A ghetto anthem

Prologue

My name was Amai Chenge before the incident. Now I have no name. Some, with pity in their eyes, call me the woman who suffered a great injustice. Others, out of indifference, or respect, or even acceptance of a cruel fate that they were not dealt, call me Amai Chigombe.

But I have no name.                                                                                                                   

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Chapter 1

Today my husband woke up in one of his moods. He was upset. I did not ask why, lest he turn his hot, unfiltered rage toward me. He ordered me to clear out the room, because his grandmother from Chipinge would be visiting, and wished to camp in there. I nodded quietly as I cleared the remnants of his breakfast. His hand slammed the table. The china clanked loudly. I jumped, startled. It all happened so fast. The plate that was in my hand, perturbed by his outburst, leaped out of my hand in an attempt to flee. It fell. It shattered into a million pieces on the floor. I stared at its broken remains. My husband stared at its broken remains.

"Respond clearly when I talk to you," he chided. I nodded. I did not speak. I could not speak. He stood quietly and left. I think he went to work. I can never be sure. I turn on the radio and allow a woman's sultry voice to fill this empty silence. If I listen to her drone on and on about people's problems that are not problems, I can almost forget my own. If I listen to her discuss the petty trends of our ghetto yut with as much vigor as one who has discovered the secret to life and eternal happiness, I can almost escape my pallid existence and become one of them once more. I can be young and free and passionate once more.

I clean the rest of the house while I listen to a song on the radio. It is a love song, the kind my husband considers tasteless and uncouth. I sing the lyrics out loud; dance a little to the electrifying beat. I feel alive. Distracted by this guilty pleasure, I don't realize that I am standing in the room. I don't realize that I have taken to folding up blankets until they are piled neatly at the foot of the single bed. I don't realize that I am clearing the wardrobe until all the small clothes are tidily tucked into large boxes. I lug them to the store room and leave them there, in case she comes back. I don't know that she will ever come back.

In the hours of the late afternoon, I hear the engine of my husband's car roaring outside. I turn off the songs of the ghetto yut and rush outside to greet him. I know that he brought the strange woman from Chipinge with him. I smell the putrid combination of sweat, bitter herbs and blood that seems to radiate off of her before I see her. She hobbles into the house on two unsteady legs. Her gnarled feet are bare, they always are. Half of the big toe of her right foot is missing; the thing was broken off at an odd angle. The shift she has on, a faded yellow dress, hangs shapeless over her stooped figure. Her wrinkled arms wrap around me and pull me into her embrace and she cackles, out of joy I assume. She grins at me, exposing her scant, scattered yet discolored teeth. I only smile back. I cannot speak. I will not speak. My husband follows with a small cloth sack. The fabric is stretched taught from its contents, worn and fraying in some areas, and caked in grime and dirt. I want to ask where this strange lady's clothes are, but what I see in my husband's eyes makes me bite my tongue. In them I see an exhausted soul, a heart in pain, a weary tired man. I will not speak.

I lead the strange lady to the room and leave her heavy sac of apparel in the room. I hear her after our supper, when I am laying in my bed, screaming and chanting, fighting an evil that does not exist in that room. I remember the somber words of our reverend. There is no effort man can make to reverse the hand of God. I wish my husband understood that. I reach out to him in our bed and touch his hand. He clasps my hand tightly. We lay there, arm in arm, listening to the chants of that strange woman, his heart filled with a frantic, desperate hope, and mine filled with a placid, calm despair.