Mother Of Soil (Part 1)

So it came that one night a jester among herders formed a legend about a mystic little girl who had found refuge with stranded caravans over icy mountains in search of grazing pastures. He carved a tale of her birth happening underground, a fetus that clawed her breathless path from raw earth’s belly. He claimed she ate the soil around her for nourishment over years of her stay alone in the wild, after having consumed her mother’s shriveled body buried with her still unborn.

MmaMobu’s physical strength had astounded those among the caravan whose initial encounter with her was unwomanly violent; many had lived bearing scars and maimed but looked after. As she was eventually accepted into the band of herders, she grew to become an indispensable nurturer to both man and animal, injured or sickly. Playing menacing games with hunting dogs, tackling goats; at one time an elder said MmaMobu had fed on her mother’s soul. This led many to fathom stories of her cannibal nature, and her preference for raw meat become misconstrued for a bad omen.  The claimed that from whence she commenced to consume her mother’s flesh, her organs became hard as mud.

It later came to light that many of the elders of the caravan knew the sordid face of a woman once buried with her unborn child kicking in her belly. Inside of her came not an infant’s cry it was said, but a harsh howl of a triumphant beast that knew it would defy death. And MmaMobu having being born full grown as they had discovered her, was not a mystery in itself; but having not been mothered there would forever be no witness to her craning neck and first wails, as she stretched conquering arms around life.

MmaMobu

She walks the dark of night, among bored hounds and midnight preachers, a song guiding her tongue lulling ghosts, ghosts of dreams sleeping broken in the shacks and other makeshift abodes. Sky flickers with a distant thunderbolt and random barking stops, echoes standing on air, and mesmerized by the dizzying shadowy wonders around her, she carries on in song and a faith in a god who protects women even in dark corners of a brutal township. 

That night she sleeps in peace among fighting neighbors, humming hope in her drying bones, a resonance of blessings she feels are coming. And as a stubborn sun rises slowly creeping through a familiarly caked horizon, spreading radiance over the veld-land, a cue for her to wake breezes through nail holes and other cracks in her wooden shed. Morning prayers beckon her to ready her soul for another brace through muck and sour souls making their way to towns and other alternative destinations meant for those who cannot stand the normal. But on this day, fate had mustered a plan for her to encounter what she had long desired; a love where she could feel respected.

Sudden was the stun later that dawn while buying vetkoeks, her crisp black dreadlocks and purple skin glistening, worn with a pride of one who is used to cruel eyes. A young man stood gazing uncompromisingly at her, a cigarette bellowing in his slightly parted lips. Both looking coarse yet electric in the rusty surroundings of fading fences and shabby houses, she proceeded walking to the beat of her brand of pious happiness that belonged not in this dead-land.

She might have lived roughly thirty years, but a darkly frozen exhilaration danced in her pupils, he had thought; and this was envied by many a witch who nursed monstrous failures gained with jukebox love and thrills. She was light, a compelling poise of being, and a black woman standing a couple of feet from the tuck-shop wire-meshed window.

A lunatic bustle of school children buying junk diet delicacies couldn’t get in his way as he resolved to approach MmaMobu, and she could feel the heat of his approach burning through her skin. A second passed in the eternity of vetkoeks being stuffed into a plastic sachet, and she turned slightly eyes cast on the dust; yet he remained mute a sheep in an abattoir. And when her purchase exchanged hands, she left stunned by the cold fear which was now resonating from his every pore.

That afternoon when men were milling around taxi ranks for the last hours of day, many afraid to go home after work; faces evaporating, blurs of self-hating persons – everything became a splitter that pieced his enraged heart. How could he just not speak to her? That was what gnawed his gut the whole day long, slaving underground where two days ago his friend lost his life to a rock-fall. He could not mourn his that day, for he thought he had seen life. Seeing her was close to laying eyes on god before approaching hell – hell if she weren’t to be there in his bilious primitive existence. Was she a figment of meant as his final truth unborn by words?

***

MmaMobu

Mother of soil - her story proverbial and insanely fitting of the times when villages were burned and no cordial sentiments shared. And though it was rumored among the elders that MmaMobu's mother was addicted to eating soil, she found no sign in her reflecting that disdainful habit. A diabolical affiliation which was proving hereditary was her calm silent resolve and unhurried manner, as well her cracked heels. She would mock pregnant women with hilarious observations of new borns every three moons, calling the women of the caravan a harem of baby springs.

For her mischief among girls, their secrets sundered rowdy herd-boys, she was nevertheless an electrifying matchmaker. Many maidens fertile grew bellies each winter turning to MmaMobu for a midwife, and over the years her prophecies fell on no deaf ears as sagely medicine men from far off lands came in hordes for her wisdom with plants.

*

Her face's misfortunes and immortal youth; purple-black skin untouched by neither blade nor fire, eyes like candle-lit caves. He was sweating the deaf night away, waiting for a rooster's crowing to awaken early birds for chore in holes and mansion and other garbage heaps. The toss of her locked hair could banish all his sore regrets of failing in love numerous times, he wished. A holy spell was creeping around him, strange and flaming that made his heart leap for weeks to follow.

*

Dearly she loved him while endless months crept by, wild and new, her spirit forgetting the markings of men's feet on her soul. And by some chance omen, she'd managed to slay many a demon huddled in her bosom, for his sake. But, a shrill secret she held close, quite like the day of her birth, and that was why he often cut deeply and wished her to blind him with truth.