The Reading Circle Under the Jacaranda Needed Somewhere to Sit

The Ground Was Always Wet

For the first year, the children sat on the ground.

They sat on flattened cardboard boxes and old feed sacks and, when it had rained, on nothing at all, because the cardboard went soft and the sacks smelled. They sat cross-legged under the big jacaranda on the corner of my street in Soshanguve, on Saturday mornings from nine until eleven, and I sat in front of them on an upturned paint tin and read aloud.

I taught Grade Three for thirty-four years. When I retired, I lasted exactly four months at home before my husband, Thabang, told me I was driving him mad. I rearranged the kitchen twice. I started correcting the grammar on the radio. One morning he came home from the shops and found me reading aloud to the neighbour's dog.

"Go and find some children," he said. "Please."

The First Saturday

On the first Saturday, three children came. They were the grandchildren of my neighbour, Mma Sello, and I think she sent them mainly to get them out of the house. I had a bag of picture books I had collected from my classroom over the years, some of them so old the spines had gone, and a flask of rooibos for myself.

I read them a story about a hare who tricks a lion. They laughed in the right places. One of them, a little girl called Kamogelo, asked if she could take the book home. I said yes, and she brought it back the following Saturday with a small brother in tow.

By the end of the first month, there were eleven children. By the end of the first winter, there were twenty-something on a good morning. They came from three streets away. Some of them came alone, some with older siblings who pretended they were only there to supervise and then sat at the back listening with their mouths open.

And they all sat on the ground.

Why the Ground Mattered

I did not think about it at first. Children sit on the ground. I sat on the ground as a child, under a different tree in a different township, while my grandmother told stories by firelight.

But Kamogelo's mother stopped me in the street one day in July and said, a little shyly, that Kamogelo had come home with mud all over her school skirt, the only skirt she had that was clean for Monday. Another mother said her son's chest was bad and she was nervous about him sitting on the cold ground in the winter mornings. A grandfather asked, quite reasonably, whether the older people who had started drifting over to listen could have somewhere to sit, because his knees were not what they once were.

I realised I had been asking children to concentrate on stories while they were cold and damp and uncomfortable. In thirty-four years of teaching, I would never have accepted a classroom like that.

Counting Chairs at the Kitchen Table

Thabang and I sat at the kitchen table one Sunday evening with a pen and paper.

We worked out that on a full Saturday we had about twenty-five children and perhaps eight adults. We worked out what we had saved from my pension that was not spoken for, which was not much. We worked out that we could not afford anything fancy and that whatever we bought had to survive being carried in and out of our garage every week, rained on, sat on by small boys who could not keep still, and probably stood on.

Thabang said what we needed was plain and simple: a plastic chair that would stack and wipe clean and not blow over in the wind. I said what we needed was thirty of them. He went quiet and did more sums.

That evening I went looking online at plastic chairs for sale and read about sizes and stacking and how much weight they would hold, the way I used to research a new reading programme before term started. I am not a person who buys anything quickly. I made a list. I crossed things off. I made another list.

The Church Women

In the end, it was not only us.

I mentioned the problem, almost in passing, at my women's prayer group at church. I said the reading circle had outgrown the ground and that Thabang and I were saving for chairs. I did not ask for anything. I would never have asked.

The following Sunday, the group's treasurer, a formidable woman named Mma Maphanga who had been my colleague at school for twenty years, handed me an envelope. Inside was money the group had collected from their own purses. Not a fortune. But it was enough, with what Thabang and I had saved, to buy thirty chairs.

I cried in the church car park. Mma Maphanga told me to stop being dramatic and to make sure the children read something with a moral in it.

The Morning the Chairs Arrived

The chairs arrived on a Friday afternoon, stacked in tall white columns. Thabang and three boys from the street carried them into our garage. The boys sat on every single one to test it. One of them stood on one and jumped, and it held, and I pretended to be angry and was secretly delighted.

On Saturday morning, the children arrived at the jacaranda and found thirty white chairs set out in a half circle in the shade.

I will never forget their faces. Kamogelo walked slowly along the row as if it were a museum. A small boy named Tumi sat down, stood up, sat down again, and asked me if he was allowed to keep the one he was sitting on. The grandfather with the bad knees lowered himself into a chair at the back and said, loudly, "Now this is civilisation."

I read them a story about a girl who walks a very long way to find a library. I chose it on purpose.

What Changed

Things changed in ways I had not expected.

The children concentrated for longer. I could read a whole chapter book instead of a picture book. They stopped wriggling and started asking questions. The older children started bringing the younger ones and reading aloud to them themselves, in pairs, while I moved between the chairs listening, exactly as I used to in my classroom.

The adults came more often too. Mothers who had been dropping children off stayed to listen. Two of the grandmothers asked me, quietly, if I could help them with their own reading, which they had never had the chance to learn properly. We meet on Wednesday afternoons now, just the three of us, around my kitchen table.

A Wedding Under the Same Tree

Last December, one of my former Grade Three pupils, a young woman named Dineo who is now a nurse, got married. She wanted a small ceremony under the same jacaranda, because she said she remembered me reading there to her little sister.

Her family hired elegant tiffany chairs for the guests, with white cushions and ribbons on the backs. They looked so beautiful set out under the purple blossom that I had to sit down. And at the back, behind the rows of fancy chairs, Thabang quietly set out our thirty plain white ones for the neighbours and the children who had come to watch.

Dineo asked me to read a short poem during the ceremony. I stood in front of the guests, where I stand every Saturday, and read it aloud, and looked out over the elegant chairs and the plain ones together, and thought that a place becomes a gathering place the moment people have somewhere to sit.

The children are back every Saturday. The chairs are a little scuffed now. Tumi still sits in the same one. He says it is his.