Mommy ✓

six

I was doing well in the new school, we had started with writing in cursive and memorising our nine timestable and I did well in all of our weekly tests.

I spent all of my breaks alone while the other children played games with each other. I longed to join them but I was far too shy and therefore kept to myself.

One day, for our P.E period we'd been given an opportunity to play indigenous games and it would count for our term assessment. All of the white children –  boys and girls alike got together and played hopscotch – but I had no desire to play with them.

The black boys played soccer with a makeshift ball made of plastic bags and leaves rolled into one another and that counted as their indigenous game. I wanted to play legusha with the black girls. I'd seen them playing it during break and I'd always wanted to join them and that was my opportunity.

There were nine black girls there, plus two coloured girls. I knew all of their names because I was a very introspective person. I'd done nothing but study them in class, sniffing out their personalities from the little snippets I saw in class.

Most of them were very intimidating – they could be quite mean and spoke in their languages whenever interacted in class. It made it very hard for me to feel comfortable enough to make friends with them.

“Can I play with you guys?” I asked.

“Okay, you will fila” Portia told me.

She was twice my size and had the sharpest tongue out of everyone in class. She was one of the biggest trouble makers in our grade. Mrs Schoeman had told her so one day when she'd failed to do her homework and had back chatted to her.

I'd never seen our teacher as angry as I had that day. It was so scary. If Portia could make a grown woman so angry that she cried and screamed, there was no telling what she'd do to the likes of me.

It was a hot day and all of us were scorching under the heavy material grey dungarees we wore with the school's royal blue pullovers. The socks were thick too, so I could feel the sweat gathering in my in between my toes as I shuffled to the legusha.

Palesa was already standing on the other side, with the legusha hacked around her ankles. I stood on the opposite end and pulled the thin material up to my ankles as well and stood still as the game progressed.

Rethabile was the first person to make a mistake so she had to swap with Palesa and fila while Palesa got a chance to play. It wasn't long until another girl, Lethabo, made a mistake too and I got a chance to play. I'd never played legusha before, but I'd observed enough in the past twenty minutes of the game to understand what to do.

Legusha was a game that was played when an old pantyhose was cut into one thin, long line where two ends would be tied together to make a large ribbon. Two people would stand at the opposite ends and hack it around their legs to create a circle-like thing. All of the other members would have to take turns jumping into the middle of the circle, then jumping over to the other side, then crossing the two lines together using only their feet. The game would progress as the two members pulled the material higher up their bodies.

This game needed some serious leg skills, you had to be able to jump over the thread, that was purposely cut into a thin line so that the higher it went, the harder it was to see. It was like it blended into the atmosphere and the heat did little to help with that. The material was also flimsy because it required skill not to snap it in half.

When I played, the thread was already hiked up to Rethabile and Lethabo's waists. I wasn't good with my feet but I managed to jump high enough to land in the middle of the legusha.