“Thank you, Mama.” Zodwa felt shy under Leleti’s gaze. As much as she’d yearned for her mother after she’d left, she now fervently longed for her gogo who’d stepped into that role so neatly that her real mother had become a kind of myth others only spoke about. Yet there she was in front of her, a flesh-and-blood woman who was clearly sick, though Zodwa didn’t yet know with what.

“You have made me so proud,” Leleti had said, cupping Zodwa’s face. “Just like Dumisa. And you will go on to even greater things. I know it.”

It shames Zodwa to think how badly she has let her mother down.

“You would have finished school if you’d stayed in KwaZulu. This,” Leleti says, nodding at Zodwa’s belly, “would not have happened there. I have just enough money to send you back. If you leave tomorrow, you will get there before the baby comes.”

“No, Mama. We will use the money to take you to a doctor so you can get medicine.”

“Doctors are not for people like us.”

Leleti speaks the truth. Just days before, Leleti’s friend Mama Beauty came over with two plastic bags filled with baby things. Some of the clothes hadn’t even been worn yet but still smelled of fabric softener because the whites apparently washed everything straight after purchasing it, regardless of whether their babies ever used it or not.

Mama Beauty was the only black person Zodwa knew who had a white friend, a younger woman named Robin who would drive out to the squatter camp regularly to visit her. From what Zodwa could tell, Mama Beauty had worked for Robin’s family as a maid before she’d retired.

Apparently the white woman, Robin, appealed to Mama Beauty regularly to move in with her in Johannesburg, but she refused the offer, wanting to stay near her sons, who both worked in the platinum mines in Rustenburg. Zodwa knew there was an older daughter, Nomsa, who’d gone missing in the 1980s, because that was the basis of Mama Beauty and Leleti’s friendship: they’d bonded over the fact that each of them was searching for a child who’d disappeared during the worst of the apartheid era’s atrocities.

Mama Beauty was kind to Zodwa, sourcing maternity clothes and baby things for her, while sharing information about a world that Zodwa would otherwise never have known about, like how white women went for regular blood tests and checkups while pregnant, and how they took pills that pregnant women were supposed to have.