She was a good storyteller and Sunil and the others gathered by the communal garden to hear her.
Have you heard about the Sorrow Tree, she asked them.
No, Nurse Dorothy, they chorused.
Deep in a mythical forest lost to time is the Sorrow Tree. Its existence was known only to the wisest of the sangomas, who kept it a close secret. Once, a very long time ago, the people who would become our ancestors went to the chief sangoma, a man so old no one could remember a time when he hadn’t been there, and asked him to remove the suffering and misery from the world. He told them that he couldn’t do it but that there was a tree called the Sorrow Tree that could bear everyone’s pain for a short while. He took them on a pilgrimage deep into the forest until finally, after nearly a moon of traveling, they came upon a clearing. There stood the most beautiful tree anyone had seen. It was as wide as many townships and as tall as Mount Kilimanjaro, and yet its limbs were thin and wispy as though made of smoke. And though the tree was so big and tall, it took only a few minutes to walk around it and even the shortest person could reach the tallest limbs.
The sangoma told the people to make a bundle of their suffering and sorrow and hang it from a limb of the tree. And although many thousands of people hung their sorrows from those delicate limbs, they barely swayed from the weight of it. At once the people felt a deep happiness come over them and they danced and sang for days. As they prepared to leave, the sangoma told them that there was a condition that he hadn’t mentioned before. They could leave none of the bundles of sorrow on the tree; otherwise the others to come would have nowhere to hang theirs. They must leave with a bundle, but not necessarily the bundle they came with. Everyone walked around the tree examining the bundles, but in the end they each settled for the bundles they had come with. It seemed that no matter how bad their lot was, they did not prefer anyone else’s to theirs. As the people left with their sorrows on their heads, their happiness faded, but they found instead a deep joy.
FAIRY TALE
What possible harm can a story do, you ask yourself as you fetch the small photo of your father from the mantelpiece. You don’t have a fireplace, so it really isn’t a mantelpiece, just a rickety shelf on a wall. There in the small cramped living room with the bare cement floor painted red by your mother because, as she says, poverty is no excuse for uncleanliness. No harm at all, you tell yourself as you nearly knock over the small plastic vase that holds the plastic flowers your father gave your mother on their first date. You have seen her dust around it carefully, every Sunday, wiping each petal with a soft cloth while she sings softly under her breath. You right the vase and dash into the kitchen, although even to you that word seems too big for this space.
Here, you say, showing the woman the picture. She is stirring a pot of beans on the stove in the small kitchen-cum-pantry. This is my real father, you say. I know that for a fact, you insist, although no one is arguing. The one in the fairy tale you are about to tell is your father too, but you don’t say that. I mean, he can’t be your real father if he is in a fairy tale, can he? It is just a story, like Red Riding Hood, and that isn’t real, and telling it never hurt anybody, did it? Although if the truth be told, Red’s big mouth did alert the wolf to Grandma and though everything worked out really well in the end, there can be no joy in being eaten by a wolf, swallowed whole. Even if you are old, even if it is temporary. Like the nine-year-old boy in the homelands that Drum magazine says was swallowed whole by a python, but bit his way to freedom, right through the snake’s belly, from the inside out.
Tell me more, the woman says. Each time you have lunch, since you first told her the story, she presses you to tell it again. And you want to because she comes to you while your mother is still at work and feeds you, and you want to because she is your mother’s special friend. It’s the same every time; you always begin with the photo that is your real father, not the father in the story. Because what harm can it do? What a rarity; a grown-up who wants to hear the stories of a child. Not just any grown-up, but a white woman too, although that is not immediately obvious when you look at her — she looks more colored than white, but this is South Africa in the ’70s and who can tell for sure. This you can understand, because your mother is Zulu and your father is Indian but there is nothing clear about that when people look at you, especially in this land where you are what your father is. But only women surround you, and so there is no clear proof that you are who you want to be. Especially since everyone thinks you are just another Zulu brat with a father lost to the mines, the war, the struggle, the bottle, or all of them, and this story your mother tells is a lie that makes her not the slut she really is, and this photo of a Sikh man in a turban, this photo could not be real. Who would admit to a marriage, a relationship, that clearly broke the anti-miscegenation laws? And you know children are just being cruel when they say this; you know it’s not true because your mother told you it isn’t, but it hurts nonetheless. And then your mother adopts this strange woman who claims she is white, and brings her home and says, Here is your auntie Alice, even though everyone else calls her White Alice.
So what harm, telling her this story?
And like always, like a game she plays with you, this lonely only child half-starved for attention, she asks, Have you ever seen your father? And you say, No, but he is a hero, just like the father in the story. And then White Alice says, Tell me the story, then, Sunil, tell it to me, you know I love it.
And she listens, rapt, moving only to keep the beans from burning and sticking to the pan. And then you begin.
Long ago and far away, but today and so forever, there lived a brave. Then one day, a big ogre invaded his land. He was a strong, evil ogre from a land far in the north where the sun hid its face. At first the people said to the ogre, There is plenty of land to share, why not share? But the ogre began to kill everyone, so the warrior fought the ogre, but it was too powerful, so the warrior fled, escaped to the land of the Shona, a powerful but kind people to the north. And there the warrior made his home, training other men who also escaped to the land of the Shona, driven off by the ogre, how to be warriors.
And where does he live in the land of Shona, White Alice asked.
He lives by a big baobab tree, you say, on an island that looks like a mudfish in a big sea called Kariba. There he and the other impis trained and grew strong to become better warriors and they would return soon to defeat the ogre.
It is a short story, but with each telling, you add detaiclass="underline" the dusty road that leads through the mystical forest of Chete Safan, which is the name of a powerful witch who protects all who dwell there; the strange Sibalians who roam free and are powerful medicine men who can fly to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro; the reeds by the water’s edge that hide the magical fish-shaped island from view like the ones that hid Moses as a baby.
And then while you stuff your face with beans and bread, sipping delicately on the Coca-Cola that you aren’t allowed but which is part of your secret, White Alice spreads a map out and asks you to tell her the story again, pen poised over the map to mark something, and with each telling, the map gets more and more marks.
Today, like all the other days, she draws lines across the map that has Rhodesia printed on it in big letters. She draws lines connecting the Chete Safan area with the small town of Sibalia on the shores of Lake Kariba, looking, searching for an island shaped like a mudfish or a whale.
But it is only a story, and what harm can it do? And if your mother trusts this white woman who looks colored and if she wants to hear your fairy tale, then what of it?