I could not stop looking at the pink plastic rollers in her hair.
Even in my distress, the orphaned thought came to me that surely,
no one made plastic rollers like those any more, the spiky ones that
attach themselves to your hair together with sharp plastic pokers.
‘A nice-looking young woman like you,’ she said. ‘You are not
so bad-looking but for the, well, you know. You certainly know
how to take care of yourself; I must give you that. But honestly,
why else would you live with a white man like that, alone, just the
two of you alone in that big house?’
She dug her right thumb into her left nostril as she spoke.
I repeated what I had already told them. ‘I lived with Lloyd
Hendricks because my parents sold me to him as a child.’
Even as I said it, I knew that no one would believe me, and
why should they, when I could hardly believe it myself, when I
had struggled to understand it all my life. From the moment I saw
my mother stuff the money that Lloyd had given her into her bra,
from the moment after Lloyd shut the door of his car on me, I have
wondered how my parents could have brought themselves to do it.
‘My parents sold me to him,’ I repeated.
Officer Rollers looked at Officer Dimples and laughed.
‘What is she talking?’ she said. With her index finger, she
flicked dried mucus from her thumb. ‘We do not sell children in
this country,’ she said. ‘What are you talking?’
There was a loud scrape as she pushed her chair back from the
table to walk out of the room. Her voice came back to us from
down the corridor. ‘ Huyai mundinzwirewo zvirimuno.’
At her invitation, the room swarmed with officers. As they
crowded around me with their mocking laughter and loud voices,
I knew that there would be no convincing them. And if they did
not believe the truth of this basic fact, how could I convince them
of how he had actually died? What imaginative powers did they
possess, these men and women in their brown-and-grey uni -forms, this woman in her strained seams and pink rollers, this
man who leered as he imagined funny things with white sugar
daddies, what could make them see the horror of the moments
that followed after I found Lloyd dead?
Lloyd rarely talked openly about how I came to live with him.
When he spoke of it at all, it was always in euphemisms. He spoke
of ‘taking me in’, of ‘giving me a home’, the good-hearted rich
man taking in the poor black child, the cheerful Cheeryble giving
room and board to an ungrateful Dickensian orphan. Except that
it was really a case of the white man buying the black child, apart,
of course, from the ‘well, you know ’, as Officer Rollers called it,
the condition that makes me black but not black, white but not
white. That is how it was, and I will tell you all about it.
First published in 2015
by Faber & Faber Limited
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London wc1b 3da
Typeset by Faber & Faber Limited
Printed and bound in the UK by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, cr0 4yy
All rights reserved
© Petina Gappah, 2015
The right of Petina Gappah to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988
Quotation from Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov is reproduced by kind
permission of the Orion Publishing Group
The lyrics to ‘Black September’ by Master Chivero are used with the
permission of the Master Chivero Estate, with the kind assistance of
the Zimbabwe Music Rights Association
A CIP record for this book
is available from the British Library
isbn 978–0–571–29684–2
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