Cion by Zakes Mda Read Free Book Online

the lives and the deaths of the dead for the pleasure of mourning them. My body cries for mourning. It has been quite some time.
    In the living room Ruth is already sitting at the metal table sewing a quilt. She is in a bathrobe and I am wondering if she slept at all. She looks at me tiredly and smiles.
    “No rest for the wicked,” she says.
    “It’s just that my body is used to waking up early.”
    “I’m talking about me,” she says, and offers me coffee.
    “I am fine, ma’am; I am not really one for coffee.”
    “You know something about quilts?” she asks.
    I confess my ignorance. Her eyes brighten as she tells me how her people are a quilting people. For generations and generations before her. Old quilts embody the life of the family. Not only was the batting of some of them made from the clothes that people had worn; but people were made on them—“If you know what I mean,” she adds in that conspiratorial tone—people were born on them, people got sick on them, people died on them. Cycles of loves and losses were enacted on the quilts. The souls of those who are gone rest in the very threads of the quilts.
    Then she walks with the aid of a cane to her bedroom and returns with two very old and dirty-looking quilts.
    “Smell these,” she says.
    It is a peculiar smell. Musty, yes, but also aromatic.
    The two quilts, she says, were made by her great-great-grandmother before the Civil War. One is an Irish Chain—that’s the name of the design. The other one is an African quilt. That also is a design. Or a series of designs. And then she gives me her beaming smile and asks: “Do you know why it’s called an African quilt, you being from Africa and all?” Without waiting for my answer, which would not have been forthcoming in any case because I do not know and none of the patterns look African to my untrained eye, she explains that her African ancestors used these quilts to escape from slavery. She does not elaborate on how quilts could be used to escape from slavery, except to vaguely mention something about following slave trails on the designs.
    The peculiar smell is the smell of history. Like Obed’s sycamores, this pile of worn fabric on Ruth’s metal table is a carrier of memories.
    The story is told by the earthy scent of the quilts.

2
Quiltales
    The story is told that the wizened old woman taught mothers never to love their children. She walked from cabin to cabin dispensing her wisdom. Because her message must be infused through the veins of the earth, the sciolist even makes her walk from plantation to plantation, silent as the air we breathe, without attracting the attention of the owners. Mothers eagerly lapped up her words, for they knew the dire consequences of loving. Those who were weak enough to love in spite of themselves received special lessons on how to cease confusing love with ownership. Invariably they failed to appreciate the fine distinction and ended up regretting that they loved at all. Some women imbibed the lessons so well that they went beyond just not loving their children; they developed a deep hatred for them. They hated them for being the children who could not be loved. If they had had the power they would have strangled them in the womb.
    Sometimes lessons failed and the wizened one resorted to concoctions that she brewed in her cabin. Concoctions that she had learned from those who learned them from the shamans of the old continent, generations before. She gave them to pregnant mothers to harden their hearts so that they would be immune from loving what was growing in their bodies.
    Men could be loved, but with caution. It was that kind of an age. They too could not be possessed by those who were weak enough to love them. Once more, don’t mix things up: love and ownership are two separate notions. They would be here today and gone tomorrow. But there would be others. The auction block would provide. Or a woman may be fortunate enough to find one from the domestic