Page 15 - The Mending Season

ling that it looked like she had finally learned to keep a job. It was the longest time she had worked in one place. Usually when she returned to our house, she stayed inside for days, complaining about how much she hated working for White women and how every Black woman should have her own business. Within weeks, the other two aunts would find her work somewhere else. They would speak to a friend working in a shop or the White peoples kitchens and Mmamane Malesedi would be gone for about three months. Then she’d be back again. Every time she came home there would be argu­ ments - she would try to convince the aunts that she had been unfairly dismissed. The aunts would tell her that pronounce­ ments like “I’m not your slave” and “Your mother should have taught you better”were not the sort ofthings people liked to hear, especially not those who pay your wages.I sat on the edge ofthe sofa trying to look like I was absorbed in the music video I was watching on TV - Bobby Browns “Don’t be Cruel”. If they thought I was listening to their con­ versation, they would close the door. I pushed my left ear towards the hallway and turned down the TV a bit. There were two bedrooms in the house but the aunts only met in the one whose window faced the back yard. I called it the Meeting Room. I heard Mmamane Malesedi say, “You don’t even say hello ... you don’t even ask how I am ... ebile, I’m sleeping, you woke me. I’m sleeping, can’t you see, na?”Mmamane Mabatho whispered something and then clicked her tongue. Within a few seconds, I felt a finger poke my left shoulder.“Close your ears!” she said to me, as she came in to sit on the two-person sofa near the window. She folded her arms across her chest and shook her head, her lips turned up and forehead wrinkled - more with worry than anger, I thought. “I don’t know any more now,” she said and I turned up the TV. “I don’t know any more.”15