Page 10 - The Mending Season

there was always a Masemola sister story going around the neighbourhood. Everyone feared them.The gossip included the naked Sunday chases as well as what went on inside our house, despite the fact that most peo­ ple had never even been near our gate. They said, “They brew things in there, things to use on men.”“No woman should have that kind ofrage.”“The eldest one killed herselfwith her own poison.”And this, which I only heard once, “That child has no chanceof a normal life, just like those girls (my aunts) never did.”At first, I thought that other children did not like me, but when I grew older I realised that I lived in the kind ofhouse­ hold mothers warn their children to keep away from. Once I was playing with a neighbour’s little girl when suddenly her mother pulled her by the ear, yelling that there had been mad­ ness in my family for many generations, and no child of hers would go anywhere near me. No one was allowed to play alonewith me, and no child invited me to her home.People liked me only when I kept my distance. I overheard Mma Motsei, our next-door neighbour, whispering to a friend over a cup oftea once, “You never know when they could sendher with something.”I was always trying to imagine what I could be sent with tothe neighbours’ houses. The only thing I knew for sure was that none of the aunts had ever married - something that all the neighbours frowned upon. I once heard someone say that it was a sign ofa shameful home that I called them all Mmamane.For their parts, the aunts returned the neighbours’ scorn. But even so, it was clear that they wanted their past to be for­ gotten. As we say in Setswana, Se se safeleng, se a tlhola - what doesn’t end is a bad omen. As the August dust must finally set­ tle, the feuds that had trailed on from one generation to the next needed to be put to rest. The country was mending many years ofbroken fences. And in our own way, so was my family.10