AMERICAN LADY by Laurie Baker

The first thing I notice about Godfrey is his walk, not a real walk, just a made‑up thing he does with no apparent self-consciousness about the way it looks, a slow, stiff-legged rocking from side to side like a man without knees. He walks like this up to my desk on the first day of the new school year, with a piece of chalk in his mouth like a cigarette and a girl’s barrette in his hair, and says that he is Godfrey Madima from Ramakgopa. He uses the chalk to draw a picture of himself on the blackboard, giving himself a very small body and a very large head, and beside it, a square house in the shade of a baobab tree.
“That’s me,” he says. “That’s where I live.”
“I’m happy to meet you,” I say.
“Thank you,” he says, and I laugh lightly. His formality amuses me.
“I am waiting many months to know you,” he says, eyeing me carefully as if to gauge my understanding of just how long that’s been. He already knows who I am of course, but I suppose he means that now he gets me for a teacher. He’s a Standard Eight – I have him for English, general science, and South African history.
After a moment he stacks my textbooks and notebooks and plastic pencil case in his arms, holding them in front the way you would carry a tray.
“I will carry these,” he says.
“Only if you want to,” I say.
“Yes, of course,” he says, “I must.”
Then he escorts me to the brothers’ house for lunch, carrying my things with a solemn pride. He has no duty to, of course, so his resolve is peculiar but sweet. I ask him basic questions while we walk, and he answers them quickly, urging me toward the next and the next. He wants me to know him.
At the brothers’ house, he faces me with a tender expression, willing us to be stoical together.
“I will be seeing you the next day,” he says.
“And I’ll be seeing you.”
“And the next day after.”
“Yes.”
He puts my things carefully into my arms and steps back, appraising me.
“Goodbye Miss,” he says.
“Goodbye Godfrey.”
He pauses. “We will be knowing each other a long time.”
“Very long,” I agree, although he makes it sound like a lifetime, which is far from the truth.
He walks his funny way away from me, then looks back and waves. I wave back and think about how strange love in this place can be, how for him, I can already see that it has started at a place of enormous momentum – for some reason, he needs me that much.

The students have come back from the Christmas holidays and behave well for about a week. I congratulate them. They say, “Ha, Miss, it won’t last!” and immediately it doesn’t. “You tricked me,” I say, which they think is hilarious.
Year Two, I write in my journal, and underneath that, “Do I already know everything there is to know? Have I already seen everything there is to see?” I stand in the middle of my room late into the night, shaking bugs out of my sleeping bag. I sweep them up with a broom and a month-old People magazine my mother sent me. The cover features Princess Diana, with the headline: “Diana Makes A Deal,” and the subheading: “Separated from Prince Charles, she gets what she wants: palace digs, co‑custody of the kids and a chance to be queen.” Visiting my room recently, a group of girls had pored over the pictures. One of them had asked, “To go on this cover, how special are you being?” and because I wished it were the truth, I had lied, “As special as you already are.”
The bugs collect in the corners, clinging to the ceiling. They drop to the floor, to my bed, and spin and crash when I snap them. I don’t know what they are, but Africans call them Lazarus bugs because their numbers suggest the feat of resurrection. I toss them out the door (there are more, always more) and stare at Princess Diana – she is too beautiful to be ordinary but too vulnerable to be public consumption – and think how her life is an unenviable absurdity compared to mine. I am no one special, but haven’t I felt righteous anyway, haven’t I felt of use?
I do my best in battle, then sit down and write, “What do I have left to give these people? What do these people have left to give me?”
I have no answers. Later I cross the second question out.

Every day, Godfrey comes to my desk after classes just as he promised, appearing in front of me with a ceremony that seems almost reproachful, as if he suspects I doubt his commitment. His classmates hurl themselves out the door, screaming insanely on their way to lunch.
We have our little routine. “Shall we go?” I’ll say, and he’ll arrange my things big to small, a little tower in his skinny arms, and nod. I love him immediately, the way I would love a small child. He’s sixteen but looks twelve, a bursary student from the homelands, too poor even for shoes. He gets everything on charity and looks it.
In class, he sits in the front row as if it’s the best seat in the house, but is a surprisingly lousy student. His English is good, but he hates to work. He’s disorganized and easily distracted. I pass him on tests he’s actually failed. A failing grade is 40%. The missionaries give English top priority, which means that a failing grade in that subject often leads to expulsion. How, given such a dire consequence, can I flunk him? He tries hard to be attentive. He writes down my lessons on scraps of paper he subsequently loses, pressing his pencil until it snaps. He drums on his desk with two pencils at a time. He folds paper into smaller and smaller squares, then carefully unwraps it as if opening a present for himself. Sometimes I pass his desk and say, “So jumpy, Mr. Madima,” and he frowns and sits stock-still for as long as he can bear.
He is narrow-chested and muscularly weak, invalid-like, but seems unaware or dismissive of his fragility. His head is overly large, as he highlighted in his drawing, a bobble-head on a long, delicate neck, and I wonder if it makes him self-conscious. His uniform is ill-fitting but not sloppy, his black pants short in the leg, his white collared shirt a size too big, the cuffs covering his hands. But he is well-ironed and tucked-in. He is particularly light-skinned, and he once pulled up his sleeve and put his arm against mine to compare colors. I am very tan.
“We are the same,” he said with satisfaction, as if that were an honor.
He loves soccer and invites me to his games. I cheer from the sidelines. He is a fierce, dismal player, running suddenly, as though uncorked, without cognition or logic; he ends up on his knees in the dirt, then he spits and keep going.
“Great game,” I tell him afterwards.
“Yes,” he agrees. “I was hearing you shout my name.”
It seems as if no one else pays him this kind of attention, or any attention at all. I can’t figure out who his friends are. On one of our walks to lunch, I ask him, “Who are your best friends?”
He looks thoughtful and says, “I am liking Ivy M. and Millicent R. and sometimes Emmanuel. I am liking you.”
I tell him he’s very sweet.
“Like sugar!” he says.
Every day, he gathers up my things as his classmates rush out, rebuffing the ones who want to help. If they whine, he swears at them in Afrikaans – voetsek! – a more bullish command than he seems bodily capable of. He guards my things against his chest and swivels away.
Lerato Moshoeshoe says to him once, “Don’t be such a hog.”
I burst out laughing.
“Don’t be such a hog?”
She bursts out laughing.
“Yes. Don’t be such a hog.”
Godfrey doesn’t laugh, but eyes Lerato carefully until she growls and flounces away.
“Your little friend,” the African teachers call him after a while. “Your puppy dog.”

* * *

One day a month or so into the year, Raymond Shongololo comes up to me after class, points at Godfrey, and says, “What about the rest of us?”
“What about you?” I say with a laugh, but I’m intimidated. I don’t know Raymond. He’s a new student of mine like Godfrey, but has never spoken to me, never shown the slightest interest or curiosity. His English is good, but he rarely does his homework and is resolutely silent in class, sitting in the farthest row back. Sometimes he falls asleep, and when I wake him, he laughs, shielding his mouth with his hand. He’s old for his standard, nineteen – he’d revealed this in a short bio I’d asked the students to write the first day – having stayed back three times. “Three times!” he’d written, as if it were a feat to impress me, the reason being that he wanted to stay in school forever. “Jobs in Africa are scarce,” he’d written. “Not like your country.” He’d underlined “your” twice.
It’s not his smug complacency that intimidates me, though. It’s his beauty. He is one of the most spectacular-looking people I have ever seen. He’s tall for an African, over six feet, and his broad face is perfectly symmetrical, with pitched cheekbones and shiny purple-black skin. His expression is confident and careless, and even though I am barely older than he, I think how typically adolescent an attitude he has. But he isn’t typical at all.
Talking to him now, I think how I’ve never known such a beautiful person and wonder what he would say if I told him that – if people tell him that all the time, or if no one ever does.
“You are not giving all of us attention,” he scolds.
I play along. “I give all of you plenty of attention.”
He shrugs and smiles in an ambiguous way.
“I’m asking to ask you a question,” he says.
“Okay.”
“How old are you?”
“Oh,” I say, laughing. “That kind of question.”
He laughs, too.
“Guess,” I say.
“Maybe eighteen I am thinking.”
“Older.”
“Twenty.”
“Older.”
“Twenty-two.”
“Almost.”
“Twenty-three.”
“That’s it!” I throw my arms out.
“Aha,” he says like he’s extracted some well-kept secret. He says I look too young to be a teacher. He thinks that I must be very smart. I thank him and say that compliments aside, he still has to do his homework.
He frowns and says, “What?” Then he grins. “I am understanding you.”
“Super,” I say. We look at each other. Everything between us seems sly and beyond reproach, for our amusement alone.
“Yes! Super!” He offers his hand. We shake the African way. “Until next time,” he says. The idiom is like a line he’s heard in an American movie.
“Indeed,” I say, and get a last look at him as he backs out the door with a toss of his hand.
Once he’s gone, I remember Godfrey and give him a grimace meant to be apologetic. There is little to read in his face.
“There is nothing wrong, Miss,” he says and sweeps his arm out to indicate that I should go out first.

Raymond starts paying attention in class. He doesn’t contribute or do his homework, but he stays awake, even takes a few notes, and sometimes I see him rein in the rest of that back-row group by snapping his fingers and gesturing their attention toward the front. They grumble but do it. One time, I acknowledge his efforts with a salute. He tilts his chin at me and salutes back.
In history, we start a segment on Shaka Zulu. I pass around pictures of Zulu warriors: grainy photographs from two oversized library books with broken spines. The warriors have grim expressions, hairless chests. They are Shaka’s legacy, with an infamous reputation for tribal hubris. They were stalwart and indefatigable and fought gruesome, glorious battles, which they mostly won. It seemed that they were united not simply by geography (indigenous to the aptly named Kingdom of Zululand) but by physical size. Historically, they were not to be trifled with. The pictures of them show exceptionally beautiful men, half-naked, wielding exceptionally beautiful spears made of sapling wood and iron. It is the sort of image that I find surprisingly seductive, the pairing of so much masculine intensity with so much physical magnificence.
The class is interested. They pass the books around, then get out of their seats for a second look.
Millicent R. holds up one book in both hands and swivels around full circle for all to see.
“Look,” she says. “They’re Raymond!”
Everyone howls like it’s a big joke, but Raymond isn’t fazed. He lifts his arms in triumph.
“Up children of Zulu, your day has come!” he shouts.
I didn’t know Raymond was a Zulu. It shouldn’t matter, but it makes him more interesting somehow. Current politics is a mess of tribal tension, with Zulus at the center inspiring fear and condemnation. There are only a handful of them at the school. Most of the students are Northern Sotho, the local tribe and a minority language. Zulus are the country’s biggest tribe and live farther west. Why a few end up as students here, I have no idea.
I take the book from Millicent and study the pictures. Then I say, “Yup, I definitely see the resemblance,” nodding like I’m in on the joke but saying it like I’m dead serious.
Because it’s true. He does look like them. But not entirely – the similarities are obvious enough, the height and posture and apparent strength – but Raymond has an added dimension, something contemporary about his looks that makes him seem accessible. In his after-school clothes – jeans and a dark, half-tucked polo shirt – he looks like someone I might have known back home. He looks like an American, like someone I might have seen a lot of in college, someone my friends and I would have wondered about but never actually known, someone everyone would stare at during class or at a party.
I do find it hard not to stare at him. The students see some version of him in those pictures, but I don’t know if what they are seeing is power or beauty or both. Maybe they don’t see power or beauty the way I do. Maybe they have a different standard for such things.
“Warrior or not,” I add in that cheeky way the students love, “he still has to do his homework.” The class howls more. What am I doing? I know full well what, but it feels like nothing more than playacting, of no consequence to anyone but me.

After classes, Godfrey and I pass Raymond while walking to lunch. He is standing with the older boys who hang out near the boys’ toilet, eating bread and bologna brought from the dorms. I don’t teach these boys; they are the Standard Tens, but not the prefect-types. They are rich and Americanized. They have gold-capped teeth. They have a boombox they crowd around, keeping the music low so Brother Richard doesn’t confiscate it. Sometimes when I pass them, they ask for money for cigarettes and beer. “Borrow me a few bucks!” they say. I show them empty pockets and they shout, “Aww!” in bad American accents. When I had first arrived, they were more blatantly flirtatious, making much of me in a showy, meaningless way. “Howzit, honey?” they’d say whenever they saw me. They’d elbow each other for room and shake my hand, pumping it. “I’m asking you to be my girlfriend,” they’d say and then argue over me in half-English, half-Sotho. I hadn’t known how to respond (what was the appropriate response?) but I had wanted to be different from what they were used to, or different from what they expected (what did they expect?), so I’d say something coquettish like, “Not today, but ask me tomorrow,” and they’d laugh so hard, I couldn’t tell if they were mocking or genuinely amused. That’s what they were like, a peculiar combination of sly and childish. But how much they were all just an act, I wasn’t sure. Sometimes I felt there was something about me they truly liked or were at least intrigued by; other times, I knew I was just a bit of entertainment for them on a boring afternoon. Eventually they had stopped paying attention to me, and I realized how stressful, in a way, their attention had actually been, and felt relieved.
I’d never noticed Raymond among them. I would have noticed. They’re not his classmates, but he’s their age – older, even, than some – and it’s clear he belongs with them. He’s talking and laughing loudly, jostling with another boy, and there’s an obvious attentiveness from the others. I’ve never wanted to get to know any of these boys, but with Raymond among them I feel that old ambivalence to be noticed, hope and anxiety both.
And I am noticed, by Raymond immediately, who calls out to me. The others stop talking. We go through the African way of greeting. He says hello in Zulu, so I respond in kind, the only word I know.
“Sawubona Miss.”
“Sawubona Raymond.”
“How are you?”
“I’m fine. And you?”
“Sharp, sharp, I’m fine.”
He asks me where I’m going.
“Lunch,” I say.
“Where?”
“I have lunch with the brothers.”
He makes a face. “Every day?”
“Except on weekends.”
“Who do you eat lunch with then?”
“Just myself.”
“On Saturday, I will eat with you,” he says. He crosses his arms as if something quite meaningful has been decided. The boys around him are watching, paying such close attention they seem to be anticipating something specific.
“Godfrey,” Raymond says, and speaks to him in Afrikaans, which I don’t understand. Godfrey shrugs, shifts my things in his arms and looks at me.
“It’s nice of you to offer,” I say to Raymond, “but I don’t think so.”
He makes a pouting face. “Why not?”
“I don’t think it would be allowed.”
“Why?”
I laugh. “I don’t know actually.”
“See?” he says, smiling broadly. “I will see you then.”
I don’t say anything. I don’t know what to say. He doesn’t mean it; I have learned that it is an African quirk to make a plan with no real intention of keeping it. One of the boys turns up the volume on the boombox and starts to dance. The song is American rap – I don’t know the name – and the boy dances in a fluid style with his whole body moving at once, seductive and almost luxurious, dancing with the pleasure of knowing that everyone is watching him.
“See this,” Raymond says to me, gesturing at the boy. “He is the best dancer. Come dance with him. He will teach you how. Come dance with him.”
He sounds half-teasing, half-stern, cajoling and almost defiant – egging me on as if it’s not just a dare but will reveal something about me they all want to know.
I hesitate, caught up in a desire not to disappoint but also to impress – I suppose I want to keep them guessing. They are looking at me as if to see to what lengths I will go. I could surprise them, couldn’t I? I could surprise myself. But Godfrey says in a quiet voice, “Come Miss,” and I say goodbye to the boys, and Raymond says, “Next time,” and I say, “Never!” and act like I’m sprinting away.
I don’t look back. I think Raymond would want me to, maybe, but I don’t.

Godfrey and I continue on our way to the brothers’ house in silence. It takes less than ten minutes from the schoolhouse, past both dorms and the teachers’ compound, by way of the soccer field, where Godfrey has a routine halfway across of kicking an imaginary ball hard and long, watching, with his head cocked and his mouth slightly open, its perfect, triumphant arc. He doesn’t do it today, however, so I take the kick instead, hollering a self-rebuke as if the ball has looped sideways into the fans.
Godfrey looks at me in surprise.
“You play soccer?” he says.
“No. That’s why the ball went sideways.”
“Oh,” he says. He doesn’t seem to get that I’m joking. He stares at the sky as if looking for a leftover sign of the flight my ball has taken.
I notice that one of his shoes – given to him, as are all his clothes, by the Church – is badly split at the toe. I feel a sudden horror for it – he is just so poor! I’ve seen worse poverty here, abject poverty, the kind that crushes your spirit in the most profound but unsurprising way, the kind that makes you motivated, then unmotivated, in a circular rush of indecision and helplessness. I’ve seen plenty of that, outside of the school; the entire continent is rife with it. Most of the students, on the other hand, are not “of the bush,” as they call the rural poor. A few are quite wealthy; the majority are middle class and can afford the tuition; the rest rely on bursaries from the Church. Like Godfrey. Of the bush.
“I’d love for you to visit me in America,” I impulsively tell him, as if the idea were more than a hypothetical. I don’t mean to be waving something impossible so cruelly in his face; it’s exciting to think of him seeing the houses for the first time, the supermarkets and parks and schools, and I think it’s a way to encourage him to think about the possibilities in the world beyond his own.
“I’d take you to a baseball game,” I say, not simply because I love baseball but because it strikes me as particularly American. I’m not an excessively patriotic type, but the students are obsessed with America, and I have a sudden need to coax Godfrey back to me, sensing an uncharacteristic coolness that makes me strangely frantic.
But when I ask if he would like that, he shakes his head.
“Why not?”
“America is full of sin,” he says.
I bark a laugh, childishly defensive. “Can’t you say that about the whole world?”
He waves that off, an oddly haughty gesture for him to make. “In my country,” he says, “you will see houses built by kings next to houses built by paupers.”
Is this relevant? Is it good? He seems to think so.
“You’re right,” I say, but know I sound dismissive.
He isn’t put off. “We have more different people than fruits. We have animals, all kinds. We have elephant, buffalo, and monkey.”
“You should be a tour guide,” I say.
“Yes,” he says, missing or ignoring my tone. He isn’t acting like himself, but nor am I.
We have reached the brothers’ house. It’s quiet – I imagine the brothers inside shedding their white robes down to their shorts and undershirts, gathering around the dining table forks in hand. They are always waiting for me to arrive, pretending – poorly – to do so patiently.
Godfrey stands at the yard gate and stares at the house.
“I am wanting to be a brother,” he says almost wistfully, as if there’s no chance in hell he’ll get to be.
“You are?” He’s never expressed any religious inclinations before; he’s never even mentioned the brothers, although he has Brother Richard for maths and Brother Declan for religion.
He nods, then says abruptly, “I wish you were a nun.” He turns his face toward mine.
“Good God,” I say. I can’t help it. “Why would you wish that?”
“A nun is sacred. Everybody loves a nun.”
I snort. He looks taken aback.
“You don’t want to be one?”
“Nope.” I use his same gesture of waving the question off. “I don’t even believe in God,” I say, and regret it at once; I am taunting him for no reason I can fathom.
He looks away, first at the sky, then the veldt, then the brothers’ house – I don’t know what exactly he is seeing or searching for; I don’t know if he is disappointed or angry or indifferent – and then he looks back at me and sighs deeply with the weight of his entire body.
“My name means God is peace,” he says, and I know he is resisting something about me he is profoundly against. He gives me a small, thin smile and presses his split-toed shoe into the dirt.
“You do not know what you’re talking about,” he says gently. He spills my things out of his arms into mine. “But it is okay. God is forgiving you.”

The next few days, Godfrey appears as usual after classes, but there’s an awkwardness between us. It’s subtle but makes me uncomfortable. We don’t talk about it. He doesn’t seem angry, but he’s lost his playful, earnest formality and seems at times almost doomed; he talks rapidly, then falls into stiff, defeated silences, and there’s an obligatory air to the way he picks up my books and carries them, as if the whole thing has started to bore him. I don’t like the feeling that I’ve disappointed him, that his enchantment with me has ended so abruptly that he doesn’t know how to face it. I tell him finally that he shouldn’t feel he has to keep walking me to lunch. I’m actually hoping he’ll stop but don’t want to give him that impression.
“I’m worried that you feel like I expect you to,” I say and gesture vaguely at the books, the pencil case: I feel guilty – who am I really trying to let off the hook, him or me? My concern – which is real enough – has the desperate, cowardly ring of breaking up with someone in a way that eschews all responsibility.
“I am happy to!” he says at once, but he doesn’t sound happy. He picks up my things and says, “Shall we go?” – my line – and walks out the door ahead of me. He has always insisted that I go first. He must assume I’ll follow, but is that what he wants?
I do follow; of course I do. He is just a kid. I have my own feelings of disenchantment, but not with him. I would tell him that, if I thought it would help; I would tell him it’s not at all about him.

The segment on Shaka Zulu is easy stuff to teach and transfixes the students with a narrative studded with endless battles, sweeping, bloody massacres, and fatal treachery between brothers. (Shaka was assassinated by his half-brothers, Dingane and Mhlangana, after his mother’s death mentally unhinged him.)
I explain that Shaka was a complicated man. He was a despot but also a genius. He was a megalomaniac but also extremely shrewd. He built the first Zulu nation, leading his army to victory by demanding strict adherence to his commands on pain of death. (Imagine, I tell the class, having to run barefoot tens of miles a day in order to toughen your feet; getting killed if you either a. keeled over, or b. just plain refused). His warriors – their miraculous genetic code practically cascading down through the generations – were paragons of strength and faithfulness and valor combined with a singularly bloodthirsty ruthlessness.
Do I exaggerate? I am blown away by all the things that make it so outrageous, so terrifically absurd.
I ask the students if they can imagine the kind of loyalty Shaka Zulu had managed to cultivate. I write the word “loyalty” on the blackboard and ask someone to define it.
SaaSa Pheeha raises his hand. “It is keeping your promise.”
“Sort of.”
Lerato Moshoeshoe calls out, “It’s staying friends when you want to be enemies.”
I laugh, which makes her laugh, too, in her no-nonsense way. “That’s certainly one way to think about it.”
Then I describe the Mfecane, two decades of widespread tribal upheaval and migration, during which time Shaka and his troops swept through much of southern Africa, decimating or absorbing whatever other tribes got in their way.
I put to them the question of the ethics of tribal expansionism by asking simply, “Shaka Zulu. Good guy, or bad?”
Given what I’ve just described, it isn’t really much of a question. But in Zulu culture, Shaka is often revered and lionized, with praise songs depicting his unique magnetism and domination. There’s even an eight-hour South African miniseries that portrays him as cerebral and arrogant, busily building a nation of disparate tribes while outwitting the haughty Brits. I imagine some of the students finding him cool and exciting.
Juliet Letseka stands up without raising her hand. Her African name means either alligator or crocodile (the distinction seems unimportant) but she prefers Juliet for its Shakespearean reference. She’s the smartest student I have by far. Her parents, lawyers who live in Johannesburg, want her away from the city. She has a British accent. She doesn’t belong here, and no one seems to like her.
“Shaka Zulu was a mass murderer and a madman,” she says. She is talking solely to me, with rapid impatience. “Did you know that Mfecane means ‘to crush’ in Zulu but in Sesotho, it means ‘forced migration’?”
I admit that I didn’t.
“Yes. And did you know that now Buthelezi and his Zulu thugs, these impis of Inkatha, are trying to kill us with their traditional weapons, their spears and sticks, just like their forefather, your Shaka Zulu?”
I feel a little stunned. My Shaka Zulu? Have I given the impression that I personally admire the guy or think him a hero? I hadn’t considered the comparison between him and Buthelezi. It seems a stretch. I don’t support Buthelezi, or the IFP, any more than she does. Buthelezi is sulky and bellicose and dangerous, constantly undermining negotiations between Mandela and de Klerk with threats of civil war. Everyone says that the IFP is funded by ultra-right whites, whose basic motivation is chaos. People around here are pretty much pro-ANC. Most of the country is pretty much pro-ANC. No one would say that ANC activists are free of sin, but it’s hard not to see them as the good guys.
But is Buthelezi actually inciting genocide? Juliet seems to think so. I get her point: today’s violence is as much tribal now as it was two hundred years ago, and Zulus are the aggressors. I might have argued that it’s impossible to parse out what’s motivated by conflicting political agendas and grabs for power versus age-old ethnic hostilities. But it hardly seems appropriate to go head-to‑head with a sixteen-year-old. Though I’m unsure who would win.
I can’t immediately think how to respond. After a moment of silence, Juliet gives me a stony look and sits back down. She has gotten us off track. She’s brought politics into the lesson, which Brother Richard had long ago warned me to steer clear of. Too divisive, he’d said. That seemed a bit myopic to me, but missionaries are known for nothing if not their neutrality.
The class is looking at me raptly, as if game for a showdown. I look back with a daft smile.
“Anyone else?”
A boy named Tao in the first row raises his hand. He also stands up (though I’ve asked the students not to, disliking its formality), pushing his chair back with a scrape against the cement floor. He has something of a following. He is boorish and overweight, with the inane charm of someone everyone else affectionately thinks of as a loser. His name means lion, he once told me, his explanation as to why he gets into so many fights. But he is slow and clumsy, so inept that the boys he fights actually look guilty when they pin him to the floor.
“A Zulu is murderer!” he says, practically shouting. He giggles, stuffs his hands in his mouth, and sits back down. The class laughs so wildly in response that for several seconds I can’t get them to shut up.
“Not funny, Tao,” I say.
Raymond, in back, has his hands clasped behind his head with his look of clever detachment. If there are other Zulus in the room, I don’t know who they are.
“Homework!” I say desperately, and begin writing lesson pages on the blackboard.

That night I write in my journal, DON’T BE A CLOWN, DON’T BE A DISGRACE, DON’T BE AN INFATUATION. The all-caps look childish. The Lazarus bugs have ended their assault, disappearing overnight, and I have given the People magazine about poor beleaguered Princess Di away to an ugly aggressive girl who said that her name is also Diana, when I know it is not. Her name is Blessing, and I should have told her to keep it; it’s the safer bet.

The next day, Godfrey doesn’t show up after classes. I’m both worried and relieved, but just as I’m about to lock up, he rushes in and stands in front of me with a look of expectant pleasure, more excited than I’ve ever seen him.
He opens his hands to reveal a prickly pear, then places it on my desk as if it’s a reconciliatory offering of some kind.
“Like apples,” he announces. “But this is what we have here.”
I thank him, smiling, and point at it. “I’ve never tried one.”
He wants to show me its insides. We lean over it.
He says he thinks that we should dissect prickly pears during science.
“That’s an idea,” I say, laughing.
“Look,” he says. He takes a small knife out of his pocket and starts peeling the skin of the pear, turning the fruit around and around in his hand.
He tells me how last year Brother Gerald had brought a dead jackal into class for dissection.
“Road kill,” I say.
“Yes,” he nods.
He says that most of the students thought it was very funny that Brother Gerald had done such a thing. They thought it would bring him bad luck. They refused to touch it. Brother Gerald was very angry and left class and wouldn’t come back until the next day. By that time the jackal had started to rot.
“I wanted to see the insides,” Godfrey says ruefully.
He cuts the peeled pear in the palm of his hand into bite-sized pieces, and placing them on my desk one by one, says, “Blacks are too much superstitious.”
It is the kind of thing Brother Gerald would say, does say, oblivious to any Africans within earshot. I don’t like that Godfrey is mimicking him. Doesn’t Catholicism hold as much superstition in its ideology? I think about saying this but know better now – he is doing his best to make up, and I’m grateful.
Before I can respond, we are startled by Raymond in the doorway. I look up at him and instinctively take a step back; he takes up the open space in an overpowering way, and I know I can only pale in comparison. He is characteristically all smiles, broad and presumptuous, teeth that vibrant African white. He says that he’s handing in an assignment he’d forgotten to bring to English. A torn paper is in one hand. He is out of breath – “I’ve been running that side and this side!” he says, just to get to me in time. He has his lunch in his other hand, bologna and brown bread.
“I thought you would be gone!” He lifts the paper triumphantly.
“You must not have been that worried,” I say. “I see you stopped first for some lunch.”
“There would be no more left!” He points to Godfrey. “He is always missing it.”
I look at Godfrey, who looks back at me with an odd desperation, and I realize that I have just been told something he had wanted to keep a secret. Did he think that I would have ended his daily escort if I had known? I would have. But I hadn’t known. No one had told me, and it hadn’t occurred to me to ask.
I take Raymond’s paper and look over it. It has only two sentences. There is a small doodle in the margin of a snake wearing a hat. It is so inadequate, it’s laughable, but I suddenly feel bereft. If he fails English, he’s out – no staying back another year. Some teachers feel a student’s failure is as much their own, but this isn’t that.
“Raymond,” I say. “C’mon, this isn’t enough.”
He grins, as if in total agreement.
“Marry me,” he says.
I groan in exasperation.
“Marry me. I love you.”
I stare at him, deeply flattered by something that has no meaning at all. I know I should stop the conversation.
“Maybe I’m too young to get married,” I say instead.
“I’ll wait,” he says.
“Maybe you’re too young to get married.”
“Not me,” he says. “Africans marry young. What about an African? Will you one day marry an African and move here forever?”
“Nothing’s impossible.”
“Wouldn’t you miss your family?”
“Sure.”
“But you would be loving the man more.”
“I guess, in that case, I would.”
“I would like to marry an American,” he says, then shakes his head. “But I would not like to leave my family.”
So live with her here,” I say, as if my advice is relevant.
“It is maybe a possible thing, who knows,” he says. “But you are not interested?”
I hold out my empty hands and shrug. “Sorry.”
He sighs theatrically. “It is too bad.” He looks at Godfrey. “Isn’t it, brother?”
Godfrey doesn’t answer but picks up my books and pencil case, stacking big to little, and carefully balances the prickly pear on top. He isn’t looking at me, but I feel his judgment anyway and think it’s unfair. I know Raymond is mocking him, but Godfrey isn’t afraid of Raymond. I don’t need to protect him.
“I don’t want you to fail my class,” I say to Raymond. “Tell me what I can do to help.”
He looks surprised, momentarily at a loss for words. He smiles slightly, but not in his cocky, dispassionate way; he is deep in thought, as if whatever answer he gives should be the right one, the one we can both understand.
“Let me carry your books today,” he says. “And then I’ll redo the assignment.”
He is looking at me so directly that his words feel less like a manipulation than a plea. There is an unfamiliar softness to his voice; he’s telling me that this game we’ve been playing is now on hold, and he is just being himself, we can just be ourselves. He gets it, he is telling me – he understands longing as much as anyone, of how it blossoms and flounders, again and again, just like that.
I don’t know if he is telling me such things at all, but I like to believe with my ridiculous heart that he is.
It is not enough to give Godfrey permission to leave. I have to insist. I turn to him and smile tenderly – time’s up.
“Go get yourself some lunch.”

* * *

The next day at morning tea, Sister Peg calls me over to join her at one of the round tables with its plastic, easy-to‑wipe tablecloth.
I take the stool beside her. The stools are too tall for the tables, which makes us look like guests in a classroom for toddlers.
“Last night there was an incident in the boys’ dorm,” Sister Peg says. She pauses, waiting for me to ask what happened.
“What happened?” I ask.
She leans forward.
“Fondling.”
“You’re kidding,” I say, but I have no idea what she means.
She shakes her head and leans back, widening her eyes. “And they’re both in your class.”
This sounds almost like an accusation.
“Who’s in my class?”
“Godfrey Madima and Raymond Shongololo. Poor Raymond was asleep. But then he woke up and caught Godfrey in the act!”
I don’t know what she’s talking about. She seems to think she’s given me enough information though, because she turns to the task of fixing her tea. I watch her fill half the cup with powdered milk. I have the strange thought that I should try to act normal. I take a piece of bread and spread jam on it. All I can think to ask is if she’s sure.
“Oh, yes!” She pauses, thinking of something. “Remarkable, isn’t it, that they’re the same age. You’d never know it by looking at them.”
“No they’re not,” I say. “Raymond’s nineteen.”
She snorts, and her tea sloshes. “Where did you hear that?” She smiles at me in a forgiving way. “Did Raymond tell you that? He was lying, of course. I imagine he wanted to impress you. I believe he’s actually a bit younger than Godfrey.”
“What?” I have heard her clearly enough. She doesn’t bother repeating herself. It’s ludicrous of course. Hasn’t she herself just said as much? Remarkable, she said – remarkable, wasn’t it, because Raymond clearly looked so much older? But she has no reason to mislead me. She’s presumably not faulting me for anything, not even naivete, but she’s not faulting Raymond either – a boy’s harmless prank, and I’d fallen for it. I want to get away from her, but she is sipping her tea, holding the cup with both hands and watching me over its rim as if we have all the time in the world.
“Angry?” she asks sympathetically. I shake my head; I am mortified, but wish she didn’t know that, too.
“What happens now?”
Sister Peg nibbles on a biscuit. “What happens now is that we – Brother Richard and I – will interview the boys to find out who’s telling the truth. Godfrey says he didn’t do it, but you know Richard has always been very good at convincing the students that a lie isn’t worth the effort.”
She chuckles. “Everyone gets found out eventually.”

Raymond and Godfrey are interviewed in Brother Richard’s office later that afternoon. They sit side by side on plastic chairs they were told to bring down from a classroom. They are interviewed together, either in keeping with some tried-and-true strategy or none at all. Brother Richard presides. He’s in his flipflops and an old pair of shorts. He’s just come from the garden, he says in way of explanation, where he’d been digging up stones.
Sister Peg sits down beside me, on a chair without a back, and yawns.
“I’m missing my afternoon nap,” she says. I don’t think she means to sound callous; she’s just unduly pragmatic. It’s all just part and parcel of the things Africa coughs up, she’d say; we’re not privy to its logic, or illogic, whatever the case may be. “We’re all just a bunch of doltish houseguests,” she once told me.
I’m here, it turns out, not because I’m their teacher, and not because of my relationship with either boy, but because someone had come to the conclusion that I can type fast. Faster than any of the Africans, no doubt; faster than the missionaries, who have other, more pressing concerns; faster, even, than Esther the typing teacher, who once told me she’s much better at maths. My being thought of as fast clearly has to do with my being American. In reality, I’m not fast at all, but as Brother Richard is fond of saying, “Truth is relative if you want to keep your job.”
He assigns me secretary. “Ad hoc,” he emphasizes; his own African secretary would be otherwise offended.
My task, then, is to transcribe the interviews of Godfrey and Raymond so that their stories can be accounted for: a couple of sheets of stencil clipped into a folder and filed in the bottom drawer of Brother Richard’s metal filing cabinet. Brother Richard wants everything written down for the sake of edification. This will give us a “reference of failings,” he says. It’s his newest policy.
I rotate a piece of stencil into the typewriter.
“Everyone ready?” Brother Richard says, clapping us to attention.
Raymond’s voice is barely above a whisper. He jiggles his legs so much the chair totters. He is hunched over as if trying to squeeze himself into a smaller shape. The shape of humiliation? An act of pretense? He is nothing like the Raymond I know.
He says, “I came awake in the middle of the night. I felt a cold thing on my skin. It was hard for me to come awake; it was too dark and I could feel my heart in my chest. It was Godfrey by my bed. His hand was on my penis. He had a knife, which was the cold thing I could feel on my skin.”
He pauses, looking shocked by what he’s just said, then adds in a strangled voice, “First I thought it was a witch.”
“But it wasn’t,” prompts Brother Richard.
“No.”
I am typing manically with two fingers, making half words I hope I’ll be able to fill in later. I have to keep my head down and focused, but I am listening with all my might, hearing the words PENIS, KNIFE, WITCH as if I’ve never heard such words before. I hold on to the belief that Raymond is confused or being unclear.
Just look at him! I want to say. He’s a foot taller than Godfrey and fifty pounds heavier!
Godfrey sits stone-faced next to him, as if impervious to life. It scares me to look at him.
Sister Peg gives Raymond a tissue and he sniffles into it. Brother Richard suggests a break and inexplicably leaves the room. I stare at what I’ve typed so far.
Sister Peg leans in my direction and asks politely if I took typing in school.
“Nope,” I say, in no mood to chat.
Brother Richard reappears, his face damp and red as if he’s splashed water on it and then pinched his cheeks. He opens a drawer in his desk and pulls out a knife. I recognize it as Godfrey’s, the one he’d used to cut up the prickly pear. But it’s smaller than I remembered, surely too small and dull to do any harm. So it could skin a prickly pear! So what?
Brother Richard waggles it. It glints theatrically. He presents it to Sister Peg, then to me. “Found in Godfrey’s locker,” he says in sober triumph. I almost expect him to tag it “Exhibit A.”
A new thought occurs to me. It leaps into my mind and does a little dance of havoc. There’s something that I need to say. I open my mouth to speak. The thing I need to say seems unwieldy, dangerous – what if I’m wrong? What if I’m giving things away that aren’t mine to give? I could defend Godfrey, couldn’t I? We’d been a team, hadn’t we? I could make it make sense. For a while, it had just been us.
Godfrey starts to say something.
Brother Richard points in my direction. “Are you getting this?” He is red with anticipation.
I stare at the typewriter’s keys as if they are tiny codes of revelation, and let it all go.

I assume that Godfrey’s words will always be part of the school’s archival collection, notwithstanding some incidence of devastation, like fire or flood. I would have liked to destroy them myself, but that isn’t the kind of thing a person like me would do. What he had said was a surprise, but perhaps only to me. I think so. It was the standard trick of irony: relieving me of one burden only to present me with another.
What he had said was this: “Raymond is a Zulu.”
I had typed the words. No one had spoken. I had poked at the keys slowly, feeling strangely alert. It had dawned on me that what he had said was the last thing I had expected and that part of me didn’t believe him because part of me had already believed something else. The idea of treachery had seemed near, but whose treachery I couldn’t say.
Then Sister Peg had let out a long breath, the breath we’d all been holding, smiling ruefully.
“Well, you’re certainly right about that, Godfrey. But what that has to do with anything, I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me.”

The formal charge against Godfrey is changed from sexual misconduct to physical misconduct. He is expelled anyway. The Africanism for this is “chased from school,” which seems an especially disturbing euphemism.
That one time that Raymond had walked me to lunch, he had talked easily but hadn’t said anything memorable. He had talked about how much school bored him, as if that were news. He said that he thought being a teacher must be the most boring job in the world. And he asked me how much my flight from America had cost.
“A lot,” I had said. “I don’t exactly remember.”
He’d huffed, and lifting my books in front of him, had said in a churlish way, “Ack, man, you have many too many.”

The last time I had Godfrey in class was early on the day of his ad-hoc trial and subsequent expulsion, no more than an hour before I’d talked with Sister Peg at morning tea. It was in English, during a lesson on verbs. Someone had drawn with chalk on the top of his head; there was a squiggle of white in his hair. The whole week had been hot. The students worked with their chins on their desks – this was not a posture of assiduousness, but what could I do? I was overheated myself. Apparently, the temperature had yet again broken some kind of record. According to Brother Richard, huge amounts of volcanic ash were blowing south, and I remember thinking it was something I could tell the class during science.
I stood at my desk and watched my students work. I’d handed out an in‑class assignment. They were working on the present perfect progressive tense. I have been running. I have been eating. I have been doing my homework. Godfrey finished early. He turned his paper over and tore another from his book. His pen was a truncated Bic, the end chewed off. I watched him draw a picture of a girl with a hairstyle like Marilyn Monroe’s. A big, blonde, bouffant wig, flipped at the ends – nothing like my own thin brown hair – but I knew it was me. He titled the picture “American Lady,” and beneath it, wrote, “I am never letting you down like an apple from a tree.”
Then he folded the paper carefully in half, and half again. When I collected his test, he handed me the note, and I slipped him a piece of chalk, even though we’d been told not to do this because of its perpetual short supply.
“Thank you,” he whispered, and began to chew on it carefully, the way they all did, as if it were a tiny bit of indescribably delicious candy.

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Laurie Baker has published short stories and essays in Spork, Narrative, Ploughshares, Hippocampus Magazine, and Arts & Letters.