What colour is God?
Excerpt out of “Stuck on My Maid’s Floor”
Attached to this fake but enticing casino village is a beautiful bird park. Apparently, this is where gambling adults deposit their children while they dispose of the family’s future.
The bird park was the real destination I had in mind for today. I wanted Evelyn to experience something pretty and harmless, stroll gently, and chat with me about pretty and harmless things.
We enter an enclosure where we can feed some brightly coloured birds.
Within a second, Evelyn is attacked by a flurry of squawks and feathers. Three birds land on her, but they seem more interested in her hair instead of pecking at the prepared food tubs we’ve brought in.
“Yoh, yoh, yoh.” Said three times in quick succession, this is usually a signal of her astonishment or extreme distress. I look at her with concern.
Evelyn’s neck shrinks into her compact body, and she starts shaking. Oh, god. It’s distress then. It’s panic mode. But before I can reassure her, she starts laughing.
“They’re eating my hair!” The tickling sensation makes her giggle like a child.
“Because they think it’s peppercorn, Eve.” I laugh, then immediately regret the South African race-tainted joke: comparing African hair to a spice. I blame the stupid birds for distracting me from political correctness.
Evelyn doesn’t care, though. She laughs. Perhaps she is immune. Or worse, desensitised.
As we stroll through the park, a sign for the reptile enclosure sends Evelyn on an instant detour. I hasten to try and keep up with her.
“Evelyn…”
“I don’t want to see those things.” She averts her eyes from the general direction of the snake picture.
“Snakes? Or snake signs?”
“Eh, eh, eh.” Three ‘eh’s in quick succession: total revulsion. “I won’t sleep at night.”
“Why are you so scared of snakes?” I ask, as though it’s strange to fear a deadly serpent. Still, to me, black people seem to exhibit an irrational phobia of anything, even vaguely, resembling a snake.
“No, I don’t want snake to come to my dreams.”
“Hmm.” She’s mentioned her dreams, giving me an opening. “Do you have bad dreams?” I summon the ghost of Jung to Montecasino.
“Sometimes.” Excellent. Now if only I actually knew something about dream interpretation.
“What are your bad dreams about?” I try to imagine what Jung would ask, nodding my head gently, imitating an overpriced psychoanalyst in session.
“Snakes.”
“Oh.” Dream interpretation over.
“Do you sleep on bricks?” I open a new but related topic. Black South Africans tend to raise their beds a little higher than the norm, in order to avoid the grip of the Tokoloshe, a gnome-like trickster. Ellen, my previous Tswana maid, used to do it.
“Noooo!” Evelyn is amazed that I would even ask her such a ridiculous question.
She’s amazed; I’m confused. This seems to be our dynamic.
“I sleep on that old bed you gave me.”
“Oh…I see.” Wait, did she say “old bed”? It wasn’t that old. It was only missing one leg. And it’s still way better than sleeping on a mud floor…
I tend to wind myself up when I’m feeling ambushed. Or called out by my maid.
“I just want to know if you are scared of the Tokoloshe,” I press on.
“Aloni, why talk Tokoloshe now?” She says it in a way that makes me feel like I’m in the therapist’s chair.
“No, I just want to — ”
She cuts me off. “Aloni, Tokoloshe will only come if you believe it will come.”
“Hmm.”
“I don’t believe in Tokoloshe, so there is no Tokoloshe.”
I look at her, surprised.
“I believe in prayer,” she continues. “When I go to sleep, I pray.”
“So you pray every night?” I walk towards the light.
“Yes. But sometimes I forget.”
“Oh, okay.” I chuckle at her sweet admission. “So, how often do you forget to pray?” I play along.
“Sometimes…sometimes…” She stops and sees my cheeky smile. “Sometimes…often!” She starts giggling. “You are laughing at me, Aloni?” She nods approvingly.
We laugh together then, easily, with none of the strain that often accompanies our interactions. It feels …good.
“That was classic, Eve.”
Now that we are on the subject of bricks, Tokoloshe and prayer, and both in a good mood, I want to quiz her about my favourite topic: the big Tokoloshe in the sky.
“What do you see when you think of God?”
“Aloni?”
“I mean…” What the hell do I mean? Oh, I know what to ask her. “Is he black or white?” I congratulate myself. Brilliant, brilliant question.
Evelyn’s eyes roll in her head, searching for God.
“He is white.”
“White!” I am angry. White? I can’t believe how deep the damage is. First you believe there is a God at all, and then you believe he is white? What have we done to you?
“Why white?”
“Because he is Jewish, Aloni.” Didn’t see that one coming.
“How do you know he was Jewish?”
“It was when I worked in Berea,” she remembers. “When white people still lived there. There was a man with a long beard…He is a Jewish, yes?”
“Yes.” A white man with a long beard is either an orthodox Jew or a hobo. “He could have been.”
“Yes. He say he is Jewish and he loves Jesus, who is Jewish and who is God.”
“Oh, I see. A Jew for Jesus…” A real nutcase. He wants to keep kosher, but then eat gammon at Christmas.
