Black & White

-19-

C H A P T E R   N I N E T E E N

July 18 1959
Topville

"How far are you?" He asked, looking into my teary eyes.

"One month." I whispered, breaking our eye contact.

"Does......Does he know?" He asked. I could still feel his eyes on me.

I shook my head, "No. I haven't told him as yet."

Max released a shaky breath and stared at the floor beneath us. He tapped his foot violently on the floor. The silence was too heavy.

I bit my nails purely out of habit and spoke, "I'm so sorry Max."

He snapped his head towards me so quick I was afraid he had broken his neck. He gently removed my shaking fingers from my lips and planted a soft kiss on them. "Hey, it's not your fault, okay?"

The tears I was holding finally managed to escape and before I knew it, I was sobbing. "What if he tells me to get rid of it? What if his wife fires me from work?"

"Miriam, you are not alone in this, okay? We are in this together. What you do with the baby is your choice, and whatever you decide, I will support it, okay?"

I nodded at Max's words.

"Just take your time to decide. We'll worry about everything else later on." He used the sleeve of his shirt to wipe away the tears that streamed down my cheeks.

I didn't need time to decide. As soon as I found out that there was a seed growing inside of me, I knew that I wanted to keep it.

I was going to keep it.

"Mama?"

"Yes sweetheart?"

"Are you okay?" I asked my mother, who was clearly deep in her thoughts when I walked in.

"Of course, why wouldn't I be?" She continued to read her bible as if she was not lost in her own thoughts a couple of minutes ago.

"You had that face on." I told her.

She looked at me through her thick square shaped glasses that she wore whenever she read her bible. "What face?"

"That face you make whenever you think about dad."

Her face changed to an expression I couldn't decipher and with a blink of an eye, it was gone. The unreadable facial expression was now replaced with a smile. "How is practice going? Khumo's mother told me that you were selected as the first speaker."

Her sudden change in topic told me that she was not ready to speak about whatever it was that was bothering her, so I decided to let it go. Whatever it was, she will tell me eventually when she's ready....hopefully.

I placed my school bag on one of our dining chairs and worked on untying my school shoes first. "Practice is okay. Tomorrow, Mrs Dlamini will give us topics to choose from so that we can start writing our main speeches for practice." Once my shoes were off, I stretched my toes and wiggled them, sighing in satisfaction as I did so.

"Whatever topic you choose, I know you will do extremely well." Mama said.

After changing from my school uniform to my home clothes, I sat next to Mama who was still pretending to be engrossed in her bible.

"I'm not so sure about that." I admitted.

"Why?" Mama asked.

I sighed before answering, "I feel like everyone is expecting me to be great. Being the first speaker for my school is a huge responsibility that I don't think I'm ready for. They are all depending on me. Not only do I have to write a main speech that will grab everyone's attention, I also have to write a reply speech that will prove to the judges why my school deserves to go through the next round.

My mother took off her glasses and placed them inside the bible as a bookmark. She placed the bible next to her and finally turned to me. The smile she had on now was different from the one she had on earlier. The one she had on now was soft and reassuring. 

"Mrs Dlamini chose you to be the first speaker for a reason. She sees something in you that you don't see in yourself." Mama said while she gazed into my eyes.

"What if I'm not as great as people think I am?" I asked her.

"You are great." She said and placed her hand on my chest, where my heart was. "You just have to believe in yourself."

"I'm scared mama. What if my speech is terrible and I disappoint everyone."

"You know what I do when I'm feeling scared and nervous?"

"What?" I asked.

"I pray. Reaching out to God can be very healing. You need to ask God to grant you a peace of mind and calm your troubled heart during the debate. God hears us and He answers our prayers."

I let out a sardonic laugh, which earned me a disapproving look from my mother. "I don't think God exists mom. If he does, then he must really hate us."

"Why would God hate the people he created? God loves us."

I stood up from the couch. "Mama, God is a white man. Not so long ago you made me quit my job because 'all white people are the same', right? If God loved us, he wouldn't have given us this skin colour that gets us killed. This skin colour is the reason why we live inside this corrugated iron. If God loves us so much, why is he letting black people suffer so much? Oh, I know why...because he's a white man...just like them."

I took a deep breath before continuing, "If God loved us, he wouldn't have taken my dad away. I didn't even get to meet him. If God loved us, Zenande's parents would still be alive."