Zephany. Joanne Jowell
part of greater Cape Town and home to about 36 000 people, Muizenberg still feels like the type of seaside village you’d only have occasion to visit on weekends or for a summer holiday. There is a welcome sense of anonymity which I hope will facilitate Miché being comfortable with me and with her process of self-revelation.
We settle down to talk against a backdrop of sea and surf. I notice that Miché speaks a little more loudly and clearly than she did at the mall. It could be a function of her growing confidence in sharing her story with a relative stranger; or it could be because we’re in a quieter environment with no one but the screeching seagulls for competition. Whatever the reason, I become acutely aware of an interesting paradox in her speech. Her voice often has a high-pitched, almost babyish quality which contrasts sharply with the maturity of her insights. When Miché speaks to her father on the phone, she addresses him directly in the third person, as in, ‘What time will Daddy be able to come fetch me? Are you sure that will suit Daddy?’ She does so out of respect for her father, and I am once again struck by the juxtaposition of girlish voice and the adult I see before me.
Zephany to Miché. Girl to woman. Minor to major. I am fascinated by the enigma and am beginning to understand identity as a fluid continuum rather than a solid state. I suspect this is something that Miché has long since realised.
MICHÉ:
Growing up, I found my mom more strict than my dad.
She was always a caring person but you knew not to mess with my mommy. My daddy I had wrapped around my finger, and my mom wore the pants in the family. She always had everything under control and that’s much of where I learned how to deal with things in the house, finances and so on. Even up to today, my daddy still won’t be able to help himself in finances and running the house. She was always in charge of the home and the family, always brought them together, always helped her sisters with marriage issues, children issues …
I know she had some hard times, like the miscarriage I told you about. My daddy told me that she had also had previous miscarriages. It was always a concern if it should happen to me one day. I would even question her: ‘You had difficulties having children, could it happen to me?’ I remember she still told me that I probably would have difficulties having children because these things could be genetic …
My parents have a good relationship, but I think it took the most strain that time when my daddy was drinking. He would go out with his friends and my mom obviously didn’t go with because she had to take care of me and my brother. My dad never drank around us, he’d always go out and drink, but I do remember her being angry at times, like, ‘If I catch you ever coming late in the house and drunk –’ But my daddy wasn’t a party person. Anyone will tell you that he’s very shy and quiet, an introvert. Nobody knows his story, not even me. I still don’t really know how he feels about everything that has happened.
He changed when I had meningitis and he had a personal conversation with the Lord. There are reasons why he had to stop drinking and reasons why he had to change – probably to prepare him for what is happening now …
I know that my mommy had a difficult past. As a teenager, I did ask her about her own life, and she told me bits and pieces, but the way I learned the most was from her court statement1 that I found when I was scratching around in her drawers trying to clear out space after she was gone. I found it in an envelope which had my name on it …
I knew she was married once before, and that she was abused by her first husband. But I didn’t know the extent of it – that he raped her and would even shock her with wires in her sleep.
My mom had six siblings, and I read in that statement that when she was about twelve years old she had to take them and walk late at night through Manenberg because there was no food in the house. Her mother – my grandma – had left them to go with another man.
My mom fell pregnant when she was sixteen and had a baby girl. But the baby died when she was six weeks old. Yolanda was her name. My mom came home that day and the family told her the baby was dead; she held her until the ambulance arrived.
After that, she had a second boyfriend – I remember we saw him in the mall once, before this whole thing came out. My mom told me she had a miscarriage with his baby but that my brother was in her life already by then. My mom left this man because he was apparently nasty with my brother. You know how she found that out? Because my brother prayed and mentioned his name while he was praying. He was about six years old, and he mentioned in his prayer something about this guy hiding his sweets away. She discovered that he was being emotionally abusive to my brother and she left him.
As for her first husband, well luckily she didn’t have a child with him because it was such a bad relationship.
I didn’t know all this detail. I only knew small things, mainly from arguments that I overheard between my mom and her mother. For a time, my grandmother lived with us and the two of them would argue all the time. Even if they were arguing over small things, issues from the past would come up and I’d hear my mom literally shout at my grandmother, ‘You know what you did wrong!’ All I knew was that my grandmother did leave them for another man and another man and another man.
I questioned my mom: ‘Why do you always argue with her? She’s your mommy! You wouldn’t like if I had to argue with you all the time.’ And she’d say, ‘There are things from the past, things that she did …’
I was left to wonder. I never really knew the details. I only knew about the first husband and that she narrowly escaped that marriage with her life. He eventually landed in prison – for robbery. My aunty even told me that my mom visited him in prison but was warned by someone in the prison that her husband had a blade between his fingers and was planning to kill her. She told the warders and left the prison. Then she filed for divorce.
After these relationships and heartaches, she finally met my dad – a completely different kind of man. My parents were friends for quite a while before they started dating. They dated other people in front of each other, they never really thought that they would end up together.
My daddy was in another relationship back then and he has a daughter. There were rumours that that’s not his child but my daddy believes she is and he will support her in many ways, even though they don’t have a relationship the way me and him do.
Then Lavona came to him saying she’s pregnant with me. He obviously told his family who told him to do what’s right – you can’t have two kids out of wedlock. They got married when I was two years old because he had to go finish his studies and then go work after that. Once he found a job, they could afford to pay for the wedding and the house we were living in.
From there, it seemed like a normal life, until The Truth came out that it was far from normal. But I still feel sad for my mommy about the difficult life she obviously had in her past. I actually cried after reading that court statement I found. If you speak to her and you live with her, you’ll never sense that she’s hiding so much trauma. Maybe you’ll pick up that she can be very defensive and precise – things must be just so.
But one thing I do know is that we never lacked anything. Her main thing, and what she’d tell me over and over, is that she always wanted to give us better than what she had.
* * *
This seems as good a time as any to introduce Michael Solomon – the apparently unwitting ‘steal dad’ who plays first order batsman in Team Miché.
Daddy Michael is a far more elusive character than his daughter. Though he seems to be on 24-hour call for Miché, it takes a good few attempts before I am able to pin him down for an interview. Miché acts as go-between, setting and cancelling our attempted meetings as his working hours and church commitments throw regular hurdles. While she insists that Michael is keen to meet with me (for her sake), Miché is dubious about just how much Michael will be prepared to share due to his famed introversion. I insist that any perspective is a useful one when it comes to unpacking Miché’s story. At this stage, I don’t foresee access to ‘steal mom’ Lavona, so I reckon Michael is the next best thing. Besides, if we dare to compare who suffered the greatest