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“I’m sorry,” I say—I indicate the toddler, embarrassed in case the man thinks I am apologizing for his older, disabled child. I quickly add, “I didn’t see your baby.”

“Baby?”

“Your small boy.”

“Ah, yes. I see. We also have a baby, you see.”

“Yes. Big family,” I tell him.

“Lowani,” says the man suddenly.

I grin and blink. “What? I don’t speak Chnyanja,” I tell him.

“Come inside,” says the man in English. He speaks quickly to his wife in Chnyanja and she disappears into the hut. “Please, we have some food. You must take your lunch here.”

I hesitate, torn between lies (“I’ve already eaten”; “They’ll be waiting for me at home”) and an impulse to please this man, to make up for the disruption and the accident. I nod and smile. “Thank you. I am hungry.”

And this is how I am almost fourteen years old before I am formally invited into the home of a black African to share food. This is not the same as coming uninvited into Africans’ homes, which I have done many times. As a much younger child, I would often eat with my exasperated nannies at the compound (permanently hungry and always demanding), and I had sometimes gone into the laborers’ huts with my mother if she was attending someone too sick to come to the house for treatment. I had ridden horses and bikes and motorbikes through the compounds of the places we had lived, snatching at the flashes of life that were revealed to me before doors were quickly closed, children hidden behind skirts, intimacy swallowed by cloth.

I am aware suddenly of watching my manners, of my filthy, oil-stained, and dust-covered skirt, of my dirty hands. I turn my dirty fingernails into the palm of my hands and duck out of the heat into the soft, dark, old-smoke-smelling hut. I blink for a few moments in the sudden dim light until shapes swim out of the grayness and form into four small stools crouched around a black pot on a ring of stones. The floor is fine dust, infinitely swept into pale powder. The father is pointing to a stool. “Khalani pansi,” he says. “Please, sit here.”

I sit on the small smoothly worn stool, my knees drawn up above my hips.

The father crouches at the far end of the hut and shouts an order, throwing his voice beyond me and into the hot afternoon; he is half-balancing, half-supporting, the retarded boy on his knee, an elbow crooked to catch the youth’s head if it should suddenly lurch back. The boy appears to be grasping at the hanging silver particles of dust that jostle in the fine swords of sunlight slicing through the thinning gray thatch of the hut. The mother leans over the fire. She bends at the waist, gracious and limber. Her baby is suckling at an exposed breast. The woman pounds at the pot on the stones where hot nshima is bubbling and steaming, letting out burps of hot breath as it cooks. A smaller pot is emitting fiery gasps of greasy fish.

A girl child comes into the hut, tottering under the sloshing weight of the basin of water that she balances, clearly straining, on her head. She stops when she sees me and looks likely to drop her burden and run.

The father laughs and points to me.

The girl hesitates. The father encourages.

The girl lowers the basin from her head and holds it in front of me. I see that I am to wash my hands. I rinse my hands in the water, shake the drops at my feet and smile at the little girl, but still she stands there, the muscles in her thin, knobbly arms jumping under the pressure. Water and sweat have mixed on her face. Large drops quake on her eyebrow and threaten to spill at any moment.

“Thank you.” I smile again.

The whole family is watching me. “Zikomo kwambiri,” I try, smiling in general at everyone, for lack of knowing what else to do. The smell of the food and the heat it is giving off while cooking make me sweat. I point at the little girl. “Your daughter, too?”

The father beams and nods.

“How old?”

He tells me.

The mother hands me a plate (enameled but rusted on the edges). She spoons food.

“Thanks,” I say when the plate is just covered, making a gesture of