by Suzanne Popp
My father had pursued my mother, taken her from her school and family, and planted me inside her. He had meant to plant a tree, and instead, he received a flower. A useless flower. That was me. I learned to bloom and I was loved. Maybe you can love a child too much and they get taken back by the gods, or you can love them too little, and they die. However it goes, I was dead within two days of having the sickness. I never saw a doctor. We didn’t have medical people out at the cattle station, and by the time we reached the clinic, I was gone.
I was fortunate that I made it to five—just when my parents thought they had me secure. My mother was also pregnant when I up and left. I can remember nothing of it, except the feeling of lightness and the unexpected wailing, with me looking down and thinking how little I looked. When I was alive, I really thought I was a pretty big girl.
When I was departing and saw myself on the mat, I was a lot smaller and thinner than I thought. I wondered who would take care of the doll lying beside myself on the mat.
But I am going off the path. Mother went ahead and had another girl, and that’s when I realized what a disappointment I had been to my father. He had really concealed it pretty well from me. With the second girl being born, father thought he was cursed. He looked at the new baby like it had been a trick of some sort. When mother had two more girls, the drinking started.
Father’s herd was growing. The cows were fat and sleek. Mother was healthy and adored her little flower garden of girls. There was Pansy, Iris, and Daisy. Rose came much later, after the twin boys had been born, also another boy they named Royal Festal. Rose was the last child, and for some reason, father doted on her.
My father was getting on in age then; his wife was beloved in the cattle station. He then took another wife during this time, but she didn’t seem to have the knack for keeping life in a child. She gave birth to four, but only one survived and Royal was not a healthy child. His legs crumpled inward and he walked in a curve, unable to move straight ahead. My mother helped the second wife with all the chores. When she was nursing the babies, she made sure her milk would not give out. My mother even helped nurse the child that did survive, even though she had babies of her own to feed. Mother also helped this woman to think more of herself because she was very young and often provoked the husband with her carelessness.
I have to say, my mother generated love in our home. Some people can add yeast to a bowl of flour and create a mountain of bread. My mother had the ability to add love to a dry place. Her little flower garden flourished. I should tell you she named the boys Kindness and Self Control after the gifts of the spirit. She also gave them western names, Reuben and Samuel. Each of them grew up with a desire to understand their world. They respected their father, protected their sisters, and adored their mother. Later, they married women from the school they attended, except for Royal, who left his family to attend culinary school where he learned to bake and ended up marrying his teacher Hen.
My mother was going to see London and visit her old tutor, Wellington Taylor. My father would not allow this, so she must wait for the future to come. I could tell her that I have seen how their lives turn out. It is surprising how life can be, but I will say no more about that, as it is not my tale to tell. It is worth the trip, however. I would tell my mother, Myrna ,that, if she could hear me. Sometimes I think she does, but often, she is closing the door to the spiritual world to get on with her busy life as a mother.
Let me get back to my life as a child at the cattle station. You cannot believe how sweet it is to be a child in Africa, growing up with animals, open space, and long days of play and adventure. I did not know it was so sweet when I was there, but now, as I observe life in other places, I know what I had was the best. Even my leaving was not difficult. It would have been so much harder had I had babies to leave, or even a husband or a best friend that would lament my going. As it was, I departed just as a new child was ready to be born. My father was sad, but he was also hopeful he would have his son. He was pained by my leaving. My mother suffered, but she also had hopes in the new child coming.
Altogether, it couldn’t have been better managed. I think it was the flies that made me sick. Flies were maybe God’s big mistake. They pester the animals to the point of madness, and humans cannot escape from their hovering. At last, you don’t even notice them on your food or your eyes. But then sickness comes. Somehow, they are part of this.
I was small when my mother sewed me a doll. I wore it in my chitenge and cared for it as any mother would her baby. She was a doll with no eyes or mouth, but she had arms and a soft body and a tuft of cow’s tail hair on her head that I could comb and plait. Best of all, Mother sewed her a tiny blanket and a dress that looked like the pictures in my book. I named the doll Fancy, for that is what she seemed to me. When it was springtime, I gathered seed pods from the palm and made holes in the dirt to play mancala.
Sometimes in the evening, my father would bring out his board and play mancala with me, carefully counting out the seeds so he would come out the winner. I liked the feel of the smooth round seeds in my hand, and the pile of them in the cup at the end of the game. We also had a game made of a checkerboard with a herd of tiny cattle that you had to protect and win back when the other player captured them. And so our evenings passed in front of the fire in the dirt courtyard of our home.
Now, I am watching my mother teach other women to read, just as she taught me when I was four. She is patient with them, helping them trace the letters in the sand several times before they try it with the pen. Many of them have not done fine work before, so it is difficult for them to hold a pen at first. When they make their first letters on paper, they are so proud. I always wanted to write a book one day, to share what I have seen in my short life. I guess that is what I am doing now, as I get you to record my thoughts. I will call on you again to record how it was that my mother and Aunt Violet met the grandchild who was mixed. Guess what? She was given my same name, Lily Wonder. So my story goes on. I don’t want to get ahead of myself, as time here is different than earth time.”
During the daylight hours, Beautiful recorded the story of this departed child, wondering if his talk with Whenny had influenced the dreams he had of Lily, or whether his imaginings were part of his illness. The descriptions were so real, the names came to him as though he had read them in the newspaper. When he did not hear from his Lily Wonder for several days, he took out the sketchbook and began to fill in the details of her face and form. One day when Reuben was visiting, he pulled out the sketchbook and showed it to the pastor.
“That is my sister Rose. When did you see her?”
“This is out of my imagination. I have a dream girl who visits me almost every night and compels me to write her story. When I am gone, I will leave it for you to read. She is as real as anyone I have ever met. You will think me mad, and maybe I am. I have caught everything else since I became positive with HIV. But her story comforts me as I think about my passing and what has been my life, and my experience as a human being.”
“I would like to read that. Does she come to you every night?”
“Not every night. When I draw her picture or try to imagine her life as a child departing so young, she responds, letting me know what her reality was. She is a beautiful spirit who can go to different places and experience all time in a single moment. I don’t want her to leave me, but she says she will when we all stop grieving her passing. She thinks that will happen soon.”
“I have never had that experience of seeing the future or the past so vividly, but I do know we have angels who look after us. Maybe she is one of these. You seem to be more creative and more alive than anytime that I have known you, Beautiful.”
“Yes. I can tell that because I want to draw and to paint and to portray what my inner self knows. I have also lost the sense of regret and despair that plagued me when I was first diagnosed. Then I wanted to end my life, the sooner the better. This dream child makes me want to read the next chapter. It ma
y be the last, but I am going to enjoy it. Some of this may also have to do with Whenny. She tells me every day I am a gift to her.”
“She says the same thing to me about you. She deserves to have a kind spirit in this place. She is the hope of these children she is raising. I pray for her and for you, and what will come from this exchange. Keep all your writings, as your vision may help others. I am going now.”
“Goodbye. I now look forward to the night, and my dreams of Lily.”
“Lily? That was my eldest sister’s name. She passed away twenty years ago.”
“Really! What a coincidence. I will give her your greetings, if she passes my way in my dreams.”
Whenny nodded goodbye to Reuben and continued to empty sugar into the vat of spirits she was brewing for the week’s brew.
Lily Wonder appeared again to Beautiful that night, after the lantern was out, and the fire was almost out. He could see nothing, but the presence was as real as Whenny sleeping in the next room, with her slight snore.
I’m back. I was telling about my life at the cattle station and the sweet times I enjoyed. When I woke in the morning, it was to the sound the rooster crowing and of my mother dishing out the corn porridge we call nshima onto the enamel plates. Mother would rise before dawn to start the fire and get the water boiling. At her wedding, her mother had given her an enormous iron pot with three legs. This pot was always on the main fire, with water heating in it. From this pot, she would dip water for making the morning tea. My father liked to have bread and red bush tea with a lump of sugar and some cream in it. For the rest of us, my mother, myself, and the orphan child we called Mpala, there was nshima. We ate it from one dish, set out on our kitchen mat in the rainy season, or outside when the weather was good, which was most of the year. The dogs would watch us eating from the dish, licking their chops, but knowing to stay out of range until everyone was finished. When my mother cleaned the cooking pot, she would gather the small chunks of cooked porridge for me to give to her chickens. They would come flapping down from their coops where she kept them at night. If she had leftover bones, these would go to the dogs. The men would head out with their cattle to the pastures where they grazed during the day. Then we took our baths, using the rest of the heated water.
We had a very secure ablution block with water above us in a bucket to rinse, and the tub with its loofah below to the water we rinsed with. When we finished bathing, we would carry the bath water to the plants in the yard. We had beans growing, followed by tomatoes, and then groundnuts would push up. We had an orange tree and a cashew tree with its broad round leaves coming from smooth branches weighted down with bricks so it would produce shade and we could reach the fruit when it was ripe. Mangos also grew in a grove of trees behind the washing area. Each plant had a set amount of water that we would pour around it from the calabash. The cashew tree received five calabashes of bath water, while the orange tree base was always damp from cooking water, wash water, and bath water. It was about the only orange tree I can recall in the cattle station.
Along the gutter and beside the inside wall were lilies taller than I was at five. They were red and orange and yellow in color and each had a drink after we bathed.
Out front at the end of a well beaten path beyond the small courtyard and wall were the calf pens, and the corral for the cattle. The valley sloped away below the pens. Along our house was a smooth gutter that caught the rainwater and carried it to a storage tank. The tank was made of clay and was black from the fires they used to make it water tight. It was taller than my father and looked like a huge ball at the side of our house near the gardens. The gutters were warm and sloped along the ground at the base of our round house. We liked to sit in them with our backs against the wall, and feel the heat of the sun. When we were able to print, we could use the outside of our house as a blackboard to make the map of the world, and our letters.
With the three baby girls, there were plenty of clothes to wash. She would soak them first then scrub them with a washboard and green bar soap. The baby clothes were washed first, then the linens, and finally, my father’s work shirt and trousers. We had a scrub board my father had brought my mother that made the soap rub into the cloth and the dirt come out. When they were clean, we rinsed them, twisted them like a piece of dough, then hung them on the bushes and wall of the courtyard. My job was to keep the chickens from jumping on them and soiling them. This was an easy job for me, as I learned to use a slingshot to shoo the chickens away with pebbles thumping on their feathers.
After washing the clothes and putting them out so they would dry in the sun, there was wood to gather, floors to sweep, the courtyard to sweep free of leaves and debris, and the garden to weed. If someone had made soil on the ground, we would pour sand on it, then scoop it with a leaf into the garbage pit. We planted the normal crops; some grew at the same time. Beans would sprout up two days after the first rain fell, followed by tomatoes, then the groundnuts, and finally, the mangos ripening on the mango trees. All of the vegetables grew under a canopy of banana and cassava leaves, if the rains came. We kept the goats out using thorn bush fencing that could be put around the plants, the same kind used for the corrals at night.
My father, Festal, would split the larger wood and make tool handles from the thick limbs. We had a walking stick, a hoe, and a pick axe for land clearing. He borrowed a saw when we needed one from the neighbor who was a carpenter as well as raising cattle. My mother showed me the impala he had carved for her from the white mahogany wood when they were expecting me. It was delicate but strong, and smooth from wear.
I can still see the rows of cooking fires dotting the darkness of the village before the sun rose. When the sun came up, the roosters ceased their crowing, no doubt thinking they had brought it about. The birds would sing at first light. The sun came up in a rush of heat and light. At this time, the birds ceased their singing and the waft of scented lilies was in our yard. Each of them would unfurl in the sunlight. After I was bathed, my mother would have me sit between her knees and plait my hair into corn rows or other designs. I could feel the baby bumping against me as I pressed near her stomach. We had a mirror over the table, but I could touch the braiding and feel how regular it was. When I pulled on my dress and my sandals, I was ready for the day.
In the morning, many of the girls went out to gather firewood or to carry water. They usually went in small groups, carrying the jerry cans on their heads and trekking to the watering hole. I was very fortunate that we had a large cistern to hold our water. Once a month, if we had no rain, my father would hire the neighbor to bring barrels of water on his donkey cart and empty it into our tank. We did not lack for clean water, except during the time of drought, when the waterholes dried up and even the cattle could not find water to drink. We could see the buzzards circling as they waited for a gaunt animal to finally drop.
During the day, the orphan child, Mpala, would gather firewood and drag or carry it to the house. He would also weed the garden with the hoe, gather stones to line the gutters on the ground around the house, and do any tasks my mother needed done. He did not speak the same language as our village when he came, and my father said he had come from somewhere west where wars were going on. He slept in the storage room on a mat and helped keep the compound free of litter and rodents, which he loved to kill with the slingshot he had made of a piece of wood and some old tire tread. I think he was around 8 or 10 years of age. We called him Mpala which is antelope, because he could run and jump like one.
Let me tell you about our house. My father had built it himself, starting with clearing the ground, then assembling a set of mud blocks carved out of the earth and set to dry in the sun. The bricks were not kiln dried in their first rondavel, so they had to be careful about keeping it plastered so the rains would not wash away the walls. It had a thatched roof made of the long grasses that grew near the river some distance away. In time, my father was able to purchase the harder bricks from the local merchant who made them, and th
ey enlarged the size of the house, using the older rondavel to store the kitchen pots, firewood, and their tools. We had a hoe, a storage jar, and a length of rope, two cooking pots, a brazier, and a small set of dishes, a tea pot, our mortar and pestle for grinding the nshima, and a set of red harness for the donkeys my mother bought. He was working on making a double set with his leather punch and the leather he had cured when my mother surprised him with a store bought set. The home-cured leather smelled like dead rats. He used bird droppings to soften the leather. There was also a pile of reeds in the storehouse that Mpala could weave into mats. I would play in this room and had a miniature brazier and a tiny cook pot made of clay which I used to cook food for my doll. Sometimes my friend Precious would come over and we would play house together. I never let her be the mother. She had to be the baby or the customer. If we played store, I was the clerk, the mother, the teacher. I wonder if she thought then I was too bossy, and later, when she had my doll, she was the boss of all. My mother gave it to her when I passed, and not to my sisters.
Precious was a good friend. We made designs in the sand with stones and sticks, shared secrets, and sometimes caught a locust and would tie ribbons to its legs so it made a beautiful kite as it tried to fly away. We would keep the locusts in a small basket in the storeroom and try to feed them something so they would not die. Sometimes the rooster would jump up and grab one when we forgot to shoo him away, and our game would be over. The locusts were not always around, but if you dug in the ground, you could sometimes find one. They were longer than my hand and their wings were like window panes of silk. We also had termite mounds among the mango trees that were higher than my father’s head. We would hide behind them, climb the sides to poke sticks in the holes, and often found shiny stones the insects had dug up while making their mounds. These stones were the semi-precious garnets that predicted diamonds were beneath the earth, I was to learn later. These mounds were shade on the hottest days, and we pretended they were castles or tall buildings that we had seen in my books.