by Norman Rush
Then, so amazingly, right in the midst of this he said Sometime we should talk about whether Boswell hated Johnson, which I can prove.
I don’t know if this was deliberate protean behavior à la cornered jackrabbits or if it was simply adventitious. I had to strain to see what it had to do with anything. For a while he’d been teasing me about my Boswellian relationship with him. And lately he’d asked me for my Oxford paperback of The Life, which he had never read. In those days I carried my Oxford Boswell everywhere as a fallback in case I broke a leg somewhere where reading matter was a problem. I’d started The Life several times, never getting much beyond Johnson tutoring his schoolmates in Latin in exchange for their carrying him on their backs to school. It took three of them to manage it. Then Nelson seemed to be going on about Johnson’s pulling strings at the British Admiralty to get his freed-slave manservant involuntarily returned to him after he’d run away to sea, as an illustration of the nasty side of Johnson Boswell was consistently revealing. I refused to talk about it. It was news to me, if true. This was not what we needed to talk about.
You’re giving me cognitive dissonance, I said, so stop it. What’s going to be done about Adelah?
Organize something, he said, continuing in the distant tone I hated and that felt so hostile.
I’m white, I said. What can I do? What about her mother?
Nelson said the news was that she was not so upset. It wasn’t that there was great disgrace involved. He said Dineo thought Adelah’s mother might have already gotten a gift of money from Hector which would have reassured her that he was prepared to do his duty. Hector had a surprising amount of disposable income, some of it from the game meat scheme he’d worked out with the Basarwa. Nelson was watching that, he reminded me.
Abortion, I thought. I knew the nurse could do it. There were other women I was sure could do it. But how far along was Adelah?
Around four months, Denoon said, and if you’re thinking about abortion, it can’t be done.
Because she’s too far along, you mean?
It may be less than four months, he said, but it still can’t be done.
You mean because someone has asked her and the answer is that she wants to have the baby? Because if that’s it, let me talk to her before anyone says no on this, please.
No, he said, standing up, very white. No because an abortion is all we need. It’s illegal. We have enemies in Gaborone doing nothing but waiting for us to break the law. An abortion would give them just what they want.
I said Oh, then the little arrangement over meat between Raboupi and the Basarwa, which is an illegality tout court but involving men, is all right. But an illegality by one or two women on behalf of a young girl is not all right—am I following you? How attractive is that?
All we need is the Christians against us, he said. If our game deal gets out it’s not good, but the people who run this country own cattle and they know that the boys out at the cattle posts do certain similar dubious things once in a while.
I said something hotly about realpolitik. Humiliatingly, he corrected my pronunciation, but without responding to whatever my gravamen was. I realized I had never heard the word spoken. I had only seen it printed.
Do whatever you want, he said, being extraordinary and childish, I thought. But remember there are two things Gaborone right left and center never forgives—cattle rustling and abortions.
It was too much for me when he said Of course we could always expose the newborn. I knew it was sheer provocation and was well aware that he was the one who lobbied to get a street named after a woman whose main activity had been rescuing abandoned infants all over West Africa, but still it was insufferable.
I couldn’t stand being in the same room with him at that instant. Clearly the feeling was mutual. I felt I was doing him a favor by being the first to leave the house, and when I came back almost immediately in order to rummage up a torch, he was clearly getting ready to go someplace himself, lest I come back before he was ready for détente, no doubt.
I didn’t care. Nothing was good. I left again and forged my way deliberately carelessly through rough brush, all the way over the shoulder of the koppie and down to a spot where I could contemplate the night fires of the Basarwa. I got a few scratches, going. It was cold and I was underdressed for it. It felt right to sit hunched up in bitterness, looking down at the Basarwa, who had nothing except lice but were happier than we were. The fires fade steadily and then brighten when they’re replenished, when it’s coldest, toward dawn. I stayed for that. I was getting a sore throat, and that felt right too.
Foul Play
I went directly from my crow’s nest to the plaza. All I wanted was to pick a job someplace that would be warm, like the kitchen or the laundry, and simple, so I could vegetate while I worked. Something was funny, though. There were more people in the plaza than there should have been at so early an hour. And there was uneasiness. I was struck again with how true it was that a village like Tsau is an organism of sorts, and that I was becoming more and more a part of it. Something was communicating dread, something was up. I needed an interlude. I still had thorns and twigs in my hair. Just then I saw something I had never seen: Dineo running, the skirts of her gown pulled high up, her enviable thighs flashing and depressing me. She ran out of the edge of my vision and into Sekopololo.
There was a troop coming up Gladys and Ruth. I had never seen anything like this in Tsau. It was military. They were ululating and jogging in a cadenced way, a Zulu war jog. They were going to be exhausted when they got up as far as the plaza. Where am I? I thought. Other women left the plaza, rather quickly, I thought. The war jog conveyed something. Mma Isang materialized and came up to me. She said They are in a rage of fury. This was the last English I heard for a while that morning. Dorcas was leading the war party. I thanked god when Dineo came out, composed, all in black, black turban, hieratic-looking. She would do something. There were men with Dorcas, just behind the batlodi and her other regulars, but no Hector that I could see. Dineo was looking around for Dirang, asking urgently, Where is the Ox? I wanted tea. There was a mechanism supposed to get tea out about now that was not working. Tea was late and Dorcas was coming, disheveled, unlike herself.
I was thinking how theatrical we would appear to someone suspended in the middle distance and facing the plaza, with women on different levels of the upper flights of stairs, arranged like players in a student production of Antigone.
Dorcas arrived with her troop. There were thirty, at least. If this was her core group, it was growing. Immediately Dorcas began shrieking at me in particular. Where was Rra Puleng? And why was I standing there shivering—what was wrong with me?
Mma Isang said She is here for work. What are you making this turmoil about?
Dorcas then produced something I had seen Batswana women do only at funerals: she went into a violently undirected flailing and hand-fluttering fit and had to be held up for a moment before she could carry on.
My attention was divided. Some of Dorcas’s people ran over to the plaza bell. There was a scuffle. The Ox was guarding the bell for our side. Dorcas herself seemed incoherent. She was shrieking questions at me and now and then at Dineo. Where is my brother? was the main one. She seemed to think I knew where her brother was, but she also seemed to know that something terrible had happened to her brother. She was saying a vision had come to her of Hector, dead, murdered. That was her first version, as I heard. There would be others. She made a raking motion at me and said You are dirty. I assumed this was about my unkemptness of the moment, but she meant more. Her group was crowding in on me.
Under stress my Setswana isn’t what it should be. I tried to say that she shouldn’t be so excited, or that she was too excited, but I mixed up gakatsega with gakatea, which meant I was telling her she was too angry. This was inflammatory, and she began appealing to the sky and the earth to say whether or not she had cause to be angry, she of all people.
I really hate being surrounde
d. I pushed my way out of the circle around me, and fairly roughly, but I felt two imperatives. Ululating is one thing from a distance and something else altogether when it’s being directed at you, hatefully, up close. I had to get away from that. And also I was fixated on getting some food to eat, an egg, a scone, anything: my blood sugar was too low for what was happening to me. I ran over to get next to Dineo on the Sekopololo porch.
This was nobody’s finest hour. Dineo was going in circles, ducking into the Sekopololo office and coming out again, starting to scrawl notes on scraps of paper, waving them around and finding no one to take them, finally crushing them up.
Do you know what any of this is? I asked her. She didn’t seem to. Miraculously she had a platter of hardboiled eggs on her desk. I snatched myself one and scratched off the shell.
From the porch I could hear Dorcas giving another version of what had happened. This story was that she had heard Hector leave his rondavel, the smaller one on her plot, after someone very quietly called him to come out. She’d thought nothing of it, because he would sometimes go walking at night, to the tannery to see about chemicals and shifting hides from one bath to another. So she had gone back to sleep and slept hard because of overworking of late, and when she had heard a cry outside she made this cry a part of a dream. But now she knew it was her brother’s cry. And even if she had awakened at the cry she would have been fearful of going out because of so many enemies always hovering against Hector. But in fact she had slept on and only in the morning had she realized that the cry she had dreamed her brother made was in fact his voice, saying he was killed. And then when her brother’s men came for him as always, and he was gone, she knew now he must be found dead.
I began to be afraid in a shameful way. I wanted to say I have nothing to do with this place, I’m on my way home, my bags are packed, virtually. Dorcas was finishing in a genuine crescendo of hysteria. I was choking on my egg for a minute. It shames me, but I thought with terror that Nelson and I were the only whites within a radius of two hundred miles.
Dorcas’s group lurched and then swept confusedly offstage right, Dorcas shouting that Hector’s body had been put among the rocks and that Dineo should call out the snake women to search. They were leaving, at least. I was relieved until I realized they were making for our place. I said urgently to Dineo that we had to follow them. She was making a list. We must have a committee. But she stopped writing and said she would come. I was already running after them. Nelson slept naked and he might not be up yet.
I got to the octagon to find smoke rising from the donkey boiler and Dorcas and her followers converged around the bathing tent. I thought it was odd of Nelson to be going to the trouble of firing up the bathing engine, especially since I obviously wasn’t being included, but also because it was a lot of work in cold weather and the tub cooled off almost before you got soaped up. It was a shock to me that evidently the women had gone into our house to look for him.
The mob, which is what this was becoming, was shouting into the tent for Nelson to come out, stalking around it, some women ululating right into the canvas.
I tried to manifest calm. I must have succeeded. They let me through and into the tent, not happily. I probably projected absolute determination to get in there and got a response to that. There was a thing about Denoon, undoubtedly rooted in his living in the periphery and alone for such long periods of time. He went around naked more than average. I was used to it. I’m averagely casual about going around naked in front of established boyfriends, but around Denoon I eventually took to being more modest. He was unusually responsive to female nudity. He claimed it was generational. Men his age had spent their first twenty or so years waiting to see a naked female in the flesh, undsoweiter. Anyway, I had generated a wardrobe of kimono-like garments which I had distributed around, one in the privy, one in the bathing tent, my prize yakuta in the house itself. I got into the tent and there was my Nelson, naked, moist to the waist, having hauled himself out of the tub when the commotion began. He was forcing himself into my garment, in his dislocation. He wanted to talk, urgently, naturally. He had looked for me during the night, and so on, and he wanted to know what all this was about, what was happening. He was between bemused and alarmed. I told him to stay put until I could bring him his bush shorts and a shirt and sandals, not to move an inch, I would manage it. I tore my garment off him, somewhat wrecking it. He was not going to be seen in this floral thing if my life depended on it. Later he denied that when I’d burst in he thought at first I was one of the furies besieging him, but in fact there had been such a moment, just a flicker, but real, which hurt me to see.
I put my head out to announce that everything should wait until I came back with proper clothes for Nelson. As I did, someone pushed in, Dorcas, out of control again. I had routinely pulled the plug on the bath, assuming that there was clearly not going to be one now. Dorcas screamed, pointing at the water running out, saying He must not wash and we must examine him for blood. People began copying, shouting Blood, blood. Nelson stood there in the corner, his back to her.
I was trilled at when I came out of the tent. I went into the house and grabbed up clothes and came back with them. There were more women in the tent. I stood in front of him while he got properly dressed. No one left. I was enraged.
I said in English to Nelson Do you understand that they claim you did something to Raboupi, as in killing him? He nodded. He was aghast. But he did understand.
Dorcas said to me You are not allowed to speak, as from this moment.
These were bullies. I said to Nelson Don’t let them touch you.
Let us see your hands, they said to him, as to marks.
Nelson looked directly at Dorcas and asked if he had ever harmed her in any way, then ruined it by saying he was speaking as a brother. This was insane of him, or course, and just what she wanted.
Rra, my brother is just lying murdered, which she shrieked, pronouncing it the South African way, murder as murdeh. That was very odd, but so was everything, my whole world. A lot of progressive Batswana in Gabs like to sound South African, prefer to be taken as South African because they think it makes them seem more sophisticated, but here in Tsau it made no sense.
Nelson was completely appeasing. I said to him—against people telling Dorcas that I was talking, in disobedience to her dictum—you have to clean up more, your hair is insane, you look like a fou, you have to insist. But no, all he wanted in life was that whatever this was going to be it would be nonviolent. This was right, undoubtedly, except that sometimes bullies vanish at the first sight of counterforce, but we were white, so he wasn’t wrong in the circumstances. As I was backing out of the tent, not through the door vent, because that was blocked, but through the side, some bitch stepped on the hem of the side wall to try to make me get down on all fours. I heaved the thing up like Atlas. This was new, unthinkable.
There were more men around, I noticed, but it was interesting to me how tightly they were being kept to being spear carriers. Women were actively waving them back from any involvement with the tent. Here I was wanting to fight just a little. I embrace the physical. I think in my hysteria I wanted to be the one-woman whiff of grapeshot. When I was an adolescent I was always the one who wanted to organize my girlfriends to go into the heart of the crowd in St. Paul on New Year’s Eve, granted the men collecting there would be reliable North Europeans more into puking than into grabbing and kissing, à la San Francisco. But still. I told them I would guarantee no one would touch us. I don’t know what I meant, but I believed it. We would be safe, somehow. Three and then four of my friends came with me, finally, and no one touched us, in the heart of the worst St. Paul had to offer. Four came with me in my senior year. No one touched us. I think all this came to me, and then: You can control men, but what can you do now? Think! You are lost.
There was one further interesting mêlée before the cavalry, the loyalists, arrived in force and we could consurge back down to the plaza. Dineo had dismissed s
chool. Many children arrived with the loyalists, potential witnesses, I realized, a moderating presence, brilliant.
Timing is all. The actual tannery manager was Moffat Dabutha, who was also a top pawn of Hector’s: he made as if to restrain Nelson, tie his hands with some thongs. He was exceeding his authority. Dorcas ignited. She ripped the thongs out of Moffat’s grasp and wound them around her wrist, repeating that only women may touch their hands to Rra Puleng. Some were, in fact, prodding him toward the sandpath down to the plaza. There were new currents here. Dorcas was operating nakedly, commanding men and women alike. I think this had something to do with the amazed inertness of our side when they were faced with the dynamism Dorcas was orchestrating and sustaining. Nelson’s utter passivity was also undermining for us. He was starting to go with his tormentors, numbly, and with only one sandal on. I fixed that. I brought him his other sandal and made everything wait until he had it securely on.
I was feeling less regressed by then. I wanted to communicate to Nelson that he was wrong to take what was going on as any kind of legitimate frenzy. There was foisting and theater in it. All of this would dissolve when Raboupi turned up. He had to be somewhere around. At that point I was incapable of taking seriously that foul play had anything to do with his absence, if he really was absent at all.
The pushing stopped and we all went down to the plaza at a stroll.
Groups and committees were already mobilizing. The main snake women were meeting. I was not being included, not surprisingly. The justice committee was being called together, which was going to be pointless since they were used to dealing with matters like cattle gates being left unlatched, at the most earthshaking. Also the justice committee consisted of three very old women, our oldest, and their deliberations were extremely slow.