The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

  Kalingalinga, named for the bell on the door of the shop of the man who owned the land where the shanty town first squatted, was a busy pocket of the city. Men went to work weak and came home drunk. Women droned hymns and bemoaned the drunkenness of their husbands over a maze of hands shelling beans, grinding grain, selling things and buying them. Babies tied to their mothers’ backs sucked their thumbs and napped and stared. Teenage boys in borrowed clothes stole things and made jokes. Teenage girls cooked and danced, cleaned and flirted. Children built toy cars out of wire and pushed old bicycle tyres along with sticks. The compound buzzed and swarmed and lived and turned its head from Matha Mwamba.

  She faded as her pregnancy swelled, her legs and arms thinning as if her flesh were gravitating towards the hub at her centre. Grace still left plates of food at the foot of her sleeping mat and emptied her bedpan each morning. But Matha’s connection to other people diminished as her crying continued unabated, as she wept on for her compounded losses.

  Even as she slept, tears slid into her ears, seeping into her sinuses. Soon the inner membranes became so cushioned with salt that everything started to sound like pebbles clicking at the bottom of a river. Her lashes grew so tangled that they planted themselves in the pores of the swollen flesh around her eyes until, like Venus flytraps, they looked sewn shut. She could barely make out shadows and light through the mesh.

  Eventually, the weeping stole her voice too. Matha was dreaming that she had found Godfrey at last, and he was drinking the tears she’d been collecting in empty Coca-Cola bottles. A stream of words issued from her lips – ‘Drink, you must be so thirsty, I hope it’s not too sweet, I hope it’s not too salty’ – but then her sleeptalk came apart, breaking into letters, which became like clusters of insects trying not to drown, knotting themselves together. When Matha woke up, there was a crawly lump lodged in her throat, like a hairy Adam’s apple, and if she tried to speak, her voice was but the barest scrape of sound.

  * * *

  When the baby came, Grace made sure to fetch the midwife. The old woman stayed only long enough to catch and smack it, cut the cord, and rattle a prayer over the two sticky bodies. She knew new mothers sometimes fell into a spell of unbanishable sadness, but this was excessive and premature. This was, in a word, witchcraft. The midwife gathered her toolkit – a razor, scissors, thread, Dettol – and as she left, she cursed in Nyanja. ‘Mfwiti!’ she spat. The cube was ripe with the human tang of amniotic fluid, urine and blood, cut with the chemical smell of baby oil and Dettol. The sack curtain was raised – they had needed the whole room. Grace was washing the floor, muttering about the fate that had her cleaning not only the messes of bazungu, but those of her useless relatives as well.

  The useless relative herself, lying half-naked on the doubled sleeping mats, barely registered these complaints through her muffled senses, dulled by the herbal anaesthetic she’d been fed. The baby was where the midwife had left it, curled up wetly on her stomach, slowly oozing up towards her breasts. Matha felt as hollow as this empty room, her thoughts eddying around like smoke. The midwife’s parting curse scythed through it like a flash of light. Mfwiti. Witch. The baby finished its crawl and tried to latch. Matha helped it along, grimacing at the sharp tug on her nipple.

  They had called her mother a witch, too. As a girl, Matha had always seen her mother as an ideal woman – the fury, the industry, the permanent sense of grievance. This world is not enough, Bernadetta had said, reaching her fingers through the wire fence the one time their father had brought the children to visit her in Bwana Mkubwa prison. Mr Mwamba had scarcely been able to look at his wife that day. It was true that everything about her was disgracefully ragged: her hair, her clothes, her face. But when her mother had clawed at the fence, Matha had grabbed her fingers with pride, clutching the fervour there. This world is not enough. Matha had always resolved that she would turn the world right over, for her mother, as her mother.

  The baby unlatched and began to cry, its halting breath cool against Matha’s damp chest. She tried to bounce it, jiggling it up and down. At the prison, Bernadetta had pulled Matha towards her – so close that Matha’s ear had pressed painfully against the wire fence – and she had whispered: Go to Ba Nkoloso! Find him! Matha had followed those instructions to a tee. She had hitched a ride to Lusaka with Ba Nkoloso’s family, waited for the great man to be released, joined his Academy, and become a star astronaut in his Space Programme. She had become the revolutionary in disguise that her mother had been. And now?

  The baby started to cry again. Matha had never considered that being female would thwart her so, that it would be a hurdle she had to jump every time she wanted to learn something: to read a book, to shout the answers, to make a bomb, to love a man, to fight for freedom. She had never thought Ba Nkoloso, Godfrey and Nkuka would each abandon her in turn to poverty and lone motherhood. Matha bounced her baby in vain. Go to sleep, baby, she whimpered. Shut up, baby. She had never imagined that to be a woman was always, somehow, to be a banishable witch. Now, as her baby wept for hunger and as she herself wept distractedly – weeping was just what she did now, who she was – Matha felt that dawning shock that comes when you look at yourself and see a person you once might have pitied.

  Dear old Eddie, Afronautical whiz! Like us, a most righteous whiner. No matter how powerful the machine may be, never doubt the old squeaky wheel. Hark his pleas: Let me see! Give us free! He obeyed his own statute of liberty. If Livingstone was our white father, Nkoloso was our black prince – Bemba royalty, they say. Equally smart, just as possessed, abrim with the will to explore…

  Born in a village, he was schooled at a mission and sent for the Catholic priesthood. But the British stole his future and sent him to Burma to fight their Second World War. On his very first flight, they say he spoke up and asked to step onto the clouds. This early release into the wide, wide world had pierced the bold man with wanderlust.

  He came home from the war and started a school, but the colonial powers refused him. So he started a riot, a real revolution, then escaped to the bush to hide out. When the kapasus found him, he promptly came forward, and stretched out his wrists for the cuffing. They netted him, near-drowned him, tortured him, jailed him. Behold the dumb beast! they cried. But nothing they did could stop this man. Talk about freedom of mind! In a prison in the bush in the middle of Africa, he penned missives to the Queen of England!

  After his comrades finally gained independence, they too tied his hands with red tape. They wrapped him in respect, sinecured his feet. He looked out at the land, then up at the sky, and said it was time for the moon. No brakes, they said. Too free, they said. Had the revolutionary lost his mind? Was he just playing games or was he just playing tricks? Was he a conman or a madman or a visionary seer? Should we praise or mock the stars in his eyes?

  There is no way to tell, but as flyers ourselves, we claim him as one of our own. Mukuka Nkoloso, the ultimate bug – needler of conventions and rules. But in the end, he succumbed to custom. They shamed him with scandal, they humbled his hubris, they said, Don’t get too carried away now! It’s true that freedom can fling you too far, that ambition can burn too bright. Just ask Nkoloso’s star Afronaut Matha. Launch too quick, fly too high, and you might perish in the calamitous sun!

  II

  The Mothers

  Sylvia

  1975

  But why does she cry? Which one? You know, whats-her-name. Mary? Mother Mary is always crying in the pictures. It is like naming your child Scissors – you will be getting what you have asked for. Imwe, she is not Mary! She is Ma-tha. Oh-oh? Isn’t it Matha who was washing the feet of Our Lord Saviour Jesus Christ? No, that was the sister. Matha was the one sweeping! Aah? Maybe this one is also making water to wash the floors. Ha! The Bible tells me so: Put thou my tears into thine botolo. It is for baptising! Is she not dying? Awe, you cannot die from crying. Maybe she is crying for the dead. Maybe she is like Alice
Lenshina, who saw a vision. Maybe she is Mama Afrika weeping for – A-ta-se, you people! This woman is just a witch. That is the beginning and middle and end-all of it. Mwandi, maybe she has a disease we have never seen. Maybe she is the Queen of Chainama Hills.

  Chainama Hills was Lusaka’s mental hospital. Straightjacketed inmates sometimes escaped from it, emerging over the hill with the jerky crawl of inswa from the holes in the ground after the rains. The escapees would stumble along Great East Road until an indignant or compassionate citizen managed to chase them down and return them to the hospital. Matha Mwamba was not an escaped inmate. Nor was she the mother of Christ, nor a saint, nor a witch. But she was silent and unfriendly, and this served to confirm each one of the reputations that floated around the crying woman of Kalingalinga.

  Aloof as her twelve cats had been, she would walk solemnly through the compound every morning, her basket of vegetables on her head, her baby on her back. She had set up a solo stall in a corner of the market between a woman selling dried mushrooms and another selling dried caterpillars. At first, Matha’s only customers were absentminded men or women softened by her sweet-faced baby. Then word spread about her produce. The chibwabwa and lepu and visashi were a little withered, but the tomatoes! The tomatoes were delicious! Practically pre-salted.

  At first, Matha’s baby girl would cry for this or that, but as time went on, even this natural language ceased. Sylvia might make plaintive noises or crease her brow like an irascible old man. But no tears would come, as if she were cowed by her mother’s incessant crying, as if she had realised that if she did let a tear spill, it would be lost in the deluge anyway. Sylvia was a quiet girl in a quiet world. Her mother rarely spoke. Her Aunty Grace, chatty enough with their neighbours, fell silent as a stone whenever Sylvia and her mother entered the cube they shared.

  Deprived of human voices, Sylvia took to touch. If an unfamiliar customer approached the tomato stall, she would scurry behind her mother and start scaling up to her back, where she belonged. When Sylvia grew too big to be papu’d, she wrapped her arms around her mother’s leg instead. And when she grew too big to cling, she patted herself on the shoulder, rubbed the side of her neck, hugged her own knees or crossed them.

  Sylvia did eventually find a friend. It turned out that the sun could make a whole other version of her, a flat, black Sylvia miming her every move along the planes and surfaces of the world. Together, she and her shadow took pleasure in small things. The crispy, crinkly sound of certain vegetables and pieces of rubbish. The reflection of her face in a bucket of water. The immensity and float of the sky. The jerky crawl of inswa from the holes in the ground after the rains.

  * * *

  One day, when Sylvia was five or six – her mother did not keep track of birthdays – her quiet life opened and sound and fury flooded in. Sylvia woke, as usual, to her mother sneezing salt. The sky beyond the raised curtain at the shack entrance was the colour of a rag that has been washed too often. Sylvia lay there, listening to the doves’ song lilting down-up-down, down…down…until the sun finally stretched its arms overhead. She sat up and imitated it. Ba Mayo was outside, lighting the fire for breakfast. The unga sack curtain was still – Aunty Grace had already left for her job cleaning for an apamwamba family in Handsworth Park.

  Sylvia loved this time of morning, when everyone was too inside their nighttime dreams or their daytime plans to pay any mind to the daughter of the witch at No. 74 Kalingalinga. Sylvia picked up her yellow bucket and padded outside, making her way to the communal latrines to pee, then to the tap to fill up. The tap had already grown its two tails – a tail of water snaking along the ground, and a tail of sleepyheads in the queue. When she reached their conjoined head, she filled her bucket, lifted it over her head, nestled it onto her unkempt afro, and quickstepped home, the water rocking contentedly above her.

  In the yard at No. 74, she swung the bucket down and set it at her mother’s feet. Ba Mayo patted her head in thanks, then crouched to blow the coals of the mbaula. Sylvia padded back inside to fold up their sleeping mats. Why did so many insects die in the night? She counted a moth, a trail of fallen ants and four mosquitoes that had all drowned in a puddle of her mother’s tears. Kalingalinga was still gathering its morning sounds – crowing, calling, complaint. Sylvia contributed the soft scratch of her handbroom as she bent double and swept the dead insects out, one hand behind her back.

  When she stopped, she heard someone crying. Ba Mayo cried all the time but she was never loud about it. Sylvia went outside and found her mother standing over the mbaula, the pot of nshima porridge on the coals trying to bubble through its own heaviness. Ba Mayo’s fists were on her hips, her head pivoting back and forth like a bird as she searched for the source of the noise. On the ground a few feet away, a woman with scruffy grey knots of hair was sitting, sobbing loudly, a big book by her side – it was their neighbour. Sylvia knelt in front of her and clapped her cupped hands in greeting. Then she helped the older woman to her feet and led her to her mother. ‘Ba Mayo!’ she shouted. ‘It is Ba Mrs Zulu!’

  The porridge on the coals had finally overcome its weight and was bubbling enthusiastically. Sylvia rescued it, pouring portions into three tin bowls. She took two over to the women, who were now sitting under a tree, and squatted nearby, sipping porridge from her spoon, watching them. It was Sylvia’s first lesson in varieties of grief. Mrs Zulu fretted with the book on her lap as she howled, her tears diverted by her wrinkles. Ba Mayo’s jaw jutted, her tongue exploring her teeth as tears slid steadily down her smooth cheeks. Punctuated by Mrs Zulu’s hiccups, the quiet between them seemed quieter. Then after a few minutes, as if struck by an idea, Ba Mayo stood up, leaned over and slapped Mrs Zulu across the face. Sylvia sputtered. Mrs Zulu gulped. Ba Mayo disappeared into No. 74.

  * * *

  Mrs Zulu had been deferred but she remained undeterred. She began posting hand-scrawled advertisements around the compound: ARE YOU CRYING? NOT TIPICO SAD PEPO, ONLY TRULLY SAD. WOMAN ONLY. SEE M. ZULU IN NO. 78 FOR INTAVEW. BEHIND THE BUTCHARY. It was rumoured that Mrs Zulu’s application interview consisted of just one question: ‘Is there a cure for your suffering?’ If the woman nodded or implied that there was a balm for her misery, Mrs Zulu would erupt: ‘Yes? Then no, I am not here to cure you. Go! Get your cure from somewhere-elsewhere!’ Mrs Zulu seemed to believe that only incurable sadness would yield the miracle of Matha’s infinite tears.

  When Mrs Zulu next made her short pilgrimage from No. 78 to No. 74 Kalingalinga, she was armed with nine weeping women in a deferential queue behind her, ordered by height. Wielding her thick Bible in one hand, a raspberry shoot in the other, Mrs Zulu stood at the head of the line and rallied them to weep and hoot and holler. Then ‘March!’ she shouted, and off they went, Mrs Zulu sending her whip whizzing behind her like an equestrian whenever the keening slackened.

  Soon everyone in Kalingalinga knew what it meant to see those thin horizontal tattoos gleaming white or pink on a mother’s or a sister’s outer thigh. The nine Weepers each had their own reason for crying. A philandering husband. A stillborn baby. An abusive brother. But Mrs Zulu did not care to hear why the women were sad and they did not dare share. As if they were at a neverending funeral, they just gathered together to sit in the yard outside Matha’s home and cry all day long, their sobs beating through the air.

  Neighbours rolled their eyes. Grace scowled. Dogs set to wailing in competition. But after a while, Matha herself grew reconciled to them. Indeed, she became downright gracious, welcoming them in for hot tea in tin cups and bread and butter sandwiches. Over the years, Matha’s constant tears had aged her and isolated her. Now she found herself enjoying The Weepers’ girlish banter, and the laughter that broke through their tears like a breeze on a humid day. She savoured the company of other young women whom she could chastise by wiping their tears with her shrinkled fingers or soothe simply by doing what she always did.

  * * *


  Maybe that’s why Matha got distracted. Because, two months after Mrs Zulu gathered The Weepers and brought them to her like a wilting bouquet, little Sylvia went missing. Matha woke up with her usual salty sneeze. But when she rolled over to pat her daughter’s head, the sleeping mat was empty. Matha sat up. Grace had already left for work. Matha fumbled around the shack, its dented, chipped objects tumbling here and there in the cyclone of her hunt. Her daughter was not inside. And she was not outside, crouching as was her wont over a small piece of the world, rapt in contemplation. Matha hurried to the toilets, desperately rubbing salt from her eyes. But Sylvia was not there either.

  Matha cursed her tears for dimming her vision and choking her throat, which only clicked when she tried to call Sylvia’s name. She knew that her daughter was too timid to go too far without her. Could Grace have taken her to work? Grace, with her scar of a frown, Grace who had ignored her niece except for exactly once, a close call with a lit mbaula when Sylvia was two? There was no kind of sense to be made of it but Matha had no sense left in her now anyway. Her mind was in the grip of panic.

  She made her way to the neighbourhood where Grace worked. Going anywhere took a long time – Matha was banned by reputation from the buses because her crying infected everyone’s mood – and she knew only that it was near the university. Matha spent the morning drifting around Handsworth Park, waiting at the gates of a dozen houses. Maids and gardeners shooed her off, thinking her a beggar or a lunatic. By the time she found the right address, the sun hung high in the sky, a bright blob.

  ‘Ah-ah. So you are Grace’s famous cousin who is crying all the time?’