Africa39 (50 page)

She looked up into his face with a mischievous twinkle in her eye, but when she saw that he was serious, she frowned. ‘I wish you’d be a little more romantic about it, you know.’

He got down on one knee and took her hand, made a mock gesture of searching for a ring in his pockets. ‘Oh, my goodness! Where is that ring? Now where did I put that ring? Will she ever accept me without that ring . . .’

Those within earshot began to clap and cheer.

‘Say yes!’

‘Make him a happy man tonight!’

‘Let the cows come home!’

Thandi laughed, attempted to pull him to his feet.

‘That’s the most melodious laugh I’ve ever heard. To wake up to that laugh every morning would make me the happiest man.’

‘Oright oright, now get up! People are staring.’

‘Let them stare. Dipping into your beauty feels like tasting freedom for the first time.’

She giggled.

Freedom, like a whiff of fresh air.
5

Bauxite, like a waft of bad breath that refuses to go away.

So happy. To think that he had thought . . . it would be for ever . . . and then Black Jesus happened . . .

1
The most disenfranchised of the affranchised slave-class.

2
It had been a glowing moment for the peasantry: tongues frothy with nationalist rhetoric, mud feet marching to the promise of a Maoan revolution, rural hearts pitter-pattering to the vision of dozens of little Dazhai villages culled from the white agricultural scape. A nation of workers chugging along in solidarity to reach Marx’s great ideal of the triumph of labour over capitalist exploitation. These men and women who, having nothing already, and therefore with nothing to lose, clung to the utopic postulations of their intellectual leaders.

How drunk with ambition!

For the people by the people.

But first, they’d had to die.

3
Face pasted into a careful smile; oh, but the hatred, the
hatred
!

4
History, of course, would not remember the names of the masses. Too many to name, really. What was a skull, what was a chopped limb, what was a gutted heart, what was a muddy-face with a name too long to pronounce, who cared who’d remember? Indispensable to the struggle indeed but . . . So who, on this auspicious day, this symbolic emancipation of the black-and-brown peoples of the House of Stone, would History focus her lens on? Of course! Of course! The intellectuals, those charlatans who could not be counted on to speak for anybody, not even themselves! Those prittle-prattlers with the talent for abstraction who History, even if only very briefly, loved to revere. There they sat, in pomp on an elevation penned from the People: Lord Christopher Soames, Prince Charles, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, President Shehu Shagari, President Kenneth Kaunda, President Seretse Khama, Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser and not forgetting his Excellency and his entourage, the then Prime Minister Comrade Robert Gabriel Mugabe. Titles and honorifics and honorifics and titles, those tactful distractions from the speci-ficities of nationalist ambitions.

5
How stupid, of course, to have thought that something as chronic as war, holding in its grip the hard currency fear of a people, could be over just like that, in the naming of a day.

from the novel in progress
Mood Indigo

Chika Unigwe

Soham's Mulatto

Life's fare is sorrow cooked or baked

Served up with trials great and small

All these misfortunes fate has shaped

Sure in its quest your joy to stall

Joanna Bromley

London, August, 1856

Joanna wakes up every day stunned to discover that she is still alive. She spends the first moments awake imagining that if she keeps her eyes shut long enough, she might slip light-footed out of this world into the next, the hem of her nightdress swishing as she leaves, her thin, frail body – so frail she cannot abide a corset – klikklikiking all the way to eternity. Death does not frighten her. But there are reasons why she does not want to go just yet. Her husband, Henry Bromley, is one of them. She does not live with Henry in this catacomb with small, dark rooms and the hallway that is no bigger than a tunnel but which she does not mind. At the foot of her bed, Fido is still asleep. This is the best part of the day, she thinks. This period between being fully awake and sleeping when her mind is blank and her brain is slow and her bones forget that they ought to be aching. Before breakfast and the clearing of it, when she has to leave her bed (and confront her aching joints) so that the maid can begin her sweeping day. Joanna has to ask as she does every day if the bed has been thoroughly brushed, all the edges and corners of the sacking-bottom where dust can settle inspected. She is particular about this because she fears that odious plague of London homes: bed bugs, and she knows, regrettably from past experience, what can happen when a maid does not pay attention to the work but rushes over it because she is not supervised. Joanna had had to bring in a carpenter who took the bed apart and washed the frame with chloride of lime and water for several days.

At the beginning, with this new maid, Joanna had supervised the cleaning, making sure that the bed was entirely uncovered, the bedding hung over the two chairs in her room, with an old sheet thrown upon it, and then the bed, the curtains and the valance brushed; the bedposts and stock well rubbed until there was not a particle of dirt to be spied. The pillows must be removed and placed on the sofa, she told the maid, and the window opened, no matter the weather, so that the beddings receive some fresh air. Now, she trusts the maid to do the job on her own but she still asks nevertheless, ‘Done a good job, Sarah?' ‘Yes, Ma'am.' This asking, even when the response is obvious and never changes, is a habit from when she taught Sunday school.

A good teacher always asks even when she's sure of the response. Henry's words. Joanna was a good teacher.

Experience, they say, is a good teacher. If experience is a teacher, she thinks, then she, Joanna Bromley, formerly Joanna Vassa, mostly known as Jo-Jo to people with whom she is on a first-name basis (of which that number has now shrunk to a great degree) has been a good and dedicated pupil. But what is the use of experience if whatever lessons she has learned have come too late for her? If she could live her life in reverse, then all that learning would be useful. She would know to avoid Henry for one. She does not want to think of him. She has always tried not to be a slave to the past but these days, against her will, that has changed. This is how she knows that for her the end is near. The past is a flame burning her up from the inside, charring her innards. It is ash on her tongue. The past is not this woman who refuses to wear a dozen flounced petticoats to support her skirt so that her dress falls loosely around her emaciated frame. She imagines that she can count her ribs when she is fully undressed. The sight of her body shames her. No, not shames. It disgusts her and she often wishes she had the will to dress up, corset and flounced petticoats and all, so that at least while dressed, she could trick herself into believing that she does not look that bad. The mind is an easy thing to train. Who said that? She cannot recall. It might have been her father.

Her father was a Negro, dead before she was three. Her maternal grandmother – an Englishwoman from Surrey – who raised her, always told her that she was yet to meet an Englishman so intelligent that her father, though African, could not match. ‘Gustavus was dark as coal. He was certainly one of the darkest Negroes I ever saw. Naturally, I was against the marriage at first. I could not imagine having a Negro son but your mother so wore me down with her pleas that I could not help but give in. Also, Gustavus was a good Christian. Were he not Negro, he would have made a good Englishman. He had a gentleman's soul and intelligence. He trained his mind to be English for like he said, “The mind is an easy thing to train.”' So it was her father after all from whom the quote came.

And she has trained her mind to forget Graham. Why is he back now? And why is he eager to see her?

Soham, 1816

In a handsome cottage on Churchgate Street in Soham, Cambridgeshire, Joanna sat in front of a mirror brushing her hair. She was in something of an ill temper. She grumbled under her breath as she dragged the brush through the thick, dark hair. Once. Twice. Thrice. She paused to draw breath. Then began again. Once. Twice. Thrice. Pause. She grimaced in pain, exposing a healthy set of astonishingly white teeth. She repeated the ritual, working the brush quickly through her hair. She stopped, then held the hair back and stared at her face as though seeing herself for the very first time, as if it were a stranger staring back at her.

Hers was an uncommonly beautiful face: high cheekbones. Huge round, black dots in pools of white, like a startled animal's. Her skin did not possess the alabaster tone – with its ghostly translucence – so richly favoured by society, but that of rich, warm honey. When the desire to be like everyone else overwhelmed her, Joanna reminded herself that that translucent pallor would not have suited her anyway for her features were better suited to a darker hue. Full lips. A rounded chin. And a nose which, while aquiline, was not thin. That was consolation enough at times. She let go of her hair and the mass of curls, dark as a winter's night, fell in gentle ringlets around her face. She pulled and tugged, pushing the hair away from her face as if it were a live, annoying thing, perhaps a cantankerous animal needing to be subdued by a tremendous amount of force. It is obvious that this hair was the cause of much distress to her and that her battle with it was nothing new. There was practised determination in the way she handled her brush. She bared her teeth at the mirror and for an instant looked like a strange, wild, beast. The sight made her laugh.

She grabbed a fistful of hair and grumbled under her breath. If her grandmother could hear her language now, she thought, the poor woman would have a fit. But her grandmother had never had to struggle with hair such as hers. Her grandmother was not ‘Soham's mulatto'. Tolerated but never quite fitting in because no matter how often she bathed her skin in the concoction of strawberries and milk touted by everyone as the way to keep it soft and white, her skin would never lose its tint. She was lucky, her grandmother said, not to have inherited more of her father's colour.

Her aunt Charlotte, her deceased mother's younger sister, used to tease her about her hair, good-naturedly of course for this aunt was very fond of her niece. ‘What will you do with all these knots?' she would ask while touching the accursed hair, stroking it as if it were a much-loved house pet. But not even Aunt Charlotte who loved her without reserve and understood more than most, could ever have known what it was like to be her.

She missed Aunt Charlotte. All of her childhood memories were served up with the image of this aunt, said to look like her own dead mother, bustling around the house like a wind on her way to somewhere, raising her skirt higher than was polite, complaining that life was unfair and that Soham was dead and she must get away from it before it consumed her.

That was a long time ago now. And the young woman could not be entirely sure that her memory was a faithful recollection of this aunt or if she borrowed this memory from hearing her grandmother complain about this daughter who ‘went to the devil a long time ago with her multitude of complaints!' Memories are uncertain things, after all, and even Charlotte's face was becoming increasingly hard for Joanna to recollect. This pained her. This forgetting of the face of one of whom she had once been very fond, trailing her like a shadow around the house, imagining that she was her mother come back from the dead. The face of this woman who told her, even though she might have been considered too young to understand, ‘Read. Read especially the books they don't want you to read.' Like many of the instructions her aunt threw randomly at her while teasing her about her hair, she was only now, as an adult, beginning to make sense of them. She was only now starting to understand why her aunt was the way she was. What other options did she have?

She did not want to think of it, but Aunt Charlotte might be dead. No one ever returned from Australia so it did not matter whether she was alive or not, she would never see her again. It had been many years since Charlotte had left Soham and moved to London, ‘For the diversion,' she said. ‘The only exciting thing that ever happens here is ploughday! And all the men here I would not wish even on Henrietta Bell!' The said Miss Bell being her very worst enemy. When Charlotte was caught stealing trinkets from a shop on Oxford Street the magistrate banished her, manacled and shamed, to Australia to serve out her sentence. ‘She is frail and will never survive Australia even if she managed to survive the voyage,' the grandmother had said. It was only then that the old woman sounded almost regretful. ‘She could have done well for herself. She was always splendidly attired. And yet she would not take any of the advantages life gave her. She was the devil's! She's brought it all on herself,' her grandmother said whenever Aunt Charlotte's unfortunate circumstances were mentioned. ‘She was the devil's. She was a wicked, wicked child. Always was. Why she could not turn out like your mother, I cannot say. I tried my best, to heavens I did, but why the devil gets hold of one and refuses to let go sometimes is beyond human comprehension. Every Christian must bear their cross quietly. She is my cross and I am bearing it as best I can. The good Lord, who consoled Job even after he had lost everything, will console me too. You will marry and give me many grandchildren, will you not my darling Jo-Jo? Help me forget the cruelty of your aunt.'