Mama said go
The kitchen, the stool, and the sentence I had spent seven years refusing to say, said for me by the person with the most right to refuse it.
Sunday. The kitchen. I was telling her about the file, which is nearly done, and about the lawyer, and about the Monday last month when the boys with machetes came down the stadium road and the woman under the umbrella lost her table, and Mama put the knife down.
She has never put the knife down. In seven years of kitchen Sundays her hands have not stopped once, not for the door, not for the pill. She put it down and she looked at me and she said: you have to go.
I said no. I said all the things. The small notebook, the money, the fact that leaving means they win, the fact that she is here. And she said: they have already won here. They won at the police station. They won at the lawyer's. They will win at the next Monday. Go and win somewhere else, and then send for me, or do not, but go.
Then she picked the knife up and finished the ugu, because it was still Sunday and there was still rice.
Seven years I have refused that sentence. Tonight it is in the notebook in her voice and I cannot refuse it in her voice. So: I am going. I do not know how or when or on what paper. But the decision, which I have carried around unopened since 2018, has been opened by the one person who could open it, and it says go.