh-oh eh, nyarara mwana.”
“What song is that?”
“A song for my children.”
“What does it say?”
She tuts, sucking on her teeth. “You are not my children.”
And then, the year I turn eight, I am too old for a nanny anymore. I am ready for boarding school. I get my own trunk with my full, proper name, “Alexandra Fuller,” printed on the top.
“But I thought my name is Bobo.”
“Not anymore. You’re Alexandra now. That’s your real name.”
Dad takes a photograph of us leaving the farm for my first day of big school in January 1977.
Vanessa is almost as tall as Mum. I am holding the Uzi, pressing out my belly to help catch the weight of it. We are standing in front of Lucy, the mine-proofed Land Rover.
Chancellor Junior School is an “A” school, for white children only. This means we have over one hundred acres of grounds: a rugby field, a cricket pitch, hockey fields, tennis courts, a swimming pool, an athletics track, a roller-skating rink. After independence, the skating rink is turned into a basketball court and half the athletics track is turned into a soccer pitch. Basketball and soccer are things white children do not do (like picking your nose in public, mixing cement with tea and bread in your mouth, dancing hip-waggling to African music).
We have our very own extensive library and more than enough books to go around. We have more than enough very well-trained (only white) teachers to go around, including a remedial teacher for the remedial kids, whom we call retards. The retards have their own room at the end of the block (all of them together, regardless of age) and they have to sit in front of everyone else in assembly, even in front of the Standard 1s. And no one plays with them at break or after school and they are excused from athletics practice.
We have music teachers, art teachers, sewing teachers, woodwork teachers, a Red Cross teacher, a tennis coach, a cricket coach, a rugby coach, and an athletics coach, who also teaches us how to swim. Our matrons are white. They’re old, and crazy, but they’re white.
The groundsmen and cleaners are black, supervised by a drunken old white man who keeps whisky and peppermints in the broom cupboard.
The cooks are black, supervised by an old white lady who has spectacularly high hair and who sits in the cool room outside the kitchen drinking tea and reading books with pictures of ladies (whose boobs are about to pop out of their dresses) fainting into men’s arms on the covers.
The maids who do our laundry are black and are supervised by the senior girls’ matron, who is deaf and so tired she spends most of the day half asleep with the radio on in her sitting room. Her room smells of old lady and mothballs.
The boardinghouse we call a hostel, a massive redbrick colonial building that was an army barracks once. It sleeps two hundred children. Forty kids per dormitory, each with a footlocker in which we keep the set of clothes for the week; one set of school uniform and one set of play clothes to last seven days, new brookies and socks daily.
Milk of magnesia, administered by our hook-nosed matron every Friday, keeps us regular. Although the fish, also administered on Friday, usually takes care of any constipation we may have been suffering from.
We wash our hair on Saturday mornings and periodically we are doused with a scalp-stinging mixture that is supposed to kill lice.
The boys are punished with stripes—a leather strap, which hangs in the teachers’ common room. Afterward, we ask to see the pattern of welts on their bums and we ask if they cried and although their faces are streaked and we have heard their shouts of pain they shake their heads, no.
The girls are hardly ever beaten. For our punishments, we are made to kneel on a cement floor for half an hour. Or write out lines: “I will not talk after lights out. I will not talk after lights out,” four hundred times. Or memorize passages from the Bible: “Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof.”
The two hundred boarders are mostly children from farms around Umtali, and the two hundred day scholars are townies and we despise and torture them, luring them up into the pine forest, where we attack them and steal their packed lunches. We are better athletes and worse students and tougher fighters than the day-bugs. It is rare that we allow a townie into the rarefied circle of friends and alliances and conspirators that makes up the boarders’ gang. But every morning we meet, in class lines, in the Assembly Hall to sing.
Morning has broken, like the first morning,
Blackbird has spoken, like the first bird.
And a chosen senior kid reads from the Bible, mumbling nervous words. We pray for the army guys. We say the “Ah Father.” And then we go back to our classrooms and stand behind our desks and say another prayer, also for the army guys. Some of the kids, whose dads or brothers have been killed in the War, cry every morning. Their soft sobs are part of the praying.
There are not very many townies with dead dads and brothers. Most of the dead dads and brothers are farmers; killed on patrol, or in an ambush, or by a land mine, or during a farm attack.
On Wednesday before lunch we take Scripture Class from a teacher with hairy legs and sandals (which gives our regular teacher a break to go and smoke cigarettes and drink tea in the teachers’ lounge). On Saturday, another woman (also with hairy legs and sandals, so that I come to associate Christian women with these particular characteristics) comes to the boardinghouse from the Rhodesian Scripture Union and we have to sit in the prep room while the sun and the fields call to us from outside. She tells us Bible stories and makes us pray and hold hands and sing the kinds of songs which require clapping and hopping up and down. On Sunday we walk in snaking lines toward our various churches; Vanessa and I are Anglicans; my best friend is Presbyterian (“Press-button”). There are also Dutch Ref
ormed, Catholics (“Cattle-ticks”), and a fistful of Baptists and Methodists.
But all denominations, all the time, focus prayers and singing and scripture on the War and we all ask God to take care of our army guys and keep them safe from terrorists and we assume that God knows this means (without us actually coming right out and saying it) that we want to win the War.
Independence Arch
INDEPENDENCE
Which is why it is such a surprise when we lose the War.
Lost. Like something that falls between the crack in the sofa. Like something that drops out of your pocket. And after all that praying and singing and hours on our knees, too.
Ian Smith rings the Independence Bell thirteen times, one ring for every year since the Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain. He and his wife, Janet, raise their glasses in a toast to “the faithful” one last time.
Even then we have a hard time believing it’s over. That we are giving in after all this time. That we’re not fighting through thickanthin after all.
“Everyone that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth.”
We lost, they found. Our-men.
Independence, coming readyornot.
In March 1978, Bishop Abel Tendekayi Muzorewa of the African National Council makes an agreement with the white government and forms an interim government, which combines the weakest of the African political parties with the most determined of the old white guard and in June 1979 he wins elections, which may or may not have been free and fair (depending on who you are, and the color of your skin). We buy T-shirts to replace our old rhodesia is super T-shirts. These new T-shirts read zimbabwe-rhodesia is super and we say, “Especially Rhodesia.” But the War carries on and more and more people die and the fight is fiercer and more angry than before. And the Africans have splintered into political groups and tribal factions and fight one another, on top of also fighting the whites.
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood Page 12