Zephany. Joanne Jowell
or role: mothers, fathers, families, protagonist identities. It’s very confusing. For seventeen years, the heart-breaking case was delineated around three main parts: distraught mother Celeste Nurse, devastated father Morné Nurse, abducted baby Zephany Nurse. Minor characters emerged from time to time – police investigators, false leads, shadowy nurse-figures – but the playbook line-up was pretty clear and limited. Then out came The Truth, and the story, once a three-tiered twig, quickly grew a tangle of roots and branches. It was no longer feasible to simply classify the one side of the family as ‘biological’ because how, then, to refer to the other side? Adoptive? Artificial? Pseudo?
This was made all the more baffling by the fact that ‘baby’ Zephany, while no longer a baby, was not yet of legal adult age (18) and could therefore not be identified by anything other than the name by which she had always been known: Zephany Nurse. And if Zephany could not be identified, then neither could her kidnapper with whom she had been living all this time and whose family name she shared. Identifying Lavona and Michael Solomon would point the needle directly at Miché Solomon, their only daughter and the unwitting kid at the heart of a kidnapping.
The media developed its own strategy to help keep lines from crossing. They built a neat wall down the middle of the story and grouped the characters into two camps: real and steal. Real-mom Celeste Nurse and real-dad Morné Nurse; steal-mom (Lavona Solomon) aka the kidnapper, and steal-dad (Michael Solomon) aka the kidnapper’s husband, though exactly who had done the stealing and who else knew about it was still to be determined over the course of a criminal trial. Throughout, the main character had only one name: Zephany.
Journeying down the twisted pathways of this story, I’ve relied heavily on the real/steal categorisation. But I just couldn’t seem to get it right. In every interview or conversation about the story, I’d find the characters caught up in a frenzied two-step, crossing this way and that through my mind and on my page. Real and steal would merge and separate without warning, like the wax in a lava lamp, changing density and viscosity depending on just how much heat was being applied. I wondered if it was the terminology that was confusing me, and I tried to replace real with ‘biological’ and steal with ‘who raised her’: Celeste, the biological mom vs Lavona, the mom who raised her. All that did was side-track me with the definition of ‘mom’ and the question around what classifies one. Are mothers born or made? Are they the start-line or the finish? A default position or an earned one? Are they the point of origin, the journey or the destination? Never mind a two-step, this was a full-blown jitterbug!
I kept going back to the protagonist of the story, assuming that, as confusing as this must be for me, it must be infinitely more so for her. But as I made my way through the story’s many tentacles, I came to understand that my confusion about who’s who is not a mirror of Zephany’s own confusion. It’s a foil. To Zephany Nurse, no, to Miché Solomon, her steal-mom IS her real-mom. For the attachment she feels to her, the mom who raised her may as well be the mom who gave birth to her. Furthermore, Miché Solomon has no problem with being Miché Solomon, so how can she be found if she was never lost?
For close on two decades, Zephany Nurse captured our hearts and minds. Celeste and Morné’s tireless efforts to find her ensured that, though her annual birthday candle went unlit for seventeen years, the singular ring of her newborn name never entirely disappeared from public consciousness. Zephany – wafting like the gentle breeze of the west wind along a trail run cold. Until the day that zephyr turned tornado.
We think we know her – this mythical creature risen like a phoenix, emerging unscathed from a kidnapped past. There she was! Hidden in plain sight for all these years. Though we are yet to hear her voice or see her face, though our image of her is still that of a day-old babe in arms, though we call her mom Celeste and her dad Morné and her sister Cassidy and her Zephany, we think we know her.
For close on two decades, we have been fed the story of Zephany Nurse from every perspective other than that of Zephany Nurse. But Zephany is a figment – a newborn-shaped hole seared into memory by trauma. Miché Solomon – now there’s the blood and guts; there’s the beating heart of the story.
But we haven’t yet heard that story. Isn’t it about time we did?
Chapter 1
With the particular dramatic irony due to true-life stories, my first interview with Miché Solomon kicks off with a child’s cry. ‘Mommy, Mommy, Mommyyyyyyyyy,’ bawls her two-year-old daughter Sofia as she is carried off in the opposite direction from the subject of her attachment. Her crying reverberates in the near-empty corridors of the mid-week shopping mall, just outside the Blue Route Mugg & Bean where Miché and I have arranged to meet.
Miché tosses her head and keeps walking towards the restaurant entrance. ‘It’s okay,’ she says, more to herself than to me. ‘She’s with my daddy. She’ll be okay.’
‘Do you want to go and settle her?’ I ask, happy to wait though the cries are definitely subsiding.
‘No, if she’s with my daddy, it’s fine. As long as it’s him. She’ll be happy soon.’
I hadn’t had much time to greet her father – just a quick handshake over Miché’s brief introduction to ‘my daddy, Michael’. He gave me a soft smile and a gentle nod before taking over the helm of Sofia’s pram and steering her away, leaving me and Miché to talk in the relative privacy of the restaurant’s only couch.
Miché lowers herself slowly into a leather cushion beaten with age and overuse. It sinks deeper than expected and she giggles as she tries to stop herself from wallowing. I’ve only just discovered that she is pregnant again, and quite far along, so her mobility isn’t quite what you’d expect of a 21 year old.
Not that I know what to expect. This is only the second time that I am meeting Miché, the first being an official introduction by our publisher, which was more about Miché vetting me as her biographer than about me gauging her as my subject. I’m as virginal to this territory as the rest of us, having known of her only as Zephany Nurse, the kidnapped baby now found, and living a stone’s throw from her biological family. But you can’t interview a figment. I’m here today to interview Miché Solomon, the real McCoy.
Miché orders a hot chocolate, which comes piled with whipped cream. She eats the top of the white spirals with a long spoon and stirs in the rest. She excuses herself for not being as made up as usual – ‘pregnancy and being a mom isn’t great for my weight or my looks’ – but it’s easy to see how a blow-wave to her honeyed mane, a slick of ruby to her delicate lips, and a pair of glossy stilettos to offset her curvaceous figure would earn her the J.Lo comparisons which she laughingly indulges.
Frankly, I’m happier to see a Miché without a façade. We’re finally getting to hear the other side of the Zephany Nurse story. We want bare-faced rather than airbrushed, in-the-flesh rather than in-the-news.
MICHÉ:
I look like my father’s family, like Michael’s family. They are all tall and some are quite fair-skinned, so I’ve grown up with the idea that I look like his side of the family.
As a little girl, I had a very strong bond with my daddy. I still do. I was more adventurous with him; we’d go to the beach, or jogging, or for drives, because my mom would be home in the kitchen or doing household stuff. I could speak to him honestly, and more to him than anyone else about certain things.
I see him now with my daughter and it’s just like it was for me. He’ll take her to the beach, or if I am busy with something, he takes her for a drive or an ice-cream. If I reprimand her and tell her, ‘Don’t do that stuff, that’s being a naughty girl,’ then he is the one to comfort her – all the time, as if it’s his own baby. She’ll probably end up calling him Daddy.
I really was a daddy’s girl. I still am. It frightens me if my dad should die or if he can’t help himself anymore – who am I going to depend on emotioinally? I’m grateful to have him as a father, really I am.
My dad is an apprentice electrician, and he was working that day when Lavona said she gave birth to me at Retreat Hospital. It was a normal