We Are Not Such Things (68 page)

“Jesus loves me,” they warbled.

That night, the family informed me that I would be sleeping elsewhere. Wowo and Taku planned to sleep on the floor with their woolen blankets, as all beds were taken, but they were all concerned that I would be unable to survive such a night, and so had arranged, without consulting me, to send me to the neighbor’s. The neighbor was a retired schoolteacher who ran a sort of bed-and-breakfast, except without the breakfast part or any advertising. Basically, people in town knew she had some extra space and you could pay what you liked.

Easy and Wowo escorted me out the back door to the car, where each of us grabbed our bags. It was very dark and frigid, but as my eyes adjusted, I could make out a human shape in the shadows, weaving around and then crouching by a rusty car.

“There is someone pooping there!” I yelled, alarmed. “He is pooping!”

“Yes, that is our relative, who is very drunk,” Wowo said, heading back inside. “Good night, Justine.”

The figure pulled up his pants and scampered away.

Easy guided me down the dirt road and we knocked on a door. The neighbor, a plump and smiling woman of about fifty, ushered us through an empty, darkened hall to a living room area, where three young women and a couple of babies were hanging out, warmed by a paraffin stove. The house was low but long, and all of it, save for this area, seemed to have been shut off, to preserve heat and save money. It was like the town, this house: largely deserted, its remaining citizens concentrated in a desolate little cluster. After exchanging pleasantries, we sat and spoke like old friends, about the dying town of Lady Frere, about how it felt to live as women in this lonely house. There was a great deal of crime out here in this barren place, she said, and no jobs. The unemployed boys and men were bored and broke, and, stuck here, had turned to petty crime within the community.

“They are robbing grannies on pension day,” the neighbor said. “Here in South Africa, white people act like they are the victims of crime only. But everyone is scared.”

After giving us glasses of Coca-Cola, she led us to a bedroom, which had been interpreted quite literally: the long space was painted teal and contained eight twin beds, arranged along the walls. At the end of the room, two such beds, with wooden backboards, had been made up with multiple woolen blankets and blue flannel sheets. A space heater pulsed out some warmth. There was no hot running water, the neighbor said, but she had been heating the samovar for the past hour, and I would be able to take a bucket bath. I nodded uncertainly. She presented me and Easy with towels, and left. Easy set down his bag.

“Are you staying here, too?” I asked.

“We don’t want you to be alone in Eastern Cape, in strange house,” Easy said, sitting on one of the beds and taking off his shoes. “Also, is better for my back.”

That evening, I tried to wash, shivering, haphazardly splashing water here and there from a tub my host had filled for me. This was the way so many township and rural residents still bathed: with a plastic basin full of water. Everyone I’d spoken with preferred it to a shower; they didn’t feel clean otherwise. But I was hopeless at bathing this way, until Tiny later explained to me the system: wash face first with the cleanest water, plenty of soap, and a washcloth, then rinse and dry; next comes the neck and the chest and the arms; and you work your way down the body, scrubbing and rinsing and drying piece by piece until you finish with your feet. After, cover yourself in Vaseline; it keeps the warmth in.

When I returned to the bedroom, I found Easy tucked in, talking on his phone to Tiny, giddy as a teenager. They had not been married long, and this was the first night since their wedding that they’d been apart. I nestled under the blankets but my nose was still icy. A car passed, its lights swiping over the room. Eventually, Tiny’s airtime ran out and the phone call ended. Easy turned over and looked at the ceiling. His phone beeped. He read the message, swooning, and passed it over for me to admire:
I luv u my bby u r the best hubby a woman could have gudnight.

Then we lay in our little beds, telling stories. Easy, his voice heavy with sleep, told me of his teenage years, of getting stabbed on the streets, of shebeen fights and recovering in his mom’s living room. It was almost like he was telling a fable, and we both grew sleepier, until Easy finally let out a loud yawn and closed his eyes. The room was bright, lit by a fluorescent bulb.

“Should I turn off the light?” I asked.

“No, no,” he muttered. “Is good this way.”

“Wait, do you sleep with the light on?”

“Yes, I prefer like this because this is another people’s house.”

“So?”

“I prefer it.”

“I’m not sleeping with the light on. Who sleeps with the light on?”

“Me.”

“Always?”

“Not always. At my place, I switch off the light because is my place.”

“What is the benefit of the light being on?”

“When you go to somebody’s house and somebody is not your family, you never know if maybe the ancestors will come.”

“What? What are you talking about? If you’re scared of someone coming to kill us, we can lock the door.”

“And then? Ancestors don’t care for locks.”

“Look, if you’re scared of their angry ancestors coming, those ancestors will come if there’s a light on or not.”

Easy considered this. “Okay, we can switch off.”

I made my way to the switch in the hall and then used my cellphone as a flashlight, navigating the many beds back to mine.

“Easy, are you scared of the dark?” I asked.

“Is true, Nomzamo, I don’t like the dark. But we must sleep tightly now, relaxing, because we have a long day tomorrow. Yho, it’s far away, this Transkei. Far, far, far away.”

In the crisp morning, Easy and I walked down the street to meet Taku and Wowo. There, by the ever-simmering fire, a cousin served us bowls of warm
umphokoqo
, a porridge of maizemeal boiled with salt and water, and then mixed with a kefir-like sour milk called
amasi
. While staying at one of London’s finest five-star hotels, with its entire culinary repertoire available to him, Mandela was so desperate for
umphokoqo
that he insisted a visitor from South Africa bring along the necessary ingredients—in her hand luggage no less, to ensure their safety. He then instructed that if she were to encounter any trouble at customs, she was to call Tony Blair directly.

After breakfast, we headed to the driveway. The town was still, the sun slowly rising up in the distance. Outside were various buckets, sheds, a car on blocks, the detritus of country living, some chickens a few houses over, pecking about.

“Now we are getting to our roots,” Taku said excitedly as we loaded into the car.

Easy drove, with Taku and Wowo barking directions from the back and me taking notes in the passenger seat. We left the main strip and headed toward a stretch of empty one-lane highway, flanked by open plains of dry yellow grass, dotted with thousands of molehills. Here the summer rains were followed by a long and arid winter. Piles of dung were being sold by the side of the road, to be used as traditional floor polish and to stoke fires. Two cocks fought in the yard of an isolated house. A brown-and-white dog lounged in a spot of sun nearby. Some women walked along the road, thumbing a ride. One wore a long purple dress. Here and there, bits of litter glistened by the side of the road. A piglet tied to a doghouse was eating from a tiny bowl.

“Yho, Justine, in 1971, I took a bicycle from Queenstown all the way to here,” Taku remarked.

We passed a green sign signaling a turnoff to a place called KwaPercy. In Xhosa, this meant Percy’s Place, a strange name in a land where the villages had either African names or Afrikaans names.

“Who’s Percy?” I asked.

“Percy was a white man, and he is famous because he was rumored to be good,” Taku said. “There was also a white man in our area who sold groceries, general goods, firewood. If I wrote a letter to my family from Johannesburg, it arrived at the white man’s shop. But when they made the homelands, the laws brought by the government caused all the white people to leave this place.”

We turned off the main way and entered a rocky stretch of dirt road. The car bumped along. To one side rose a vertical expanse of brick-colored rock where the locals used to graze their cattle.

“Nowadays, these areas are not as alive as before,” Taku reflected. “When the whites discovered gold and diamonds, they took the people who were capable and left behind mothers and young babies. Our main destruction came when the diamond mines and gold fields were discovered. What happened here, you cannot really rely on historians to tell. They write with their perception, so you must learn to read between the lines.”

“Sometimes if I think too much about this, I feel other way,” Wowo said evenly. “But then I think, I’m still alive, so why worry?”

We drove along the dirt road for nearly an hour and covered only a few miles. Our pace was slow, the terrain difficult and twisted. We passed through clusters of houses set in the midst of obscurity: a dozen or so homes constructed out in the boonies, and then nothing for a half mile, and then another dozen homes. Finally, we curved onto an enormous field and stopped near a village of about twenty-five houses. Sheep roamed the prairie. It reminded me of Wyoming, open and melancholy. The wind whipped across the exposed land, loud and constant. Taku and Wowo led me and Easy to a large pile of rocks by a low tree. Upon this space had once sat the home of Melvin and Alice Nofemela.

Melvin had been born here and was well known locally as a skilled stick fighter. Stick fighting was a waning Xhosa tradition, though one that had once been an important way for a boy to prove his valor.

In his twenties, Melvin had attended his brother’s wedding. His brother was marrying a woman from a village over the hill, and the people from her area came with their offerings of cattle for the celebration. Included in the crowd was a teenage girl named Alice, to whom he proposed that very day.

“That very day?” I exclaimed.

“You don’t believe in love at first sight?” Taku asked.

“You are too much white,” Easy said.

Melvin and Alice had lived by the tree in a traditional rondavel, a thatched-roof hut with a floor that smelled of grass. But soon enough, as the family grew larger and the region offered little in terms of opportunity, Melvin left for the cities to find work.

“If my father had money, he would like to live here,” Wowo said, meaning that his father had always dreamed of returning to his birthplace—the place where his umbilical cord was buried. “He cares too much for this place.” But Melvin had never made it back to stay.

“Can you imagine, to leave this beautiful place with warm homes, to go live in shacks in Langa?” Easy asked, surveying the land.

Wowo sucked in his breath, thinking of his father. “That man. He work hard and have too much pain.”

We left the empty plot and headed back to the car, and then drove farther away from town, and upward, until we stopped at a pale pink house sitting alone on the top of a hill. A crowd of people were milling about. The women wore skirts, sneakers, and aprons, their hair wrapped with cloths. The men wore hats and sweaters and slacks. Wowo, Taku, and Easy pushed their way through to find an elderly man in a cardigan and a knit cap, sitting at a table. The man, a cousin, threw his hands in the air and began to greet the Nofemelas with handshakes and hugs.

It turned out that the man was a widower, his children far away, and his church group made the long trip weekly in taxis and buses and cars, from Lady Frere or even Queenstown, to visit him and bring him groceries. They chipped in money from their small pensions and salaries, and the ladies cooked him food and scrubbed his pots and pans. The men helped him plant vegetables and tend his garden, and kept him company. When we arrived, everyone was sitting down for a meal of goat meat, pap, and boiled carrots.

I was, as usual, an oddity in these parts. In Gugulethu, women usually played interior roles in the family: in the house, in the kitchen, cooking and cleaning and watching the children. Men, meanwhile, milled about outside, fixing cars or smoking and talking. Automatically, due to the subject of my research and my relationship with Easy, I had ended up with the men, hanging in the sunshine and shooting the breeze. My whiteness, my foreignness, and my profession as a journalist separated me, placing me in a sort of gender-role limbo. Here in the Eastern Cape, where such roles were more strongly entrenched, especially with the older set, my presence was an even more confusing matter.

I was herded to the border separating men and women, where I sat awkwardly on a bench, literally half in the men’s room and half in the kitchen area. When lunch ended, the men streamed outside, and I followed. A long-drop outhouse made of corrugated tin sat atop a bluff, overlooking the biblical stretch of land below. A white clay structure with dark floors contained a chicken and newly hatched chicks. The air was very clean. I held in my hand a novel by the famous South African author J. M. Coetzee, and I absently flipped through its pages.