Mama Was Half Right

13. WORK HARD. Mama says "Whoever works hard will never lack. God does not bless empty hands." So my hands will NEVER be empty. (Even in holidays.)

The quotation marks are mine, and they are the most careful thing on the page. I made them like little tadpoles, two at the start and two at the end, because I had just learned in P.7 English that when you copy somebody's exact words you must fence them in. I fenced in Mama the way you fence in a goat you love: so she wouldn't wander off, and so everyone passing could see she belonged to me.

She said it often enough that it had a rhythm, the way church songs do once you've stopped hearing the words. She said it while sorting beans on a tray, flicking out the small stones with her thumbnail. She said it when I came home with seventy-eight in Maths and asked why the other twenty-two mattered. She said it to my brother when he was found sleeping under the mango tree at two in the afternoon with his mouth open and a fly considering it as a residence. "God does not bless empty hands." My brother, to his credit, said his hands were full of sleep. He was beaten for that. Not hard. Mama hit like someone who didn't believe in it.

I have told you a lot about Mama by now, mostly in the past tense. She is alive and well and currently, as I write this, refusing to buy a new mattress because the old one "still has years in it." I would like her to be right about the mattress. I'm less sure, these days, about the beans.

Here is what I believed for most of my life, and what I suspect you believe too, because you would not have read eighteen chapters of this if you didn't. I believed that effort was a kind of deposit. You put it in, and later, with interest, you got out a life. Good grades went in, Makerere came out. Makerere went in, a job came out. Discipline went in, respect came out. If something didn't come out, you checked what you had failed to put in. You always found something, because if you look hard enough at any life you can find a morning you overslept.

It was a lovely system. It made the world make sense. It also meant that every bad thing that happened to me was, by definition, an invoice.

So let me run it through the ledger, because that is what we do here.

PLANNED: Work hard. Never lack. Never have empty hands.

HAPPENED: I worked hard. Not perfectly, and you know where the gaps were, because I've shown you. But I read by the hurricane lamp. I got into Makerere. I got through Makerere with the kind of grades that make aunties forward your transcript to their WhatsApp groups. I sat in my room carrying two things I could not say out loud, and I still handed in my coursework on time. Then I graduated, and I applied, and I applied, and I applied (one hundred and forty-something applications; I stopped counting when counting became its own small cruelty), and I lacked. My hands were very full and nothing landed in them. And then there was the year I've already told you about, the grey one, when I lay on that bed and thought about not being here, and it felt less like a thought than a weather that had settled over the house.

PAID: This is the column I've been avoiding.

The obvious costs I've told you about. Money, time, the photo of me in a gown that I can't look at directly. What I hadn't put into the column before was the quieter thing the gospel charged me, every day, in small instalments. If work guaranteed outcome, then my outcome was my fault. My unemployment was proof of a laziness I couldn't locate. My depression was ingratitude, because Item 10 had told me sadness was time stolen from God. And the pregnancies (I'm going to say this plainly, because the plainness is the point) became, under Mama's gospel, the ultimate empty-handedness. The one time I had not worked hard enough at being careful, and look what it cost. Look what I did about it. Look who I didn't tell.

For years I ran a court in my head with one defendant and no defence lawyer. Every evening it sat. The prosecutor had my handwriting.

I want to be careful here, because there is a cheap version of what comes next, and you have probably already read it on a poster in a clinic with a sunset behind it. The cheap version says: You did nothing wrong. Release the guilt. You are perfect as you are.

I don't believe that, and I won't insult you by pretending to. I made decisions at Makerere that I would make differently now. Some of them I would make the same way and still grieve. Some of them I made because I was frightened of Item 3, of people talking, and I let a twelve-year-old's fear of a church car park choose for a twenty-year-old woman. I regret that. I expect I will always regret some of it. Regret is a reasonable response to having been a person in a situation.

So that leaves a harder question. If I'm not going to pretend I'm innocent, what exactly am I allowed to stop doing?

My counsellor asked me this, in a different form, the week after I put the appointment card on her table. I had been talking for twenty minutes about the second time, about how he had sat in the same building as me, alone in his own plastic chair, and how I had spent years hating him partly so that I wouldn't have to hate only myself. And she let me finish, and then she said, "You keep saying you need to forgive yourself. What do you think forgiveness would require?"

I said I supposed it would require deciding that what happened was okay.

"And is it okay?"

"No."

"So maybe that's the wrong word for now," she said. "Try this. What would it look like if you stopped sentencing her?"

I said, "Who?"

She waited. Counsellors are very good at waiting. It is the main thing you are paying for, and at first it feels like a scam.

"Oh," I said. "Her."

The girl in the hostel room in Mary Stuart. The girl with the exercise book. The girl who graduated smiling so hard her cheeks ached. I had been prosecuting all three of them for years, sometimes in the same evening, and I had never once considered that a court which only convicts is not, technically, a court. It is a punishment room with good furniture.

Here is the distinction I came away with, and I've tested it enough since that I'll give it to you. Excusing says: it didn't matter. Compassion says: it mattered, and she was twenty, and she was frightened, and she was working with the information she had, and she has been punished enough. Excusing erases the event. Compassion keeps the event and releases the person. You can hold her accountable in the sense of looking clearly at what she did. What you can stop doing is hurting her for it every night at eleven o'clock when the generator next door goes off and the house goes quiet enough for the court to convene.

I wish I could tell you that knowing the distinction ended the trials. It did not. What it did was give me something to do when they started, which is a different and more useful thing.

But first I had to deal with Mama's tadpoles.

It took me two more weeks to go home. I told myself it was the transport money, which was partly true; the taxi to Mukono had gone up again, and the conductor now announced the fare with the air of a man personally saddened by it. Mostly, though, I was afraid. I had the appointment card in my wallet and the exercise book in my bag, and I knew that if I sat in Mama's sitting room with both of them, something was going to come out of my mouth that I hadn't rehearsed.

I am a planner, as you have noticed. Unrehearsed speech is, for me, roughly equivalent to skydiving.

She was in the back, of course, under the avocado tree, peeling matooke into a basin with that short knife she's had since before I was born. She did not stand up when she saw me. She said, "You have come," which in our house is a complete paragraph, and she pointed with the knife at the second stool.

I sat. I took the other knife. We peeled.

You should know that my mother does not ask questions directly. She asks them sideways, through food and weather and other people's children. In the first twenty minutes she told me that Nalongo's daughter had finished her nursing course and was now in Dubai, that the price of sugar was a sin, and that I looked thin "like someone who eats standing up." All three of these were questions. I answered the third one only, by saying I'd been eating, and she said, "Mm," which meant she had noticed I'd only answered the third one.

On the wall inside, through the open back door, I could see my graduation photo. It hangs between the Sacred Heart and a calendar from a hardware shop in Seeta that stopped being current three years ago. Mama won't take down the calendar because the picture on it is of Lake Bunyonyi, and she says it's restful. I could see my own face from where I sat, gown and hood and teeth. I looked away from it and back at the matooke.

"Mama," I said. "Do you remember what you used to say? About working hard?"

She smiled without looking up. "Whoever works hard will never lack."

"And God doesn't bless empty hands."

"Eh. You remember."

"I wrote it down," I said. "When I was twelve. I made a whole plan." And I took the exercise book out of my bag and wiped my hands on my skirt and opened it to Item 13 and held it out.

She put down the knife. She wiped her own hands, slowly, on the cloth she keeps on her knee, and she took the book like it was something from the hospital, an X-ray, something that might have news on it. She read the item. She turned back a few pages and read some others. I watched her face reach Item 4, about no boyfriends, and do something complicated around the mouth. I watched it reach Item 6, the stick-figure children, and go still.

"You wrote all this," she said.

"Yes."

"At twelve."

"Yes."

"In pen," she said, and for a second I thought she was going to laugh, and then she didn't. She closed the book and kept it on her lap. "I didn't know you were carrying all this."

"I wasn't carrying it. It was in a box at the bottom of the wardrobe."

"Mm," she said. Wrong answer again.

This was the moment. I had decided on the taxi, somewhere around Bweyogerere, what I would tell her and what I would not, and I want to be honest with you about the arithmetic, because I think you are doing the same arithmetic about your own mother. I was not going to tell her about the pregnancies. Not that day, and maybe not ever; that is a decision I am still allowed to change, and I've written it in pencil. Some secrets you keep from shame. Some you keep because the telling would cost someone else more than the keeping costs you, and I'm still working out which kind this is. But I had also decided that I would stop letting her believe the graduation photo.

"Mama," I said. "After I finished campus. That year at home, when I said I was resting. I wasn't resting. I was sick. Not in my body. In my head. I was very low. There were days I didn't want to be alive." I said it to the basin. Then I made myself say it to her. "I'm going to a counsellor now. Every week. It's helping. I'm okay, I'm not in danger. But I didn't want you to keep thinking I was fine."

The avocado tree did its small noises. Somewhere next door, a radio was selling herbal medicine for twelve conditions, including "lack of confidence in the bedroom," which I mention only because it was genuinely happening and I could not, in that moment, have made it stop.

Mama didn't say anything for long enough that I started to talk again, to fill it, and she put up one hand, palm out, the way she used to when the pastor was praying and we children were whispering.

Then she said, "When your father's mother was dying, she used to say the river doesn't tell the fish when it is going to flood." She looked at the book in her lap. "I thought you were the fish. You were swimming so well. I didn't look at the river."

I didn't know what to do with that, so I picked up the knife again. My hands were shaking enough that I nicked my thumb, and she took the knife away from me without comment and handed me the cloth.

"You should have told me," she said.

"I know."

"I would have come."

"I know, Mama."

"No," she said. "You don't know. You thought I would say pray more. Work harder." She was quiet. "Maybe I would have said that. First." She turned the exercise book over in her hands. "Then I would have come."

I have thought about that "first" a lot. It is the most honest thing my mother has ever said to me, and she said it while looking at a basin of matooke peels.

We sat. A chicken came and inspected the peels and was chased off with a bare foot. Then I did the thing I'd come to do, and I was clumsy about it, because I hadn't rehearsed this part either.

"Mama, the saying. Whoever works hard will never lack. I believed it so much. And then I worked hard and I lacked, and I thought it meant I hadn't worked hard enough. I thought every bad thing was because I was lazy somewhere I couldn't see."

She frowned. "Who told you that you were lazy?"

"You did. I mean. The saying did."

"Eh, eh." She shook her head, slowly. "I said it to make you sit down and read. I didn't say it so that you could beat yourself with it." She looked toward the house, toward the wall with the photo. "You think when the rain doesn't come, it's because the farmer didn't dig? Your grandfather dug every season of his life. Some seasons the rain came. Some it didn't. He still dug." She paused. "And he still ate. Because the neighbours shared. That's also in the proverb. I just didn't say that part."

"You never said that part."

"I'm saying it now," said my mother, with dignity, and took back the knife.

Mama was half right. Work matters. It is the digging, and you should dig, because nothing grows in ground nobody touched. But the rain was never in our hands, and the eating, when the rain fails, depends on whether you let anyone near your granary. I had spent years digging alone in a drought and calling it a moral failure that the field was dry.

Before I left, I asked if I could write something in the book while we were sitting there. She nodded. I had a pencil in my bag, the stubby one from the kiosk, the one from the beginning of all this. I found the space under Item 13 and wrote, in grey, smaller than the girl's handwriting:

Work hard because the work is good, not because it guarantees anything. Some seasons it won't rain. That will not be a verdict on you. When it doesn't, let someone share.

Mama watched me write. "Pencil," she said.

"Pencil."

"You used to fight me about pencils." She reached over and touched the grey letters, lightly, the way you test whether paint is dry. "This one, you can rub out?"

"If I need to."

She thought about it. "Good," she said. "Then you can still change it when you find out more." And then, because she is my mother and cannot be tender for more than about four consecutive seconds, she told me to take some of the matooke back with me because I was clearly eating standing up.

On the taxi home, holding a polythene bag of matooke on my lap like a sleeping baby, I did something I had not done in perhaps two years. I laughed out loud, by accident, at nothing in particular, at the conductor, at the radio still selling bedroom confidence two stages away, at the idea of my mother telling me she had simply not said the second half of the proverb for twenty-five years. The woman beside me looked at me sideways. I didn't stop for a while.

I should tell you that the court still sits. It sat that very night. Eleven o'clock, generator off, and there it was: the prosecutor with my handwriting, reading out the charges. Second year. Second time. You told no one. You told your mother half.

What changed is that I had something to do. I've been doing it since, and it's simple enough to give you whole.

When the trial starts, I get the exercise book. I find the item it's about, or the closest one. I don't argue with the charge, because arguing just extends the hearing. I write the charge in the Paid column, in plain words, exactly as harsh as it is. I didn't tell anyone. I let fear choose. Then, underneath, I write one sentence that begins "She was," and I finish it with something true about the girl who did it. She was twenty. She was frightened of being talked about. She had been taught that problems stay in the kitchen. Not an excuse. A fact about her conditions. And then the last line, the hard one, in pencil: She has been punished enough. Court is adjourned.

Sometimes I have to write it three nights in a row for the same charge. Sometimes I cry so hard writing "she was" that the pencil goes through the page, the way the full stop did after "baby" all those years ago. Once I wrote it and then, at two in the morning, sent a WhatsApp to my counsellor's office asking to move my session earlier, which I would never have done before. They moved it. That was the point of having written it down.

If you want to try it, you'll need very little. Something to write in. A pencil, which costs five hundred shillings at most kiosks, sometimes less if the man likes your face. One charge you've been sentencing yourself on, the oldest one, the one that convenes most often. Write it plainly. Write the "she was." Write the adjournment. Then, and this is the part I missed for years, tell one person that you did it. You don't have to tell them the charge. Just that court sat, and you adjourned it, and you might need to again.

I told Mama, on the phone, the Sunday after. I didn't tell her the charge. I said, "Mama, I had a bad night, but I wrote in the book and I'm okay."

She said, "Mm." Then: "Come on Saturday. I'm making luwombo. Don't eat standing up before you come."

I've put Saturday in my diary, in pen. Some things I'm sure about. The bus fare is already in an envelope on the shelf beside the exercise book, and next to it, the pencil, sharpened at both ends now, because I have started to wear it down.