A little town at a time   elsbeth e (2003) I know too many small towns from the inside out. I know. No one really knows how many people live there. They don’t count the bodies in that place. It is not important. They know how many graves are marked and how many not. How many people left and how many stayed. And those who are yet to be born they leave to the hands of the rubbing old women and knowing gods for they have their own ways that few can recognize and most must fear. Here every thing has its place and for some nothing has its time. At this place, washing hangs because it must on days when the wind blows strong. There. They know enough…how many houses there are, whose child was fathered by which man on what day of which season, who sees in the burning playfulness of the sun revenge from a living God, which woman needs to be watched carefully, whose clothes need to be passed down to whom. There. Small towns live in two minds. Its back turned to that which it cannot change and that which their own eyes cannot believe. I know. I come from there. I was born there. I return now. To small places. Every other week I pack my bags and I go. Back. On gravel roads cutting away the skin of distance, carving me back into what ought to be…a little town at a time. But it cannot be the same. I speak with a pausing tongue for the things I have to say are strange and out of place. Development. A secluded word that falls too easily off my mother’s tongue and puts out the fire between them and me. Us. They who are black and rural like me, make me walk in mourning with a bowed head and closed eyes swaying dangerously like a thirsty child towards tears. Here. Learned knowledge loses its certainty and the mind is tripped like a circle drawn violently in the air given belief by the nod of a passing stranger. For they know what time it was when the world stopped and stared and moved on leaving its name behind in the starving bark of a dog chasing leaves. Here the world waits and redeems itself in the name of dogs who answer to Bin Laden, Pagad, Mandela…Here. Dogs, who are seldom called, seldom touched, often chased away and mostly fed with the shame of left over meatless bones are the memory of a world gone forgotten. Here. Dogs are a white smile and a black scream. They are explained in time. Never understood with time. It is here. That they know they give birth to me every time I return. They know. And I know. That I must know my place. Here. I know too few small towns from the inside out.

(Reprinted by the Community Development Resource Association - www.cdra.org.za)