Cover

Dedication

For my mother, Patricia Gladys Nunn

Epigraph

When the ground is hard, the women dance.

—African proverb

1

Dying Days

It’s Thursday night, so we walk down Live Long Street to the public telephone booth at the intersection of three footpaths called Left Path, Right Path, and Center Path. My flashlight beam bounces the length of the dirt road and picks out uneven ground and potholes, of which there are many. Mrs. Button, who lives in the pink house behind the mechanic’s workshop, says that all streets should be paved like they are in England, but we’re not in England—we are in the British protectorate of Swaziland, fenced in on all sides by Mozambique and the Republic of South Africa—so what does she know?

“Pick up the pace,” Mother says in a fierce whisper. “We can’t be late.”

We hurry past cement-brick houses with cracks of light spilling from under locked front doors. Dogs bark in fenced yards. A curtain twitches, and a face peers at us through a space the width of a hand. The face belongs to Miriam Dube, the church minister’s wife, who makes it her duty to spy on our weekly pilgrimage to the public phone box. It’s dark, but I imagine that Mrs. Dube's expression is smug disapproval.

Mother holds her head high, like she is balancing the weight of an iron crown or suffering a garland of thorns. The neighbors are jealous, she says. Jealous gossips who frown on her high heels and her dresses straight from Johannesburg that show too much leg. They know we have carpet in the living room, she says. We also have Christmas bicycles with flashing chrome, in the backyard, and new Bata school shoes that still smell of the factory, under our beds.

They have concrete floors, and if they do have rugs, they are sure to be ugly when compared to the tufted field of purple flowers that blossom under our feet when we walk from the settee to the kitchen. That’s why they hate us. That’s why they don’t stop to give us a lift when they see us walking at the side of the road, weighed down with shopping bags. The Manzini market is three miles from our house, Mother says. Three miles across dry fields pocked with snake and scorpion holes. A dangerous walk. A Christian would see our suffering and pick us up. But our neighbors—who call themselves Christians and stuff the church pews every Sunday—they drive by and leave us in their dust.