When the Ground Is Hard Page 10

  I grab a stone, and the weight and the shape of it fits naturally into my palm. Sunlight hits the dried spit on the back of my hand, and I tighten my grip. That ugly white boy spat on me. My stomach knots, and Mother is right. They hate us. They treat us like animals. And Lottie is right. Why must we be polite when they are not? Sweet when they are sour? My fear leaves me, and anger rises in its place. I raise my arm, ready to throw.

  “Girls,” Mrs. Vincent’s voice says. “Come here, please.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Lottie and I swivel to face Mrs. Vincent, who is right there on her porch with her cheeks flushed from working in the garden. She saw everything: the white bus, the spit, the stone, and the blood. The mixed-race teachers and matrons who patrol the students are God’s soldiers, but the five white American missionaries who’ve come from across the ocean to bring us to righteousness, they are God’s captains.

  I let the stone drop from my hand. Too late to pretend I was clearing it off the road. Lying is our first way out of trouble at Keziah, but now that option is gone.

  “Over here,” Mrs. Vincent says. “It’s all right.”

  Lottie opens the garden gate, and we walk through the pink and white blooms. Bees nose the petals, and the air smells sweet. I go slow. Being invited closer by the white staff is a badge of honor, but being punished by them is a badge of shame.

  Lottie and I stop at the bottom of the porch steps. Children must keep their place, and our place is below adults. Mrs. Vincent wipes dirt from her hands and says, “Come on up. I won’t bite.”

  Lottie hangs back so that I’m forced to take the steps first. I am her shield. She hopes that my politeness, which she hates and thinks of as weakness, will help soften whatever happens next.

  Mrs. Vincent stands with her hip against the porch rail. She is lean and tan from living under the African sun, and wears her skirts below the knee, despite the new fashion for short shorts and minidresses. Compared to Mother, Mrs. Vincent is plain, but she is white and foreign and belongs to a world we can only dream about. Lottie and I duck our heads and stare at our feet.

  “What that boy did was wrong,” Mrs. Vincent says in her American accent. “But the Gospel tells us to repay unkindness with kindness, and hatred with love. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Vincent,” Lottie and I say in unison, because our job is to agree with adults.

  She sighs. “Look at me, please.”

  We raise our heads, but I concentrate on Mrs. Vincent’s chipped front tooth, a strange imperfection in an otherwise perfect American face. She purses her lips, thinks for a moment, then says, “What does the Bible tell us about loving our enemies?”

  I wait for Lottie to contribute, but she keeps stubbornly quiet, so I say, “‘But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.’ Matthew 5:44.”

  “That’s right.” Mrs. Vincent smiles. “Violence begets violence, so tell me what you should have done instead of throwing stones.”

  “‘We . . .’” I go to quote another Bible verse, but Lottie cuts in.

  “Adele should have turned the other cheek and let the boy spit on her a second time. Then, amazed by our humility and goodness, the boy would have come to love and appreciate us.”

  Mrs. Vincent seems to struggle to say something but finds nothing.

  “In time,” Lottie adds in the silence.

  “Yes . . .” Mrs. Vincent draws the word out because Lottie gave the right answer, but Mrs. Vincent doesn’t know how to tell me straight to my face that, yes, I should have smiled when the boy called us “monkeys.” That I should have let him spit on me again. That God loves to see his children endure, because it teaches them strength.

  Would she give her two young daughters the same advice?

  Her silence makes me bold, and I look straight at her. She’s bright red, and the cords in her neck stick out under the skin. I wait for her to do something, say something, anything. But Mrs. Vincent is quiet, and it strikes me that she doesn’t know what to do or what to say to Lottie’s perfect reply.

  My boldness makes Lottie bold. She sticks out her hand, with the palm up, and says, “Punish us, so that next time we will be kinder and gentler to white boys who hate us.”

  Mrs. Vincent blinks, and the cords in her neck stretch so tight I’m afraid they’ll snap and her head will collapse on her shoulders. She turns away from us and grips the porch rail with both hands. “Go,” she says. “You’re dismissed.”

  Lottie moves fast, in case Mrs. Vincent changes her mind and sends us to ash the toilets. I move slower, and when I reach the bottom of the stairs, Mrs. Vincent says, “Be careful of where your anger will lead you, Adele.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Vincent. I will.”

  I hurry through the roses, grab up my grass broom, and catch up with Lottie. We walk the road to the senior-girls’ dorm. Halfway there, I stop and look over my shoulder at Mrs. Vincent standing alone on her porch. We escaped, but I’m not elated like I should be.

  “Come on.” Lottie tugs my arm. “She doesn’t know anything about us. She’s white and American. How can she?”

  It’s true. Mrs. Vincent will never know what it means to live in the space between black people and white people. The spitting boy will keep her up tonight. And while she struggles with the challenge of spreading God’s love, Lottie will lie awake and remember her dead father and her broken mother.

  And I will lie awake and imagine my own father in his house far away, surrounded by children that I will never meet.

  14

  The Lord Giveth

  Saturday is set aside for “healthy body, healthy mind” activities: soccer for the boys, calisthenics for the girls, and track-and-field training for all students who’ve shown athletic talent. After lunch, we get a choice of activities. I work in the gardens while Lottie goes on an organized walk to the Matula Gorge. The gorge is to hell and gone, so I stay on school grounds, and when the gardening is done, I join the Saturday Scripture club to learn more Bible verses.

  Sunday is our day off. On Sundays we get to sleep in for an extra hour, and after breakfast and church, we do whatever we want. Girls iron their hair straight with hollow-bellied irons filled with hot coals while others knit, do puzzles or laundry, and walk hand in hand to splash in the river . . . so long as a senior girl is there to supervise them.

  I wash my school clothes first thing and hang them over an out-of-the-way bush to dry. Then I find a shady indoni tree to sit under and read Jane Eyre. I was right about Lowood. Jane has gone from being a virtual prisoner in her aunt’s house to being the prisoner of a boarding school that is similar to Keziah but far, far worse. We get Sundays off. We eat roasted sweet potatoes and curried beef and bread-and-butter pudding with raisins. It’s plain food made from cheap ingredients but warm and spiced. Jane eats cold or burned porridge, toast, cold meats, and brown bread, with a single mug of coffee. All the food is served in small portions, “scarcely sufficient to keep alive a delicate invalid.”

  Keziah students do die. Mostly, they die at home in farm accidents and car accidents and by drowning in rivers. Lorraine Anderson and Billy Bernard are exceptions. A mystery fever took Lorraine in the night, and Billy dropped dead, just like that, on the sports field.

  Billy died before my time, and I have only a vague memory of Lorraine, an older girl with brown hair and brown eyes. The death of Helen Burns, Jane Eyre’s best friend, affects me more than the deaths of real students who walked where I walk and might have sat under this exact same tree. I wipe away tears to think of Helen and Jane shivering together in the cold stone hall of Lowood Institution.

  Helen was sweet and kind and turned the other cheek just like Mrs. Vincent told me to do with the white boy. Helen died. Jane can see when adults are wrong and greedy and cruel, and she resents them for it. She has a temper. Her mouth doesn’t hurt from smiling.
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  She’s the one who gets to live and write the book.

  * * *

  • • •

  Near sundown, when the shadows creep across the valley floor and the trees ring with the sound of nesting birds, I collect my dry uniform from the bush behind the native servants’ quarters, hang it on my side of the wardrobe, and slide Jane Eyre under my pillow. Jane’s gaunt face shadowed by a black bonnet, with a black ribbon tied under her chin, promises to share her next adventure with me when I get back. I hurry to the dining hall. If I arrive early, I’ll avoid the long walk past the groups of girls sitting together and the boys who throw food to get my attention.

  I collect my plate and find a seat in the middle of the table. That way, the spaces on either side of me fill up and I disappear into the noise and the chatter. Lottie arrives late, with red cheeks and her hair sticking up. She disappeared straight after church, and by the wild look of her, she’s been out in the bush all day. I’ll bet money that she spent her free time searching for Darnell Parns in the fields and farms that surround the school. She worries about him, and, even though she tries to hide it, I’ve caught her staring down the length of road that leads to Keziah with a fierce concentration, as if willing Mr. Parns’s tractor to appear. It is strange. Darnell ran off on Tuesday at sunset and now it’s Sunday afternoon. His father should have brought him back to school by now.

  Lightning strikes outside the tall windows, and the little girls jump. The big girls laugh to prove they aren’t afraid, but we all fear the lightning. It kills in a flash. Last year a bolt hit the man who owned the Skonkwane Stock and Feed Co., outside of Hlatikulu. He died. And the year before that, lightning hit three cows in the Ezulwini Valley, and they died. When lightning strikes the ground, it can spark fires that destroy villages and farms. We give lightning the respect that it deserves.

  Lottie walks past me with her dinner plate and squeezes next to the Bartholomew twins at the far end of the table. The boys watch her pass and, infuriatingly, say nothing. She interests them, but they keep their mouths shut because she’s been known to clout rude boys who say rude things. Just ask Lazy-Eye Matthew.

  I eat slowly, the same way that I take small bites of Jane Eyre so the story lasts longer and the suspense over what Jane will do next builds. Lottie, meanwhile, is forced to read The Oxford Dictionary from A to Z, because the students in Mrs. McDonald’s English class have put a temporary hold on Lottie raiding the novel box. They want first pick of the titles, and Lottie’s read all the books anyway. Most of them twice.

  “Are you going to eat that?” Claire Naidoo points to a burned crust on my plate. I shrug, and she scoops it up and throws it into her mouth before I change my mind. When I was with the pretties, we gave our scraps to our pets and we felt good about it. Sharing my scraps with Claire Naidoo is different. It doesn’t feel good at all. Just the opposite. I think of the canned peaches and shortbread biscuits hidden in the suitcase under my bed and how Mother, who was poor, most likely ate the scraps from other people’s plates. She was always hungry, she says, her stomach hollow with need. I’m embarrassed at having so much where Mother had so little.

  * * *

  • • •

  After dinner, I brush my teeth in the washroom and sit on the edge of my cot in the dying light. I wish the remaining nine weeks of term were over. I wish that I was anywhere but alone in Dead Lorraine’s room with my unsettled feelings about sharing scraps and hoarding food. Life was easier when I was with the pretties. The pretties cared only about themselves and they had rules I followed: Never look Darnell Parns in the eye, or your mind will turn slow. Don’t make friends with the poor girls; they’ll steal from you. Give scraps to your pets only; it makes them feel special. Dress perfectly and keep your hair beautiful so that the others can see, with their own eyes, just how top-shelf you are. Now I’m free to make my own rules, and it’s hard because I’m not sure what makes me me. Am I happy in and of myself, or do I smile and keep my voice low because that’s what nice girls do?

  I don’t know anymore. I blame Lottie. Her lax attitude towards Miss December’s cheating is wrong. The way that she challenges adults is also wrong. And throwing stones at a white bus is very wrong and yet . . . I can’t help but think that she is right to stick up for herself and right to follow her own rules. In the time that I’ve shared the room with Lottie I have been hit by the Elephant in public. Talked to Darnell Parns. Peed in the moonlight. Thrown stones at a filthy white boy and looked Mrs. Vincent in the face. Lottie is a bad influence on me for sure.

  I lift my pillow so that Jane will distract me from my thoughts. Jane will take me to a place where the naked trees shiver in the wind and where rivers freeze in the winter.

  Wait one second . . .

  I shift position to make sure I’m exactly where I was when I put Miss Eyre to bed. If I’d been in a hurry, the way that Lottie’s always in a hurry to find the right page and dive into the story, I might not have noticed that someone has moved my book.

  She walks in and makes a sound that is half surprise and half apology. I’m furious. First, my underpants, which I gave to her to spite Delia and the others, and now my book, which I did not give her permission to touch, and at the rate that she reads, she might already know if Jane has left Lowood. Without me.

  “Where are you up to?” I snap.

  “I stopped where you stopped. Trus faith.”

  “And how did you keep up with me?”

  “I read while you were asleep and when you went to Saturday Scripture club to learn more Bible verses.” Lottie lets out a deep breath. “And just now, when you were in the washroom.”

  “You stopped where I did?” That’s a big, fat lie. Once Lottie is inside a story, she reads till the end. She’s greedy that way.

  “I did. Honest. It would be rude to go past where you are, to know what happens before you do.” Lottie throws herself onto her cot with a groan. “I can’t believe how slow you read. It’s excruciating.”

  She’s the one who did wrong by touching my things, yet somehow I’m the one in the wrong? I am clever but ignorant. I read too slow. And now, thanks to reading through The Oxford Dictionary resting on top of our shared chest of drawers, she has new and better words to describe my faults and life in general. Homework is laborious. Mr. Newman, our lazy leans-too-close science teacher is a degenerate, and the sunset sky is suffused with color. Show-off.

  “It’s excruciating how fast you read,” I say. “You miss all the details, and the story ends too quickly.”

  To prove the point, I open the book and carefully set aside the bookmark. Lottie sits up: a bright-eyed puppy who might, if patient, be given something from the dinner table. She’s too proud to actually beg, though.

  I like that about her.

  I shift closer to the pillow, the same way that she moved closer to the window of the Ocean Current when Lazy-Eye Matthew croaked, “Adele. Adele,” to get me next to him in third class. Lottie accepts my silent invitation. The cot springs creak, and we lean our backs against the wall. I find my spot and, afraid that Lottie will race ahead and get to the good bits first, I read out loud.

  “I tired of the routine of eight years in one afternoon. I desired liberty; for liberty I gasped; for liberty I uttered a prayer; it seemed scattered on the wind then faintly blowing. I abandoned it and framed a humbler supplication; for change, stimulus; that petition, too, seemed swept off into vague space: ‘Then,’ I cried, half desperate, ‘grant me at least a new servitude!'”

  “Thank heavens,” Lottie breaks in. “Jane is ready to make a move. I was afraid she’d stay at that school till kingdom come.”

  “Same here,” I say. “Imagine being stuck at Keziah forever? I’d go crazy like Mrs. Thomas, for sure.”

  “Me too. But ‘a new servitude’ sounds dull. I want Jane to have excitement in her life.”

  “Maybe she will.” I think about Jane’
s future for a moment. “Jane’s got no money, so she has to find work, but work that’s new and different from what she knows. It’s the same for us. We’ll have to find jobs when we graduate from Keziah after next year. Just like Jane.”

  “True,” Lottie says. “What are you going to do?”

  If I was still with the pretties, I’d know the right answer to give, right away. It would go like this: I want to marry a good-looking man with money. We’ll live in a big house and spend the summer holidays in Durban or Mozambique.

  It’s different with Lottie. With Lottie, there are no right or wrong answers—just the words that come out of your mouth. I close my eyes, and I search for a vision of my future that comes from my own mind and not from the ideas of others. After a moment of terrifying blankness, images flicker to life: stone buildings and snowcapped mountains, ocean waves rolling under a slate-gray sky and lazy rivers winding through a hot green jungle. A pang of longing blooms in my chest and spreads across me. For the first time, I know what I want from the future.

  “I . . . I want to travel to all the places I’ve read about in books. Scotland and India. England and America. The Swiss Alps and Canada. Maybe study overseas.” My eyes fly open, and I glance at Lottie, afraid that I’ll find annoyance or, worse, ridicule written on her face. Daydreams are for children. And my daydreams of traveling overseas and studying in an ancient university hall covered in climbing ivy are . . . impossible. I’ll be lucky to get as far away as Joburg. Lottie’s expression is warm and curious with no trace of annoyance or ridicule. She takes me at my word.

  “And you?” I throw the spotlight back onto her. “What do you want?”

  She shrugs. “A small farm with cows and goats and a view of the mountains. I’d leave the trees for the birds, and the fields for the wild animals. There’s a river to swim in, and I have . . . uh . . .” Lottie leaves the sentence hanging and motions to Jane Eyre. “Enough about us. How’s Jane going to find a job and get free?”