Love in Black and White: The Triumph of Love Over Prejudice and Taboo (33 page)

GAIL’S VIEW The only image of Mark’s father I had came from the Boy, photographs of him we occasionally received from Alexandra, and hearing his voice once or twice on the phone as he spoke in Venda to Linah or Diana. So it was with a great deal of trepidation that I rode to the Greensboro airport to meet him. I imagined an angry man who would hate me for being white, who would frequently argue and come to blows with Mark, and who would try to run our household according to his own rules.

I was surprised when I met him. He was of a much smaller stature than I had imagined, with a gentle disposition and kind eyes.

When I saw how readily Bianca sat on his lap in the van, and how he listened attentively to her toddler’s babble and showed her his broken watch, I knew my initial fears were unfounded.

He impressed me as being a very proud, dignified man, who seldom let on that he was surprised or excited by new experiences.

Having just completed his first flight in an airplane, he yawned and said flying was nothing remarkable. When we pulled up in our driveway, he silently got out of the car and roamed around our house, both outside and inside, without revealing that he was the least bit impressed by its comfort or size, though it was about ten tImes the size of the home in which his children grew up, a fifteen-by-fifteenfoot shack.

He went for long walks with Mark’s mother around the neighborhood each morning and evening, and wondered why Americans remain cooped up inside their homes so much. He also wondered why we drive to the grocery store instead of walking, when it is only three miles away.

I was amazed and puzzled by many of his habits: the way he would lie in the blazing sun for hours, deep in thought, with a handkerchief over his face; the way he would carefully peruse magazines and newspapers even though he couldn’t read; his saying grace at each meal; and his expectation that all the women in the house serve him. Despite his idiosyncrasies, he was extremely affable and respectful. I grew to call him “Papa.”

The Mathabane children had always been expected to address their father in Venda, to show respect for his native language and his authority, but Linah, Diana, George, and Mark were much more fluent in Tsonga, their mother’s language. When Mark tried, after twelve years without hearing the language, to speak to Papa in Venda, his speech was so halting that Linah and Diana burst out laughing. Mark’s father merely smiled, and from then on it was understood that everyone could speak Tsonga without offending him.

I heard Tsonga, Venda, Sotho, and Zulu so much that I began to understand a bit of the languages, which always made Diana exclaim, “How did you know what we were talking about?” Sometimes, just for fun or to show off his knowledge, Papa would speak in Afrikaans. This, too, I could often understand, for Afrikaans has many German words.

Papa and I would point to various things on the dinner table-bread, butter, glassomparing the names for them in German and Afrikaans. I hope to learn as many African languages as I can-they’re so poetic, so melodious-as a way to fully sharing in the rich cultures of blacks in South Africa and effectively communicating with my other family.

As the months went by, Mhani’s English improved, and we were able to discuss increasingly complex topics. A diligent student, she daily studied the alphabet and the beginning readers I borrowed from the literacy center at the public library. When I listened to NPR on the car radio, she would pay close attention, smiling proudly whenever she was able to catch a word or phrase she understood.

She sat for hours on the floor of Diana’s room, wearing headphones, listening to English-language tapes and repeating what she heard.

“Give me your address,” the tape said.

“Give me your dress,” Mhani echoed proudly.

Communication between us was not easy at first, and there were a few disastrous misunderstandings, like the time I said, “Those towels are dirty,” and she thought I said that she was dirty. She sulked alone in the laundry room all day before I found out why she was [I upset.

“How could you think I’d have said such a thing!” I cried.

“Oh, Gail, I didn’t want to believe it. But my heart,” she said, pressing her hand to her chest as if in pain. “My heart-so sorry.”

We embraced and laughed over the misunderstanding. After that, each time we inadvertently hurt each other by not making our meaning clear, we always made up by embracing.

Unlike many foreigners who try to speak English, Mhani was not afraid to make mistakes as long as she could get her meaning across.

Soon I was able to interpret her sentences and she, listening carefully as I spoke slowly and clearly, was able to interpret mine. Mark was amazed by how much we could communicate. I’d describe to him some in-depth conversation between Mhani and me and he would refuse to believe it.

“How could she have told you all that?” he said.

At that time I was pregnant with our second child, so Mhani and I often spoke of the differences between bearing and raising children in America and in South Africa. She described the births of each of her seven children, telling me how difficult each had been, how Granny and some women from the neighborhood had acted as midwives, how much each child had weighed, and how each had got its name. One time, while we were doing laundry, she said confidently, I.

pointing to my rounded belly, “This one is a boy.”

“How can you tell?” I asked.

“From the way you look and feel,” she said cryptically.

“I don’t understand.”

She laughed. “There are things you cannot yet understand,” she said.

“Look at it this way. My firstborn was a boy. Then came a girl.

Then a boy, then a girl. You see? You have a girl, so the next one will be a boy. After that you’ll have another girl, then another boy, and so on.”

I laughed. How could I tell her I was not planning to have as many children as she had? I got the feeling, from talking to Mhant, that it was customary in an African woman’s life to raise many loved, strong, and healthy children. This was an admirable goal. But the world can no longer support too many of us, as shown by the cruel life of deprivation and early death many children in underdeveloped countries face. Also I don’t know many American women of my generation who could bear the strain of raising more than three. Many don’t even find the time to have one child before their biological clock runs out. Most of my friends from Brown were amazed that I was already married and had a child, not to mention a second one on the way.

Every time Mhani told me I would have a boy, I cringed inside.

Would she be doopointed U I had a girl? Would Mark? He had assured me that he wouldn’t. Yet I felt the full weight of African tradition on my shoulders, a tradition that values sons more highly than daughters. Personally, I wanted a little son so much that I was afraid to hope for one, and I kept my preference a secret, even from my journal. I was afraid that if I wrote about my desire for a baby boy and then had a girl, my daughter might be deeply hurt if she read my journal years later. Whenever someone referred to my protruding stomach as “he,” I would quickly correct them by saying, “she.” I prepared myself psychologically for a girl.

Because of my condition, Mhani pampered me. She forbade me to pick up Bianca, who now weighed more than twenty-five pounds, and would insist I take long naps in the afternoon and not subject myself to undue stress. She was the perfect midwife. She possessed more earthy knowledge about the emotions and psychology of childbirth than anyone I have met. She often accompanied me to my monthly checkups and thought much of what was done by the doctor unnecessary.

“A strong woman should be able to bear healthy children,” she would say. “So take care of yourself and the baby will be fine.”

I was surprised by how indulgent Mark’s mother was toward Bianca.

Because Mark and his siblings are so self-disciplined and hardworking, I assumed she had raised her children with strict guidelines and punished them when they were naughty. But she let Bianca run about freely, cleaning up her messes as she made them.

She never said, “Naughty girl” or “Bad girl.” In fact, Mhani would get upset if Mark or I scolded Bianca. She told me she felt “a pain in her heart” whenever she heard Bianca cry. Yet she always seemed to find a way to get Bianca to behave.

“Treat children like children and not adults,” she would say.

When I saw Mhani constantly praise Bianca and call her, “Beautiful girl, clever girl, well done,” I realized how she had managed to raise self-confident, secure children amid the terrors and deprivations of South African ghetto life: She had given them a strong sense of self-worth in their early years.

Whenever Bianca cried, Mhani would kneel down beside her, embrace her and ask, “Who hit you?”

At first I was offended by this, for I thought Mhani really believed we hit Bianca. Then Linah explained to me that asking, “Who hit you?”

was her mother’s way of comforting a child. She had frequently asked the same thing of Angeline, Given, Lionel, and Sibusis her grandchildren back home in South Africa. It allowed the child, who most likely was simply frustrated at not getting whatever she wanted, to pin the blame for her distress on someone else and then quickiy forget it.

When Mhani played games with Bianca, like the African version of hide and seek, or tossing stuffed animals for her to catch, she would roar with laughter, thoroughly enjoying herself. Bianca would clap her hands, laugh, and jump up and down, unable to contain her excitement.

Though I felt completely at ease with Mhani and Bianca, I became a bit selfconscious whenever the three of us went out in public. It seems an interracial couple has to adjust to stares three tImes: first, when seen with one’s spouse, then with one’s child, and third with one’s in-laws. People would stare at us-a white woman, a black woman, and a brown child-trying to figure out the connection between us.

Every week I took Mhani and Bianca to the Forsyth County Health Department. We were desperately trying to get Mhani’s diabetes under control. The patients and clinic employees were predominantly black, and many took me for Mhani’s welfare case worker or some volunteer do-gooder.

“Are you from Crisis Control or social services?” they would ask.

The black women behind the desks and in the lab had little patience with me.

“Why don’t you let her talk for herself?” one nurse snapped at me when I kept answering questions about Mhani’s medical history.

“Can’t she talk?”

“Yes, but I can tell by the expression on her face when she doesn’t understand a question. She’s still learning English. She speaks Tsonga.”

“She speaks what?”

“She’s from South Africa.”

“And who are you? Her interpreter or something?”

“Her daughter-in-law,” I said.

As we continued to go to the clinic each week, however, the employees got to know us and began to treat us kindly. When we told Mhani’s doctor that she would soon return to South Africa, he was distraught.

“Oh, but you can’t leave!” he said. you’re my best patient!”

When Mhani came to the United States, her blood sugar count was between 400 and 50between 60 and 120 is normal. By following a strict program of diet, exercise, and regular doses of insulin, her blood sugar count steadily dropped.

I did not realize how attached I had become to Mhani until the night she collapsed on the floor, faint, dizzy, sweating, and shaking.

She had been on insulin only three days, and we feared she was having a reaction. I phoned the clinic and the doctor on call told us to make her drink some sweet juice and rush her to the hospital.

“Otherwise she might die,” the doctor said.

“Die!” I exclaimed. My heart started pounding and I trembled all over. No one had told me an insulin reaction could be lifethreatening.

Shivering and too weak to sit up, Mhani crouched under a comforter complaining of the cold. She refused to drink any juice, insisting she would vomit if she did. Mark, Diana, and Papa carried her limp body downstairs, into the garage, and placed her in the backseat of Mark’s car. Mark sped down the highway toward the hospital while I sat in the backseat with Mhani, trying to keep her from lapsing into a coma. Her eyes were half-closed and her lips were dry. I watched her chest rise and fall, afraid it might suddenly stop.

“Please don’t let her die,” I chanted to myself. “Please, God.” I tried to calm myself, knowing that panicking would be of no help.

We became lost in a maze of side streets and nearly ran out of gas by the time we reached the emergency room. A nurse and an orderly hauled Mhani from the car into a wheelchair and whisked her through a pair of heavy swinging doors labeled “Patients only.”

Mark was permitted only because they needed a translator.

I was left to sit alone in the waiting room, stunned and quaking.

“If anything happens to her it will be all my fault,” I thought. “I’m the one who’s been taking her to the doctor. I should have known about insulin reactions.” The baby kicked restlessly within me, and I realized I was right in the middle of two generations-the one that is about to be born and the one that gave us birth. “If we should lose her…” I thought with tears in my eyes.

After what seemed like hours an emotionally exhausted Mark came out and told me her condition was stabilized, but that she would have to remain in the hospital a bit longer. I hugged Mark as tightly as I could with a baby between us. Knowing how deeply the prospect of losing Mhani had shaken me, I realized she had truly become a second mother to me. A few weeks later her diabetes was Fmally stabilized through a combination of diet, exercise, and insulin.

Mhani sorely wanted to stay for the birth of our second child, but Mark’s father was eager to get back to Alexandra, back to his friends and family, back to the familiar sights and sounds of his homeland, back to his native language, back to being the head of his own household.

Mhani and Papa departed for South Africa in late December, laden with Christmas gifts from us to the rest of the Mathabane clan.

Mark accompanied them to New York to help them with their numerous bags and boxes and to make sure they safely boarded the proper Alr Zambia flight at JFK Airport.