by Malla Nunn
“We are poor,” I tell her straight out. “Jacob has seen us haggling with his brother over food. You may be white, but you still live here with no money and with me. Jacob’s figured it out: I could do worse than him.”
“Over my dead body,” she says. “The next time I see him, I’ll tell him exactly what he can do with that marriage proposal.”
“Please, don’t.” I stop her right there. “Jacob made up a story to scam money from his brother. That’s all it was. Talking to him will only make things worse. Ignore him. He’ll soon find another girl to bother.”
That’s the hope, though I pity whoever catches his eye next. I push thoughts of Jacob aside. In my mind, Neville is a bigger threat. Jacob is deluded. Neville is sharp and vindictive. One word from him landed us inside a police station, and one word from him set us free. His sudden change of heart bothers me. His walkout puzzles me. He was happy to insult Annalisa till she asked him how he knew about her memory loss. How did he know?
The private investigator’s report stashed inside my backpack might have the answer to that question and a dozen more. Mayme made me promise to keep the envelope sealed till after she dies, but if Neville has his way, Annalisa and me will never speak to her again.
Where’s the harm in reading the file and keeping what I find out a secret? Nobody will ever know.
Except me.
* * *
* * *
My mind keeps me up while Annalisa snores. After our run-in with Uncle Julien and Neville at the police station, I fully expected her to have a nightmare. Instead, I am the one lying awake. I’m tortured by the report in my bag. Knowledge is power, Lil Bit says, and the quickest way for me to gain power over my grandfather is to tear open the envelope, but then I would be breaking the promise I gave to Mayme.
I slide out of bed and tiptoe into the kitchen. Moonlight slants in through the window above the sink and illuminates the floor. I unzip my backpack, pull out the report and my sketch pad, and lay them both on the table. Lil Bit also says that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. There is a chance that the information inside the envelope will mess up the world as I know it.
But . . .
If the report gives up secrets that will help me understand who I am, who Annalisa is, how maybe we can make our lives better, then that’s a risk I’m willing to take. I push my thumbnail under the sealed flap and push slowly upward. Finally, the truth will come out.
“Amandla?” Annalisa’s voice stops everything. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.” I cover the report with the sketch pad, flip it open to a fresh page, and grab a pencil. “Just going over what happened this morning.”
My pencil automatically glides across the paper, filling the blank space with fine lines and soft curves. I have no control over the image that takes form out of nowhere. Mother strikes a match, lights a candle, and holds it high to see better in the darkened room.
“Is that me?” she asks.
Is it?
I peek down at what I’ve drawn. Or rather, what my hand and my mind have drawn without my permission. It’s Annalisa, the same age as she is now, but different. Her hair is tied up in a messy bun, a style she never wears. Her expression is cool and defiant. She is Annalisa Honey-Blossom Bollard. Rebel. Smart and outspoken.
“I remember . . .” she says. “I remember being that girl.”
“I saw her inside you today, waking up from a long sleep.”
“If I remembered more of the past, I could work my way back to her, but my mind switches off and on and I can’t tell what’s a dream and what’s a memory.” She brushes her fingertips along the edge of the page, making contact with that long-forgotten girl. “It’s good to see her, to know some part of her is still there. What else is inside your book? Show me.”
I flick to the sketch of Lil Bit, the avenging angel with wings made up of a hundred singing birds. I half expect Mother to laugh at my grand vision of Lil Bit Bhengu, who is so small and unassuming in regular circumstances that she can make herself invisible at will.
Instead, she says, “You got the heart and soul of her exactly right, Amandla. ‘Though she be but little, she is fierce.’ ”
“Shakespeare?”
“From A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We studied it in high school.”
It takes a second for the importance of the moment to sink in. Annalisa remembered two facts from the past at the same time and in order. No mind static. No hesitation. Talking face-to-face with Grandpa and Uncle Julien has briefly opened up a door to the past. Maybe each new fact is a plank. Gather enough planks together and she can build a bridge to the past that will be strong enough to hold our weight as we journey back to get answers.
Annalisa flips to the next page of the sketchbook and her attention drifts away, the miracle of Shakespeare and high school fading faster than watercolors in the rain. One plank saved. For now.
The portrait of Grandpa Neville, sketched after our meeting at the hospital, is brutal and ugly. Harsh black lines and sharp angles make up his face. His pupils are tunnels that kill the light. It’s embarrassing to see my loathing for him drawn so clearly.
“Now, this one’s wrong,” Annalisa says. “There’s more to him, Amandla. Your grandfather can be kind, when it suits him. He made me laugh when I was a little. It’s sad to think you’ll never see that part of him.”
Not my fault. He threw the first stone, and I returned the favor. Our relationship is biblical. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Annalisa flips the page. The last sketch is of Mayme, freckle-nosed and smiling from her hospital bed. It’s a pretty likeness of a sweet old lady, but it’s false. Behind the smile and the warmth is an ocean of regret at failing to protect Annalisa. Even now, with death at her door, she prefers ignorance to facing the truth inside the report. She has a weak heart because she is weak. Even so, I can’t hate her for it because that smile in the institute was all for me.
“You take after her,” Annalisa says. “Same mouth and curve of the eyebrows. The same lovely cheekbones and smooth skin. Just a different color. That’s all.”
That difference means everything to Neville, it seems. He hates that I’m not the pretty little white granddaughter he should have had. Deep down, I want to believe there are other, less obvious, more complicated reasons for the terrible way he treated me on the rooftop garden. But there aren’t. My hair is too frizzy and my body is too curvy for him to accept. My clothes are too ordinary. Finding fault in myself is easy, an old habit that comes with being not one race or the other.
The truth about Neville is simple, though. And it hurts.
He is a bigot.
He called me a kaffir.
The kaffir daughter that Annalisa drags around with her like a shameful ball and chain. Was Neville born with an aversion to black skin or did it creep into his mind over time? The poisonous roots of his racism are probably buried deep in South Africa’s brutal history. Neville probably grew up in a house where black people were the servants and whites were the masters and the line between them never crossed. Till Annalisa fell in love with a Zulu man. What a shock that must have been.
I wish I could have seen his face the moment he found out.
“Do I take after my father?” I ask Annalisa, hoping the door to the past is still open enough to let another memory through into the present. A name would be good. Boris. Phineas. Homer. Funani. Shaka Zulu. I’ll take any of them. Annalisa only ever calls him “your father.” He is a series of faded images: A sharp dresser. A dancer. A wonderful kisser.
When I try to imagine him, he is never alone. He is always with Annalisa, the two of them standing on a terrace at night with the moon shining on the ocean behind them. She laughs, giddy in love, and he sweeps her into his arms, the two of them melting into each other. I want to love someone that way, too. Despite the fact that it hurt my mother forever.
“Was he a cook, too?”
“No. He liked to cook. Same as you.”
I cook because cold baked beans and soggy peas from a can are not real food. When Mrs. M figured out that our meals mostly came from the tinned-food shelves at the Supa-Value, she taught me to make the basics. Boiled eggs. Stir-fried onion with fresh chili and spinach. Soup made from whatever was in the kitchen. Black beans and rice. Cheap food, but warm and filling.
As for Annalisa’s memory of a man scrambling eggs at the stove with rolled-up sleeves? I don’t trust it. It might be my father or one of the dozens of servants who cooked and cleaned and indulged her for most of her young life. Me included. Still, I’ll take what I can get.
My father:
He was a Zulu bartender.
He had curly hair.
He made a scrambled egg to remember.
Three more planks to build a bridge to the past. Annalisa yawns and stretches out, exhausted from the fight with Julien and from the shock of coming face-to-face with Neville for the first time in years. Approximately fifteen years is my guess.
“Come to bed,” she says. “We’ll see my mother again. I promise.”
In Sugar Town, promises are cheap, but the hope they create is priceless. They also help us to sleep and to dream of the good things waiting for us around the corner. Mayme is out of our reach for the moment. Our hearts know the obstacles. This week or maybe the next, Mayme will figure out that she is an individual free and separate from her husband. That all she has to do is walk out of the gates and come find us.
18
“What happens now?” Lil Bit kicks a soccer ball across the dirt field where Goodness plays goalie for the up-and-coming Sugar Town Shakers. A cold wind nips my nose, and dust swirls around my ankles. A few days ago, it was impossible to imagine the three of us trading shots during the holidays.
“What happens now is nothing.” I accidentally kick the ball far to the right of Goodness, who runs it down with easy grace. “Next time around, Neville might press charges and we’ll end up in real trouble. It’s not worth the risk.”
“He won’t press charges.” Goodness is confident. “Your gramps is hiding something. That’s why he walked away when your mum asked him about her memory. He couldn’t answer. Or didn’t want to.”
Reading the report is the only way to find the facts, but Mother waking up at the exact moment that I started to open the envelope? That was an omen.
“I’m not sure that Neville has a conscience, but it doesn’t matter in any case,” I say. “Fighting him is too risky. There’s no way to tell how he’ll react, and we have all the problems we can handle right here in Sugar Town.”
“So he wins?” Lil Bit huffs.
“The battle. Not the war.”
Sam’s mobile number, we found out this morning, is disconnected. Uncle Julien must have him locked down for the holidays. Three teenage girls up against a mean old man with something to hide? That’s a fight we’ll never win. Tough go, but there it is.
“Here’s what we do.” Goodness bounces the soccer ball from one knee to the other, thinking. “First, we forget the rules our mothers taught us. Forget good manners and smiles and high-heel shoes. We ain’t no ladies watching from the sideline. We take action.”
“All right.” Lil Bit is spellbound by the picture that Goodness paints of us. “What comes second?”
“We go to your grandpa Bollard’s office in the city and we fuck him up.”
“And exactly how do we fuck him up?” I ask. “With an iron pipe or a big stick?”
“Both. But only if we have to.” Goodness is dead serious.
“I’m not going to the youth center, my sister,” I tell her. “The girls inside those places are rough. I won’t last a day.”
Goodness will be fine. Her father will buy her freedom while Lil Bit and me will be left to serve out our sentence for assault with a deadly weapon. Hurting Neville is fine in theory, but in reality, me and Lil Bit will be the ones who suffer.
“Wait.” Lil Bit’s eyes shine bright. “We won’t need to use force. Your gramps called you a kaffir, remember?”
Yes, I will remember that insult for years and even decades to come.
“Think about it,” she says to Goodness and me. “Who uses that kind of filthy language in Nelson Mandela’s South Africa? I’ll tell you. A prejudiced man. A bigot who was brought up with racist attitudes and hasn’t changed his thinking. In his head, black and mixed people are still inferior. That’s our way in, right there.”
Goodness reaches over and taps the center of Lil Bit’s forehead with the tip of her finger. “Slow that big brain of yours down and tell us what you mean. Use small words. What’s the plan?”
This time, Lil Bit does not step back from Goodness or jerk away from her touch. Instead, she lets out a shaky breath and smiles, pleased by the attention and the mention of her big brain, which a less confident girl than Goodness Dumisa might find intimidating.
“If Amandla’s skin color bothers her gramps, then we can use that against him. All we have to do is turn up. Three dark girls from the township waiting outside his office? People will talk. The receptionist. The office assistant. The security guards. Word about us will spread. And what does the boss man get up to after hours with those girls, they’ll wonder.”
“Eww. I don’t want people to think that we . . .” The words dry up. I can’t even put my thoughts into words. Neville in an intimate situation is just too disturbing to imagine. “Besides, if Neville really is a bigot, nobody will believe that he’d . . . you know.”
Lil Bit rolls her eyes. “Are you serious? This country was founded by hypocrites who said one thing and then did whatever pleased them after dark! Besides, your grandpa’s employees will eat up the idea that he’s been naughty. We may not get into the main office, but our being there will shake things up.”
The logic behind Lil Bit’s plan sinks in. The odds of three black teenagers making it past the ring of Bollard employees that guard Neville’s lair is close to nil. Now I see that we don’t have to breach the corporate floor at all. Instead of begging for entry, we can put on a show for everyone to gawk at. It might actually be fun.
“Sharp thinking,” I tell Lil Bit. “We’ll be township girls with bad attitudes.”
“Yeah. I’ve always wanted hoop earrings, a crop top, and tight, tight leggings. I’d do it, too, except the church ladies will see me and then tell my mum. I can’t go out in public dressed like that,” Goodness says.
“Maybe Lewis could drive us, and you could wear whatever you want! He did offer to help.” The moment the words are out, I regret them. Lewis and I have spoken to each other three times and suddenly it’s okay for me to ask him to do me a favor? Thinking that he owes me anything but politeness is an Annalisa-level delusion. I rush to take back the words, but Goodness gets in before me.
“About that . . .” She rolls the soccer ball against a rickety grandstand that creaks and sways in the wind. It’s a death trap that offers the possibility of “death by fire,” “death by stadium collapse,” and “death by crushing crowd” as part of the experience. Three good reasons why Annalisa and I never attend the deafening Saturday matches.
“There is this one thing . . .” Goodness sweeps down, grabs the soccer ball, and passes it to me with an underhand flick. It lands straight in my hands, a gift from a sports star to a toddler. Goodness Dumisa is uncomfortable.
“My, uh . . .” She stops and starts again. “My brother Lewis is interested in you, but don’t get your hopes up. My parents have a list of Zulu girls lined up for him, and you’re not Zulu, so you’re not on it . . .”
I duck m
y head to hide the anger that shoots through me. Having a Zulu father makes me part Zulu, but not the “pure Zulu” that Lewis’s parents want for him. Funny. I am not white enough for my own grandfather, and I’m too light to get on Mr. and Mrs. Dumisa’s list of acceptable girls. Too black. Too white. Never quite right.
Being excluded hurts more than it should, but damn! It doesn’t matter that Lewis is out of my league. I like him. I want to kiss those plush lips and run my fingertips across those insanely cute dimples that appear when he smiles. Who am I kidding? Like is too small a word to describe my feelings. I want that boy in my life, but does he like or want me enough to go against his parents’ wishes?
For all I know, Lewis has already decided to walk away from the pulse of warm feeling that beats between us. Tears sting my eyes. I deliberately throw the ball long over Lil Bit’s shoulder and then chase it down. I need a private moment to pull myself together.
“Amandla . . .”
Lil Bit calls out my name. She wants to help, but I need a hot minute to feel the pain of losing my white grandmother and the boy who now I know actually likes me back!
I crouch to retrieve the ball from under a stack of blue plastic chairs. Black sneakers covered in sawdust step into my field of vision. Lewis. Speak of the devil, the church ladies say, and he will appear. A second pair of shoes, off-white with worn heels, step into the space next to Lewis’s sneakers, beside which they appear comically small. The white shoes belong to Annalisa.
* * *
* * *
Annalisa and Lewis stand side by side: white and black, small and tall. Seeing them together stuns me. They’ve never met or talked. Annalisa is famously odd, and the Dumisa family is famously rich inside the township; they are practically strangers. Annalisa’s creased blue jeans and messy bun get my attention. Nothing short of an emergency would push her out of the house and into the streets looking less than “proper.”