We Are Not Such Things (42 page)

One day, Ndumi, Easy, and I went to Hout Bay, a small fishing village on the peninsula, where Ndumi’s sangoma lived. The sangoma was a heavyset woman who claimed, as many sangomas do, to have been commanded by her ancestors to enter the world of witch medicine. To become a full sangoma, a person had to undergo a number of otherworldly challenges.

“You go out to the ocean, you go down to the bottom of the sea,” Easy once explained. “The scientists look for you but can’t find you. But you are there, talking to ancestors.”

This particular sangoma had met Ndumi at a shop, noted that Ndumi was in crisis, and offered her services, for a modest fee. A desperate, lonely Ndumi had come, in the span of a few months, to consider this particular sangoma a mother, a mentor, a comfort—none of which she had in her life in Gugulethu. The sangoma’s daughter brought out glasses of Coke on a tray, and then we brought Ukhanyiso to the back room, where the sangoma performed a prayer to the ancestors, lit some herbs to fire, and blew a lot of heavy smoke around. Then she placed a red string around Ukhanyiso’s neck, and Easy dug his last 200 rand from his pocket and placed it in her palm.

The more temperamental Ndumi became, the less frequently Easy visited her. He often drank to draw up the courage to approach her. When he did go to her, they fought. She confessed to me that one evening she had smacked him in the face with a broom and his nose had spouted blood. He pressed her against the wall and the wall cracked, but he didn’t retaliate.

“She told me she hit you in the face with a broom and you bled all over the place,” I reported to Easy.

“Ahhh, she joking,” he said. It was a terrible shame to be knocked around by a woman, in a place where a real man would not be judged for hitting back (or hitting first) to keep his lady in line.

“I believe her,” I said, inspecting the scratches, bristle-shaped, on his face.

“Womens are lying in the township,” he said, gingerly touching the small scabs.

Easy missed his boy but he couldn’t provide for him. He was nervous for Aphiwe, for he sensed that Ndumi was growing to despise her. Easy didn’t like the person he was becoming, and he worried that he would hit Ndumi.

“She can paint me black. She can throw blames on me. Sometimes, I grabbing her and I stop myself. I say, ‘Easy, don’t do it.’ ”

He drank more, she fought harder, he drank more, she raged, and then he finally disconnected. One morning, when Ukhanyiso was five months old, Ndumi called me. She was going to kill herself, she informed me. She’d found a text on Easy’s phone from a girl called Tiny:
Hey there sweetlips.
Worse, according to Ndumi, Easy had taken a loan from a local shark and used it to buy himself booze, $500 worth. Easy had dressed up smart and taken Aphiwe shopping in the city. Easy had promised Ndumi that he’d call and that she and the baby could take part in the spoils. She took the cloth off her hair and put on her wig, penciled in her eyebrows, applied blue sparkly shadow, and dressed in a purple, slinky off-shoulder top. The baby wore his cutest pair of denim overalls. They waited all afternoon but the phone didn’t ring. When Ndumi called, Easy didn’t pick up. Next thing, Aphiwe’s got brand-new blue jeans and long braids and Ndumi and Ukhanyiso have nothing at all.
Sweetlips.

“He won’t answer his phone,” she said. “I will do a suicide.”

I dialed Easy and whispered Ndumi’s threats. “She joking,” he said.

“I think you should deal with this rather than ignore it,” I hissed.

“I know,” he said, sighing. But he didn’t do a thing.

“Okay, Jus, I won’t do a suicide,” Ndumi promised when I called back. “But I do want to leave this place, just go away.”

She didn’t do a suicide. Instead, after a few hours spent mulling over how she had been wronged, Ndumi grabbed her baby and marched to Easy’s house, where he was drinking beer on the street with relatives visiting from Johannesburg. By then, weeks into their latest battle, Ndumi was disheveled, her eyes full of fire. She handed the baby to Aphiwe, who clutched her brother and smooched his forehead passionately. Then, as Aphiwe and the neighbors and Easy’s family watched, Ndumi suddenly attacked Easy, pulling her long nails through the skin on his cheeks. Wowo put his hand to his forehead and Kiki entertained visions of throttling Ndumi herself, and the Johannesburg relatives cocked their heads to the side.

Easy felt a fury rise up inside him but he did not fight back. He suspected Ndumi of a plan: He hits her, she goes to the cops, he lands in jail, and jail can lead to prison, and prison “is not a place for anyone.” Plus, Easy had stopped beating up ladies long ago, before prison, after that one time, when they were teenagers, when he stabbed his girlfriend Pinky during a dustup—just once, and not even enough to warrant a trip to the clinic.

Pinky, now in her forties and living across town, still remembers the relationship fondly, apart from the stabbing. “He was drunk when he stab, but after he was sorry and so worried.”

“Just a little stab?”

“Just a little stab. And we stayed together. Even now, we are friends and I am friends with his family. And he is changed. He is grow up.”

So Easy waited for Ndumi’s assault to end instead of retaliating. She then retrieved the baby, tied him to her back, and marched home, muttering. Easy’s cheeks and nose were torn up. Aphiwe sobbed, holding her father, burying her face in his chest. For his part, Easy had been preparing for this moment.

“I just trust myself,” he once told me. “How can you trust a human being? Better to trust a rock. You can go back in ten years and a rock is there, unless removed by a human being. You love somebody, somebody love you. When you going to close your eyes, the person is going to disappoint you. You pray to God, you want straightforward person, but is a human being. You need inside of you a room of disappointment. You have to have a disappointing room. A little space, but is not active when you love somebody. I go with the flow, but when the time comes, I got that room.”

A few days after the attack, Ndumi called me again and asked me to come to her. I was living in Sea Point then, a wealthy suburb on the Atlantic Seaboard. The streets were narrow and swept clean every day by a tired army of black and colored workers in neon vests emblazoned with the words
JESUS SAVES
—they were employed by private companies that had won tenders with the city. The blocks were lined with homes in pale, creamy colors, hidden behind high walls. From my kitchen table, on clear days, when I opened the iron security gate all the way to get a nice view, I could watch paragliders who jumped from the peak of Lion’s Head floating down to the lush rugby field near the ocean promenade.

I drove down the highway and over the Gugulethu border. Some people were burning garbage on the township’s outskirts and the stench fanned out. As always, that same old man with the dented head hobbled up to my window at the same stoplight, putting out his callused hand, and as always I averted my eyes.

On hot afternoons, the township was dry and flat. All the colors melded together, a sea of pastels, hazy as an airplane strip. I drove by Kanana, that “land of milk and honey” where Mzi’s brother Steyn was committing his slow suicide. By then, I had conducted a few interviews inside Kanana’s borders, and each time groups of men would wander by and eye my car. And then Mzi or Easy or whoever I was interviewing would shoot them a firm yet friendly “no-funny-business” nod, and the men would wander off amenably.

Along I went to Ndumi’s family home on a street lined with old apartheid-government-built houses that had been in families for generations and had been, if the families were successful, expanded, painted, and improved upon. The New & Used Tyres shop, a desolate field, a hair salon offering “eyelashes, soft-n-free, dark-n-lovely.” Flyers were plastered all over light poles. “Dr. Monica” was particularly enterprising, and had posted her ad up and down the poles throughout several townships:
Abortions/womb Cleaning, Dr. Monica, For your families planning, Beware of Imitators.
Additionally, Dr. Hawa the sangoma could help you with the following issues:
Penis enlargement, Lost Lover, Man Power.

A Golden Arrow bus ambled by. Golden Arrow is the city bus line that serves the townships. Its tagline is “The Bus for Us.” People joke that Golden Arrow bus drivers must boast one simple skill in order to get hired: the inability to drive a bus. A mural of a cartoon sausage with the words
Chhsch chhsch
written below it covered a wall. Two little boys were fistfighting, cheered on by a group of kids. A bead of blood fell neatly from the nose of the taller child.

I pulled up to Ndumi’s place. Two little boys approached me.

“
Umlungu,
crisps, crisps,” they said, grinning wide, hands out, awed by their own wild courage. I looked in the backseat, where, anticipating this common request, I’d thrown a few little bags of Nik Naks cheese snacks. I had heard a lot of convincing arguments about why one should not give candy or gifts to poor kids—undermines the parents, creates dependency, connects white skin with privilege and charity. But I pulled a bag out and gave it to them to share.

I slipped by the gate. The old dog nodded hello and licked a wound; he always started fights with passing dogs and then had to spend days recuperating. Diskie the puppy, now recovered, bounded up to me. Ndumi’s dad waved from the corner. He was wearing a mole’s tooth around his neck. Why? Because a while back he’d found a dead mole in the sink, skinned it, and made a necklace from its cuspid.

Ndumi was standing up in her shack, packing up her clothes with purpose. She wore a flowered romper, her pretty face scraped free of makeup, her hair pulled back beneath a wrap the colors of the South African flag: yellow, red, green. I sat on the worn futon and picked up the baby, who had previously been lying in his blanket, gazing at the ceiling.

Today she was going to Hout Bay to stay with her sangoma, Ndumi informed me. Everyone had betrayed Ndumi, even her father, always telling her to calm down. Easy had been her best friend, her everything, and now he was cheating, leaving her alone with this baby. His baby. You look at this baby, just look, and you’ll see Easy there in his face. Did you know there are other babies around this neighborhood, babies that look exactly like him, that he won’t claim as his own? Maybe even five of them!

I held the baby closer. He smelled like chemicals. It could have been that blue jelly Ndumi smeared on his head to keep bad spirits away. He looked a little yellow, too, come to think of it, but he was still in a good mood. He had deep black eyes, big pools set in his beautiful face. He wore the sangoma’s red string around his neck. He looked at me steadily.

Ndumi scooped Ukhanyiso up, wrapped him in his fuzzy brown blanket with teddy bear print, and pulled him to her chest. She gathered her belongings—a plastic tub of sausage, a change of clothes for herself and her child, a tin of formula—in a Winnie the Pooh duffel and announced she was ready to go. I was her ride, it seemed, so I drove Ndumi to town. She sat in the back of the car and held the baby close. She set her jaw and stared out the window. I blabbered on.

“Stay strong for your baby,” I said, trying to come up with platitudes but finding only clichés. “You can’t let a man get you down. You have your degree!”

It was nonsense: Ndumi was a black woman born in Gugulethu. Her father had been fired from the potato chip factory and relegated to wandering the township with his weed wacker, offering to trim lawns; then the weed wacker broke. Her grandmother, who had raised her, was dead. Her absent mother, gone for her entire childhood, spent all day at church. Her degree had gotten her nowhere, and a decade after graduation her résumé only boasted jobs as a checkout girl, a stacker of boxes, and a stocker of shelves. Ndumi was thirty-three and unemployed. She lived in a shack behind her parents’ house with her baby. Once in a while, she applied for a gig here or there, and said, “Maybe today is my lucky day.” It never was.

“I can’t lie, Justine,” she said finally, from her perch in the backseat. “I do pray for Easy to be punished for what he did to me.”