city. The firstborn son is the man of the house. He raises his siblings. His mom treats him with a certain level of respect as the dad’s surrogate. Since this was Abel’s big homecoming with Andrew, he expected my mother to play her traditional role, too. But she refused.
The women in Tzaneen had a multitude of jobs during the day. They prepared breakfast, prepared tea, prepared lunch, did the washing and the cleaning. The men had been working all year in the city to support the family, so this was their vacation, more or less. They were at leisure, waited on by the women. They might slaughter a goat or something, do whatever manly tasks needed to be done, but then they would go to an area that was only for men and hang out and drink while the women cooked and cleaned. But my mom had been working in the city all year, too, and Patricia Noah didn’t stay in anyone’s kitchen. She was a free-roaming spirit. She insisted on walking to the village, going where the men hung out, talking to the men as equals.
The whole tradition of women bowing to the men, my mom found that absurd. But she didn’t refuse to do it. She overdid it. She made a mockery of it. The other women would bow before men with this polite little curtsy. My mom would go down and cower, groveling in the dirt like she was worshipping a deity, and she’d stay down there for a long time, like a really long time, long enough to make everyone very uncomfortable. That was my mom. Don’t fight the system. Mock the system. To Abel, it looked like his wife didn’t respect him. Every other man had some docile girl from the village, and here he’d come with this modern woman, a Xhosa woman no less, a culture whose women were thought of as particularly loudmouthed and promiscuous. The two of them fought and bickered the whole time, and after that first trip my mother refused to go back.
Up to that point I’d lived my whole life in a world run by women, but after my mom and Abel were married, and especially after Andrew was born, I watched him try to assert himself and impose his ideas of what he thought his family should be. One thing that became clear early on was that those ideas did not include me. I was a reminder that my mom had lived a life before him. I didn’t even share his color. His family was him, my mom, and the new baby. My family was my mom and me. I actually appreciated that about him. Sometimes he was my buddy, sometimes not, but he never pretended our relationship was anything other than what it was. We’d joke around and laugh together. We’d watch TV together. He’d slip me pocket money now and again after my mother said I’d had enough. But he never gave me a birthday present or a Christmas present. He never gave me the affection of a father. I was never his son.
Abel’s presence in the house brought with it new rules. One of the first things he did was kick Fufi and Panther out of the house.
“No dogs in the house.”
“But we’ve always had the dogs in the house.”
“Not anymore. In an African home, dogs sleep outside. People sleep inside.”
Putting the dogs in the yard was Abel’s way of saying, “We’re going to do things around here the way they’re supposed to be done.” When they were just dating, my mother was still the free spirit, doing what she wanted, going where she wanted. Slowly, those things got reined in. I could feel that he was trying to rein in our independence. He even got upset about church. “You cannot be at church the whole day,” he’d say. “My wife is gone all day, and what will people say? ‘Why is his wife not around? Where is she? Who goes to church for the whole day?’ No, no, no. This brings disrespect to me.”
He tried to stop her from spending so much time at church, and one of the most effective tools he used was to stop fixing my mother’s car. It would break down, and he’d purposefully let it sit. My mom couldn’t afford another car, and she couldn’t get the car fixed somewhere else. You’re married to a mechanic and you’re going to get your car fixed by another mechanic? That’s worse