A Girl Named Disaster: Chapters 33–42

Nhamo sank into happy oblivion again.

The old man was affronted, and Nhamo was too overcome with embarrassment to say anything more.

Whatever their opinion of Vapostoris, everyone deferred to Baba Joseph, even Dr. van Heerden: “The old man looks at you with those luminous eyes,” the Afrikaner told Mother, “and you find yourself saying, Yes, Baba. You want me to stand on my head with a flower up my schnozz? You got it, Baba.”

The language was generally Shona, but smatterings of other tongues cropped up when people became excited.

“The Wild Child has imprinted on me. I was the first thing she saw after her ordeal in the forest.”

Nhamo would watch for a while, suffused with happiness.

She lifted the tortoise from its pen and let it lumber across the animal house for exercise.

He told the first king, ‘You will die because your fingers will drop off. I give you the disease called leprosy.’

And to the third king he said, ‘You will die because your flesh will be consumed. I give you tuberculosis.’

“I hope Baba Joseph has never touched that ugly crocodile,” she said as she dangled a sprig of lucerne over the guinea pigs to see if she could make them stand on their hind legs.

“You’d make such a wonderful mother,” Dr. van Heerden said sentimentally.

The old man told her about how Jesus ngozi had slept in a cow’s feeding trough when he was a baby.

The beast started for Nhamo with its red tongue lolling out of its mouth.

The dog was almost upon her now, but something in her face checked its gait.

“I think I’ve been sent to stand in the corner,” the Afrikaner murmured at last.
“You and me both,” said Mother in a subdued voice.

At last they arrived at the bare knoll of the mountain with only the stars for cover.

He seemed to be really hurt but, paradoxically, he was the only one willing to talk.

She took to reading with a fervor so extreme, Baba Joseph had to take the books from her hands by force.

Her fingers were callused from years of grueling work.

The nurse taught her to oil her skin as well, and to buff her fingernails with a piece of leather.

Some of the houses were attractive; most were merely hovels.

They might think she was an ignorant Wild Child of dubious parentage.

“They have to. You’re family,” the woman said placidly.

The servant brought them tea, which Nhamo was too distraught to drink.

Nhamo studied them covertly.

She told him about the ngozi and how she had fled from an imposed marriage.

“You can beat him if you like,” Mrs. Jongwe said lazily, on one of the few occasions she deigned to notice Nhamo.

A chuckle drifted out of the grape arbor behind her.

The road deteriorated into a path scarred by deep ruts from the rainy season.

Lloyd-the- lackey turned into Murenga-the-revolutionary overnight.

Jongwe Senior was slumped in an easy chair with a cut-glass decanter on a table beside him.

The air in the room was full of the sweet, cloying smell of whiskey, and every corner was heaped with mementos of trips to England and South Africa.

Mother wore a gauzy white cloth over her hair and held a bunch of flowers trimmed with ribbons.

Nhamo had written letters to Dr. Masuku in her clumsy, uneven scrawl.

You’re far too intelligent to be turned into a family drudge or forced into a bad marriage. Women are never free until they can control their own money.