But I know better than anyone how the heart can play the most terrible tricks on the mind. It’s a traitorous beast that can’t be trusted at the best of times, but even less so when it’s so utterly broken.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Zodwa

10 May 1994

Big Hope Informal Settlement, Magaliesburg, South Africa

The celebration of Nelson Mandela’s victory is electric. It animates the squatter camp so wholly that for a few hours it’s transformed from a scrap heap of human and metal debris into a living, breathing thing. Life calls a refrain and the township, itself, responds.

When Mandela was released from prison more than four years before, hope was born. Everyone knew, though, that hope was a fickle thing; it would allow you to warm your hands against it one minute, only to flare up and burn you to a husk the next, which is why people were cautious with it. But on this day, the day on which millions of dreams have impossibly come true, hope has ignited into joy.

Zodwa feels it. The township is celebrating and there will be no sleep for anyone that night because who would want to sleep through such a moment? The ANC has won. A black man is president. History is being made, and to be a black person who has lived through apartheid and come out of it the victor is a blessed, blessed thing.

The festivities are so loud that Zodwa’s cries cannot compete. As contraction after contraction rages through her, she grips the foam bed and waits for the pain to consume her. Leleti sits next to her, wiping the sweat from Zodwa’s brow and stuffing a cloth between her jaws to clamp down on every time her belly tightens. Their roles have been reversed, and it is now Leleti’s turn to watch as pain racks her daughter’s body, helpless to do anything to keep it at bay.

Even as Zodwa pants fiercely, the baby struggling to be free of her, she recognizes her mother’s frailty. Leleti has aged ten years in the past week and Zodwa knows it’s as much her confession about the rape as it is her mother’s worsening illness. Leleti positions herself between Zodwa’s knees and instructs, “Push now. Push, my child.”

The dog whines and paces, and Zodwa pushes until she is sure she will die from the pushing. Her mother fades in and out of focus until it’s no longer Leleti between Zodwa’s thighs, but Mongezi.

She sees his face, hovering just above her, contorted with both fury and triumph just as it was on that fateful day so many months ago. Zodwa couldn’t move under the weight of him and struggled to breathe around his rough cheek, which was pressed down hard against her mouth and nose. She bites through the pain now just as she wishes she had bitten through his cheek then.