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KOLA BOOF's landmark short story "DAY OF VOW" (reprinted below) 
first appeared in the collection "Long Train to the Redeeming Sin". 

"DAY OF VOW"

a story by KOLA BOOF 

She stuck with it...being a glassmaker.  When you make glass, there's an experience as it forms when the matter is so fiery liquid and lava-taffy hot, becoming more and more of itself like the ocean that it is literally intoxicating and otherworldly hypnotic.  Like something from Mars or hell or inside the sun.  Beautiful as anything you could dream about paralyzed.  That's how it felt having the privilage and the blessed luck to make glass for a living.

It wasn't a normal job for a South African woman, educated or otherwise to occupy...but Zorina had been doing it since she was eight (the house maid's curious little daughter back then), and now at seventeen, no one at the furnace could match her craftsmanship.  The Theron family was making quite a name (not to mention a pretty penny) for itself because of this quaint little wonder, and Zorina, too, had an obsessive interest in their manorborn.  Miss Lindy and Cribbitch could absolutely send one.

But the person who really intrigued her, even more than glass, was the Theron family son--nineteen year old polo champion Noble Theron--who had raped Zorina when she was thirteen.  The Theron's called him, "Golf".  He was tall and handsome, chilly white with an innocent soldier boy's face and warm glacier-blue eyes.  He fascinated Zorina to no end, mainly because he had lived for a while in what she considered to be life's promised land--America; and then, too, because he had raped her and then seemingly forgotten all about it (as if she had just imagined the whole thing)--and this only increased Zorina's pain until all she could do was pass out from it (have a nervous breakdown) or become fascinated by the source of that pain.

"Haven't I told you not to call me Golf when we're alone, Zora?"
"Yes, Noble", she always replied with as feminine an incantation as possible.

At the mere sight of him, Zorina always felt dizzy in the tummy and weak in the knees.  Like most white men in South Africa, Golf moved about like a stern wire coathanger.

"And do sit down, girl.  I want your delightful company more than any breakfast.  You know that."

On the veranda's cool dawn, the sun barely up and cloud white butterflies fluttering about the garden, Golf Theron took his milk with a spoonful of cognac and his oatmeal with cream and sugar.  They sat together; two extremely secretive people.  Zorina more than him--because only she knew about the little match box that she kept in her skirt's front pocket and the tiny black pellets inside (rat turds).  Only she knew how metallic and perfectly formed they looked, like little black rice pods, as she took a few out each morning and stirred them into his oatmeal right after her mother cooked it up.  And every morning, for years, he had eaten it all down, and that's what helped Zorina justify her love for him.  She thought that he must be as poisoned and tricked inside as she was by now.  Her being raped at Theron Estate and violently burned at school and his stomach full of rat turds made them seem perfect for each other.

"So you've heard about the tennis match?", he asked Zorina.

Her face, a lemony ice-tea color, was instantly lit with a grin.  Like all the other South African black girls, she had cheered the arrival of Venus and Serena Williams (Americans!) and had been overjoyed to see an African-looking girl play tennis and beat the turd out of Amanda Coetzer, South Africa's white champ.  All over the country, in the streets and dirt roads, the blacks had cheered and rooted: "Go Venus! Go Venus!" As if Venus was the South African.  So yes, Zorina had heard.  Her mother had even made a keg of beer for the ghetto's celebration and black fathers had danced barechested in the streets with VENUS written across their hearts in the bloodiest red paint they could find.

Golf Theron blushed and gave a carve-dark grin.  He whispered across the table, "I was rooting for Venus, too."

Heat covered Zorina's forehead.  Like it did every morning when Golf was done with breakfast.  Because that's when he always rose, towering over her...and swaggered on by, deliberately brushing his athletic hairy leg against her lean brown arm.  For a split second, she remembered his weapon of authority; erect--the only manpart she had ever known.  His mighty white skin touched her clean brown embarrassment.  His white tennis shorts, the ones that Zorina's mother washed and ironed in stacks each week, seemed so fresh and pure; so sunshine bright and snow white.

Whiter even--than the sickle shaped burn seared into Zorina's right buttock like a pothole of saintly white ashes.

"Carry on, Zora."
In a breathy voice, "Yes, Noble."

~~

But once he was gone and her mother had cleared away the dishes he left behind, Zorina always managed to turn back into herself.  Humming some American pop song ("I Can't Tell You Why" by the Eagles) as she left the veranda and passed Miss Lindy's gazebo, the swing set for Cribbitch, the heavenly green arc of field and forest that shaded the horse stables...and finally, on down the dirt road past the creek, her favorite place in the whole world...the Theron furnace.

Three brick chimneys pointed up from the old building like a crown and the trees on either side of it seemed ageless and ancient--brittle gray and undying.  Zorina's mother always told her that "trees are loyal beings".  The furnace house was made of granite with a cobblestone floor inside the entrance hall.  On the hook outside, she always hung her sweater before placing a sack lunch in the little locker that made her feel accomplished and important, because it had her name written across it in typed ink.  Golf Theron had done that.

Ebaneezer called out, "That you, Milady!?"
"Yes it is!" Zorina hollered back with a grin.

He was having breakfast in the nook.  His face pink like strawberry ice cream and his chin and cheeks always foaming with a white unkempt beard.  He was a fat, stinking soot-covered Santa Klaus-looking man with ale on his breath and gas passing from his arse every twenty minutes...but he had a heart of gold.

Zorina entered the nook.  "Balu inside already?"
Ebaneezer nodded and farted.

Balu was the new glassmaker from Cape Town.  He ws Indian and had a wife who was half-black, half-Korean...and since the two of them were legally coloured (which is higher class than plain old black in South Africa), they didn't allow their two children to play with black, kinky-headed kaffir kids.  Balu had told this information to Golf Theron (to affirm, as coloured South Africans do, his loyalty to whiter sensibilities) and then Golf had turned into Noble and told Zorina.  So Zorina didn't like Balu--because she knew a lot of Indians, Asians and mixed race people that were like that.  In fact, according to her dead father, Africa was infested with them.

The other glassmaker on the premises, Othello, he was mixed race, but he wasn't like that at all.  For whenever whites called a black person "kaffir"--it was as if they had called Othello himself that horrible word.  He considered himself an African and would say it out loud and to anybody's face.  His wife, however, was as ugly as raw liver according to Zorina's mother.  He could've had his pick instead of choosing a girl who was so darkskinned and walked and talked with the smell of sex in her personality.  Him being such an eggcreme pretty fellow with a good job and so ruggedly mannish with those big soccer legs and that curly Italic hair (his father was Italian-Lebanese and his mother was a black South African woman, herself part Indian).  Wasting himself on some low class chocolate kaffir bitch, Zorina's mother would say.  Here he was now.

"Greetings, Zorina!"
"Hey...top of the morning, Othello!  How's LissaMondi?"
"Oh, mighty good going.  The baby kicked this morning and Lissa graduates from nursing school next saturday.  I'm inviting everyone for stew and bread.  You bring your Brenda Fassie albums, Zorina!"
"I'll have to sneak this past Big Mama", she laughed.

~~

The flames resemble pieces of hellfire tumbling around like clothes in a washing machine. Capable of baking the face six shades if one doesn't wear a protective mask.  It's hot like an oven down there.  The sweating is unavoidable and yet the skin beneath the sweat remains dry, parched and crackly.  The blistered smell of the liquid glass as it's looped and spun, twirled and blown...transformed from recipe to imagination to creation's beauty both challenges and resists Zorina everytime, but her standard of taste is not a will bestilled.

"Hers are special", Balu whispered enviously whenever she set a sea-crystal wine goblet atop the cooling board. "She's gifted", snorted Ebaneezer, as if Balu had better recognize that he is not the big maestro he thought he was back in Cape Town.  He's just a talented backup singer now.

"Damn, that's pretty" said Othello as he glanced at the intricate spheres, the way the light was alive beneath the precise layers of Zorina's spooling sheath.  He got a lump in his throat just looking at it.  Her creations looked more like jewelry than tablewear.

"It's all in the wrist", bragged the little brown girl.
"No, no...the heart", smiled Othello, tenderly.

~~~~

In the late evening when Zorina and her mother took the state worker's bus from the back road of the Theron estate all the way to the dirt roads of the ghetto shanties of Sowego, the transition felt as normal to them as breathing.  They were slightly higher class than most of their neighbors, because being the head maid for a family as rich and as well known as Dutch Theron's was a major coup, and more than that, Zorina's status as glassmaker provided her the rank of a college graduate and surpassed all the menial factory jobs that the local men were allowed to hold.  She and her mother were looked up to.

"I need time for the wedding dress", sighed Etah, Zorina's mother, as the two of them busied themselves setting supper in the small of their kitchen.  "The hours inside the night just aren't deep enough."

Zorina, solemn and deeply breathing, tried not to burst into tears.

Etah was a hefty woman with a profound pair of buttocks and huge feet like a camel's.  In the center of her face she was pretty.  She greatly resembled the beautiful American actress Alfre Woodard, her spitting image, only Etah was fat and had much lighter skin.  She wore a rag around her head and sometimes grimaced from the arthritis plaguing her knees and left shoulder.  Her man had been dead for years, so her thinking skills weren't as whiplash quick as they had once been.  Mainly, she let herself settle into acting a lot older than she actually was and looking like it, too.

"Oh...I've got to sit down."
"Big Mama, get off your feet now."

Zorina had the pot of red beans, rice and oxtails heating up (leftovers), and Etah would just have to make herself a little pan of peppercorn broth to go over the bread.  Her late husband had always loved having his peppercorn broth over some bread.

"I've got to work some with that dress", restated Etah, and Zorina's heart jumped again at the mention of it.  She could just imagine all the lavish white lace, satin, tulle...flowing beneath the soft pretty whiteness of Maritza Buitengracht--the proper young lady who was engaged to marry Golf Theron in just another month.

"Let her buy a dress in Durban, Mama.  They'll shop and horse race this coming weekend as it is."

"Miss Lindy wants Maritza to wear the same dress that she wore.  It needs lots of alterations, because that Maritza girl is no bigger than a strand of straw.  Skinnier than you, Zorina, if that's possible."

"You think Golf really loves her, Mama?"

"I think he's like any other man entering marriage--he'll act out what he's seen others do.  But it's Miss Lindy that picked her.  Brought her back from Europe and set it up.  She sure is a lovely girl, I'll say.  Just as beautiful as a snow white princess from a land of angels."

Instantly, Zorina recalled the time that she and a friend had been in line at the cinema house and overheard a group of handsome black boys repeating a saying that's very popular among South African black men.  Two boys told another boy: "White women don't need to take baths, because God made them clean by nature and they never smell."

Zorina blacked out just thinking about Maritza's long, golden tresses of angel's hair and the gorgeous way it flowed heavily down her back like wavy yellow sunshine.  She floated away thinking about how Golf always held that dainty little white hand and kissed it just so...like it belonged to a Queen.

"I hate Golf Theron", Zorina heard herself say.  Her voice tight and mean.  It surprised and startled Etah.

"But what, my daughter?"
"I said I hate Golf Theron, Mama.  He doesn't deserve a beautiful white woman like Maritza Buitencgracht, she's too good for him, Mama."

Etah rallied back with her maid instincts.  She insisted, "But Golf has always been a good boy!  He's as handsome and kindhearted as a man could come, Zorina!" 

Zorina almost mouthed off and reminded her mother of the time that Golf had told his classmates visiting from boarding school that Etah was part of an ancient ape tribe and then asked her, right in front of all those white giggling faces, to speak "planet of the apes language".  But Zorina said nothing.

Teardrops, huge and wet began swelling and falling into an emotional breakdown as Zorina screamed out, "If I could rip out his throat, I'd do it!  With my bare hands, I'd do it!"

"What!?"

Etah was no dummy.  She'd seen that kind of bitterness in the eyes of black worker-bee women before, but she couldn't risk hearing what might come out of her daughter's mouth next.  For if it came out to be rape, then Etah might have to do something about it, and courage had never been Etah's strongsuit.  So instead, she jumped to her feet and slapped the living shit out of her daughter!  "SHUT UP!"

The shock of it stunned Zorina to complete stillness, her eyes bulging and her back tense as though a pan of cold water had been dumped over her head.  "Now you stop this jealousy you have towards white girls and thank our sweet lord for the privilages that you do have, you selfish black arse!  I won't have you say another bad word against Mr. Theron.  He's a good boy, educated and handsome and he treats you like you're his own sister, Zorina!  You don't know how spoiled you are by the Therons, that's the problem!  He lets you call him Noble, and not even his own mother calls him that!  You thought I didn't know your little secret?"

An iceburgh moved between them.

"Alright then, Mama", whispered Zorina.  "I...love Noble."

Then she left her supper on the table and went up to bed.

In the dim light of her bedroom, fully unaffected by the sound of mice playing in the walls, Zorina stood up naked in the half mirror staring at herself.  She couldn't imagine how anyone could think for a single moment that Maritza Buitengracht was more beautiful than she was.  Obviously, Noble knew the truth.  He was the one who always insisted that Zorina looked exactly like the gorgeous movie actress Thandie Newton (only Zorina was four shades browner)...and wasn't it Zorina's hair that had fascinated Noble when she was just a child?  Hadn't he marveled at how soft it was--natural, springy African hair worn in a medium fro?  Hadn't Golf always liked putting his hands in it often (without permission as white people do)?

From Golf, Zorina had learned that nothing gets dirty faster than white skin.  Or can smell more foul.  So black men in South Africa certainly didn't know what they were talking about.

Carefully, just as she did every night, she applied several coats of pure vitamin E oil to the burn on her bottom.

Zorina thought this whole entire world must be insane to think that Golf could find a better woman than her.  But then again, white men were different from other men Zorina had observed.  White men admired themselves and their race far too much not to give birth to purely white children.  That was the catch, Zorina realized.  It was their own white children that they loved so dearly, more than life itself, and for that, she couldn't help but respect them.

Zorina pulled the covers over her head and drifted off to sleep.

Once asleep, she was back at Children of Christ Protectorate School.  Eve was holding her hand.  She could see the charred black door again...lava red beneath the blackened wood.  The only classroom was burnt down around it, smoke everywhere.  Most of the children beneath the rubble were burnt to a white crisp.  It was a black school (without whites or coloureds), so the fire brigade didn't arrive until the next day.  But Zorina had escaped with her life. 

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