White Sheep - A Colonial Story
A knot had formed in my throat. It seemed out of place at first. Bottles were clinking. There was loud music, singing and laughing. But from the back seat, I could see she was nervous. So the knot remained.
As she got out of the car and walked slowly towards the house, my sad, tired mother sighed.
‘She needs to leave him. When is enough going to be enough?’
The answer came as a shout in the dark a few nights later.
‘Wake up!’ Mum screamed as she shook my bed.
‘He’s done it! He’s bloody killed her!’
Hospitals are odd places – a kaleidoscope of emotions housed within standard blue uniformity, a myriad of life experiences all veiled under that distinctive smell. The knot in my throat was back. This time, it was warranted. Mum had asked if I wanted to see her, if I wanted to be there when they flicked the switch. I didn’t.
I waited outside. People faded in and out of focus: police officers, doctors, nurses, the patched riff-raff she’d carelessly considered friends.
Then there was my mum. Then there was my sad, tired mother.
‘It’s done,’ she wept softly.
‘She’s gone.’
Homecomings are meant to be welcoming. Ours wasn’t.
It was wrong. Or maybe we were wrong.
Wrong language. Wrong culture. Wrong colour.
Kin is meant to be kind. Ours wasn’t.
History. Bad blood. Politics.
An elder stood over her casket.
Salt-and-pepper hair and a crisp white collar framed his dark skin.
‘Sad business this … Sad, sorry business.
When did we lose you, child?’ he asked.
Did you ever really have her? I thought.
He shook his head and walked away.
It was a fair question, I guess.
It took me back to the grey room.
That was before the car. That was before that knot in my throat.
There were police in the grey room.
There were also social workers, strangers, Mum, me and her.
We sat in a semicircle as a stranger said a prayer in our language.
Our language that none of us understood.
‘You need to make some changes,’ a social worker told her.
‘We’re concerned about you and the kids.’
Her kids. Her poor innocent children.
It wasn’t until later that we found out what he’d done. What they’d seen.
I vomited when I read the report.
To see his cruelty spelt out in detail turned my stomach.
Was he drunk, high or both?
No, we decided, he was evil.
He needed to rot in jail.
But he isn’t in jail.
Not now, anyway.
He is here, with the patched riff-raff, lying beside her casket.
He’s drunk, if you can believe it. And he’s snoring.
How can he sleep after all that he’s done?
I wasn’t sleeping. Neither was Mum.
It’s morning. The ceremony is starting.
They’re speaking in our language.
We don’t know what they’re saying, so we just nod and cry.
Now they’re singing.
We don’t know the words, so we just pretend to move our mouths.
Are we meant to know this stuff? The stuff we just pretend to know.
Is this what it means to be ‘us’?
Years later, a white woman corrects me when I say our words wrong.
She thinks I’m white too. Perhaps I am.
Perhaps it’s time to stop pretending.
The ceremony is over. It’s time to move to the burial ground.
My sad, tired mother is now exhausted.
She’s so tired that she almost collapses.
I’m tired too, but I manage to hold her up at the grave.
Now it’s raining. In December.
This land is sacred.
It is our sovereign birthright. But it doesn’t belong to us.
They told us that no one owns it. They said that the land owns us.
But we know the truth. This land belongs to them.
They own this sacred place. We don’t.
He’s here, too.
He and the patched riff-raff are here.
He’s here in this sacred place.
I want to stop him.
I want to stop him from violently pelting her grave with the sacred dirt.
I want to stop him from violating her memory as he did her body.
But we are sad and tired.
So we just stand in the rain and cry.
The patched riff-raff are singing.
They’re ruining reggae and blues.
Bob Marley songs make me cry now.
Melodic scars make me weep as we cry in that sacred place.
It’s weird, the things you remember.
It’s finished. It’s time to leave.
We say our final goodbyes.
We won’t be returning to this sacred place.
The sacred place that owns us but doesn’t belong to us.
The sacred place where we don’t belong.