Helen Oyeyemi - White Is for Witching

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There were protestors outside the Immigration Removal Centre. Miranda and Sade walked into a bristle of placards that tilted as people moved to let them through. “What’s the matter, what’s happening?” Miranda asked. She didn’t notice how tightly she was clutching Sade’s arm until Sade gently removed her hand. They were surrounded by grim faces and black print.

“Another inmate hung themselves.” It was a wiry woman that had spoken; her sleeves were pushed elbow high. “No social visits today.”

Sade made a short, low keening sound that seemed not to come from her mouth.

It was strange on the Western Heights, you could see both town and sea, one seeming to hold the other back with its split brick and glass. On the Heights you were high and not at all secure, you felt as if you could fall at any moment, and that gave the stones and water a vitality of colour — if these things were to be the last you saw while falling, then they belonged to you.

Miranda had known the address of the detention centre before she had come, she knew that the place was called The Citadel, but she had forgotten that it actually looked like a citadel. She had reimagined the building as white and similar to a hospital. But now she understood that that would have been silly. A building of this size would not blend on the Western Heights if it was

white

was a colour that Anna Good was afraid to wear. Her fear reflected her feeling that she was not clean. She had, of course, been baptised in white. As a child she had been buttoned into frilly white pinafores and had subsequently been too frightened to move. At school, her gymnastics class had been filmed for a programme on British sports and pastimes, and she’d been picked to wear a bronze-coloured helmet and a white gown and a blue sash and sit at the top of a chariot built of the other girls’ bodies. She was Britannia, and her shield was a round tea tray covered with coloured crepe and ribbon. There was no lion, but some of the girls dug their fingernails into her thighs, and it was just like being bitten. She had still smiled, though, and waved her arms at the camera. Britannia had to have pluck. Anna never thought she would have a granddaughter who didn’t know what Britannia meant; Lily said that patriotism was embarrassing and dangerous. Who gave you your mind? Anna would wonder, when Lily said such things. She couldn’t believe her ears. How had Britannia become embarrassing and dangerous? It was the incomers. They had twisted it so that anything they were not part of was bad.

When Anna met Andrew she was wearing a cream-coloured dress, the material having been the cheapest she’d seen on sale and easily slid beneath the needle of her sewing machine. Anna smoothed the cloth of her dress over her lap as he, Andrew, walked past the desk she shared with Alice Williams at the newspaper office. Andrew was on his way to see the editor; you could tell he was someone important because of the way he wasn’t afraid to be caught looking at whatever interested him. He stopped and nodded at Liz Welles, who had a little band of scarlet ribbon fixed around a spare scroll on her typewriter. Was it a charm to help her type faster, he wanted to know. His smile was charming, but very dark somehow. Liz laughed shyly and said she didn’t know, her daughter had made it.

“He’s stinking rich, that Andrew Silver,” Alice Williams whispered to Anna. “From an American merchant family, but they had him schooled over here and he’s almost English. Isn’t he handsome? It’s just him in that big house on Barton Road.”

“Stow it, will you, he’s coming,” Anna muttered desperately, smiling hard at her typewriter as he passed.

His manners were strange. He didn’t speak to her, but he looked at her for longer than was polite, and she knew that they had met now, that everything real that had ever been going to happen to her would happen now. She inspected the entire front of her dress once he was gone, convinced that some vast stain had left her and entered the cloth. It was summer. She was sweating slightly, but that was all.

White is for witching, a colour to be worn so that all other colours can enter you, so that you may use them. At a pinch, cream will do.

Four years later Anna Good put the cream dress on again, and an expensive white coat that Andrew had bought her, and she did some witching.

Andrew Silver was a Dover Queensman, one of the “buffs,” as they were called, a brave man in brown who flew a plane to Africa to fight the Germans there. One morning someone knocked on my door and gave Anna a telegram, which said that her husband was dead. She looked at it and then she wandered up and down my staircases, in and out of my rooms, flinching, hearing bombs far away. I curved myself into a deep cup, a safe container for her. I did not let her take any harm to herself, I did not let her open the attic window to jump. I was like a child with its mouth obstinately closed, refusing speech, refusing air. She had bought some rat poison the week before, and though she did not turn to that, I shook the pellets so that they fell deep into my recesses. Just in case. She was pregnant, you see. It was two Silvers at stake. My poor Anna Good, my good lady.

“They killed him,” she wept. I could not respond. Her fear of her pica and the whispers and her fear of shrapnel and fire and, yes, her fear of me, of being left all alone in a big silent house. Her fear had crept out from the whites of her eyes and woven itself into my brick until I came to strength, until I became aware. I could keep Anna Good from killing herself and her child, but I had no other gift.

“I hate them,” she said. She sat down on the kitchen floor, the telegram rumpled on her lap. A rat scampered past her, putting its feet on her white coat. Her hair fell from its pins. She was supposed to go to the newspaper office and type, but she would not that day. Instead she gave me my task.

“I hate them,” she said. “Blackies, Germans, killers, dirty… dirty killers. He should have stayed here with me. Shouldn’t have let him leave. Bring him back, bring him back, bring him back to me.” She spoke from that part of her that was older than her. The part of her that will always tie me to her, to her daughter Jennifer, to Jennifer’s stubborn daughter Lily, to Lily’s even more stubborn daughter Miranda. I can only be as good as they are. We are on the inside, and we have to stay together, and we absolutely cannot have anyone else. It’s Luc that keeps letting people in. To keep himself company, probably, because he knows he is not welcome (if he doesn’t know this he is very stupid). They shouldn’t be allowed in though, those others, so eventually I make them leave.

•

Since GrandAnna’s washing machine was there, the ration-book larder became a mini-laundry, washing powder scattered over its tiles, its shelves stocked with small piles of clothes. If you were a guest and had booked in for three days or more, you got your clothes washed, dried and delivered back to you for free. “Just human kindness,” Luc said. The clothes on the shelf were sorted according to whether they had been washed but not dried, or whether they had been both washed and dried and were ready to be returned to their owners. There were no tags or coloured dividers; Miranda had no idea how Sade managed to keep track, but she did it effortlessly.

From her place by the door, where she sat with her course-work notes spread over her knees, Miranda watched as Sade picked up a pair of Eliot’s jeans and laid them over the ironing board. “Please, you mustn’t iron Eliot’s denim, he hates it.”

Sade looked up from the ironing board with eyes like liquidized stars.

“Are you — are you alright?” Miranda stammered.

Sade seemed to laugh; at least, her shoulders shook.