I followed Josias out into the yard, he was carrying two plastic bags. He was wearing the long pants I saw him in on his days off. The bags were the white ones from our grocer, I saw the logo on the side: Kyle & Anderson, Grocers. Is that all your luggage, Josias, I said. And then Josias and Emily had a quick exchange, in their language, small laughter between them. I think of that now, the three of us standing in the sun next to the laundry lines. My choice of word: luggage.

How much luggage would Josias have had? I feel embarrassed as I think of it.

Goodbye Josias, hope it’s alright, hope your mother will be alright, I said. See you next year, I said, and I smiled. January 2nd, right? He bowed his head, sometimes he did that. He had some words with Emily then, as I turned away and went back into the house.

JOSIAS WAS GONE for a month, he did indeed return on January 2nd. Emily called me when he arrived, I went to the kitchen, the back, to find him drinking tea and eating bread, laughing with Emily, talking, talking. I felt such relief to see his familiar face, his lean figure, wearing the long pants. Even the children went in later, I could hear them bantering with him: nice holiday, Josias, did you enjoy your holiday?

I asked him how his mother was and he said, she’s okay, she’s an old lady, ma’am, an old lady. He nodded, as though thinking about her, about the old woman he had left. Because when would Josias get back there? I imagined an old woman, a country woman, I had seen women like that on the sides of roads near Villiers. She’d be standing, standing for a long time, watching Josias’s thin figure start its long, slow walk down the dirt path, to the road, the walk along the long, winding road to Umtata in the distance, from where, hours later, he’d take the train, one long day on the train, to Johannesburg.

But I didn’t really imagine that, where Josias had gone. The Transkei, the train, Umtata, his mother, the wide countryside he had traversed over many hours: they hardly existed in my mind, at all. I had a vague impression, more a feeling, of the wideness of our country, which I carried within me always; a vague instinct, or knowledge, about the ‘homelands,’ where the Black people lived and came from. That’s all. And I say ‘our country.’ It wasn’t our country, all of ours: mine, Josias’s, Emily’s. It was a place that was taken, a people dispossessed. I knew that. I knew it because of my education; I knew it because I was married to Howard, who knew it. And there was Joseph: Joseph in our home, working night and day to overthrow the state itself, by all and any means necessary. I knew it.

I say I knew it because of my education. I mean my university education. At elementary and high school they didn’t teach us that. They taught us nothing about colonialism; about dispossession; about what was really happening there, at all. In fact, they purposely hid it. They lied.