Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [50]
“Now brush him!” I shout. “No, not like that. Like this. Hell man, you guys are a bunch of Dozy Arabs.” And I push the children away from the invisible horse to demonstrate the action of a currycomb, a body brush, hoof pick.
My nanny comes back from her lunch and she presses her lips at me. She claps her hands at my “boys” and shoos them away, like chickens. They run down the drive, holding their mouths with insolent laughter, and shout insults back to me in Shona.
“Why did you send my boys away?”
“They are not your boys. They are children like you. Girls and boys.”
I’ve told her that if she shouts at me I will fire her. But now I say, “I was only playing.”
“You were bossing.”
“So?”
She says, “Are you grown-up?”
I frown and push out my worm-pregnant belly.
She says, “When you can reach your hand over your head like this”—and she reaches a hand up, over the top of her head, and covers the opposite ear—“then it means you are grown. Then you can boss other children and you can fire me.”
“I can fire you if I like. Anytime I want, I can fire you.”
“Aiee.”
I reach my hand over the top of my head but it only reaches halfway down the other side.
“See?” she says.
In the later afternoon, after the laundry has been washed and hung up in bright flags at the back of the house, my nanny stands under the tap at the back of the house and rubs green soap on her legs. She doesn’t wash the soap off again, so her legs stay shiny and smooth and the color of light chocolate. If she leaves her legs without soap, I can draw pictures on her dry skin with the sharp end of a small stick and the picture shows up gray on her skin. If I fall, or hurt myself, or if I’m tired, my nanny lets me put my hand down her shirt onto her breast and I can suck my thumb and feel how soft she is, and her breasts are full and soft and smell of the way rain smells when it hits hot earth. I know, without knowing why, that Mum would smack me if she saw me doing this.
My nanny sings to me in Shona. “Eh, oh-oh eh, nyarara mwana.”
“What song is that?”
“A song for my children.”
“What does it say?”
She tuts, sucking on her teeth. “You are not my children.”
And then, the year I turn eight, I am too old for a nanny anymore. I am ready for boarding school. I get my own trunk with my full, proper name, “Alexandra Fuller,” printed on the top.
“But I thought my name is Bobo.”
“Not anymore. You’re Alexandra now. That’s your real name.”
Dad takes a photograph of us leaving the farm for my first day of big school in January 1977.
Vanessa is almost as tall as Mum. I am holding the Uzi, pressing out my belly to help catch the weight of it. We are standing in front of Lucy, the mine-proofed Land Rover.
Chancellor Junior School is an “A” school, for white children only. This means we have over one hundred acres of grounds: a rugby field, a cricket pitch, hockey fields, tennis courts, a swimming pool, an athletics track, a roller-skating rink. After independence, the skating rink is turned into a basketball court and half the athletics track is turned into a soccer pitch. Basketball and soccer are things white children do not do (like picking your nose in public, mixing cement with tea and bread in your mouth, dancing hip-waggling to African music).
We have our very own extensive library and more than enough books to go around. We have more than enough very well-trained (only white) teachers to go around, including a remedial teacher for the remedial kids, whom we call retards. The retards have their own room at the end of the block (all of them together, regardless of age) and they have to sit in front of everyone else in assembly, even in front of the Standard 1s. And no one plays with them at break or after school and they are excused from athletics practice.
We have music teachers, art teachers, sewing teachers, woodwork teachers, a Red Cross teacher, a tennis coach, a cricket coach, a rugby coach, and an athletics coach, who also teaches us how to swim. Our matrons are white. They’re old, and crazy, but they’re white.
The groundsmen and cleaners