White Dog Fell from the Sky - By Eleanor Morse Page 0,118

to their homes and put them in the stove and eat them. They fatten children with food that cannot be resisted, and when they are fat … zoop! The enchantresses are sweet, like the food. They find children wandering in the desert without their mothers, in trouble, and they are kind and smile like this white woman.

Moses was not clever. If something glittered, he took it in his hand without thinking, but there are things that glitter that you must never take in your hand. She would not eat any more food in this place.

She understood now that her mother had lied to them. She told them that Isaac was not far away, that he was working in a place near where they would go to school. They would not have to speak Afrikaans at this school, and the teachers would be kind and not beat them. They would live with Isaac during the week, and they would come to their granny on the weekends. The place was not far away, she said. They would like it there. The night before they were to leave, Lulu heard her mother weeping. She had come from Pretoria to see them in Bophuthatswana. “Never mind,” she said when Lulu asked her why she was crying. “You will get a good education.”

“How will we get home?”

“You will come by train. Don’t worry. It is not far. Isaac will put you on the train.”

“But why have you given me a knapsack? The children who go to school have only small sacks.”

“You are going to a special school. Now be quiet and listen to me. These are the papers that you must give to the conductor when you are going on the train … Moses! Tla kwano! … I am giving these papers to Lulu not to lose them. If the conductor asks where you are going, say you are going to stay with your brother in Gaborone. If the conductor asks if you are from South Africa, you must say, ‘No, I am from Botswana, I have only been visiting my granny in South Africa.’ Can you remember this?”

Lulu nodded her head.

“Moses, where are you from?”

He grinned. “From Bophutatswana.”

She cuffed him on the side of his head. “It’s not a funny joke. You are not from Bophuthatswana.”

“Lulu, where are you from?”

“I am from Botswana,” she said.

“Do you know where in Botswana you are from?”

“No.”

“You are from Gaborone. This is where you must get off the train.”

“Where are you from?” she asked Moses.

“I am from Botswana in Gaborone.”

“No, you are from Gaborone in Botswana. Lulu, where do you come from?”

“I am from Gaborone in Botswana.”

Moses asked her why they must say these things, and their mother told him to stop with his questions, that he must only remember what to say. “Otherwise they will throw you off the train.” Lulu imagined the two of them sailing through the air while the train laughed down the tracks with its white smoke. Her mother had told her that they must get off the train in Mafeking and find a Motswana to ask the way to the train that left for Gaborone. “Do you understand? Tell me it back.” Lulu told her. Moses was a year older than she, but her mother knew that she wouldn’t forget. She had given her the papers because she had more sense.

But she knew now that they’d been tricked. She didn’t understand why her mother would send them to this white woman. And where was Isaac? She turned in the chair and looked at the stove behind her. The door was large enough to shove her in. Their mother had put them on the train, and it was only when they had been traveling from the time the sun rose until it was high in the sky that she knew that Gaborone in Botswana was at such a distance that they would not be traveling home on the weekend to see their granny and that maybe they would never see her again. She didn’t want to cry because crying makes the spirit come out of you her mother said, but the tears rolled down her cheeks. She wiped her nose with the back of her arm, and the snot dried in a streak like the trails the snails left on the wild spinach her grandmother gathered after the rains.

The white woman came back and with her came a black woman with a little child holding her mother’s skirts. The black woman asked in