Those Bones Are Not My Child (85 page)

“Girard and Mama?”

“Crazy about each other. You hadn’t noticed?”

“Too busy watching you and the mailman, Gerry.”

Gerry threw her head back and laughed, and Zala joined in, more for the memory the arched, supple neck recalled than anything else: Gerry the teenager laughing at little Zala, fresh back from summer Bible school and worried about the state of her soul.

“I’m laughing, Zala, because that crazy brother of mine has been trying to marry me off for the past year. First to a teacher in Botswana who’s not in the least interested in a woman who owns no land. Then to a Zambian medic who works with the Flying Doctor Service. A very fine man, he has two wives—a city wife and a bush wife.” I don’t know what Maxwell can be dreaming of.”

She tugged on the basket to hurry Zala along. “One bull, six horses.”

“Sixty hives, eight hens, one rooster.”

“Forty-six meters of cloth.”

“Six macramé planters.”

“Harnesses and saddles.”

“Beeswax.”

“The collected writings of Nkrumah and Cabral.”

“Back issues of
Klanwatch
and
The African Call
and one dog-eared copy of
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
by Walter Rodney.”

“Ahhh, my sister. We’ve got treasures to match the Girards’ treasures for certain.”

“BEHOLD!”

There was a hush. Everyone came to a halt. Lovey was standing in the middle of a spread of evening primrose, her arms flung wide.

“Evening primrose blooming in September?” one of the students whispered.

“They weren’t even here last year,” Bernard said to Kofi.

“Just one or two,” Titus Girard corrected, smiling. “She’s been out here talking to them a little bit. While the others sported their colors, these little tricksters were laying in the cut.”

Gerry moved into the spread, searching for flowers that had
dropped their petals. She and Zala plucked the pods that contained the seeds that had the oil that, pressed and refined, kept their mother going financially.

“Very costly,” Gerry explained.

“You were saying, Mrs. Loveyetta, that this is better than aloe for burns?”

“Fire burns, X-ray burns, eczema, ulcers, arthritis, thrombosis, dandruff, baldness, cholesterol, blood pressure, hyperactive little chirren, fat, alcoholism, childbirth, cramps, a heap of female complaints, various allergies, migraines, glaucoma, toxemia, hepatitis.” Lovey dropped to her knees and scooped up the pale yellow buds in her hands, then let them go. They danced on their stems. She was radiant. Titus Girard patted himself down for a clean handkerchief to give her.

“Good for razor bumps too,” Junior said, scratching his chin.

“Watermelon rind just as good,” Bernard said, “or the sloppy side of a papaya skin. This stuff’s too expensive when watermelon just as good.” He elbowed Junior when Kofi started feeling his “mustache” and “beard.”

“Waaaaatermelon, red to the rind,” Sheena sang out. Cookie joined in to sing the fruit wagon’s chants; then they all went back to being wolves again when a cloud passed from in front of the moon.

Titus Girard lifted Miss Lovey from the ground, and the two grown-up ladies picked primrose in earnest.

“I like that man,” Gerry said. “One spring-open umbrella for the broker.”

“A radio that plays in the shower.”

“An audience for my slide show.”

“Fresh flowers for my hair.” And when Zala turned, she saw Sonny approaching with a bouquet of tiger lilies and swamp punk.

“If, as you say, it’s a case of wishful thinking or of mass brainwashing, then the sponsoring organizations will want to call off the rally, won’t they? Obviously Atlanta is not going to turn out in numbers. On the other hand, I can’t see how they can stop the momentum in other cities. Buses are leaving from Birmingham—are you listening to me?”

Gerry reached across the basket and pinched Zala’s arm. They
rounded the bend, and Spence glanced up at the tin chimney gleaming in the green-purple foliage.

“I’m listening,” Zala said. She would wait for him in the cabin. The glow from the logs would be all she could see by until he opened the door and the moon spilled in.

“If there’s a rally, I guess we’ll be there,” Spence said, listening to the crunch of needles underfoot. He pictured the trail of clothes he would leave from the house to the cabin, how his pants would look on the bed of needles when he turned up at the door. “I’m not sure the rally is the time and place for Sonny—” He cut himself off when the boys dashed by, zinging pinecone torpedoes over their shoulders. “Not that he’s told us anything concrete as yet.” The girls pursued with vines and twigs that their shouts turned into snakes.

“It’s an odd thing about the tortured,” Gerry said, then waited until the chickens quieted down and the children’s noise, far ahead now, grew faint. “When political prisoners slip through Pretoria’s grip and reach us, torture is the last thing they tell us about. The beatings, the electroshock, the burns—that is not what’s on their minds. To read, Spence, that’s what they wish to speak of. Think of it, sentenced to 10 years on Robbens Island, and on top of everything else forbidden to read. “Mostly they speak of the hungers. Five unrushed minutes on a clean toilet. A cake of milled soap. A real toothbrush. To read. Which do you think you could endure the least, Zala, twenty lashes or twenty weeks without writing materials and something to read? And music. It’s quite an adjustment out in the world again,—car horns, transistors, laughter. Laughter after the screams of the tortured, the screams of the broken gone mad in their cells. Or the silence, the absolute silence of solitary confinement. Clandestine whispers for months and months, and then free, across the border, to see people walking two and three abreast in the streets, lambasting the government or discussing the news or just talking nonsense. People at the cinema club, in the coffee bars, people freely assembling in a free country. Well, not so free. Not so long as the mad dog across the border is given free rein by the ‘free world.’ ”

“In Africa they have a saying,” Gerry continued after a few steps in silence. “ ‘A borrowed fiddle cannot complete the tune.’ I think of it sometimes watching the two of you practically giving Sonny mouth-to-mouth every five seconds. Are you listening to me?”

“We’re listening,” they both said.

“What strikes me is, if it’s difficult for adults—adults armed with an analysis, men and women who, no matter how cut off from the world or from the rest of the prison population, know at least why they are there and know too that they are not alone in the brutalization or the struggle, for the struggle goes on all around them behind the walls—then how impossible it must be for Sonny. He’s a boy.”

“You think he’s protecting them, is that what you’re saying, Gerry? You think he’s protecting … his tormentors, through silence?,” Spence asked.

“Do they denounce their torturers?” asked Zala.

“Not with the passion you’d expect. And not because they’ve accepted it or gotten used to it. Not because their minds recoil from the memory. Though certainly some of that applies. And not because they identify with their tormentors. That’s what your friend McClintock suggested, isn’t it—confused loyalties? I’ve thought a lot about this,” Gerry said. “Long before I met banned people and torture victims. The Stockholm syndrome, as they call it, rarely applies with freedom fighters with a passionate ideology.

“But a child. It’s good that you have a friend who’s skilled to assist.”

“Mac. Yes,” Spence said.

“I hope I’m making sense. It’s the only context I know,” Gerry apologized.

In the soak tub the surface of the water was silvery. The branches where Zala would hang her clothes were silvery too. The moon would wash the floorboards white and she’d ask if he’d come like that from the house, what would her mother think? That hers was one lucky daughter, he would say, striking poses in the doorway. She’d kick her feet against the ceiling, egging him on. And when he came inside the cabin, she’d roll onto her hip and extend her foot to catch on to so he’d know how to move in the dark.

“It’s the same with us and the sixties. Neither Maxwell nor I dwelt on the beatings. I’m sure we spoke of the fear. We didn’t want to shield you from that.”

“Mostly I remember the singing,” Zala said.

“Yes, the singing. Perhaps there is no way to talk about torture and hatred, because they aren’t images, they’re un-images. I don’t mean I can’t picture the clubs and the guns and the electric prods. But it’s all
an un-image. Half the people I work with have been political prisoners in one liberation struggle or another—and even with ANC members in numbers transforming prison conditions … torture is an un-image. That’s as far as I can get. It’s similar to your situation, isn’t it? You’ve not spoken of the yearlong torment nearly as much as …” Gerry could not find the words.

“The longings,” Spence said, but his mind and body were elsewhere. He would find his way to the lower bench, groping, then put his knee on the slats and climb up to her.

“The hungers, as you say.”

She’d roll onto her hip and grip his in her thighs and with her heels in his buttocks guide him to where he wanted to be.

“You don’t want me to speak of these things.”

“It helps, Gerry,” said Zala.

Gerry took the whole of the basket to carry, scooping up the seeds and letting them sift through her fingers. Zala and Spence crowded closer to hold her.

They heard Girard’s truck backing out the side gate. Lights went on in the house as they approached. In the driveway between the rows of snap beans and the kitchen garden was the limo, long and sleek. It gleamed like a dream car. It lured them away from Gerry’s voice and even their thoughts of a late rendezvous. This time tomorrow, they’d be on the Georgia coast, grinning slyly about their night in the sauna.

“I’ve been trying to pin down what it is that always makes me hold back a little,” Gerry went on. “It’s not lack of sympathy, or lack of knowledge. I know the degree to which propaganda can contaminate. And yet, a part of me is always thinking that they must have called it down on themselves somehow.

“Had it coming,” said Spence.

“Yes.”

“Not like you and me, pure and safe.”

“Yes. Even though we know better. I certainly know better. We listen and say all the right things. But inside we hold back a little and don’t empathize as we should.”

“Yes,” Zala said. “We study the persecuted to see some difference between us that will make us feel safe.”

“I’ve been doing that with Sonny all along, I think. From the beginning.” Gerry’s voice was small and cramped. “Please forgive me.”
And when they did not recoil, she flung herself at them to kiss and be kissed.

“You think we don’t understand blame-the-victim? It’s—attractive, especially if you can’t get your hands on the … the …” Zala could find no word loathsome enough.

“I love you both,” Gerry said, and moved around quickly to the front of the house.

They clung tightly as they listened to the porch door knock closed, then the squeeze of the hammock as Gerry threw herself into it for a night of armed dreaming.

Spence looked up at the windows. “I’ll tuck them in,” but he did not move.

“I’ll be waiting,” she started to say, but his tongue was in her mouth.

“Mushy, mushy,” Kenti called down from the landing, her face pressed against the window screen. They looked up as the light from Sonny’s bedroom went on behind Kenti’s head.

“What the hell are we going to do, Zala, if he won’t talk?”

She buried her head in the crook of his neck, then tugged him toward the path to the cabin.

Mama Lovey broke out switch after switch, searching for one special one, supple but stout. Switches sap-sticky or split she didn’t bother to test but dropped, lifting the hem of her nightgown to kick them with the side of her foot under the delphiniums. By the time the bush gave way at the heart and splayed out, she’d found the best of the bunch. And best had always been good enough for Lovey. She’d had her fill of the worst—grandson vanished, Mr. Williams ailing, her daughter on the telephone broken, her voice flat and unwilling to forgive. Lovey would hang up and resume her vigil. Chair tipped back to the wall in the bedroom, she’d fall asleep with the Good Book open on her face and sliding.

When Death came to the house, it caught her dreaming about peaches and cream. She awoke still cranking the handle, but it was the arm of the chair: She could have sworn she’d been shearing off a corner of ice a second before and packing in rock salt, then hurrying the churn because Mr. Williams was fond of ice cream. She’d been shearing the ice
and dreaming the meadow was crowded with children on snowshoes of cardboard. So many children, children on TV, in the papers, in Sister Myrtle’s talk from New York, not one of them Sonny.

Mama Lovey pulled the switch through her fist and stripped the leaves off. The child had come back, had come back from hell, tracking into her house a strange contagion that had them all fetching and scurrying, spying and whispering, but not paying attention to his get-away plans when their questions and their love became too much. She brushed bits of leaf from her pleated bodice and took up her post. Never ever had she whipped a child in her life. But if it came to that, they’d have to forgive her that too, just as she’d forgiven them without anyone knowing that Mr. Williams had quit breathing in order to free her to the claims of blood kin.

She waited under the tree, her feet cool in the pool of pollen that gleamed lightning-bug green even in the darkness. She kept watch on the house, her eyes tacked to the window above the roof of the porch. But that’s not how he came. He didn’t so much come as be there, giving flesh and form to a shadow she’d thought was thrown by the fancy car parked by the pole beans.

Then there he was, the boy, the baby named for the great bowman of ancestor epics. There he was, crouched low, hobbling toward the fence like a burglar, shaming the blood. And she had to stop him now or she’d be guilty of the unforgivable.

“You know one thing?” She pitched her voice in his direction and pinned his shadow to the ground. “Them people sleeping up there are at the end of their tether as it is, Sundiata. And one of them people is my girl. Do you know what I mean?”