Before the light goes out
On the windowsill of Mansa's room, in the Boseja neighborhood, in Maun, there are three stones. The gray one with white veins. The reddish one. The black one, smooth as an egg. They've been there for three years, always in that order, and nobody moves them. Not Keitumetse — her mother —, not Mma Tsheko — the neighbor who looks after her when her mother works nights —, not Mansa herself. Because the order is the order.
She picked them up from the dry bed of the Lotsane river, in Serowe, four hundred kilometers southeast of Maun. She was four years old. She was with her grandmother Koko — a Shona woman, practical, who knew which stones are good for sharpening, which for grinding, and which are simply beautiful. Koko washed the stones with her in a plastic bucket and told her something Mansa still sometimes repeats quietly to herself: "When you miss something, touch a stone. The stone doesn't move. Neither do you."
Koko died when Mansa was six years old. A Wednesday in July, at the hospital in Serowe, from pneumonia that started as a cough. Mansa didn't travel to the funeral. She stayed three days at the neighbor's house. She didn't cry in front of anyone. When Keitumetse came back, Mansa asked for Koko's reading glasses — elderly prescription, useless for a child — and put them in the bedside drawer, wrapped in a handkerchief. That same night she moved the stones from the living-room shelf to the windowsill of her bedroom.
