Love in the Driest Season (10 page)

One week passed in this manner, then two, then three. Chipo would seem to improve for an afternoon or rally for an entire day, looking more alert and crying less often. Then she would lapse into coughing spells and withdrawal, either sleeping or taking little interest in her surroundings. Our attempts to coax her into smiles and giggles continued to play like bad vaudeville to a tough crowd. She looked at us without expression, as if two slightly deranged adults had taken leave of their senses.

H
AD THE ADMINISTRATION
of Robert Mugabe dealt seriously with the AIDS or orphans problem, the country would not have deteriorated to the point it had. But the government had been ignoring warning signals for more than a decade. AIDS was rarely discussed by high government officials; when it was, it was listed as a disease “created by whites to harvest blacks,” in the words of vice president Joshua Nkomo at his adult son’s graveside service. Those bitter 1997 remarks were one of the first times a high-ranking government official acknowledged the disease was killing members of his family.

Orphans, meanwhile, were almost completely ignored. In 1995, already several years into the epidemic, government officials developed the National Policy on the Care and Protection of Orphans. It set out comprehensive guidelines for how social workers and rural communities should handle the influx of children. For the next four years, while the country skyrocketed to the top of the world’s list of worst-hit AIDS countries and the number of orphans doubled, Mugabe’s de facto one-party state (the Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front [ZANU-PF] controlled all of the executive branch and 147 out of the 150 seats in parliament) could not bring itself to pass the measure, much less implement it. For its part, the Ministry on Education stuck to its policy of barring children without birth certificates from attending school, according to aid organizations. That kept almost all orphans and abandoned children from receiving any education, thus ensuring that a large part of the population would grow up with almost no training or viable job skills.

Instead of boosting medical care as the AIDS scythe began to swing across the country in the 1990s, the government allowed its state-sponsored system, once the envy of the continent, to fall into shambles. More than 450 doctors left the country between 1990 and 1998—our landlord was one of them. Between January 1996 and June 1997, some 890 nurses resigned, one report found, complaining of government salaries that scarcely covered their rent. At the time, ZANU-PF allocated less than 2 percent of the national budget to health care, about half of what they spent on defense.

But if the government was apathetic, the efforts made by extended families and individuals to care for orphaned children was nothing short of astounding. A 1999 UNICEF survey in the Masvingo and Mwenezi provinces of southern Zimbabwe found that there were 11,514 orphans or other children in need of protection in those areas. More than 11,000 had been taken in by relatives—over 95 percent. The Chief Charumbira Community–based Orphan Care Programme in Masvingo, making do with very little government help, was one of many programs undertaken by very poor people to try to care for the rest.

To understand how severely taxed the country was to handle the crisis, consider one small comparison. Rwanda and Zimbabwe began the last decade of the century with almost the same percentage of orphans. During the next ten years, Rwanda suffered one of the most murderous episodes of the century. Zimbabwe was completely at peace. At decade’s end, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development, the percentage of orphans was higher in Zimbabwe than in Rwanda. The percentage of children who had lost at least one parent was more than 25 percent in both countries. In Zambia, also devastated by the AIDS epidemic, the percentage of children under the age of fourteen who had lost at least one parent stood at 34.3 percent.

UNICEF and other international agencies painted a numbing picture of what was happening across the southern swath of the continent. “The most striking situation of the HIV problem is of unusual family structures, a grandparent surrounded by grandchildren, adolescent-headed families, often siblings and cousins bonded together, dying adults being cared for by their children. . . . Orphans run greater risks of being malnourished and stunted. . . . Often emotionally vulnerable and financially desperate, orphaned children are more likely to be sexually abused and forced into exploitative situations, such as prostitution, as a means of survival.”

The year after Chipo was born, a major international development agency called PACT organized a conference in Zimbabwe to look at the orphan crisis. The agency pulled together seventy-eight public and private groups, local and international nongovernmental organizations and charities, to figure out how things had gone so terribly wrong. The final, official report of the conference stated: “Regardless of the seriousness of the orphan problem, the government continues to ignore the orphan crisis.” There were actually three government policies in existence, none of them implemented: an Orphan Care Policy, the Child Protection Adoption Act, and the Social Workers’ Act. “Government departments dealing with orphans cannot cope. The National AIDS Coordination Programme is focusing on AIDS awareness and does little for orphans. . . . The Department of Social Welfare can only assist about 3,000 children per year. . . . To make matters worse, Social Welfare lacks resources (it is owed about US $545,000 by government) and therefore whatever help it gives is far below what is needed.”

The Zimbabwean zeitgeist was summed up in “Mabasa,” a mournful tune written by Oliver Mtukudzi, one of the nation’s most prominent musicians, that the radio stations played over and over. Translated, the main lyrics are a lament of the crisis:

Tears run dry

We mourn quietly

Death has now lost its meaning

Funerals no longer have the necessary dignity

Everyone around us is dying

Who will sympathize with whom

Since each of us has death in our homesteads daily?

Who will mourn whom?

Who will bury whom?

In these early days with Chipo, despite the recommendation of Dr. Paz, our legal custody of her was as thin as the paper on which it was printed. Three days after Vita brought Chipo home, while I was still covering the Nairobi bombing, a social worker named Douglas Chapara had come to do a home study. Since the department had no automobiles, and since Vita couldn’t drive to go get him, he was driven to the house by department director Tony Mtero, the man whom we had had dinner with. He wanted to make sure things were done properly in this unusual circumstance.

Chapara asked Vita the standard litany of questions—background, reason for wanting to take care of a child on an emergency basis, income, education, marital status, and so on. He inspected the house and Chipo’s living conditions. He took notes for two hours. Then he filled out a yellowish slip of paper that had three printed lines. It was titled “The Children’s Protection and Adoption Act (Chapter 33). PLACE OF SAFETY: PLACEMENT UNDER SECTION 15 OF THE ACT. (Section 8 of the Children’s Protection and Adoption Regulations, 1972).” It was made out to: “Mr and Mrs. N & V Tucker—You are authorized to receive and retain BABY CHIPO a child/young person alleged to be in need of care, in accordance with the provisions of section 17 of the Act. The said child may be detained during the validity of this authority and until he may be brought before a juvenile court in terms of section 18 of the Act.”

It was a standard form—only the names had been filled in—and Mtero signed it. It was, by statute, valid for no more than two weeks.

His final question to Vita, as he stood up to go: “The father, is he an absentee one?”

Vita called me in Nairobi five minutes later. While my colleagues kept reporting the story—the United States fired missiles into Sudan, an alleged terrorism sponsor—or went back to the Congolese crisis, I flew home. I was in Chapara’s office before closing, making a friendly introduction that I hoped showed I was no absentee.

T
WO WEEKS LATER,
on the morning of the fourteenth and last day of the commitment order, a Friday, I drove to a complex of tin-roofed, one-story buildings set in a dusty courtyard in downtown Harare. The halls were gloomy corridors of blank walls and chipped paint. The offices were tattered rectangles with simple desks and overflowing file cabinets. This was the Department of Social Welfare.

I went inside to find Chapara. I had tried calling for two days and had not been able to get through. His office had been moved, it turned out, and I had no idea where it was now located. There was no one at the front desk, so I knocked on doors and asked for directions. It took fifteen minutes, but I found it. No one answered a rap on the door. It was locked. I waited ten minutes. Then I went down the hall, knocking on doors until I found the deputy director, Florence Kaseke. I introduced myself and asked if she knew when Chapara might return. She did not. I asked her who might, and she said she did not know that either. I waited another fifteen minutes, then wrote a note with my number, tucked it into his door, and left. I called two hours later and got no answer from the switchboard. I returned just before noon, but no luck. The same at two. And at three.

I finally caught him at twenty minutes to five, walking out of the building. I asked if he would sign another custody order, and he explained that it wasn’t his case any longer. Surprised, I asked for the name of the new caseworker. He said he did not know. It was closing in on the end of the business day, and I was nervous about letting our custody order expire, even for a weekend. Kaseke, the deputy director, had smiled when I introduced myself, but it had been one of those transparently false barings of the teeth that bureaucrats the world over seem to keep in their left-hand pocket. Wondering what to do, I saw Mtero crossing a corridor and dashed after him. He signed a new order and promised to look into who had the case now.

August turned into September, and we took Chipo into Dr. Paz’s office for her twice-weekly checkup. Vita plunked her down on the stainless-steel scale, and the balance teetered at nine pounds, one ounce. She had more than doubled her weight in four weeks. She looked like a bowling ball that had sprouted arms and legs. At nights, her lungs no longer seemed to have that same ominous rattle. I bothered the Department of Social Welfare two weeks later, and they gave us another emergency placement order. Her weight moved up another half pound. She began to sleep two hours at a stretch.

Days later, I was back at work, this time traveling to Uganda. I sat next to Johnnie Carson, the former U.S. ambassador to Zimbabwe, on the flight from Harare to Kampala. I tried to get my mind back on Africa’s political and social situation. Carson was going to Kampala, I suspected, to monitor national elections. I was going on the hotfoot because FBI agents had raided a local Islamic charity on the suspicion that it was a front for a group of suspects in the embassy bombings. I checked into the Grand Imperial Hotel as an impromptu victory party for a candidate was sweeping through the streets. Adonia Ayebare, my trusted colleague and interpreter in the region, and I rushed around the town’s Muslim neighborhoods for three days, trying to sort out what the FBI did, and did not, have as evidence. I was in my room one evening, writing on deadline, when the phone rang. I said hello, still tapping the keyboard.

“CHIPO IS SMILING!” Vita shouted down the phone line.

She had been changing Chipo’s diaper when she leaned down and tickled Chipo’s stomach with her nose. Chipo’s eyes sparkled and she turned up the corners of her mouth.

She had dimples. Who knew? She was nearly six months old.

8

M
ISSISSIPPI
R
EDUX

I
WAS PUSHING
Chipo in a stroller around our Harare neighborhood one Sunday morning, taking in a little fresh air and sunshine, when we approached a lady who stopped dead still. “What are you doing?” she said, dispensing with “hi” and “hello.”

“Walking,” I said.

“I mean with that baby,” she said, her face trying to crinkle into a smile.

“Still walking, ma’am.”

“She’s your baby?”

“Every day,” I said, and kept moving.

I knew what she meant, even though I didn’t acknowledge it, because it was already a question I was getting from Zimbabweans from time to time. Lingering glances, stolen looks, the occasional stare. I knew perfectly well what it all meant:
What’s that white man doing with that little black baby? Did he just call himself her daddy? Who does he think he is?
Vita never got this, of course; she and Chipo had almost exactly the same complexion. And when people in Harare would find out that she was adopting Chipo, it scarcely raised an eyebrow. People seem to understand maternal instincts much more easily than they do paternal ones, especially when those fall across the color line. I got it all the time in all sorts of ways, primarily from black people, although I suspect this is true because curious white people were probably leery of their questions being construed as racist. It wasn’t always a hassle—most of the time the questions were good-natured—but there were many times when complete strangers did not hesitate to question me in public about the child in my arms.

Like the time I took Chipo along to buy a carry-out pizza one Tuesday evening, as friends were coming to watch Monday Night Football. It came on cable live at 3
A.M.
Tuesday in Harare. I would tape it when I was in town and a small group of friends would come over that night for pizza and beer. I set Chipo on the counter while waiting on our order. I was the only customer around, and the young female cashier reached out to touch Chipo’s hand, smiling, and said, “Whose little baby did you bring with you?”

“Mine,” I said.

Her eyebrows arched. “That’s your baby?”

“Yep.”

Her smile frozen in place, eyes darting, she considered the texture of Chipo’s hair, her complexion, the width of her nose, then looked up at me with a shy glance. “Is her mother
really
black?” she finally whispered.

“Very,”
I said, leaning over the counter with a conspiratorial tone. “She’s from
Detroit.
”

“Ooohhh,” she said.

I didn’t mind letting people hang themselves in these situations, but it had nothing to do with why I immediately considered Chipo to be my daughter. The talisman to this small secret is buried in my family history; its only remaining symbol is the last name that I somehow carry.

When my father was only a few days old, as it happens, he was abandoned by his father, a man named Clayton Tucker. Clayton and my grandmother, Gladys, lived in the red clay hills of north central Mississippi, at a tiny intersection of dirt roads called Gum Branch. It was on the edge of the Tombigbee National Forest and was not and is not on any map, but it exists nonetheless, and this was where she moved back onto the small family homestead.

The prospects for a deserted teenage mother and infant child in rural Mississippi during the Depression were not good to say the least. So it was a great relief when Gladys married a thin, wiry man named Pete Gazaway. Gladys and Pete migrated across north Mississippi in search of jobs, my father in tow, for more than a decade. They moved from logging camp to sharecropping stead to working on Parchman Prison’s farm before finding some stability running a small country grocery store in the Delta. Pete was a small but ferocious man. He once got in a fight with a much larger man (what they called a “whoppin’ big sum’bitch” in those parts) outside a livestock sale barn near the town of Louisville. It was going bad for Pete until he grabbed the man’s head and bit off a chunk of his ear. A doctor tried to intervene, but Gladys knocked him flat. She and Pete later divorced and she moved out to Texas, estranged from us. She existed to me as a voice on the phone every so often, as she would call and berate my father whenever she got both mean and drunk, which was not an infrequent occurrence. She called one afternoon and blurted that she was getting married again that night, this time to a German immigrant. She called back at midnight, pickled, and said, “Well, I just shot the son of a bitch.” That marriage didn’t last either; gunfire so soon after the nuptials is always a bad sign, even this far down south.

My mother was from faded southern gentry, I suppose. Her great-great-grandfather had owned a Civil War–era plantation called Rest Easy. His name was Charles Brown, and family lore has it that somewhere around 1890 he ran off with a freed slave, a woman whose name was never recorded. The wife and children he left behind lost the plantation and the family money. My grandmother, Catherine, died when I was three years old. My grandfather, Augustus, worked most of his life on another man’s cotton farm.

It’s a fairly ordinary family history for a region so mired in poverty for so long, and the only thing remarkable about it is that I didn’t know any of it until I was thirteen or fourteen years old. My parents were very conservative, and the airing of the family’s dirty laundry, especially in front of the children, just wasn’t done. I think I was in college before I actually heard the name Clayton Tucker. As a child, it never occurred to me that the man whom my father called “Daddy,” Pete Gazaway, was anything but that. There was my parents’ wedding picture in a faded family album, with Pete helping my father fix his collar before the ceremony, then another of him standing beside my father as best man. We spent every Thanksgiving with Pete and his second wife, Bonnie; they came to our house each Christmas Day. Bonnie was a short, slightly plump figure in a simple housedress, her black hair showing a little more gray each year. Her face was crisscrossed with lines from years working in the sun, but her eyes were always bright. She was one of seventeen children, never learned to drive, and could catch a chicken in the backyard and snap its head off before you could blink. It would be frying on the skillet within the hour. She didn’t say much, but she slipped a quarter in my palm for candy at the country store every time we came to visit, giving me a conspiratorial wink. She was warm when you hugged her, and she hugged you right back.

She and Pete lived on a hardscrabble farm a dozen miles from our house, on a dirt road that I suppose you could say was near the community of Bradley, but it’s probably more accurate to say it was way out in the sticks. In the summers, Shane and I would load up plastic buckets and burlap sacks into the back of our rattling old station wagon just after dawn. It was cool in the shadow of the trees at that time of day, the overnight dew soaking the grass and settling the dust on the back roads. The radio played country music, buzzing with static, as my mother turned off the paved highway and onto one gravel road and then another until we got to their place. We came upon the little wood-frame house with a chicken coop in the back and a box fan with streamers, blue and red and green and yellow, propped in the open kitchen window. We referred to the place as if it were one word, GrandaddyPetenBonnies. Bonnie would come out, wondering why we were so late. “It’s already seven o’clock,” she’d call out, frowning, “the day’s half gone.” She would put on a broad sun hat and we would walk down to a garden that covered three acres. The morning would unfold, the sun rising into a blast of heat, the humidity a living thing that would run a wet hand down your pants and under your shirt and clamp a sweaty hand over your mouth. The butter beans would go by, your back hunched over and aching, then the bright yellow squash, which we could sell in town for what Bonnie called “cash money.” Then there were the long rows of black-eyed peas and string beans and corn and okra and greens and the watermelons. We spent the afternoon in the cool of Bonnie’s house, shelling what we had picked. There was no air conditioner for many years, nor was there indoor plumbing until the mid 1970s. You went to the outhouse in the backyard next to the chicken coop. For showers, we went down the road about three hundred yards to the “old house,” a shack that had a water pipe hooked up to the back wall. You stripped down and stayed close to the house, under the water, so that no one driving by could see you.

In the fall, we cut trees into firewood. Pete worked with us, a leathery man in overalls or work trousers and an old shirt, a Winston dangling from his lips and a pack in his shirt pocket. I loved him, of course, as he taught me about snakes and fishing holes and deer hunting. I would sit next to him in the woods late on chilly autumn afternoons, taking a break from chopping wood and soaking up the smell of his sweat and cigarettes and old clothes as he talked.

Years later, during a rare visit home, I drove out to their house one morning to help Bonnie make a set of fried apple pies for my parents. Pete had died several years earlier, and she lived alone in the house now. She still awoke before daylight and was waiting for me when I pulled up, a cloud of red dust from the road settling over the car. The chickens in the backyard were gone, as were the cows in the pasture. She was alone most of the time with her daytime game shows and “stories” (soap operas). We cut up the apples while sitting at the dining table, set two steps away from the kitchen, in the room where I had spent so much of my youth. She did not turn on the lights, content to let shafts of morning light stream in through the windows, dust motes dancing in the air. The screen doors let in a soft whisper of a breeze, carrying the first touch of fall. We talked a while, a conversation punctuated by her observations that I was a pretty lousy apple slicer, and I finally got the nerve to tell her something I had never told anyone: She had always been my favorite relative, I said, and I loved her as much as I did anyone I knew. She worked to keep the corners of her mouth from turning up into a smile, which was only partly successful, and told me I should watch out or I would slice my thumb off.

On the way home, I opened the tin box she’d put the turnovers in, removed the wax paper covering, and pulled out two for myself. They were the last Bonnie ever made for me.

Even though I know the full family history now, even though I realize that Pete and Bonnie were actually my former stepgrandfather and his second wife, I have never considered them as such. They were my grandparents, and I knew that because my heart told me so.

This sense of family, something that goes beyond bloodlines and shared last names, was strengthened in my generation. When I was five years old, my first cousin, Cathy Brown, came to live with us. Her parents were parting in an ugly divorce. On the day she came to our front door, my parents did not say, “Your cousin is coming for a visit.” They said, “Your sister will stay in this room.” She has never been referred to or regarded as anything else, in more than three decades. I stayed the baby of the family for years, until my parents met a young Indian immigrant named Vanishree Rudraswamy, who was trying to make it alone in this country. Vani now calls my parents Mom and Dad, comes home to the farm for holidays, and, when I introduce her to my friends I just keep it simple: “This is my little sis.”

F
OR HIS PART,
the two-bit bastard who gave us his name, Clayton Tucker, lived his entire life within ninety miles of us, my father found out years later. Clayton’s children by other marriages discovered my father’s existence only after Clayton died, his cast-aside son mentioned in some obscure papers buried in the bottom of a trunk. Clayton had never called my father, made contact, or showed any interest in us at all, though he could have driven to our front door within an hour or two.

My father was always happy to return the favor.

Other than mentioning his family details to my mother once—and only once—when they were dating, he never again mentioned his father. Not to his wife, to his friends, and never, not once, to his children.

The power of such a stance, held over decades of time, honed and refined to a sheer state of nothingness, impresses me still. It was the inverse corollary that verified Pete’s role as father and grandfather. Taken together, it defined what family was and was not, what love was and was not.

I inherited that way of looking at the world. Though I spend large parts of my life tracking down obscure details for eight-hundred-word newspaper stories, though my files for this book fill two filing cabinets, I have never so much as lifted a finger to find out anything about my “real” grandfather. I have never even seen his picture. I have no curiosity to do so. In my family, Clayton Tucker, patriarch of us all, adds up to a little less than zero.

W
HEN
V
ITA AND
I were married, I thought that was pretty much it for my family ties, whatever they might once have been. My parents and I had been estranged for several years preceding the wedding anyway, split by issues about race, long hair, earrings, and tattoos. It was obvious that they were not about to warm up to the idea of a black daughter-in-law. Interracial marriages had been illegal in Mississippi until 1969, and my parents’ generation saw miscegenation landing somewhere between the unnatural and the downright sinful. But time has its way of working away at things. The year after we were married, Shane and my mother flew to Poland to visit us. While Shane and I went for a jog one afternoon, my mother pulled Vita aside on the couch.

“I just want you to know that I have prayed about this, Vita, and I was wrong about this race thing,” she said. “I was just plain wrong. I don’t know how else to say it. I was raised a different way, I guess. But I want you to know how very sorry I am about it. I apologize and hope you can accept it. I didn’t intend to hurt your feelings.”

“I didn’t take it as something to do with me,” Vita said carefully. “We had never met, so it couldn’t have been something about me. If you had problems with black people in general, that sounds more like your issue.”