Page 46 - The Mending Season

as “not aggressive enough” because he said yes to everything they asked him and never claimed me as his own. I liked him a lot and wished I could spend more time with him, but he worked all year except (some years) at Christmas, and every time he asked me to visit him in Gauteng the aunts said that he should come to our house instead. Whenever the aunts were angry with me - or with him about me - he and I would make fun ofthem on the phone. He called them “your moth­ ers”. Once I called them “your wives” and he gently told me I shouldn’t say that. Occasionally I called him papa just to see what the aunts would do and they would always look at me as if I had suddenly gone mad.When I arrived in class, everyone was talking. The teacher walked in after me, a slightly overweight, middle-aged woman with short brown hair pulled forward in large arching bangs. She stood at the front ofthe class, slammed her books on the teacher’s desk and turned to my side ofthe room. My timetable told me she was the Geography teacher.“Black girls,” she started, “making noise as usual!”“Ah, miss!”Trish said. “Its not us!”“Hao, Miss! Its everyone, not just the Black girls,”Tamzprotested. Several Black girls were offended but everyone else kept quiet.“Miss, you always think its us,”Veronica said without look­ ing directly at the teacher and looking at the other girls for support. “But everyone makes noise.”“Excuse me! You’re so rude! I wont tolerate rudeness in my class. Now, I don’t know how you speak to each other where you live, but this is not how we do things around here.”The class fell silent. The girls started whispering something in Sesotho, and the teacher retorted, “And you know you’re not allowed to speak your language in here! This is an English Medium school!” She emphasized “English” and “Medium”. “One more time and you’ll have to LEAVE the room. And then46