The Barefoot Woman by Scholastique Mukasonga & Jordan Stump

Author:Scholastique Mukasonga & Jordan Stump
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2018-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

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Imagine my surprise, on entering the School of Social Work in Butare, to find that the students got bread with their breakfast. So there was such a thing as the daily bread we prayed God to give us! So the Fathers hadn’t been lying! How I regret having so soon been driven from that school in Butare, the only haven of freedom I knew in my youth! Never again do I want to see the image of my Hutu friends, boys from the public school, coming after me to kill me, me and my Tutsi schoolmates…But I’ve already written about that…I spent the week before vacation conscientiously saving up my shares of bread so I could take them home to Stefania. On the day of our return to Nyamata, I had six loaves to put in my suitcase. I laid them in at the very bottom, under my pleated blue skirt and pink dress. It was Candida who gave me that dress, which she herself got from her big sister after much begging and blackmail. The pleated blue skirt I’d bought at the second-hand clothes stall in Kigali, with the money I’d made from my banana trees. Mama assigned each of her children a little garden plot, and the earnings from the harvest were our pocket money. That blue pleated skirt was like a dream. I’d seen one exactly like it on the Minister of Women’s Affairs when she came to visit Notre-Dame-de-Cîteaux. She’d graduated from the School of Social Work, and one day I would study there myself, maybe I’d become a minister, so I needed a minister’s skirt! That skirt cost me fifteen Rwandan francs, I think – probably less than a euro. I almost forgot: there was also a t-shirt with a drawing of a big-eared mouse. Only much later did someone tell me his name was Mickey. I’m not sure it was meant to be worn with the minister’s skirt. I couldn’t wait to get home and give Mama those six loaves of bread.

I never saw Stefania eat one of my loaves of bread. She took them from me like precious treasures, as carefully and reverently as the priest picked up the blessed host, and stored them away in the little suitcase her oldest daughter Judith had brought back to her from the capital along with a white nylon t-shirt like the one only the schoolteacher Patricia could afford. Glowing with joy, she told me, “This will be for the children.”

And the children of Gitagata heard Stefania had bread…They would come first thing in the morning. And Mama told them: “Come, children, come and sit down next to me.” She ran to her little suitcase and took out a loaf, often white with mold. “It’s Moses’s beard!” the children who went to catechism would laugh. Stefania brushed away the beard and handed around the bread. The white was streaked with dull green, which did nothing to spoil the children’s excitement and gratitude. “Now,” said Stefania, “it’s time for school.

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