COVER FEATURE CLIMATE CHANGE | CREATIVE NONFICTION
Provenance
by Sandra Jensen
“W
here are you from?” a man,
a black man, asks me at a
cocktail party. The answer
rolls in my mouth like a rock.
“South Africa,” I say. My voice is bright,
my eyes wide, as if I’m participating in a
private joke that has nothing to do with me
or him.
There’s a second rock. A very large,
very yellow diamond I inherited from my
mother. It’s a heavy, square ring. My mother
designed the setting. The stone sits to one
side, flanked by four little walls of gold. It is
a ’70s ring, ’60s actually, but my mother was
ahead of her time. I never owned a diamond
before and I still don’t know what to do with
this jewel my mother plunged her savings
into so as to remove them from apartheid
South Africa.
As I try to gauge the man’s response (I
detect none, he’s chatting about the drought
in Cape Town), I think of those that mined
the stone. You’ve seen the movie, of course,
Blood Diamond? My father—I’ve told this
story before but perhaps it bears repeating,
like a bad dream—was a sociologist com-
pleting his PhD at the time of our escape
from the country. He studied the effects of
mining upon the miners. The black min-
ers. Did whites mine? Or did they only
order miners about? I don’t actually know.
Anyway, I proudly told people of my father’s
work, assuming he hoped to improve con-
ditions. Years later my mother proclaimedsomething else, something I now cannot
remember the details of—I listened to her
grievances with as much attention as the
slip-sliding of the interior of one of those
very mines—but the import remains clear:
my father viewed the miners as nothing
more than rats in an experiment. I can’t ask
him if this is true because when I was seven
he smashed up a car and his head just days
after celebrating the clear air of a free (free-
er) country.
I didn’t think to ask my mother why she
never sold the diamond and now it’s too late
for questions. I’m told that this four-and-a-
half-carat knuckleduster has excellent clar-
ity but all I can see within are the conflicting
and unverifiable stories of my past. UntilWINE GLASS PHOTO: BILLY HUYNH/UNSPLASHright Cape Town drought, 2018. Photo: 6000.co.za72 W LT SUMMER 2019