Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [54]
I turn to my neighbor and hiss, “I hope I don’t get that napkin when it comes back from laundry.”
“Ja, me too, hey.”
Within one term, there are three white girls and two white boys left in the boardinghouse. We are among two hundred African children who speak to one another in Shona—a language we don’t understand—who play games that exclude us, who don’t have to listen to a word we say.
Then our white matron leaves and a young black woman comes to take her place. She is pretty and firm and kind. She does not smoke cigarettes and drink cheap African sherry in her room after lights-out. She redecorates the matron’s sitting room with a white cloth over the back of the worn old sofa and fresh flowers on the coffee table, and she gets rid of all the ashtrays. A sign goes up on the door of her sitting room: no smoking please. young lungs growing.
Some of the new children in the boardinghouse are much older than we, fourteen at least. They already have their periods, they have boyfriends. They laugh at my pigeon-flat chest.
We sleep so close that, even with the lights out, I can make out the shape of my neighbor’s body under the thin government-issue blanket. I watch the way she sleeps, rolled onto her side, too womanly for the slender child’s bed. Her name is Helen. Her warm breath reaches my face.
Helen, Katie, Do It, Fiona, Margaret, Mary, Kumberai.
Some of the children at my school are the children of well-known guerrilla fighters. We have the Zvobgo twin sisters for instance, whose father, Eddison, spent seven years in jail during the War for “political activism.” He is a war hero now and very famous; he is in the new government.
There are, it turns out, no white war heroes. None of the army guys for whom I cheered and prayed will be buried at Heroes Acre under the eternal flame. They will not have their bones dug up from faraway battlefields and driven in stately fashion all the way to Harare for reburial.
We eat elbow to elbow. We brush our teeth next to each other, leaning over shared sinks, our spit mixing together in a toothpaste rainbow of blue and green and white. We shit next to each other in the small, thin-walled booths.
That year, there is a water shortage and we have to conserve water.
Now we must pee on top of each other’s pee. One cup of water each every day with which we must brush our teeth and wash our faces in the morning. We have to share bathwater. I am reluctant. Then the new, black matron says, “Come on, stop this silly nonsense. Skin is skin. In you get.”
While our new matron watches, I climb into the bathwater, lukewarm with the floating skin cells of Margaret and Mary Zvogbo. Nothing happens. I bathe, I dry myself. I do not break out in spots or a rash. I do not turn black.
The year I turn twelve, Mum and Dad drive me to Harare, where I write an entrance examination to get into a prestigious, girls-only private high school, and much to everyone’s surprise I pass the examination and am accepted into Arundel High School, known by its past and current inmates as the Pink Prison.
Mum on Caesar
LOSING ROBANDI
Rhodesia has more history stuffed into its make-believe, colonial-dream borders than one country the size of a very large teapot should be able to amass in less than a hundred years. Without cracking.
But all the history of this land returns to the ground on which we stand, because all of us (black, white, coloured, Indian, old-timers, newcomers) are fighting for the same thing: tillable, rain-turned-over-fresh, fertile, worm-smelling soil. Land on which to grow tobacco, cattle, cotton, soybeans, sheep, women, children.
In Rhodesia, we are born and then the umbilical cord of each child is sewn straight from the mother onto the ground, where it takes root and grows. Pulling away from the ground causes death by suffocation, starvation. That’s what the people of