I Will Always Write Back: How One Letter Changed Two Lives Read online

  “I don’t want to look at it,” she said, quiet this time, but still fierce. “Or you.”

  As I turned to leave, the report crumpled in my hand, she whispered, “School is your only hope.”

  She took a deep breath and finished her thought. “Otherwise you will end up like me.”

  I understood. My mother wasn’t being unkind; she was being protective. My mother was smart, but she had to drop out of school when she was twelve because her parents could not afford the fees. My parents were also poor, but at least I was still in school. I promised her, and myself, that I would always work as hard as possible.

  The next semester, I pushed myself and was number one from that year onward. That meant I always got to sit in the front row of our classroom. Since there were so many kids and not much room, four students shared a desk meant for one. It was crowded, but it made it easier to share textbooks—the teacher had only four, which she brought to class every day. I often stayed after school to take notes to make sure I understood what was being taught. We were very rarely allowed to take the books home. They were too precious.

  Everyone in Group One got a letter from America, but then Mrs. Jarai ran out, leaving the last four groups with nothing. I felt especially fortunate that I was in the classroom that morning. Due to the overcrowding in our school, each group was also split into teams: 1A, B, C, and D. That meant every day, two teams would start classes inside and then finish outside beneath a big baobab tree—our teacher would travel with us and sit in a chair as we sat cross-legged in the dirt and listened to her read passages from textbooks or lecture us on a topic. On sunny days, it was actually quite pleasant. But when it rained, we had to move into the hallways, which was not as fun. The other teams started outside and finished in. This was called hot sitting and was common throughout Zimbabwe.

  Mrs. Jarai handed me the first letter and asked me to read it out loud. We learned English in school—Zimbabwe used to be a British colony—but I spoke Shona with my family and friends. Mutare, where I lived, was 99 percent Shona. I knew how to speak English but used it only in this class, so the words felt funny in my mouth. I tried to mimic the voices I had heard on the radio and television: high-pitched and nasal-y.

  “‘Hello, my name is Caitlin,’” I began. It was such a strange name that everyone laughed. I had never heard of Pennsylvania, and had a difficult time pronouncing it. But then I got to the part where she listed the sports she played and smiled: We had something in common. I played soccer daily with my friends but had never heard of field hockey and was not sure how to say the word.

  “‘Field hooky,’” I tried.

  “HAH-kee,” Mrs. Jarai corrected me before I continued.

  “‘I also really like the Spice Girls. Do you know them? Baby Spice is my favorite.’”

  Someone sang “If you want to be my lover!” and everyone laughed, including our teacher. The Spice Girls were very popular in Zimbabwe.

  “‘What is life like in Zimbabwe? I hope you write me back! Sincerely, Caitlin Stoicsitz.’”

  The class burst out in laughter again as I tried to pronounce her last name.

  Mrs. Jarai just shook her head, smiled, and said, “I cannot help you with that one!”

  Mrs. Jarai told those of us who had gotten letters to craft a response and bring it back the following day. I always loved homework, but this felt more important than any regular school assignment: I had a new friend. In America.

  That afternoon, I walked home with a bunch of other kids who lived near me in Chisamba Singles. It was a housing development built in the 1960s as a place for men from the rural areas to stay during the week while they worked in different factories on the outskirts of Mutare, the third-largest city in Zimbabwe. My father had arrived there in 1980, after my older brother, Nation, was born.

  My mother grew up in a rural village several hours north of Mutare, near the Chimanimani Mountains. She had two older brothers and one sister. She was very clever and always was first in her class. The problem was that her family was dirt poor. They had no electricity and bathed in the rivers. My mother stayed in school until fifth grade, but then her family could no longer afford to send her. She dropped out, and soon after, they sent her to work for my father’s family because they could no longer afford to feed her, either. She was twelve years old. Or rather my mother thought she was around that age, as there is no formal record of her birth. She was born in her family’s hut, as were her brothers and sister. This is how some people in rural areas of Zimbabwe are born. And it was also common to send children to work for other families—one fewer mouth to feed. My mother worked in exchange for her food and keep, which still happens today.

  My father grew up in a nearby village, and while his family wasn’t wealthy, they at least had goats and chickens. They were rich compared to my mother’s family. She was around fourteen years old when she got pregnant with Nation. My father was twenty-four. It was not like my parents fell in love—in Zimbabwe, if a woman becomes pregnant, our Shona tradition requires that she get married or else she brings shame on both families. Basically, my father was forced to marry her. I don’t think it was a choice for either of them. And I know it was why my mom was also very strict about any interactions with girls. I was not allowed to talk to them, or play with them, or even look at them.

  Shortly after Nation was born, my dad left the village for Mutare to find work. He got a job at Mutare Board and Paper Mills, the biggest paper mill in Zimbabwe, which was how he wound up at Chisamba Singles. He shared a room with another man—there were four rooms per housing unit. The men worked hard, saved their money, and then headed home once a month with groceries and money for their families. My father’s original goal was to save enough to build a house in his village, but apparently he started to misbehave. My father liked to drink, and he liked women, so the story goes that his every-month visit home became every six months. During one, my mother got pregnant with their second son, who died a few days after he was born. People said terrible things to my father, like “Why keep a wife who bears dead babies?” They even told him to get a new wife.

  Culturally, any issue around childbirth was the woman’s fault, whether the child was crippled, or he died. Polygamy was not common back then, but it also was not a big deal. My father’s brother, Uncle Sam, had to get a second wife because his first wife only gave him one child. But my mom was stubborn: After she lost her second son, she insisted on moving to Mutare, into the one-room shack that my dad shared with another man. They put up a curtain in the center of the room, and my parents lived on one side with Nation, and our roommate, Mr. Dambudzo, lived on the other.

  I was born there in 1983, three years after Zimbabwe was liberated, which meant I was one of the “born frees.” That was what people called children who were born after liberation from British colonial powers. In Zimbabwe, there’s often some kind of direct significance to your name. Nation was named after my father’s favorite cow. I was lucky: A medical student from England delivered me, and his name was Martin. If you were born on Friday, you could be called Friday. Or if you were born during a dry period, you could be named Drought. I knew people called Disaster and Weakness.

  I have a Shona name as well. It’s Tatenda, which means “thank you.” Nation’s other name is Tawanda, which means “We are many.” He actually named our other brother Simba, which means “power” in Shona—his English name is Mack, my grandfather’s name. And then Lois, my sister, was named after my aunt. Her Shona name is Hekani, which means “surprise,” like, “Whoa! Finally a girl!” And then the youngest, George, was named for my father. George does not have a Shona name. I think my parents were too tired by then to think of one.

  My father was not the only person to bring his entire family to Chisamba Singles—soon everyone did this, including his roommate, who had two wives. Each wife would swap every two weeks, commuting back and forth from the rural areas with her children. It was chaotic. Some weeks, between our family and theirs, there
were twelve people living and sleeping in a room intended for two.

  During the day we shared the same space, but at night we pulled the curtain across the room, which was meant to give us privacy, but you could still see and hear everything, a shadow puppet show. My mother and father slept on a single mattress, our only piece of furniture, which took up a third of our space. During the day my mother stored our pots and pans beneath the bed, but at night she stacked them in the corner so Lois and George could sleep there. Nation, Simba, and I slept on the concrete floor beside them. This was how all the kids lived in Chisamba Singles.

  I know now this place is called a slum, but for me, it was home. I imagined Caitlin’s life as very different from mine, and I was excited to learn more about it, and her.

  The little I knew about America I had learned on television. Several thousand people lived in Chisamba Singles, but there were only a few TV sets in the entire settlement. One was a fifteen-inch black-and-white set owned by a man who worked as a manager at the same paper factory where my father worked. Whenever World Wrestling Federation with Hulk Hogan came on, or The A-Team with Mr. T, people would cram into his living room and gather around his house, trying to watch through his window. I sometimes climbed onto Nation’s shoulders to get a better look as others peered through the door.

  As soon as I got home that afternoon, I showed my mother Caitlin’s letter. I did not think my mom would mind that Caitlin was a girl—she was too far away to get in any kind of trouble with. And I was right.

  “You can learn many things from her, Martin,” my mother said, smiling.

  I wanted to write Caitlin back immediately, but I had to do my chores first. First, I had to change out of my school uniform—I had only one. It was a pair of green shorts and a green shirt, which I wore every day and washed twice a week, on Wednesday and then again on the weekend. My siblings and I each got a uniform every Christmas and had to make it last the entire school year. I changed into my regular T-shirt and shorts, which hung from my nail—we each had one—and then I went to gather wood for the fire.

  Our family shared a fire pit, which was directly outside our home, with four other families. There, my mother cooked over the fire in a large metal can once used for cooking oil that we now used as a stove. This way, we could move the fire into the house if it was raining.

  My father left every morning at six to head to work at the factory, and returned by seven PM. We’d usually hear him singing before we saw him, his husky voice bellowing a liberation song by Thomas Mapfumo, a Zimbabwean legend, or “It’s only rock and roll but I like it.” My father loved the Rolling Stones, Cream, and Led Zeppelin too.

  “Baba!” I’d shout, and start running past women selling tomatoes or mangoes on the side of the road, dipping beneath the clotheslines that crisscrossed between the dozens of identical wooden slab shacks. Nation and Simba would always come running, too.

  My father used to surprise us with small gifts, perhaps a piece of paper from the factory, or a pen, or a coin for each of us to spend on a pack of peanuts. And he’d usually bring something for my mother to cook—greens or a bag of chicken feet. But these days, he was mostly empty-handed. My dad used the word “inflation” to explain why we no longer ate bread, which rose in price overnight from two to five dollars.

  Back home, we’d gather around the fire to eat, sitting on stones or overturned cans made into stools. My mother dished out sadza, a cornmeal porridge that is our staple food. Sometimes, we had collard greens, too, which were common and cheap. Chicken was a once-a-year Christmas treat. We’d get beans from time to time, if our father could afford it. But lately, it was mostly just sadza.

  After dinner, Nation and I had to wash the dishes before we could start our homework. Electricity was rationed from six PM to six AM, though sometimes it did not come on at all. That night, I wrote my letter by the light of the fire. I knew Caitlin was a girl, and I assumed she was white, which made me even more curious about her. White people lived in Zimbabwe, but I didn’t know any personally. I had only ever seen a white person up close once before, when a group of people from the Netherlands came to visit our school.

  They were so pale, they practically glowed in the dark. They also smelled very sweet, like flowers. We called that the white smell. I think it was from deodorant. We used soap when we could, but if we ran out, we just bathed with water.

  That was all I had to compare to Caitlin. I wondered if she glowed in the dark. And smelled like flowers. Did she know Hulk Hogan? Or was she just a regular kid like me?

  I did not want to overwhelm her with all my questions. Instead, I wrote a basic letter, using hers as my guide. I told her what grade I was in, and the names of my siblings. I told her that I loved to play soccer, and that I really hoped we’d continue to write each other. I promised her I would not let her down, and I hoped she would do the same.

  October 1997

  Caitlin

  AFTER I SENT MY PEN pal letter off to Zimbabwe, I continued on with my life, which in seventh grade consisted of spending a lot of time obsessing about how I looked: I changed outfits several times every morning before settling on one—wide-legged jeans and platform sneakers were popular back then. And then I spent another thirty minutes on my hair.

  This was around the same time that my brother, Richie, started calling me The Queen, or Princess, or Prinny for short. He thought I was spoiled—and I thought he was a jerk, because he was. That fall, I came home one day to find that he had hung several of my stuffed animals from my ceiling fan, each with a noose around its neck. It was like a scene from a horror movie, but also classic Richie. He called himself a survivalist and liked to wear camouflage and collect skulls of animals he found in the woods behind our house or on the side of the road. He had a cat, a beaver, a possum, a snapping turtle, and a pig that he got after my parents had a pig roast in our backyard. He also had a dart gun, and practiced shooting at a target in his room. I could hear the suck and thump of the darts being launched and landing on his wall, through mine. He had another bull’s-eye in our backyard where he liked to practice archery with his compound bow. I was actually glad that he would graduate high school before I started—I didn’t want anyone to know that I was related to him.

  I had just untied the last teddy bear when I heard Richie clomping up the stairs. Quickly, I hid behind my closed door. As his footsteps grew louder, I jumped out and shouted “Hiya!” and karate-kicked him in the stomach.

  I heard the air leave his mouth with a big “pah” as he doubled over. When he stood back up, he lunged for me.

  “You little…” he said, just as I slammed my door shut.

  Through the now locked door, I shouted, “Stay out of my room!”

  That night at dinner, I started telling my mom what Richie had done when he came to the table.

  “You already got your revenge,” he said, glaring at me. “Wait until I get mine.”

  “What’s this about?” We heard my dad’s voice from the den. He had just returned from a business trip and was still wearing his trench coat and sunglasses. We teased him that it was his Men in Black look.

  “Get any aliens today, Dad?” Richie asked.

  “I would tell you,” he said as he took off his glasses. “But then I’d have to kill you.”

  My dad was about to sit down when I asked:

  “Seriously Dad, what do you do? Every year, all my new friends and teachers ask, ‘What type of work is your father in?’ and I never have a good enough answer.”

  “Tell them I work for the government doing energy contracts,” he said.

  “I do!” I said, exasperated. “But what does that mean!”

  “It means I signed a contract with the government that said I would never talk about my work with anyone, including my family,” he said.

  He then winked at me, and started helping himself to dinner.

  When I was young, I imagined that my dad was a spy, and worked for the CIA. As I grew older, I realized he was aro
und too much for that to be true. While he sometimes flew to California or overseas on business, he was never gone for more than a few days. Otherwise, he was home by six PM for dinner and found time to coach my softball team in sixth grade. Not very James Bond–esque.

  Over dinner, we usually talked about what was happening at school. I filled them in on my classes and talked about my softball games, which my dad coached, but all I really cared about was boys. I kept a diary of all my crushes in my bedroom closet. My mom let me write on the walls there. She called it my sacred space.

  That October, I made my first closet confession. With a Kelly-green Sharpie, I first wrote 10/18/1997 and I LUV MATT JOHNSON. Matt was in my algebra class, and while I generally hated math, I loved that class because I got to sit behind Matt. He played soccer, a cool sport at my school, and had wavy brown hair that almost touched his shoulders.

  Other than dreaming of kissing Matt Johnson, I did start to wonder if my pen pal had received my letter. Kids in my English class had started receiving theirs from Europe. By late October, I still had not received mine.

  I checked the mailbox every afternoon as soon as I got off the bus and felt disappointed each time there was nothing for me. I got concerned. What if my letter didn’t make it all the way to Africa? Or what if my pen pal didn’t like my letter?

  Then one day, a week before Halloween, I saw it amongst the catalogs and bills and coupon flyers. The envelope was a pale blue gray, small and square, and plastered with colorful stamps that took up one-third of its surface. I ripped it open right there in the driveway.

  It read: Hallo Caitlin! Thank you for your letter! I am very happy to have a friend in America. My name is Martin. I live in Mutare, the third-largest city in Zimbabwe. I am fourteen years old, the second oldest of four brothers. Their names are Nation, Simba, and George. I have one younger sister called Lois. I like soccer very much. And I love school, especially math.