The Girl Who Wasn’t in Any Photos

(Nomvula)

Nomvula Dlamini first understood something was wrong with her at seven years old, in a photograph where she did not fully exist. She was standing in the back garden of her grandmother's house in Pinetown, squinting into a sun that had no mercy for anyone. It was Easter Sunday. The whole family had gathered — aunts and uncles and cousins arranged in a loosely shifting crowd that smelled of Sunlight soap and braai smoke and the particular sweetness of amagwinya frying somewhere inside. Everyone had dressed for photographs. That was the thing about Easter in the Dlamini family: you dressed not for church and not for God but for the camera, which was its own kind of god, one that required offerings of pressed collars and vaseline-shined foreheads and freshly plaited hair.

Nomvula's hair had been done the night before by Aunt Nompumelelo, who had sat her between her knees on the kitchen floor and worked in silence, her fingers moving through the tight coils with a comb that caught and pulled and made Nomvula's eyes water. She had not cried. She had learned early that crying about hair was not something that earned you sympathy in the Dlamini household. You simply sat still and breathed and counted the tiles on the floor and waited for it to be over.

The result was two neat rows of flat twists that her aunt had finished with small yellow beads, the kind that clicked against each other when Nomvula turned her head. She had looked at herself in the bathroom mirror that morning and thought she looked all right. Not beautiful — she was careful never to think that word in relation to herself, because the world had spent considerable effort teaching her that it did not apply — but all right. Tidy. Acceptable. The yellow beads were nice.

The photograph was being organised by her uncle Sipho, who always took charge of these things because he owned the best camera. It was a digital camera, expensive, bought on a trip to Durban city centre, and he handled it with a reverence that suggested he was not entirely sure the rest of the family deserved to be near it. He was arranging everyone on the three steps that led down from the back door into the garden, calling people by name, adjusting heights and positions with the casual authority of a man who considers himself the curator of family memory.

"Busi, come stand here. No, not there, here, next to your mother. Lindiwe, you're blocking the light, move left. Sbu, stop pulling your collar. Mama, you sit on the chair, I'll bring a chair. Thandi — Thandi, in front, you can stand in front, yes, right there."

Thandi was eight years old and had her mother's light complexion, the warm honey-brown that people in the family called "lovely" without ever seeming to realise they were making a comparison. She had been placed in front, which was where she was always placed in photographs, and she stood there with the easy unthinking confidence of someone who has never once considered that the front might not be her natural position.

Nomvula stood at the edge of the second step, between her cousin Sibonelo and a potted plant that no one had thought to move. She waited to be called forward, or placed, or named. She waited for uncle Sipho's voice to find her the way it found everyone else.

It did not.

He lifted the camera, looked through the viewfinder and said, "Okay, everybody smile," and the family smiled, and the shutter clicked, and that was the Easter photograph of 2003.

Nomvula was in it. She appeared, if you looked, as a dark shape at the right edge of the frame, slightly cut off, one yellow bead catching the light. You could see perhaps half her face. Her smile — which she had prepared, which she had held ready — was there in profile, directed at a camera that had not quite included her.

She did not say anything. Seven-year-olds in the Dlamini family did not say anything when something was wrong. They learned to file it away in the place where such things were kept, a place that grew larger every year without anyone acknowledging its existence.

***

What Nomvula would come to understand, slowly and then all at once, in the way that understanding tends to arrive when it has been circling for years, was that she was not ugly. This was not, she would one day learn to insist to herself, a matter of ugliness. It was a matter of shade.

She was dark. Not in the way people said "she's dark" meaning she had a difficult personality, though people would say that about her too, later, when she grew into a quietness that the family found unsettling. She was dark in the way that is simply a fact of melanin and light and the genetic lottery of ancestry — her skin was a deep, true brown, the colour of the earth in the garden after rain, the colour of the bark of the umthi omkhulu at the back of her grandmother's property, rich and deep and, in a world with different values, completely beautiful.

But the world had particular values, and the Dlamini family, like most families, had absorbed them without examination. Dark was not said to be ugly, exactly. It was simply passed over. It was not placed in the front of photographs. It was not called forward by name. It was not described as "lovely" or "striking" or any of the words that accumulated around lighter skin like blessings.

Dark was left at the edges, half in frame, one yellow bead catching the light.

***

The house where Nomvula grew up was in Umlazi, in a neighbourhood where the streets ran in unpredictable directions and the houses were pressed close together and everyone knew everyone's business whether they wanted to or not. Her mother, Zodwa, had grown up in this same house before her, and Zodwa's mother before her, and the walls held a century of accumulated life: the marks where children had measured their heights in pencil on the kitchen doorframe, the particular creak of the third stair that no one had ever fixed, the smell of Cobra floor polish and yesterday's phutu that had soaked into the plaster so deeply it had become part of the structure itself.

Zodwa Dlamini was a woman of great practical competence and very little sentimentality. She worked as a supervisor at a clothing factory in the industrial area and she came home tired in the evenings and cooked and cleaned and made sure that Nomvula and her older sister Zanele had what they needed for school. She was not a cold woman. She loved her children. But love, in Zodwa's understanding, was demonstrated through provision — through the school uniform washed and ironed on Sunday nights, through the birthday cake bought from the Spar even when money was short, through the way she pushed Nomvula's schoolbooks across the kitchen table on evenings when she herself was exhausted and said, "Come, show me what you're doing, let's check it."

What Zodwa did not do, or could not do, or had never been taught to do, was to say the thing directly. To say: I see what is happening to you. I see how they look at you and how they don't look at you. I see you standing at the edge of the photograph. I see you and you are entirely worth seeing.

Perhaps she could not say it because no one had ever said it to her. Perhaps it was because she had her own relationship with shade and its meanings, having married Nomvula's father — a dark man, a good man, now gone — in the teeth of her own family's quiet disapproval. Perhaps the wound in Zodwa was too old and too unexamined to become language.

Or perhaps she simply did not see it, because when you have swallowed something whole and it has become part of you, you stop being able to taste it.

***

Nomvula's sister Zanele was four years older and lighter by several shades — light enough to belong firmly on the "lovely" side of the family's unspoken accounting. Zanele was not unkind. She was simply oblivious, in the way that people who have never been passed over find it genuinely difficult to imagine what being passed over feels like. She grew up assuming the family's warmth was simply warmth, not warmth selectively distributed, and because she was immersed in it she could not see its shape.

Nomvula watched her sister with a complicated love that she could not have named as a child and could barely name as an adult — a love that contained within it the exhaustion of being compared to someone who did not know she was being compared, who would have been horrified and defensive if she had known, and who therefore could not be asked to carry any of the weight.

She watched Zanele be called beautiful and she felt not jealousy, exactly, but something more like grief. Because she did not want Zanele to be less called beautiful. She wanted to be also called beautiful. She wanted there to be enough of that word for both of them. She had not yet learned that some families operate the word like a finite resource, to be hoarded by those who most resemble a particular idea.

***

The cousin who saw it — who saw her — was Thandi Mthembu.

Thandi was technically her cousin through Zodwa's side of the family, the daughter of Zodwa's younger sister Nozipho, and she lived forty minutes away in Queensburgh in a slightly larger house with a garden that had a lemon tree and a dog named Biscuit who bit everyone except Thandi. They had grown up spending school holidays and Easter weekends and the occasional long weekend together, two girls orbiting each other in the way of children who have been told they are cousins and have simply accepted this as the natural condition of the world.

Thandi was bright and loud in the way a kettle is loud — there was always something building in her, always some opinion on the verge of being announced. She had a laugh that arrived before the joke and stayed after it, and she had her mother's light complexion and her father's broad face and a quality that Nomvula thought of privately as ease: a fundamental ease with the world that Nomvula had spent her whole life trying to understand.

But Thandi also had something that ease alone could not account for. She had attention. Not the careless attention that people paid to pretty things — she had attention in the way a good reader has attention, a willingness to look at something until you actually see it, to follow a thread until you find what it connects to.

And what Thandi had seen, in the years of watching Nomvula and watching the family watch Nomvula, was a story that no one was telling aloud. A story that lived in the space between what was said and what was done, in the edge of the frame where the yellow bead caught the light.

She had not yet found the words for it. Neither of them had.

But the story was there, waiting.