Always Another Country

by Sisonke Msimang

  Baba’s face darkened but he did not comfort me.

  ‘And what did you say?’

  ‘Nothing. I just walked away because the other kids started laughing and making sounds too. And when I was already leaving he shouted and said I must stay away from the swings.’

  Baba was livid. ‘You kept quiet? You allowed him to speak to you like that?’

  ‘I didn’t know what to say.’ Baba was now standing. He was standing and I was sitting and he looked bigger than he ever had before and where usually his size was a consolation – the thing that marked him out in a crowd and allowed me to claim him – in that moment my neck hurt from straining to look up at him and tears crawled out of the sides of my eyes and found solace in my ears.

  Mummy came in and said, ‘Wally, please, she’s a child. What was she supposed to do?’

  ‘What she was supposed to do,’ he said, shouting quietly at Mummy the way he did when he was very angry, which was not often, ‘what she was supposed to do was to stand up for herself not walk away like some sort of . . .’ His voice trailed off but I knew what he had stopped himself from saying. The word ‘coward’ stood between us, unspoken. It was always Baba’s worst insult. Nothing, in his mind, was lower than a coward.

  Mummy looked at him and tried to contain her anger. She always got quiet when she was angry so that she seemed to radiate cold rather than heat.

  ‘You should be angry at them, not her. We should be talking to the school, not shouting at the child.’ She was whispering and I could hardly hear her above the roar of shame in my ears. Baba was right. He was always right and he was always strong and I wasn’t. Sometimes – especially here in this new place where I was different without trying to be – I didn’t know what to do and I didn’t know how to be so my words failed me and I became a coward.

  My instinct had not been to fight – it had been to turn and leave. Even as I was doing it I knew it wasn’t the right thing to do, but still it felt like the only thing I knew for sure how to do. The only place my legs could take me was away and my mouth suddenly did not want to work and everything in me that had ever been scared had been activated. In spite of the brave face I put on for Mummy and the way I shrugged off Mandla and Zeng when they wanted to hold hands on the street, I was still the same child who had hidden in the crowd at Burley Court, the one who had flinched at Mama Tawona’s mean face. I knew the lesson that Praisegod had taught me, which was that the safest place was in the middle, but here in this flat country I stuck out. I was an anthill on a prairie. Here, I had to be brave because everybody was always looking at me. They were looking at me, even when I hadn’t seen them.

  Baba started again. ‘Listen to me, Sonke,’ he said. ‘If anyone ever, ever insults you like that again, you hit them. You hit them there on the spot. You hit them hard and you make sure there is blood. Do you understand? We do not turn the other cheek in this house, not about things like this.’

  I nodded, still crying. I understood. I had not made him proud and this was a new and unexpected feeling.

  The next day Baba took us to school. Mandla went to her classroom and he took my hand in his and went to the principal’s office. I sat next to Baba in a fugue, certain that whatever he was going to say would mark me for life. I would be a target. A tattletale and a baby and, worse, a monkey to boot. Our turn came and Baba rose with the grace of a cat. I came in behind him, the tears already threatening, looking drowned and small. I wished I were Zeng, that I was five and still in playschool and too little to understand the weight of Baba’s expectations.

  Inside the office, Mr Barry – all the kids called him Mr B – was smiling but his brow was furrowed. He looked curious and kind, the way a principal ought to look. We sat down and before Mr B could even offer a cup of coffee Baba had begun to speak. There were no preliminaries, no soft-pedalling or pussyfooting about.

  Baba responded to ‘How is Sisonke settling in?’ by saying, ‘Well, that is why we are here,’ and recounting the monkey story in all its shameful detail. I liked Mr B and I wanted him to like me, too. I did not want to be magnified like this, sitting in front of his desk crying. I wanted to see him in the hall and wave the way I had seen some of the girls in my class doing, and for him to tease me and call out in a stern but kind voice, ‘If you walk down the hall instead of running you will probably get there without falling, Sisonke – slow down.’ But this no longer seemed like a possibility. I would henceforth be the girl who had cried in his office because she had been called a monkey.

  Baba didn’t care about any of this. He only cared about his anger. He was talking now to Mr B, so I tuned in. He was calm and angry at the same time and his great head was erect with outrage and dignity. His large hands were still in his lap as he spoke. I stared at them when I felt overcome and tried not to look at his face because it only made me sadder.

  At the end, before he allowed Mr B to speak, he said, ‘I am from South Africa. I think you must understand what that means. I will not allow my child to be bullied. Do you understand? I will not allow this to happen to her. Not here,’ he concluded. ‘It won’t happen.’

  Mr B had listened without interrupting, nodding his head occasionally. At the end, after Baba had issued his ultimatum, Mr B allowed for a beat, a respectable pause to indicate that he understood the gravity of the situation.

  ‘Mr Msimang,’ he began, ‘what happened is unacceptable. We will bring in the pupil responsible and ask him to apologise. I will also talk to his parents and make sure they understand that we have zero tolerance for this sort of thing. Now, as for the others – the ones who laughed and so on – I mean I think we need to understand that children laugh at all sorts of things without really knowing what they are doing. I mean, we can’t punish the entire school for every slight – much as I would like to! I mean, I would spend all my time chasing after bystanders and charging them with criminal offences if we did that.’

  Mr B chuckled, trying to lighten the atmosphere. Having given Baba some of what he thought he wanted – in fact, having been reasonable about the whole thing – he felt it would not be a good precedent to let a parent dictate how his school should respond to matters like this.

  Mr B exuded confidence. He was clearly good at his job. But general competence was insufficient for this situation and Baba was unimpressed. He would not be charmed or soothed. He refused to be cajoled into concessions that were beneath him. No, he was here for justice. Baba remained calm and angry in a way that always scared me because at any moment the anger threatened to swallow up the calm.

  ‘No.’

  Mr B stopped smiling.

  ‘No, they do not laugh at my child and then pretend they don’t understand the joke. You are the principal. You are supposed to punish children for their cruelty. You have both the power and the responsibility to do it.’

  ‘I understand that you are upset, Mr Msimang, but the reality is that this is Canada. Not everyone is as enlightened as they should be. The schools can only do so much but unfortunately these things do happen in our society. I can see you are new here and I don’t like to say it, but your daughter will have to learn how to deal with these sorts of things.’

  The calm was almost fully gone and now the anger had grown and Baba’s face became different and his voice was like the elastic on a catapult just before you release the stone and Mr B’s eyes got bigger and he looked scared and surprised and also almost as miserable as me.

  ‘And you are happy for my child to be called a monkey on your watch? As a principal, you are proud and comfortable to sit there and say there are lessons a black child must learn? You are happy to say one of the lessons should be that she is deserving of insults? Really?’

  The question was rhetorical but Mr B tried to answer it anyway. ‘That’s not what I mean,’ he stammered. ‘I’m simply saying that what happened is unfortunate but we can’t control every aspect of schooling.’

  Baba would not be deterred.

  ‘Those children – all of the
m – owe my daughter an apology, and if you do not accept this I am not sure how you expect me to trust you to have my child’s best interests at heart. So, on this one, sir, we will not agree. On this one, you will not convince me otherwise.’

  There was a silence. Not the comfortable type that Mr B may have been taught in conflict-management or mediation conversations, but the long and awkward one that says, ‘I do not know what to say or do now, I am stuck.’ Mr B turned red and embarrassed, maybe even – as I had been the day before when Baba had yelled at me – ashamed.

  Baba was intimate with the arguments in a way I had never witnessed. It is one thing for freedom fighters to drink and debate the launching of Africans into space, and quite another for a guerrilla to stand at his full height of six feet and five inches in a suburban office that is crammed with Board of Education memos and books on curriculum development and trophies and yearbooks. Mr B looked small and confused because he didn’t know that Baba was fighting the arrogance of John Cecil Rhodes and David Livingstone, of Henry Morton Stanley and the wonderful nuns of Inkamana Abbey who had taught him well in high school but never lost their sense of slight superiority in the eyes of God and man.

  Baba spoke again, his anger still potent, his indignation righteous. ‘You realise, sir, that you are supposed to be on her side – on our side, in fact. You are aware of this, am I correct? That’s your job.’

  Mr B looked up. He was getting angry. It seemed he wanted to accuse the tall man in front of him of insolence. But he was also scared, perhaps physically. Baba was larger and angrier and blacker than him and so he conceded, but just barely.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I will speak with the teacher and Sisonke can identify the students and we will make sure that they apologise.’

  He spoke as though this capitulation was the result of his reasonableness rather than because of the moral weight of what Baba had said and Baba looked too weary to fight any more. He was done with history and only wanted the matter resolved so that I could get back to learning and the children in the class could be sorted out and he could go back to the office. Suddenly, he was Baba again and not the puffed-up guerrilla whose spectre had filled the room.

  ‘Good, very good,’ he said, deciding that this was the best he could expect. He stood abruptly and Mr B, surprised the worst was over so swiftly, also rose.

  ‘Come, Sonke, I’ll accompany you,’ Baba said, before turning to the principal. ‘It will happen now, correct?’

  The man nodded slowly and said, too tersely I suspected for Baba’s liking, ‘It will.’

  We walked together down the hall, my hand in Baba’s. The principal walked half a pace ahead of us. When we got to my classroom door, Baba touched his arm.

  ‘You will do this properly,’ he said. ‘She is not to blame for whatever it is you are feeling about me. Yes?’

  Mr B nodded brusquely: more shame.

  Then we went in. Baba stayed behind, standing just outside the classroom watching through the glass. The principal had a word with my teacher while I stood alone in the corner just next to the blackboard. Then Mr B walked back towards me and began to speak. ‘Class,’ he said, ‘we have something important to discuss.’

  He turned and looked at Baba over his shoulder. He was still standing there outside the door. Mr B hesitated slightly. Then he reached for my hand and I took it and we stood together in front of everyone as he said, ‘Yesterday some of you were mean to Sisonke. It has come to my attention that she was called a monkey.’

  Silence.

  ‘You all know this is wrong. Now, I know that not all of you were there but we will be speaking to everyone who was present on a one-on-one basis. In the meantime, I wanted to start off today by making sure that you all understand that what happened out there was not okay. More than that, I think we all owe Sisonke a big apo­logy. All of us do. Now I’d like to hear you all say it together. I don’t want anything like this to ever happen again.’

  And he led them all in a mass, sing-songy ‘Sor-ry Si-son-ke,’ which did nothing to make me feel better about them, but everything to restore my faith in the system and in Baba’s ability to be courageous even when I was afraid.

  That evening, in the den as I was doing my homework through tears because it had been that kind of day, Baba pulled me close. I was stiff in his arms; still bruised. He smiled at me from deep inside his eyes and said, in the same sing-songy voice they had all used in the morning, ‘Sor-ry Si-son-ke.’

  Then he hugged me and said, ‘Really. I am. I am very sorry, big girl. I shouldn’t have been so angry with you. It wasn’t your fault that they called you a monkey. I want you to learn how to fight for yourself. You understand? You will be braver next time.’

  That sorry meant more to me than the one from the pasty-faced children who had only said it because Mr B made them. It told me that Baba loved me enough to show me what bravery looked like. I belonged to him, after all, and so I ought to be brave. That is what he was saying. And he was right: the next time I was braver, and every time after I have been braver still. I am my father’s daughter.

  * * *

  By Grade Six, life in Canada had fallen into a rhythm. Because Baba was away a lot and Mummy worked a full-time job, we were latchkey kids. For the first time in our lives there was no social infrastructure. There was no Aunty Angela and Uncle Stan, no Lindi and Dumi, no domestic helper we called Aunty, telling us what to do and where to go.

  Instead, we had a strict regimen. Mummy was our only boss and she laid out a clear set of rules. We dared not disobey her. She wrote them all out and went over them with us. She enforced them with a ferocity that made it seem as though our lives depended on them. I suppose they did. We knew which of the neighbourhood kids were allowed to come over and which ones weren’t welcome. There were rules about food and homework and playing in the basement and watching TV and the temperature of the heater and playing outside and taking off shoes and putting on boots. We followed her every command because the immigrant child knows that outside is one thing but home is another country.

  Outside, in the big bad world, I had learnt to fit in. I dressed like all the other girls – in OP T-shirts and denim shorts in the warm weather and in flannel lumberjack shirts and tight jeans in the winter. I was beginning to sound like a Canadian too – with a nasal tone to my voice and a sharpness in my As that had not been there when we had arrived.

  I even found myself in the ‘cool group’ alongside Shelley and Candy and Joyce. Someone had decided that Shelley was the pretty one in the group. All groups must have one, and often her position as The Pretty One is self-designated. Shelley’s prettiness made her the leader of our circle, which entitled her to pilot us through daily conversations organised around her prettiness. She had strawberry-­blonde hair and blonde eyebrows and eyelashes and a generous lashing of brown freckles all over her face, arms and legs.

  They were everywhere, copiously spread across her forehead, spattered across her cheeks, generously dolloped across her small upturned nose, and smudged across a chin so pointy it could have been used to good effect in battle.

  She anointed herself our queen and we believed her. Perhaps it was because of the force of her personality and the stubborn way she insisted on being the centre of all discussion. Likely it was because she was mean and confident so she ruled with an iron fist.

  Joyce was tall and lanky and wore her hair cut short like a boy’s with a long heavy fringe sweeping across her face that she constantly needed to blow out of her eyes. It was a style she had made up herself and because her parents were much, much older (her mother was fifty and her father must have been close to sixty) they weren’t paying that much attention to her any more so they let her be.

  When I started at R. Byrnes Curry in Grade Five, Joyce was assigned to show me around the school, so she became my best friend. We had sleepovers and she knew all my secrets. So desperate was I to be her friend that I even forgave her when she put her big sister on the phone to listen to
my accent. We had been talking endlessly about nothing when I heard a muffled sound. It sounded like a giggle and a snort. Then the extension dropped clumsily.

  ‘What was that?’ I asked.

  ‘My sister,’ she responded sheepishly. ‘I told her how you talk and she wanted to hear it for herself.’

  I was quietly mortified.

  Candy was petite and slender and in truth she was far prettier than Shelley. She had dark-brown hair and an even, just-so mouth and a nose that would never bother anybody. But she was anxious and prone to laughing unexpectedly and often too loudly. She confessed to me – before ties were severed – that she had wet her bed every night until the year before, but didn’t answer me when I asked, ‘How come?’

  * * *

  The last few months of Grade Six didn’t go so well. For weeks I felt picked on and insecure. Shelley turned her meanness on me and Joyce and Candy seemed incapable of defending me. I took to eating lunch on my own.

  So, I was surprised when Joyce marched towards me at morning recess one spring day. She stood in front of me. The sun was behind her and her hair was flopping in her face as usual so I could barely see her eyes. I stayed sitting and half-heartedly offered her a fruit rollup. She declined. She was here on business. I shrugged. ‘Suit yourself,’ I said. ‘I will,’ she responded with equal aggression. Then she said it. In a big rush through spittle and bravado and nerves, she said, ‘Shelley says you aren’t part of the group any more.’

  ‘What?’ I looked up. I was mad at myself for even asking.

  ‘Shelley says you aren’t part of the group any more. You can’t hang out with us. You’ve been talking bad about all of us,’ she said, sounding unconvinced. ‘You’re trying to get everyone to hate everyone else, and Shelley knows it. We all know it. I mean if you want to be back in, you’ll have to come and say sorry to everyone and promise never to do it again.’

  I blinked back tears.

  Joyce continued, in a slightly more contrite tone, ‘I’m not sure that she’ll say yes, but even if she doesn’t, if you promise not to tell her, you can still sleep over at my house sometimes.’