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in every way. If he wanted a woman to bow to him, there were plenty of girls back in Tzaneen
being raised solely for that purpose. The way my mother always explained it, the traditional
man wants a woman to be subservient, but he never falls in love with subservient women.
He’s attracted to independent women. “He’s like an exotic bird collector,” she said. “He only
wants a woman who is free because his dream is to put her in a cage.”
—
When we first met Abel, he smoked a lot of weed. He drank, too, but it was mostly weed.
Looking back, I almost miss his pothead days because the weed mellowed him out. He’d
smoke, chill, watch TV, and fall asleep. I think subconsciously it was something he knew he
needed to do to take the edge off his anger. He stopped smoking after he and my mom got
married. She made him stop for religious reasons—the body is a temple and so on. But what
none of us saw coming was that when he stopped smoking weed he just replaced it with
alcohol. He started drinking more and more. He never came home from work sober. An
average day was a six-pack of beer after work. Weeknights he’d have a buzz on. Some Fridays
and Saturdays he just didn’t come home.
When Abel drank, his eyes would go red, bloodshot. That was the clue I learned to read. I
always thought of Abel as a cobra: calm, perfectly still, then explosive. There was no ranting
and raving, no clenched fists. He’d be very quiet, and then out of nowhere the violence would
come. The eyes were my only clue to stay away. His eyes were everything. They were the eyes
of the Devil.
Late one night we woke up to a house filled with smoke. Abel hadn’t come home by the
time we’d gone to bed, and I’d fallen asleep in my mother’s room with her and Andrew, who
was still a baby. I jerked awake to her shaking me and screaming. “Trevor! Trevor!” There
was smoke everywhere. We thought the house was burning down.
My mom ran down the hallway to the kitchen, where she discovered the kitchen on fire.
Abel had driven home drunk, blind drunk, drunker than we’d ever seen him before. He’d been
hungry, tried to heat up some food on the stove, and passed out on the couch while it was
cooking. The pot had burned itself out and burned up the kitchen wall behind the stove, and
smoke was billowing everywhere. She turned off the stove and opened the doors and the
windows to try to air the place out. Then she went over to the couch and woke him up and
started berating him for nearly burning the house down. He was too drunk to care.
She came back into the bedroom, picked up the phone, and called my grandmother. She
started going on and on about Abel and his drinking. “This man, he’s going to kill us one day.
He almost burnt the house down…”
Abel walked into the bedroom, very calm, very quiet. His eyes were blood red, his eyelids
heavy. He put his finger on the cradle and hung up the call. My mom lost it.
“How dare you! Don’t you hang up my phone call! What do you think you’re doing?!”
“You don’t tell people what’s happening in this house,” he said.
“Oh, please! You’re worried about what the world is thinking? Worry about this world!
Worry about what your family is thinking!”
Abel towered over my mother. He didn’t raise his voice, didn’t get angry.
“Mbuyi,” he said softly, “you don’t respect me.”