How do I know this, how do I know how Maggie arrived? Because my mother told me, years later. When I was an adult, and had asked her. Where did Maggie come from? Who was Maggie?

My mother brought a blue uniform and white apron, a white head scarf, a doek, home, she brought it home from my father’s shop, he did brisk business selling maids’ uniforms to the white women employers, in town. The Afrikaans women. My mother was not an Afrikaner: I’ve said that before.

My mother showed Maggie the small room in the backyard, an iron bed was brought by a man from my father’s shop, some milk crates pushed together for a table.

That was Maggie’s room.

And something very important: where did Maggie get her name, I asked my mother that too, when I was an adult — a mother — myself.

I — I gave her her name, my mother said. She didn’t have one, I mean I don’t know what her name was, she couldn’t tell me, she didn’t speak English, and she said nothing at all for many weeks, just followed me around, as I showed her everything.

I wondered about that, about Maggie’s name. Give someone a name? It seemed so much more important than we — my mother — understood it to be.

Maggie’s English hardly improved. Perhaps Maggie didn’t like to speak, I feel that speaking cost her too much, too much energy, too much . . . something, I don’t know what. I feel she was an inward person, but what is an inward person? And what was within her? I don’t know.

Maggie would go out on her day off, my mother thought she went to the Location, and she’d come back again in the evening. A long walk it would have been, to the Location, along a hot, straight road. How else would Maggie have gone there? I think about that, now.

And Maggie developed a problem with drink, as I’ve said. Over the years. It wasn’t so evident in the beginning. She drank meths, meths was cheap, it cost nothing, a bottle of methylated spirits, you could get it in any shop. It had a sharp, a terrible smell, I remember it. We: I, my mother, my father, knew instantly when Maggie was drinking. Those fumes, that smell, was the smell of our home, too.

Maggie was a person carrying absences. The vagueness when she was drunk, her inability — or unwillingness — to speak in our language, held a truth: the truth of erasure within her. But this insight is one I’ve only had over the years, and here. I told you: I read Ta-Nehisi Coates, and others. I’m an admirer of Kerry James Marshall, whose exhibition Helena saw last month.

But that year, in December of 1972, we arrived in Villiers, our family in our car, happily, to visit my parents. There was Maggie’s faint smile, as she greeted us with a nod of her head, and moved to the trunk to help us carry out our bags.