Tokoloshe by Jean Hey
My nanny Ester leads me to the servants’ quarters that lies in a sunless stretch behind our big house. It is damp back there, shaded by trees and a bamboo hedge, and smells of rotting leaves. My small, pale hand feels safe folded against Ester’s brown skin, rough from washing and scrubbing. She says she has something in her room for my cold and sore throat. I have never been inside her room and when she opens the door, I notice how tidy it is, and sparse, and that the faded bedspread is identical to the one my mother used to tuck under my chin at night. But her bed is not like my bed. Hers sits as high as my chest and I see that the legs stand on bricks.
“That is for Tokoloshe,” Ester says when I ask.
I’ve heard the name before. He might be famous in South Africa, but I’m not sure.
He is a fat little man, Ester says, who comes at night. A bad spirit with short legs. He cannot reach her if there are bricks.
“What if he does reach you?”
“Then I will get sick, and maybe die.”
My feet dangle off her bed as Ester scoops Vicks VapoRub from a tub and smears it on my chest and tucks a little goop into each of my nostrils. My eyes water as she murmurs Zulu words that click and roll like the hush of lapping sea. Usually her voice soothes me, but today I squeeze the familiar bedspread, braced against a fresh fear: my bed does not have bricks.
Ester says I must not worry, that Tokoloshe is only for Black people.
“Zulu nonsense,” my mother says when I ask at bedtime about the bricks, and when that doesn’t reassure me, she places one-eyed Teddy next to me on the pillow, his mangy body soft yet sturdy against my cheek.
My eyelids dip as I relax against him, unaware at five that Tokoloshe comes in many guises and spans many continents, and neither bricks nor bedfellows can keep him at bay. It will be years before I realize that the only bear that can protect me is the one inside — a fickle creature that needs constant nurturing, but whom with each decade grows a little more settled in his tiny lair.
Artist’s Statement
Having grown up in apartheid South Africa, writing is the one thing that helps me excavate uncomfortable memories and probe their fault-lines, knowing that in the cracks new truths can shine through.
Jean Hey’s essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Plain Dealer, The Chicago Tribune, Solstice Magazine, The MacGuffin, Arrowsmith Journal and Abandon Journal. She holds a dual-genre MFA in fiction and nonfiction from Bennington College and recently completed a collection of essays about immigration and race.