Inyanga's Star and Other Constellations

If Inyanga Gets In - Flash Back in Time

Two years earlier.

"Umama, I can't go to school looking like this."

Inyanga had placed herself in front of the mirror at the first hint of first light on the first day of her final year of primary, and the face that met hers belonged to . . . not just a stranger, but a phantom.

A ghost, a shaitan, a shade.

The colorless pre-dawn rays that penetrated the nimbus curtain before the sun had fully crested the horizon backlit her reflection, uncloaked the bedroom's shadows, and unveiled her skin to reveal how it had been robbed of its color. She was gray all over. Like the poor she sometimes saw begging for spare solidae downtown, grayscale. Inyanga's entirety was black, white, and gray. Multitudinous shades of shade.

The sobbing voice from Inyanga's throat was an unfamiliar guest in her bedroom.

Much went unsaid, her throat swelling and tight from the tears. How many women, working how many years, does it take to send one girl to magician's college?

Two women, and four centuries, and even then must they give up more?

Even after hundreds of years working non-magical jobs, when Amandla and her daughter Kyuma are within sight of paying the price for Inyanga, Kyuma's daughter, to attend, they must sacrifice more.

Her hair's coils were now monochrome like ink in a well, her skin stony like waterpaints. Gone were the golden undertones in her cheeks, and the indigo brown in her eyes. She looked like a grayscale picture printout of herself, moving and lifelike, but ultimately a copy of something.

"I can't go today."

Kyuma, the woman who had brought Inyanga into this world, appeared behind her in the mirror with a grayscale body of her own.

"Inyanga, I have never heard you cry so, and why you would start now, when you are closest to becoming a grown woman, I can't understand. You didn't cry like this when you were a child."

Kyuma, an immortal, didn't look more than a year older than her daughter, and yesterday her round face had held red clay undertones, and her hair had been bronze occasionally highlighted with strips of sun rays.

Now Kyuma too was absent of any tincture, a breathing, moving shadow. "You can go, and you must start today."

"How can I? How can I do well in school like this? How can I study? How can I listen to the instruction? All the others will know we're poor."

One of Kyuma's skin and bone hands, the color of spilled ink diluted as it runs along on a white page, went to Inyanga's right shoulder, and then came Amandla's hand, larger, plumper, on her left. Grandmama Amandla, too, bore the fresh face of adolescence, and her entire person, too, was robbed of hue.

"Two things, maybe three," said Grandmama Amandla. "First, they already know we are poor. They have known since your first day. Second, you will be surprised to find you're not alone."

"That's right," said Kyuma. "You won't be the only one giving up spell subscriptions to save on magicians college tuition. Others, too, will give up their beauty to save a few solidae."

"Beauty?" Inyanga turned in her seat, the better to talk to her parens. "I don't care about that. I'm not vain, I don't need that. But this is — something else, something beyond what I can tolerate. I don't need to be beautiful to do well in school, to focus on my studies — but I do need to be myself. And this—" she threw an angry palm toward the mirror as if casting a handful of dust at it, "this is not myself."

Grandmama Amandla said something about shame, and something about Inyanga being beautiful inside and out, but the girl was not hearing any of it.

Kyuma said something about shame. Something about not being ashamed. Inyanga wasn't hearing any of it.