Free The Madonna of Excelsior by Zakes Mda Page A

convinced of any imminent danger when the Man with the Umbrella pointed his funny shoes towards the door and left to warn others.
    Niki carried Popi on her back, wrapped in a red and blue tartan shawl, and briskly walked to Mmampe’s shack three streets away. Mmampe’s ageing mother sat forlornly on the mud stoep in front of the door. She expressed her surprise at seeing Niki walking the free earth of Mahlatswetsa. Her own daughter and her lightskinned granddaughter were in jail. The police had come for them in the middle of the night. Three police vans in all. Each with five heavily-armed Afrikaner policemen. They kicked the door down and shone torches in the eyes of a startled Mmampe and her mother. Mercifully, they gave Mmampe the opportunity to put a dress on over her nightie, before they frogmarched her into the street with the bawling baby in her arms. They bundled Mmampe and the baby into the back of a van, ignoring the old lady’s pleas that they leave the baby with her. There were already other women and babies in the van. They drove away in a triumphal convoy.
    â€œMaria!” cried Niki. “I must warn Maria.”
    â€œMaria and her baby boy were picked up the night before,” said Mmampe’s mother.
    â€œWhy didn’t anybody tell me?”
    She did not wait for an answer. She scurried back to her shack. Like a field-mouse sensing a rainstorm.
    She retrieved the brazier from the back of the shack where it had been gathering summer rust, waiting for its winter tasks of warming the house and cooking the food. She carefully placed dry grass and twigs at its base. She piled dry cow-dung on the twigs and ignited the dry grass.
    While the fire was burning outside, she pumped the Primus stove and boiled a little water in a kettle. She poured the water intoa blue enamel washing basin, placed it on a grass mat and knelt next it, holding Popi’s head over the steamy water. The baby cried as her mother worked up a rich lather of Lifebuoy Soap on her head. Her hair slid between Niki’s fingers like green algae filaments. The top of the head was pulsating like a wild heartbeat. With a Minora razor blade, she shaved her daughter’s little head clean. No stranger would know that the hair that belonged on that bald head was not black and matted. Not nappy. Not frizzy.
    But Popi was still pink. They would see that she was of mixed blood.
    Niki took the smoking brazier into the shack and placed it on the floor. She held a naked Popi above the fire, smoking the pinkness out of her. Both heat and smoke would surely brown her and no one would say she was a light-skinned child again. The baby whooped, then yelled, as the heat of the brazier roasted her little body and the smoke stung her eyes and nostrils. Cow-dung smoke is gentle in reasonable doses. But this was an overdose. There was so much that it made even Niki’s eyes stream. She assured the baby that it was for her own good. She sang a lullaby as she swung her over the fire. Rocking her from side to side. Turning her round and round so that she would be browned on all sides. Evenly.
    F OR FIVE DAYS , they did not come for Niki. The nights became too long to bear, for they were unaccompanied by sleep. Days were tiresome and teary, for she spent them hovering over a smoky brazier, browning her little girl. Singing lullabies and hoping the baby would get used to the heat and would stop crying so. Singing lullabies until the baby became red instead of brown. Until the baby’s skin began to peel from her chest right up to her neck. Until the baby became truly coloured, with red and blue blotches all over.
    Just when Niki was beginning to relax, and to brown Popi for shorter and shorter periods, the police pounced on her. Not in the night, but in the glare of the day when the whole world could see.Two police vans stopped outside her shack. Four burly policemen wálked into the house and dragged her out. Her resistance had no effect.