Triangulum. Masande Ntshanga

huts, I volunteered to pass plates to the men sitting in the peaked tent. The plastic plates, worn enough to feel slicked with grease even after being washed, were stacked with samp that had been cooked over a wood fire in large three-legged pots.

      But Mama first had to look for me. She found me staring at the ceiling in the matron’s room. She took a seat on the bed and touched my arm, smiling down, then stroked my forehead. Her mourning regalia was beautiful; I’d never seen her cry, I thought.

      “Tell me if you know the answer to this one,” she said. “The year of your grandmother’s birth?”

      I remembered it from the service.

      “That’s correct. Now tell me how she got her name.”

      “I don’t know.”

      And so she told me.

      •••

      Three years after the matron, a teacher from the Transkei hinterland, followed her husband to settle on a plot he’d inherited from his father in Zeleni, she was promoted to the position of headmistress at the local school. That same year, two escaped convicts from St. Albans stalked into the region. They were feared. The villagers spoke of how the convicts walked with their knives on show—and how they paid shopkeepers with counterfeit money, grinning at them with lips burnt from spirits.

      My grandmother, still an outsider in the village, didn’t share their caution. She concocted a plan to lure the bandits to a lakeside meadow, on the pretext of celebrating the return of a rich man’s son from ulwaluko. The two men caught wind of the news, and arrived at the meadow to exuberant singing, but no meat. Instead, they found a tall woman half-submerged in the lake, a Bible in one hand, beckoning with the other. The crowd fell silent, cleared a path.

      The bandits complied and approached her, allowing her to baptize them as the village pastor gaped. It must’ve been her lack of fear—the men would attest to having known inmates of lesser mettle in the cages of St. Albans.

      That afternoon, she enrolled them at the school, determined to teach them to read, and it was under these circumstances— in a room with two broken windows and one uneven, rocking desk—that the two convicts, in gratitude, first called her “the matron”; at which my grandmother, who was known for maintaining a stern exterior in her classes, looked up and smiled, indicating her acceptance.

       RTR: 011 / Date of Recollection: 05.31.2002 / 11 min

      Today drags. It’s casual day, which means we’re dressed in civvies, and after our first break, we get assembled in the courtyard for an apple-bobbing contest like we’re 12. Then there’s a presentation from a non-profit group that’s visiting our school to tell us about computers. I’m surprised it isn’t about condoms. It’s always about condoms.

      In the courtyard, Lerato asks what’s happening with me. “You’ve had two half-days.”

      “Nothing’s happening.”

      “Is everything okay?”

      “I’m tired, that’s all.” I turn away from her toward the makeshift platform.