War Serenade

2. The Girly Hots

2

The Girly Hots

Pietermaritzburg, South Africa

28 July 1943—next day

Lena and Sofie sat on the steps of the stoep, the South Africanism for back porch, leading from kitchen to backyard of the one-story brick home owned by the Fuller Family. These slate steps were their morning meeting place after the most essential housework was done.

This slightly elevated vantage point was perfect from which to observe the comings and goings. The women enjoyed the smell of the lush, wild banana and mango trees within easy reach, were they so inclined.

Many debates had ensued on these steps, and this day was no exception. “Ibhubesi has a spring in her step today,” said the robust Lena.

“Ibhubesi,” the Zulu word for lioness, was their name for the vibrant youngest of the Fuller household, whom both had known for nearly all of the girl’s twenty years.

Others knew her as Iris.

“I am telling you, Lena. Every day she is more like a cheetah with her long legs and her spotted face.” Sofie was in her own world as usual.

“A cheetah? Eikona, Sofie. You have forgotten the wild animals from the hills. A cheetah may be agile and solitary, but it’s timid and shy and it doesn’t roar. Does that sound like our Ibhubesi?” Her large body wobbled with mirth and exposed a dark gap where recently a front tooth had gleamed. Ibhubesi had paid the dentist to extract the offender with her own money. The healing herbs Lena would have used were not to be found in town where buildings and roads replaced nature.

Sofie was determined to be contrary. “A leopard then, still spotted, eating its prey in a tree, like our girl who spends her life suspended above the ground, drawing dresses.”

Lena was adamant. “Why do we not agree? For nineteen years and more, we see her legs grow longer, her eyes get more catlike, and her red mane get wilder.”

“But a lioness with a mane?” Sofie won the argument with that. Sort of.

“Perhaps a Big Cat with the spots of a leopard and the legs of a springbok, her favorite prey,” Lena sniffed. Compromise was the only way the two women remained friends.

Sofie’s face and demeanor softened. “But she is our Ibhubesi in fearlessness, I will grant you that, you old cow.” She giggled to lighten her insult.

But Lena had other things on her mind. “And I am telling you, Sofie, since yesterday she carries the fire down there. She has the girly hots.”

“How can you see this heat through her clothes?” Sofie was confused.

“A mother knows her child, even if she was birthed by another. And Sofie, our girl became a woman yesterday. I know this.”

Sofie spun to face her friend, shocked out of her quarrelsome mood. “No! A woman?”

“Eikona. Not that kind of woman. Not yet. Just one who has found what she wants.” Sofie relaxed. She thought she’d missed something mammoth.

“Today Ibhubesi looks like me when I see Philemon from the petrol station,” Lena said.

“Those girly hots are clear on your face when you see him. Does Philemon know he makes your isibunu full of juice?”

“Are you crazy, Sofie? I am a married woman.” Lena looked at her friend with disdain.

“Married to a usually impotent man in the hills who smokes the dagga and does nothing.” Sofie’s filter had long ago collapsed.

“Married is married, but it doesn’t prevent the girly hots. I look at him. I feel tingles. Juice flows. I am happy. It is Philemon who is responsible for my pleasure when my husband is not impotent.”

Sofie snorted. “Well! Praise the ancestors for the girly hots then!”

“I wish you a Philemon from the petrol station, Sofie. Then perhaps the carrot you have lodged up your bum would fall out, and you would not be so bad tempered.”

“Carrots have good nutrition,” Sofie said, straight-faced.

Lena started to giggle, then she laughed until her whole body wobbled and Sofie joined in. As they laughed together, Lena put out a big arm and squashed the thin Sofie to her in a bear hug. All was right in their world. For a minute.

The women came to town from their separate kraals, beyond the Pietermaritzburg hills, a score of years before. Their daily grind in the kraals as young, married women was to toil and chat together with the other wives, making sure food was gathered and prepared, chickens, cows and goats fed, and young girls properly guided to womanhood.

Perhaps the developments down the hill would not have held the same attractions had their husbands remained virile and fighting-fit, rather than lazy and dulled by the wild weed that inflated memories of their own importance.

Once great warriors, claiming their corner of the South African continent, in the recent peace they became puffed-up and useless, filling their days by outdoing each other with tales of great battles, their heroism growing monumentally with each retelling.

At night they barked orders at their wives and drank too much Kefir beer. They could seldom fulfill their own urges in the darkened huts, let alone those of their ripe women.

True, there were no surprises and life was mostly peaceful, but “Town” below the kraal grew with settlers and industry. The air was filled with strange languages, odd music, moving machines, interesting smells, new noises and bright colors of every hue. A longing to be immersed in the madness tugged at these unfulfilled women, like hungry puppies yearning for ripe teats.

“Town” was where they could work for a little money (they’d never bartered with coins before) and live in the servants’ quarters attached to white men’s homes and relish life in the thick of all the change.

The young Lena and Sofie came from two different kraals, though they arrived in town on the same day, drawn by the same lust for life. But, on arrival, they found themselves lost and overwhelmed in the new chaos.

Recognizing the bewilderment in the other, they immediately linked hands and set off together, knocking on doors, in search of any white families needing “a girl.”

It was pure luck that the Fuller family was socially on the way up and needed help with their redheaded newborn and five-year-old boy with the lightest of spirits and the darkest of hair; at the same time, the van Niekerks next door lost their last maid to a leopard attack on her way up the hill to her kraal.

The ladies were snapped up and had been neighbors and friends ever since.

Usually the outside of the servants’ quarters looked as handsome as the large manicured brick homes they were attached to, but inside they were nothing more than rough-plastered caves with no amenities.

But not for long. Lena and Sofie soon had cozy nests, courtesy of their new families’ castoffs. It was all they needed to rekindle their pride and allow them to experiment with their newfound individualism.

But, like all the other Zulus who gave up their traditional life for servitude to the white man in the colonies, they quickly learned their place. They were servants.

As heady as town was, all Zulus were pulled home to their roots in the hills on occasion. An invented relative’s funeral was the perfect remedy for homesickness. It began with loud keening and high-pitched wailing traditionally used for Zulu ceremonies. The ear-piercing, mournful sounds, along with the threat that if forbidden to go, their ancestors might retaliate, were enough to convince the most hardened Christian employer to allow their servants time off.

They labored most of the day up the steep hills to their kraals, excited to see old friends. They spent the next two days satisfying their homesickness and their husbands, then with wings on their heels, they came back to the action and the lessons in humility.

Their visit sustained them for some time. A powerful reminder of where they no longer wanted to be.

Town had its own problems, and the white man took some getting used to with his vanity and his need for social prowess. The saving grace was that the town Zulus still had their language, their keen sense of humor and each other.

No white folks were remotely interested in understanding or talking Zulu, so their native tongue allowed them to openly criticize and make fun of the world around them. Their employers were none the wiser. In fact, such was their white self-importance, they simply presumed, because the Zulus beamed through their gibberish-sounding exchanges with each other, that their servants were always jolly.

Their delicious comedy buffered them from feeling downtrodden; it was their outlet for pent-up anger and their bonus for putting up with the whites they served.

Zulus were keen observers, and Lena and Sofie were no exception.

Ibhubesi’s mother, well, her birth mother, had no patience or softness toward the girl child. Lena understood then why, as she grew, the child sought her own company, her older brother’s or that of Lena and Sofie’s, rather than her mother’s. But when her father came home, he was the child’s focus, and she, her father’s delight.

Lena was always there when real mother gallivanted off to tennis or teas or galas with other upper-class white women. She watched Ibhubesi living mostly in her own world, perfectly happy with paper and pencil, drawing everything her eyes fell upon.

Brother held his little sister’s heart very gently in the palm of his hand. He was every bit his father’s son. Like the sun, he emitted warmth, and people and animals alike basked in his healing rays.

The Zulu friends often reminisced about the huge event in Ibhubesi’s life that had so enormously affected their own. All because of the mister’s thoughtfulness, the ladies became celebrities amongst their peers.

Sofie loved her mister. On this remarkable evening, Ibhubesi’s seventh birthday, he’d struggled out of his driving machine with a big box that the ladies helped him carry inside.

The child was overcome when she saw her father’s beaming face and the big box. She tore at the paper like a hungry hunter ripping open the belly of a fat rabbit.

The ecstasy that came from her little voice box was a special something the ladies would always remember. Little white arms hugged her father so tight, they caused water to spout from the elder’s eyes. They were baffled by the cause of the unbridled excitement: the heavy black machine, with a little wheel and a sharp needle, didn’t look worthy. Ibhubesi’s cry, “A sewing machine!” shed no light on its prowess at all.

But in the months that followed, they learned what magic the “Whirr Whirr” had in store for them.

Lena and Sofie became the black fashion icons of Pietermaritzburg courtesy of that crazy little black buzzing machine. Their status had taken some trial and error as the child experimented with her adult toy: Their hems came undone while strutting their stuff, sleeves were at odd angles, and wrongly positioned darts cut their breasts in half, but their garments were brand-new and tailor-made. No make-do castoffs for these ladies. They wore the finest of fabrics. Well, certainly in the first few Whirr Whirr years.

The three spent hours in Lena’s modest quarters, the youngster on a box to reach their strong naked shoulders, draping them in exotic cloth that felt cool and opulent against their ebony skin. They felt like queens in the making.

Like statues they stood, thoughts of dazzling their peers was their end goal, as Ibhubesi pinned and pricked, tilting her copper head the same way as the fabric she’d just draped, likely imagining the finished creation. The ladies’ status improved at the same remarkable pace as did Ibhubesi’s expertise.

It was true the men in her house adored Ibhubesi, but to Lena’s eye, the more she enthralled them, the colder the birth-mother became toward her girl child.

And then, out of the bluest skies, the darkest raincloud gathered without warning and beat down mercilessly on the Fuller household.

Lena and Sofie couldn’t laugh for months, so broken were their hearts when the mister died. He had thrashed and sweated in his bed, delirious with fever, as the miesies wrung her hands in the bedroom doorway. Lena wiped his sweating face and shoulders with cloths soaked in vinegar-water to take down his fever, while Ibhubesi held her father’s hand and said softly, “It’s all right, Daddy. I am here. I will never leave you. It’s going to be all right.”

But it wasn’t all right.

The fever took him early one morning, and Miesies’ wail brought Lena charging in to find Ibhubesi curled in a fetal position, next to her dead father, her head and her knees touching his cold body, soundlessly weeping and still holding his hand.

Brother held mother’s head against his shoulder as she wept, and at that moment he was the older, the stronger and she, the younger, the weaker.

Once the mister’s soulless body had been removed, and Lena aired and freshened the dark space, Miesies announced that she was not to be disturbed and disappeared into the room where she had last seen her husband.

And didn’t come out.

Ibhubesi was lost. She wouldn’t go outside. She wouldn’t be tempted to lie like a leopard, above the ground, on what they called “the hammock” that she so loved. She wouldn’t go to school. She wouldn’t eat. She wouldn’t stop wandering around aimlessly. She wouldn’t even draw and, worst of all, the Whirr Whirr was silent.

Friends came by with food and concern, but either Lena or Brother made excuses as to why the Miesies and the child could not visit with them that day.

People stopped coming.

Lena and Sofie’s eagle eyes followed their lost nine-year-old cub as she wandered around, sad and confused. Though she hardly noticed them, the ladies stepped in. They took turns holding her tight and stroking her wild, un-brushed hair. Often tears streamed silently down her white cheeks. So many days indoors had rendered all her leopard spots, which the mother called “freckles,” nearly invisible.

The ladies had to be cruel to be kind and bathed her, albeit kicking and screaming, plaited her hair neatly, even cooked her favorite meals, which went mostly untouched. They weren’t sure they were helping at all. It was not their comfort she needed. Not their love she longed for.

And still their girl-child’s mother hid from the world.

Their concern over Ibhubesi’s emotional survival was genuine, but they confessed after a month of nothing to show off that the lack of new outfits also affected their deep sorrow.

Their little redhead resembled a prairie dog going deep into the bush looking for a place to die, except it was her spirit that wanted to die, not her body.

No amount of cajoling could convince Ibhubesi to use the two ladies as her models anymore. The child’s keen sense of humor disappeared, too. Lena strutted to the opposite side of the kitchen with her “front business” leading the way, then turned her buxom frame ever so slowly and pushed her bum out on the way back. But the performance produced no upward movement of the little mouth.

To console themselves, Lena and Sofie made some tea and added six heaped spoons of sugar (because Miesies wasn’t there to scold them) and reminisced about happier times just a few short months before: An excited Ibhubesi had pulled them by the hands to watch skinny white girls from Durban walk the same way Lena just demonstrated, up and down a wooden plank at the town hall. The ladies weren’t allowed inside—it was, of course, whites only—but their budding lioness presented a strong case that these ladies were her guardians.

The only nonwhite faces in the cavernous hall, the ladies got dirty looks from the women packing the space for this rarest of fashion events, but they didn’t care. If filthy glances paid the price to be on sacred white ground, they paid happily. Looks couldn’t kill, and stories they would later share with their Zulu friends would be worth every disapproving scowl.

As long-legged, hungry-looking ladies walked awkwardly hither and thither in various garments, the child squiggled in her drawing book and, within a week, Lena and Sofie were sporting variations of the dresses they’d seen that very day.

But the inventive fashions had proved too much for their usually envious peers, who made fun of their fussy ruffles and encouraged them to join the traveling circus.

They sighed. Even those ruffles would be better now than this new dress-starvation.

For two months, which seemed like two years, Miesies hid from life in her dark room. Twice a day Lena quietly slipped into the blackness with her tray laden with tempting newly dried rusks and steaming rooibos tea, with just a hint of milk, covered by a crocheted doily to keep off the flies. Three hours later she’d take out the tray, untouched but for a nibble and a sip.

Lena made Miesies’ bed with her in it, and when Lena couldn’t stand the odor in the room anymore, she opened the windows while Miesies, lying face down, beat her hand on the bed like a spoiled child having a silent tantrum, until the room was restored to its black cocoon.

Lena found Ibhubesi lying curled up outside her mother’s room, a stray cat left out in the cold, waiting on the off chance it would be let in and stroked, before it was tossed out again. Wondering how long she’d been there, the Zulu tried to pick her up, but young heels dug in, and her resistance was so strong, the child magically became too heavy to lift, her young face determined and angry. So, Lena left her there, checking on her every twenty minutes.

Only Brother could coax her away from the doorway when he came home from school. He’d shout, “Where’s my Sunshine?” and for just an instant, the child’s eyes lit up.

The fourth time Lena found her curled up—the lonely cat lying outside the bedroom door—her heart broke, and she crept up stealthily and scooped up the child before she could resist. Little hands beat at Lena as Ibhubesi screamed bloody murder, but the Zulu held her tight, rocking her and making the baby sounds that brought her quiet. Tears ran down both ebony and ivory cheeks until all the child’s resistance ebbed, and she sobbed, hardly able to draw breath.

Lena’s tears reflected her inadequacy as a surrogate mother. She couldn’t heal the child, nor did she have the audacity to interrupt the mother’s grief, even if she knew that would ease the anguish and fear and sadness of this abandoned soul.

Though Brother visited the darkened chamber briefly morning and night, not even he had the guts to tell his mother what she needed to hear.

But he alone could make Ibhubesi smile during that dark time. He eventually made her laugh again and invented clever games to make her brush her teeth, eat and go to school.

Buffer was Brother’s idea. He’d asked around the black locations on the outskirts of town. It was an obvious place to find a stray dog. Sure enough, an emaciated Alsatian had delivered three puppies that freezing winter morning but was too weak to survive their births. Only the puppy who had instinctively found his way underneath his mother’s body to pull at unyielding teats was shielded from the icy sleet and spared.

Lena and Sofie well remembered the day Brother presented Buffer to the child. That little helpless puppy made Ibhubesi come alive again. She nursed it, like Sofie showed her, with a baby’s bottle, teasing the little closed-eyed puppy with the pretend n****e. With every ounce of fresh warm milk he suckled hungrily, Buffer and Ibhubesi both grew stronger.

They saved each other.

The two women marveled at how the puppy realized their prophecy of this child becoming Ibhubesi, the lioness. The little runt gave back the courage that loss had stripped away.

Three long months after the mother went into hibernation, Ibhubesi tucked Buffer under her arm and, not bothering to knock, marched into the dark master bedroom.

“Get up, Mom. Get out of bed and meet Buffer.”

Nothing.

“Buffer was alone. He was so sad. He needed a mom.”

Not a twitch from the outline in the bed, Lena noticed from the open doorway.

“I am alone and sad, too.” Still nothing.

“I need a mom.” Child and dog were still as can be. Waiting. Refusing to move.

“Will you be my mom again?”

An eternity passed. Finally, the mother lifted her head.

It was enough. The nine-year-old with the tousled red hair held the puppy tighter still, kissed the top of his head and then left the room, deliberately leaving the door wide open.

Much to Lena and Sofia’s great surprise, Miesies appeared in the kitchen within the hour, groomed and dressed, and as if she hadn’t missed a beat, resumed her position as bossy mistress of her home.

Buffer became the first puppy-model in Pietermaritzburg, but he hated every minute of being paraded in colorful outfits. It was not dignified for a boy dog, so Ibhubesi reverted to her more experienced and willing models. Lena and Sofie were enormously relieved. The Whirr Whirr was back in business.

If Buffer brought back Ibhubesi’s spirit, then Brother (who became a tall, handsome man) continued to make her shine like the brightest star in the heavens.

But, just two summers ago, the word “war” rounded lips on white faces. Since then, young, white men, all dressed the same, kept disappearing in flying machines or steamelas (as trains were called in Zulu).

When The Brother came home, wearing that war outfit, they knew hearts would be broken again. Their seventeen-year-old Ibhubesi’s mournful wail when she saw him was heard all the way from the servants’ quarters. The sound hurt their hearts and damaged their souls.

Miesies’ screams were louder but not nearly as heartbreaking. It was understandable the women were distraught at the thought of losing the only man of the house. He was the umbilical cord connecting the cub with her mother, long before they were both damaged by loss. But the glory of war was stronger than the needs of his family. Even the adoration of his little sister couldn’t keep Brother uninvolved in what they called “bigger issues.”

The day he left was a black day as Lena, Miesies and Ibhubesi sat sobbing together on a “whites only” wooden bench on the platform, long after the train puffed over the horizon.

Buffer paced back and forth in front of the bench protectively, stopping only to jump up, paws on either side of his mistress, and shower her with sloppy kisses. In spite of herself, Ibhubesi smiled, perhaps only because she wanted to give him the comfort he was giving her.

When they returned home, Sofie was waiting to help the heartbroken women, and it was then that both ladies witnessed their cub become a lioness.

The grief-stricken birth mother ran toward her room to hide from the world. But Ibhubesi was prepared and ran ahead, blocking the master bedroom doorway with splayed arms and legs so her mother couldn’t cross the threshold.

She shouted: “Mother, stop! Don’t you dare hide away from this pain we share. Not again.” Her anger was like a rumbling mountain before it shed big boulders.

Miesies stopped dead and hung her head in shame. As the tears came, Ibhubesi wrapped her arms around her mother, and they wept together as they should have eight years before.

The old Zulu saying came to mind: “However long the night, the dawn will break.” Ibhubesi’s surrogate mothers beamed at each other and wiped tears from their own eyes, because they knew then that they’d played a part in bringing their mutual child to strong maturity, as good Zulu mothers are wont to do.