Love in the Driest Season (11 page)

“It was,” my mother said. “But it isn’t anymore.”

The rest of the visit went well. They flew back home, and my family mostly just got on with things—although at a cautious, transatlantic distance.

But when Chipo came home with us, it initiated a remarkable family rapprochement. My father, who had grown up with the sting of being abandoned, took to her immediately. He applied for an expedited passport and bought a plane ticket to Harare. He seemed to forget that he hates to go north of Memphis or east of Tuscaloosa. He and my mother traveled for thirty-eight consecutive hours—Mississippi to Atlanta to London to Johannesburg to Harare—so that they could see their only grandchild. Race, the defining issue of life in Mississippi, suddenly became a minor thing. The differences we’d had seemed to be a memory of the distant past. During that visit, my mother related the story of Charles Brown, my great-something-or-other grandfather, the one who was said to have run away to be with a freed slave—the first time I heard that little family secret. Charles and his lover disappeared from family and Mississippi history, it appears, leaving a question mark that has lingered for more than a century. No one knew what became of them, my mother told us after dinner, while I listened in stunned silence.

Vita was very amused.

“Once a century, somebody in the family just
has
to run off and marry a black girl,” she giggled at the table. “And here you were, thinking you were blazing a trail. You’re just a family retread, sweetheart.”

She kissed me on the nose.

Later, after my parents returned to Mississippi, my father went to his fiftieth high-school reunion. It was in Clarksdale, a drowsy little town lost in the heart of the Delta, mostly renowned for the extraordinary number of blues musicians who once resided there.

In the small banquet hall, those in the all-white crowd were in their late sixties, the generation of Mississippians who once had battled so fiercely against integration and the civil rights movement. After dinner, they were each given the chance to stand up and tell their former classmates the one thing—the most important and meaningful thing—that had happened to them in the half century since they were all classmates and teenagers.

My mother, sitting beside my father, silently wondered what he would say. He had been the first person in her family or his to go to college. He had also gone on to get a doctorate (in animal husbandry), and now everyone called him Dr. Tucker. He had risen in his chosen profession, the Cooperative Extension Service, to being the state’s number two official, a position of some clout in an agricultural region.

When his turn came, my father stood up. He didn’t mention any of that.

“I am most proud to tell you that I have a granddaughter, her name is Chipo, and she is from Zimbabwe,” he said.

And then he sat down.

My mother was speechless. And then she could have kissed him.

9

C
HILDREN OF THE
D
RY
S
EASON

J
UST BECAUSE
we considered Chipo to be part of the Tucker clan didn’t mean anyone else did, however. The question before us was how to get approval from everyone in the Department of Social Welfare, all the way up to the presidential cabinet, for an adoption that would make her legally ours. The early assurances Vita had been given that all of this would go smoothly had quickly proven to be nonsense. I remembered Tony Mtero’s words of warning about the process, and it stopped us from immediately filing an application to adopt. We knew that would be rejected outright. After debating on a course of action for a couple of weeks, and doing a little legal research, we decided to begin with a flanking operation. We submitted paperwork to become foster parents, the step Tony had mentioned that night at dinner. There was no law excluding foreign nationals from this, and while fostering still had to be approved by the department and legalized by the courts, it was not subject to the same rigors as adoption.

A new social worker, Florence Sibanda, did another home study, and we answered all the questions and filled out all the forms a second time. She was very nice but almost never in her office. She once showed me her case files—the thin folders were stacked more than a foot high—and said, “Mr. Tucker, your file is one of these. All of these people want to see me. If you need me to do something on your file, you must find me.”

She wasn’t kidding, and I wasn’t shy. I probably spent more time following Florence Sibanda around than I have any public official in my professional life. All I needed her to do was sign and date the emergency placement order, an act that was becoming a thirty-second formality, every two weeks. The problem was that her signature was harder to get than that of a Mafia don. She would not make appointments, never answered the phone, never returned the dozens of messages we left for her, and didn’t keep regular office hours. I tried to track her down at her office, at court, on her lunch hour, when she came to the building in the morning, and when she left at night. I would start stalking her every other Wednesday to make sure I found her by the Friday deadline—or, if I was out of town, Vita would. When it was my turn, if I had not found her by midday Thursday, I would take my cell phone, a notebook, and a couple of files to the department. I would sit cross-legged in the gloomy hallway and conduct interviews from there, sliding my feet to the side when people passed.

Neither would she provide a checklist of required paperwork for foster custody—things such as our marriage license, birth certificates, pay stubs, police clearance, personal references, and so on. Instead, she would mention two or three items she needed from time to time. We would go away, get those things, and come back with them, and then she would ask for two or three more.

For the police clearance, you had to buy your own fingerprint form at Kingston’s, the state-owned bookstore, then drive out to your local precinct and be fingerprinted. Then you had to take it back to the Department of Social Welfare to be vetted. We went to the Borrowdale police station to be printed late one afternoon. An officer waved us into the back of the compound. A young woman was with him. She wore blue jeans and a disheveled look. He printed her, standing outside next to a water hose, rolling her fingers across the ink pad, then carefully across the white paper. He walked away for a moment. She looked at us, rubbing her hands beneath the water to get the ink off, sizing up what a pony-tailed white man and a dreadlocked black woman might have been doing to get arrested.

“What are you here for?” she finally asked.

“Fostering,” Vita said. “You?”

“Sex.”

“Don’t tell me they outlawed it.”

“Only if you sell it.”

She walked off, and Vita nudged me, whispering, “Go on, baby, make her an offer. See if you can get some play.” I tried to stifle a laugh, nudging her back, and then we were giggling—the first laugh we’d had in a month.

It was difficult to relax, even though Chipo’s health seemed to be stabilizing. The situation at Chinyaradzo was as grim as ever. Tadiwanashe Mtero, an infant who had slept across the room from Chipo, died in the hospital due to diarrhea and vomiting. He was the fourteenth infant to die that year.

Not only was there still no inquiry, it had come to the point where the government almost seemed to resent the wave of abandoned children. Articles would pop up in the government-run newspaper from time to time, lecturing the overwhelmed public that they should somehow take up more of the responsibility themselves. “Communities Must Assist Disadvantaged Children,” read the headline of one article in the state-owned
Sunday Mail.
It was buried deep inside the paper despite some astonishing information. “About 10,500 orphans went through the Department of Social Welfare in the last seven months. One of the children’s homes in Harare reportedly admits not less than four abandoned children every week. These children are found by the police or members of the public. Since March this year, Harare Central District dealt with 91 cases of abandoned children.” The numbers were extraordinary by any measure, and almost beyond belief in a nation of eleven million. But the statistics were at the bottom of the story. The lead, in the state-sponsored style of journalism, read as a government scolding to the proletariat. “Although Government has, through the Department of Social Welfare, tried to accommodate disadvantaged children in institutions, it has now run out of resources and most of the available homes are reportedly over-enrolled. It is now up to the communities to take the burden off Government and bring an end to the anguish of these children,” the article began. Florence Kaseke, the same deputy director of social welfare in the Harare office whom I had met, was quoted as saying: “Our traditional system of caring for children in need of State care and protection is rapidly becoming inadequate, ineffective and unsuitable.”

The article was striking for several reasons. The news judgment to bury it deep inside a paper that would sometimes strip a story about a decent rainfall across the top of page one was beyond me. Ninety-one children abandoned in six months in one province! It read like a typographical error. Further, the willingness to turn truth on its head was jarring—people were turning to state-run orphanages to help with abandoned children
because
their extended family networks were already overrun, as the UNICEF study had shown, not because they didn’t want to be inconvenienced. And while the government was indeed facing high inflation and some very real financial pressures, none of it was because they were spending too much on orphans. It either did not matter or did not occur to President Mugabe that by dispatching more than eight thousand Zimbabwean troops to protect “the precious lives of the people of Congo” in that nation’s ongoing civil war, he was sealing the fate of his own nation’s most vulnerable children.

We had no illusions about making changes in this vast system. But, struck by the rapid-fire deaths at the orphanage, we did think that by focusing on the medical care of ailing infants in one ward, we might be able to at least slow the mortality rate there. Getting the infants to three years old seemed to be the trick; the death rate dropped off dramatically after that. So we made dozens of trips to Makro Cash and Carry, the city’s warehouse grocery, buying more than three hundred large cans of powdered formula, dozens of bottles of vitamins, more than one thousand diapers, cases of baby powder and skin cream, garbage cans, laundry baskets, and an electric kettle for the kitchen.

One afternoon when I was delivering some of these supplies, not long after we had brought Chipo home, Stella mentioned that there was another case like Chipo’s. A newborn had been thrown in a roadside trash bin in Norton, a farming village about thirty minutes outside of town. Vita and I were absurdly optimistic about our fostering/adoption chances at this stage, given how quickly Chipo had been placed in our home, and I was moved by the child’s circumstances. Stella made a call to the local social worker, and I drove out there to see him.

Downtown Norton was a dusty street with a few scattered concrete-block shops and a farm supply outlet, with trucks parked out front and men lounging in the shade. It might have been a small Delta town from my Mississippi past. Then the road turned to gravel and twisted along past a row of small houses. There was a turn to the left, another to the right, and then I rolled through a row of shade trees and parked in front of a small rectangular building. Several dogs rousted themselves from the dust and sniffed my feet, tails swishing cautiously. This was the Ngomi Community Hall, with bench seats and a small stage at the front. Behind it was a tin-roofed addition, a single room with a concrete floor that served as the local branch of the social welfare office. There were five chairs, two desks, four filing cabinets, one typewriter, one telephone, and one employee. E. W. Matinyadze rose and shook my hand with a smile. He was a serious man, and he quickly told me what had happened.

Norton had several large trash bins set on the edge of town. Three days earlier, someone tossed in their garbage and heard crying. They peered over the edge of the bin and there, halfway buried in the trash, was a squirming newborn child. His umbilical cord was still attached and he was crying at the top of his lungs.

“The doctor said he’d been there five to seven hours, judging by the exposure problems he had, the big number of ant bites,” said Matinyadze. “But good for him to be wriggling around! To be making that noise at that time! What a lucky chap. If he’d been sleeping and someone had tossed a bag on top of him, I doubt we’d have heard from him.”

They had taken the boy to a hospital. Social workers had named him Ferai, a popular name that translates as “happiness.” I stopped by the hospital to see him, explaining to the curious nurse that Matinyadze had said it was okay. She brought a white bundle of cloth, and deep inside was a sleeping little boy, his fingers as tiny as anything I’d ever seen, his eyelids so thin you could see the veins in them. I held him for a few minutes, thanked the nurse, and drove home.

“What do you think about a little boy?” I said to Vita, telling her about Ferai. We were exhausted with Chipo, but his circumstances were so jarring that it seemed cruel to say no. Vita took a deep breath, and then she laughed. “You know I would love to have a little boy,” she said.

We waited for Ferai to be transferred to Chinyaradzo. We would do his paperwork by the book, we resolved, instead of Chipo’s dramatic circumstances, so that no one could later accuse us of Western arrogance. When he didn’t appear after a couple of days, I drove to the orphanage and asked Stella when he was coming. She made a couple of phone calls.

“Oh,” she said. “Ferai, he died.”

I looked at her.

“Yes, in the hospital there. It is very sad.”

I did not know what to say. I left her office and got in the truck. I felt nauseous, fingers tapping on the steering wheel. He had been in my hands. Should I have taken him to the Trauma Center, as Vita had done with Chipo? Should I have gone back to see him each day? Well, of course, I could see that now. But they hadn’t said he was sick. Just a bit of exposure, they said, and now he was gone, dead and buried.

“But I
had
him,” I kept saying out loud.

I scarcely knew how to tell Vita. I pulled into the driveway and switched off the ignition. I sat in the quiet for several minutes.

I finally went inside. Vita was cooking dinner.

“Hey,” she called out, with a half look over her shoulder.

I leaned against the refrigerator. “Ferai didn’t make it,” I said. “He died at the hospital. Never got to Chinyaradzo. Stella told me just now.”

Vita stopped, perfectly still. She was looking straight ahead. Sliced onions popped and hissed in the skillet. The clock on the wall ticked a long time. Then she looked back at the stove and stirred the onions. Her jaw was set into a grimace. I left.

We never talked about it again. It was too depressing, too much of a reminder of Chipo’s delicate hold on life.

But over the next several days, my sense of sadness and guilt intensified. If I had acted promptly, the boy would have lived. There was no getting around it, and the thought came to me unbidden, in the shower or in the middle of an interview or the first thing when I woke up in the morning. I could shake neither the sense of failure nor the sorrow that fluttered along behind it, like a whisper in the breeze.

We kept working at the orphanage, though, and soon we were drawn to a bright, happy little girl named Erica. She was nine months old. Her head was shaved so close she was almost bald. She had a lopsided grin, which she flashed all the time. She was light-skinned, likely biracial, and she too was completely abandoned. We applied for permission to bring her home. Stella looked up her paperwork, and weekend visits were approved.

Erica came home on a pleasant weekend in late September. Vita took her to the bathroom, undressing her as she had Chipo that first day. Erica was much healthier, but still underweight. Vita wrapped her in some new clothes and took her into the kitchen, warming up some formula. Her health problems were quickly apparent. She was wracked with some sort of intestinal disorder that turned her waste into foul-smelling diarrhea. We treated this and tried to fatten her up with steady meals and bottle after bottle of formula, something she couldn’t get at the orphanage. Vita rocked her back and forth on the couch, Erica tucking her head against Vita’s neck, and they would both drift into a nap. In the afternoons, we put the two girls on a play mat together. They were small enough to sleep in the same crib. There wasn’t much rest on those nights, as one of them was awake, or the other, or both, or all of us, but Erica came home with us for another weekend, and then another, and then they started fussing over the same bottle.

“They’re already acting like sisters,” Vita laughed.

Then the orphanage took Erica back.