“The humor?” he asked.
“We call all the British soldiers Tommy . . . or Khakis,” Janetta said.
I tugged at her hand, pulling her halfway around.
“Yes . . . the mythical Tommy Atkins . . . but I’m the real Tommy Maples.”
“Maples?”
“Yes . . . like the tree.”
There was no excuse for this. I pulled hard enough to get Janetta turned.
She struggled against me but relented rather than let me create a scene. She punished me with a lecture as we walked away.
“We should have asked how old he is,” she said. “Not much older than us, I don’t think. He’s just a boy, really. A man . . . but a boy. I like his eyes. What color would you say those are? Green? Green blue?”
“Janetta, I didn’t notice his eyes. . . . I saw his red hair,” I said. “Is there anything worse? He’s so . . . pink . . . pale.”
“His hair looks good with his skin,” she said.
“What is wrong with you? He is just another of the devils who burned our houses.”
“It wasn’t him doing the burning,” she said. “He’s in here, too, just guarding fences.”
“How do you know?”
“I looked at the men who burned our house. . . . I don’t recognize him.”
“The devils all look alike.”
“I don’t think he’s the devil at all.”
“He’s hideous. . . . He’s spotted and his teeth are . . . askew.”
“Askew?”
“Ja . . .”
“You mean, what . . . crooked?”
“Ja, askew, one of my new words.”
“Lettie . . . think about it. . . . You saw his teeth because he smiled at us,” she said. “How many other men are smiling at us in here?”
9
October 1899, Venter farm As she had since discovering I could not say the word she used for a greeting, Bina always said “peace” when she saw me approach. I liked it. This morning, she had finished collecting the oxhide riempies that Vader had hung over a tree branch to stretch into flexible strands to be woven into banding for chairs and furniture.
“Can I help?” I asked.
“I’m done; maize next.”
I knew others thought me a pest with my questions, but Bina said she didn’t mind because I was the only one who asked her things. She would sometimes use just a few wise words to respond to a story I might have taken many minutes to tell. I often wrote down the sayings she shared.
She told me once that a person’s face tells everything about them, and I had an “open” face. Another time she said that my wide eyes and long lashes reminded her of an ostrich. She held the back of her hands to her eyes and waved her fingers like long-lashed blinks. I liked it best when she said that I was as smart as a grown-up “but still made of soft clay.”
The one thing she did better than anyone else was this: listen. When I spoke, she looked in my eyes and listened until I was finished. I thanked her for it once, and she said it was a sign of respect, one I always should show others.
“We are who we are through others,” she said, and then she repeated it while looking straight into my eyes.
I wrote that down later, and I thought at the time that Oupa Gideon would have objected, as he always said we were created and driven by God’s will. Other people have nothing to do with who we are, and even we can’t change God’s will for us. The path he has charted is already writ, Oupa said.
I came to believe that the things Bina said were closer to whatever might be the real truth than most grown-ups told me. I asked her about her parents. They had been apprentices for farmers, but she did not explain.
I asked about her daughter, Tombi, and Bina told me that she was a happy girl and smart. Tall. A woman now, and gone to live with her husband, taking with her a piece of Bina’s heart. When Tombi was born, she said, the men in the village poured water over Tuma as a lesson that a daughter must learn to change shapes, like water. I asked what they do if the baby is a boy. “They beat the father with sticks, as a reminder that boys are of war.”
Bina hoisted the basket of maize to the top of her head to carry it to the chairs beneath the blue gum tree at the side of the house. Sometimes when she sang, it sounded like shouting; other times, it was a soft chant. It was almost always repetitive, and in rhythm with the physical motion of her chore.
“My name means ‘to sing,’ ” she told me. “When I’m happy, I sing. When I work, I sing. When I cook, I sing. My mother said I sang when she carried me at her back.”
I tried mimicking the words. It made no sense and it made her laugh, but the sound was nice. I was probably saying something stupid in her language, but that was fine with her, as nothing seemed so serious when we sang. “Did you look up into the branches before you sat down here?” Bina asked.
“Yes . . . every time.”
“You were too young to remember.”
“Only the stories. How long was the snake?”
Bina held her hands at least four feet apart.
“Really?”
“Maybe bigger . . . green and black . . . nearly fell on top of you when you were crawling . . . a boomslang . . . would have killed you with one strike . . . and you were laughing like you had a new plaything.”
“And you saved me?”
“I was there with the big knife, snatched it by the tail . . . cut its head off.”
“I’m sorry you had to kill it.”
“I’m glad it didn’t kill you.”
She sang another song. It rose and fell like gentle waves and was soothing.
“What’s the song about?”
“About a boy who kills a lion to become a man and marry the chief’s daughter.”
“Did Tuma kill a lion to get you to marry him?”
“Gave my father ten goats,” she said.
“Ten?”
“If you don’t pay for something,” she said, “you don’t know its value.”
I would write that down.
“He wanted you more than anything?”
“He was young.”
Bina stopped her song and looked into my eyes so deeply that it felt as if she entered my mind.
“Your time is coming,” she said. “We celebrate it . . . not hide it.”
As with many of her comments, I didn’t understand but nodded and smiled as if I did.
“I don’t think my father had to pay for my mother . . . not goats or anything. . . . He said God brought her to him.”
Bina started to sing again.
“They don’t say much in front of us . . . but they don’t get cross, not like Oom Sarel and Tante Hannah.”
She pulled more maize from the basket.
“Do you think Oom Sarel gave goats for Tante Hannah?”
She shrugged.
“They almost never talk to each other.”
“Words can be stones.”
I tried to picture Tante and Oom throwing rock-hard words at each other, and each ducking as they neared.
“Tante Hannah is nice to me, but I don’t think she likes Moeder.”
Bina resumed her song.
“Do you think she does?”
Bina sang for another moment and then answered the question with one of her sayings.
“Some women—your mother—can make it rain.”
I imagined that her next line would have been that Tante Hannah was dry, but it went unsaid.