We Are Not Such Things (67 page)

On the morning of the road trip, I walked into the Nofemela house on NY111 and found Wowo sitting expectantly by his suitcase in the living room. Wowo’s two-year-old grandson, perched on a plastic motorcycle, was glaring, alternately at me and at Wowo. The child slept against Wowo every night of his life, and he sensed that the suitcase meant that he would be abandoned. He mumbled something in Xhosa and cocked an imaginary gun, which he aimed at me, and then at his grandfather.

“What did he say?” I asked.

“He say he will kill me and you as well. He say he will shoot us dead.”

Easy, in a puffy jacket and a knit cap, came from the back room with his own suitcase, as well as a small binder of CDs.

We loaded up the car and drove to Taku’s tidy house, which he had been improving whenever he had money. He had managed to build two tasteful and contemporary back rooms, which he hoped to rent out, and had gutted his sitting room, though he was waiting for the next cash influx before he could fit in finishings and floorboards. For now, the windows were covered in plastic and the floor and walls were bare concrete.

Taku finished quarreling with his eldest son, a hollow-cheeked twenty-something with a tik habit, and loaded his own small bag into the trunk. He hopped in back with Wowo, two upright old men with legs short enough to be comfortable in the small confines of a hatchback. They were stocky, though Wowo was more rotund, where Taku made efforts to keep his belly at bay. Where Wowo’s nose was flat and round, Taku’s was long and sharp. Wowo was light, and Taku was dark. Wowo kept his gray beard trimmed and his head shaved, while Taku kept his face shaved and his gray hair trimmed.

On that day, Wowo was dressed in his long woolen overcoat, a green polar fleece, a white cap, and fancy leather shoes. Taku wore a plaid flannel shirt and a plaid flannel scarf, nylon sports pants, sneakers, a brown corduroy jacket, and a beanie cap. Easy was wearing a tan jacket, tan pants, a tan sweater, and a knit cap. These would remain their outfits for the next several days, as it turned out their bags contained—in addition to changes of socks, T-shirts, and underwear—blankets and towels and soap, in case they had to bed down on the floor. I was swathed in a down parka and sheepskin boots, and had packed an oversized sweatshirt and a sweater; I was prepared, for some reason, for an arctic journey. Easy had agreed to drive the first leg, and then I would drive the next.

On our way out of Gugulethu, we passed people standing along the main road.

“Toilet protesters,” Wowo said, unimpressed.

The toilet protesters were the ones who had thrown poop at the mayor’s van, a questionable tactic to communicate how sick they were of relieving themselves in open containers. Now here they stood, assembled in little crowds along the sidewalk, displaying their buckets full of excrement and demanding flush toilets be installed near their shacks.

“They are disturbing people,” Taku said.

We drove east, toward the apple orchards of Grabouw, passing through the mountains, the dry bush, the rocky landscape dotted with pine trees. We ignored hitchhikers, 10-rand notes in their hands if they were willing to pay for gas. We passed an ostrich farm. We passed a rumpled group of men and boys holding out crates of grapes beneath a billboard that warned:
BEWARE OF ROBBERS SELLING STOLEN GRAPES
.

We played oldies, which Wowo and Taku liked, especially Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Louis Armstrong, Grover Cleveland, and the Zimbabwean superstar Oliver Mtukudzi. Easy sang along badly and inaccurately to every single song.

South Africa is a physically epic place. It contains deserts and seas, rivers and lakes and towering mountains. To drive across the country is to pass through ecosystem after ecosystem, each one ancient and boastful. We drove by vineyards and cut through the mountains, zigzagging up and out. There were swaths of dry bush and miles of rocky terrain dotted with pines. A troupe of baboons trotted along the road, engaged in the many dramas of monkeys, who kvetch and fight and love like they’re on a reality TV show. At one point, a forest of enormously tall trees bordered the highway, the trunks reaching up like skyscrapers, covered in smooth, white bark and topped with deep green leaves. We burst out from the flatlands and before us stretched the sparkling Indian Ocean. We passed through the wealthy vacation town of Plettenberg Bay, where Capetonians kept summer homes. Slate-and-white mansions cascaded down to the famously immaculate beaches. Just as suddenly, we passed the township on its outskirts, pressing against the highway, shacks and a crumbling wooden church.

“This is the N2, the National Road,” Easy said, observing the township. “Is embarrassing.”

We stopped at a KFC. Easy had cobbled together a couple hundred rand, which had been burning a hole in his pocket for the entire morning. He jumped out of the car, rushed into the franchise, and ordered three boxes of chicken and three mini white loaves from a weary, middle-aged colored woman in a little red cap whose name tag announced her as Maritsa.

“What does that mean?” Easy asked, pointing at the tag.

Maritsa ignored him, punching at her register.

“Does it mean you love me?” Easy asked, leaning in. Maritsa didn’t look up. “Does it mean you hate me?”

He collected the chicken and sprinted to the table, where we sat and ate. The three men eyed me as I picked at my food and finally Easy informed me that the family had recently been engaged in a debate about why I was slender, with Kiki arguing genetics while Wowo argued that maybe it was because I didn’t eat hot dogs all day,
like someone he knew
, and then Kiki spitting back that Wowo was one to talk.

“For me, fried chicken is just…unhealthy,” I said tentatively.

“What do you mean?” Taku asked.

“Fried chicken…It’s really bad for you.”

I had long assumed—naively, I now realized—that people in Gugulethu knew, but did not care, that their diets were generally unhealthy. The staples tended to be fried or barbecued lamb, goat, or skin-on chicken; slice after slice of fluffy white store-bought bread; fried potatoes; boiled-to-death carrots and green beans;
pap;
a variety of processed meats; soft drinks; packaged cakes; candy bars; maybe a wan apple or cucumber here or there. Looking at Wowo and Taku across the pile of fried chicken, I realized that for a large portion of the population, nutritional education had been elusive, while fast-food advertising had been plentiful. Health food was unavailable, out of reach, while the spaza shops dotting the township sold cheap chips, sweets, and fizzy drinks.

“What is healthy, then?” Taku asked.

“Like, grilled chicken,” I said. “Um, brown bread? Fish.”

He nodded. “Baloney?”

“Not baloney.”

“No more fried chicken for me,” Taku decided. “I don’t want to die of Kentucky.”

Months later, when I visited him at his house one afternoon, Taku would still be abstaining from fried chicken, a decision his wife found baffling, since fried chicken was, she said with a shrug, “very tasty.”

The earth turned red and yellow when we reached the Eastern Cape, and the traffic thinned. Once there, we were often the only car in sight. There were no mansions or industries. Time turned back. The plains and hills were dotted with horses and cows. We saw the silhouettes of sheep walking across a craggy hilltop in a perfect line. “Like soldiers,” Easy said. We bought a sack of oranges on the side of the road, and Wowo prepared each orange with his pocketknife, cutting off a perfect spiral of peel in one piece.

We passed a fake Khoikhoi village, advertised with billboards—we could see the collection of straw-roof rondavels from the road. The Khoikhoi, the first to encounter white settlers, had been largely destroyed or absorbed into other communities so we supposed the endeavor involved a few Xhosa people dressed as ancient pastoralists, willing to pose for a tourist picture if the opportunity arose.

In the Eastern Cape, a white police officer pulled us over for a standard check. He peered into the car. Wowo, Taku, and Easy nodded hello. I handed over my New York State driver’s license, which he examined.

“Where are you going?” the policeman asked.

“Lady Frere,” I said.

“Why?” He was not asking in an official capacity; he was simply overcome by curiosity.

“To visit some friends.”

The policeman returned my license and stood to the side, unsatisfied, as we drove away.

In the Eastern Cape, the main towns were few and far between. They contained Shoprites and Pick n Pays, sneaker stores, cheap clothing shops, run-down auto shops, and gas station franchises. In one such central town, we stopped and bought groceries. As we strolled through the store, Taku asked me to point out healthy foods and unhealthy ones as he took mental notes.

We finally reached Lady Frere, where Wowo and Taku were born. Lady Frere was now a town, spread out over thirteen square miles, of around 2,500 people, nearly 99 percent black Xhosa. Lady Frere’s main road contained little more than a police station and a few shops. The surrounding lanes were built with run-down single-level ranch houses that had once been owned by white government employees and teachers, until they found themselves contained within a homeland ruled by a semiautonomous chief. Then they booked it out of there.

This was the general feeling of Lady Frere: of a place abandoned, first by the whites and then by the blacks, who headed to the cities to eke out work. Anyone who could get out, it seemed, did get out, for there was simply no opportunity here. No jobs, no universities, no money, no nothing. And so the streets had a vaguely mournful quality, as they do in any ghost town.

Wowo and Taku directed me to the house of their late brother, close to the police station. He had died a year earlier, leaving a widow and assorted sons and daughters and grandchildren. The house itself was low and beige. It had once belonged to whites, Taku told me with an inkling of pride, and now his family owned it.

The living room into which we entered was painted fuchsia and decorated with framed photographs hung high up on the wall, so that one had to crane one’s neck to see them—a common aesthetic choice in many Xhosa homes, and one I never understood. At the center of the living room sat a gigantic, severe widow. This was the Xhosa custom that always threw me: it was up to the guest to greet, to welcome herself into the home, to say hello to everyone, and then to take any place she could find. It was the opposite of Western etiquette, in which the host stands, welcomes, and offers the guest a seat, and I almost always screwed it up. I grew shy, or awkward, or greeted the wrong person, failing to properly identify the matriarch or patriarch, using the incorrect honorific, admiring a cute baby first (acceptable in America, but discourteous in black South African households).

Xhosa people were unfortunately accustomed to much grander offenses by whites, and generally received me with generosity and good humor. As far as I could tell, though I certainly deserved multiple helpings of disdain during my time bumbling around a new culture, I was never once corrected harshly or subjected to any grudge holding or even judgment.

“You do try,” Easy once said, and it seemed that this was what counted.

The five rugrats running around the house were immune to social mores, and they promptly tackled me and then, when I stumbled to a seat, climbed atop my lap, and those who could not fit hung over my shoulders. When I looked any one of them in the eye, he or she collapsed into a fit of giggles. As Wowo and Taku and the widow caught up, a teenage girl served us milky tea. In the corner, Easy had reunited with a cousin, and the two of them were laughing uproariously.

Dinner was two loaves of bread that Taku and Wowo had brought, and a cooked chicken I had picked up on the way, having been advised that the family would have a hard time feeding us. Everyone ate on individual trays balanced on their laps. An American sitcom called
The First Family,
which as far as I could gather centered on a fictional black family living in the White House, played in the background. In the kitchen, various young women cleaned up, and children flew around. Nobody spoke much, not to me or to each other. The lone table was worn and cracked. In the living room, the widow held in her lap an ice cream carton full of change and toilet paper, and anybody in need of either item approached her meekly, and she handed out the goods accordingly. It was the norm, where bathrooms were shared and toilet paper was expensive, for people to keep their own rolls in their rooms, which meant that when I used a bathroom at somebody’s house, I was usually first provided with the roll. As the evening wore on, the matriarch put down the carton and picked up a baby, whom she cuddled to her breast. At one point, she ordered the children to assemble and sing a song for Wowo and Taku.