came to the place where the woman with the green knitting yarn had continued straight, he followed the way she had gone, toward the Old Village.
Although it was early, the road was already full of people. He passed women with tins of water sloshing on their heads, others with heaps of firewood piled high. Two school girls with scrubbed knees and blue uniforms, a man wheeling a single tire down the road, hand over hand. One half of a car, attached to wheels, pulled by a donkey and driven by an old man. A teenaged boy carrying a sack of sugar slung over one shoulder. A small girl with an even smaller child clinging to her back, legs wrapped around her hips.
When he had a job, he would buy paper and a pen, an envelope and a stamp and tell his mother that all was well. But these days, all was not well, and he wouldn’t write to her, not yet. His old life felt farther away than the moon: his family’s faith in him, the chemistry lab with its gouged wooden tables, his cell biology teacher, who walked with his wide feet splayed, his tie stained, his mind brilliant. The heat had already begun to travel off the pavement through the soles of his shoes. Where was the Old Village? A Toyota pickup truck came by, followed by a three-ton Chevy with people hanging out of the back. At last, he came to a small grocery store on a corner. He knew what would be on the shelves: oranges, a half sheet of newspaper folded around a half loaf of brown bread, chips, sweet bananas, Coca-Cola. Everything a person could want.
Boitumelo was to have been his wife. They were going to have four or five children. At work, he would have cured the sick, delivered babies, put his younger brothers and sisters through school. What you expect, though, is not what will be. When you’re a baby, moving down the birth canal into the world, about to take your first breath, a young animal eager for life, you don’t know that you’ll come out into a dimly lit dwelling into the arms of a midwife, a woman with shriveled breasts and tired shoulders who’s brought thousands like you into the world. You don’t know that there’s black and there’s white, and you’ve arrived on the wrong side of the fence, boy.
He stood outside the store for several minutes, watching people come and go. Africans and Europeans were using the same door, and when he looked inside, a white woman at the counter was waiting on a black African man. It stunned him. Outside, someone had discarded the Botswana Daily News. It had been trampled upon, but it was still legible. He sat under a tree, cross-legged, and read the caption of a picture on the front page. “The Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Archie Mogwe, greets the U.S. Ambassador, Donald Norland, on arrival in Gaborone.” The two men were shaking hands. Another article began: “Water alight? Unbelievable, but villagers at Keng, some 125 kilometers west of Kanye, are convinced that they have witnessed a case of burning water and look on the incident as a sure case of ‘super-witchcraft.’”
Inside the paper was a picture of a handsome man standing next to a white woman. To his astonishment, Isaac read that this man was the president of Botswana, His Excellency, Sir Seretse Khama, standing next to his wife, Lady Khama. They were holding a pair of scissors together, cutting a wide ribbon, presiding at the opening of an agricultural fair. Sir Seretse Khama had a large head, a black mustache, and a regal bearing. His wife was rather plain looking with a strong, kind face. She was pale and wore a small white hat. He’d heard a rumor of this marriage back home, but he’d dismissed it as an impossibility. Nowhere could a black man marry a white woman, surely. But here it was, the two of them, their hands touching. He folded the paper carefully and put it in his pocket to study later. He felt dazed and disoriented. Not only Sir Seretse Khama and his European wife, but a newspaper full of the news of African people.
The trees grew larger down here in the Old Village. Vines spread over shaded patios. The servants’ quarters were larger, with stoops to sit on. Chickens scratched in a yard. He turned down a small road, where three huge jacaranda trees