DISCOVERIES

DON’T LET’S GO TO THE DOGS TONIGHT: An African Childhood, By Alexandra Fuller, Random House: 256 pp., $24.95

You will not recognize the Africa in this memoir of an English girl growing up in Rhodesia and the renamed nation it became, Zimbabwe. It is not Hemingway’s Africa or Beryl Markham’s Africa or Isak Dinesen’s Africa. “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” is not a sentimental memoir, though sometimes a reader begs for sentiment. Alexandra Fuller tells the story of a white family on the run from Africa’s independence: growing tobacco in Rhodesia until Mugabe is elected in 1979 and their farm is taken; moving to manage a 750,000-acre cattle ranch in Zimbabwe until it is clear they are not wanted there. “How can we,” Fuller asks, “who shed our ancestry the way a snake sheds skin in winter, hope to win against this history? We mazungus. We white Africans of shrugged-off English, Scottish, Dutch origin.” Fuller’s mother is a hard-drinking, horse-breaking woman with more losses than gains since she came to Africa with her husband and two daughters in 1971.

Alexandra, born in England in 1969 and brought to what was then called Rhodesia when she was 2, inherited her mother’s molten core and iron exterior. Of five children, only two, Alexandra and her older sister, Vanessa, survived. In 1978, at age 9, Alexandra is left in a store in a town to care for her baby sister, Olivia, then 2. Olivia wanders off and drowns in a nearby pond. “My life is sliced in half,” Fuller writes, before Olivia died when the family was happy and after, when Fuller’s mother begins to drink herself into madness. These are children who know how to shoot and kill. Their father is steady, brave and softer-hearted than their mom. The land is not described in grandiose terms but sensually, the way a child would perceive its hot and cold, its smells and immediate dangers. There aren’t many whys: why we came, why this happened, why we survived, why I love Africa. It just is.

*

BREAK ANY WOMAN DOWN: Stories, By Dana Johnson,

University of Georgia: 158 pp., $19.95

“Why don’t you come and sit with me for a spell, keep me company? That’s right. Right c’here on the porch with me. It’s evenings like this I get to thinking bout things,” says the old lady in a housedress to the reader in “Mouthful of Sorrow,” one of many voices in these rich stories by Dana Johnson. The voice in “Melvin in the Sixth Grade” is an 11-year-old black girl whose parents’ move to the suburbs of L.A. pitched her headlong into a virtually all-white school. “I ain’t stuttin’ these white foks,” her older brother says when she asks him if it doesn’t feel funny to go to school there. By stuttin’, he means studying, using a word his parents and grandparents have always used, but, already, he sounds strange and foreign to his sister. “Three Ladies Sipping Tea in a Persian Garden” is a stunning story, reminiscent of Gloria Naylor, about three women resting from love troubles, drinking tea, discussing men and babies and hair, a story in which happiness is so close, the narrator can almost grab it. “Break Any Woman Down” is the story of a young black stripper who falls in love with a white male porn actor, a story in which the divisions between men and women are absolute and promise generations of constant striving for love. You can hear Johnson’s voices ringing long after you put the stories down; you feel purged and rested and in the company of friends, not strangers. No character could stay a stranger long in this writer’s hands.

*

RED DUST, By Gillian Slovo, W.W. Norton: 340 pp., $25.95

“You don’t know what it is to wait for your son’s return,” James Sizela, black headmaster of a school in a small town in South Africa, says to the lawyer who wants to help him find his son’s body and bring the murderers to justice. Gillian Slovo does. The daughter of Ruth First and Joe Slovo, white anti-apartheid activists, Gillian attended the hearing of her mother’s murderers before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and her novel, “Red Dust,” bears this burden. The year is 1999. Sizela’s attorney, Sarah Bacant who is white, left South Africa 14 years earlier, the year that Sizela’s son disappeared. She went to Harvard and then became a prosecutor in New York. Her mentor and professor, Ben, calls her from South Africa and asks her to take the case. When she arrives, they argue about the value of the Truth Commission.

Yet while doing justice to the raw complication of apartheid’s aftermath, Slovo falters. Her characters lack the depth, dimension and moment of the historic circumstances they are set in. In Slovo’s hands, the guilty are sometimes more interesting than the righteous, but in the end, the truth is more powerful than the law.