A longish story, Sorry.
As I was headed into town on the bus one friday morning, I was gazing out the window, and we drove past a long board laying beside the road. It looked like a piece of 1×8, about 8 feet long, just laying there, calling out to me, so I leaped to my feet, and said “Stop! Stop!’ to the conductor and the bus driver. He stopped, and I jumped off and ran back, and picked up the board, and threw it atop the bus where they put the big things that people were transporting. Like sacks of potatoes, or 50kg bags of ground white maize, or a goat with its feet tied together. The board had dried mud on it, but it looked fairly straight, and a nice piece of wood like that was not a thing to be wasted by a woodworking teacher. When we got into town, I lugged it up the hill to the Technical College where I stayed sometimes while in town. Later I cleaned it off, and ran it thru the planer there, and it turned out to be a beautiful piece of Eucalyptus Gum wood, with a nice grain pattern. On Sunday, when I returned to my school, I took it with me.
My highest level woodworking class had reached a point, where this term, they could draw whatever they wanted to make, and once I approved their drawing, I would issue wood, and they could make what they had drawn. As always, I also made a project with every class, and would put it up front on the day projects were due, and it would be included in the general discussion that we had as a class, about each project that was made. And I had that nice piece of Eucalyptus to make something out of.
The class submitted their drawings, and were all busy getting their projects going. I had decided to make the board into a Jewelry Box. I had never made one before, but I had some ideas, and I got started cutting out pieces. I always encouraged the boys to take time now and then, and walk around and look at what the other students were making, and they came by my bench as well, and looked at my project. I made a simple rectangular box, about 4″ by 8″, that was 4″ tall. With a lid.
A week into the project, I was walking the 7 km down the road to the muddy river with my 25 liter jug balanced on my head, to fetch me a jug of water to bathe with. The roads by my school were called “all weather” roads, and were just dirt roads that they ran a scraper machine down about 3 times a year, and the sides were a small berm of what the scraper scraped off and left along the way. They had just scraped the roads flat a week before. I caught something glinting, and put my jug down, and went over and dug the glinting thing out of the berm. It turned out to be a small 5″x6″ piece of malleable brass plate. No idea what it came from, but I pocketed it, and went to the river to fill my jug. On the way back, with my jug full of muddy water, just as I got near the school again, I saw something else in the berm, and when I unearthed it, it was a piece of broken mirror, which I also kept and carried back to my woodshop. The mirror was bigger than the lid of my soon to be jewelry box, and if I could find a way to cut it square, I could put it in the lid of the box. Good find.
The next weekend I went into town, and to the hardware store, which sounds like more than it really was, but they did not have a glass cutter. They could order one from Johannesburg, and it would be there in two weeks. Um, no. The projects were due in two weeks. But while I was there, rooting around in boxes shoved under the shelves of hardware, I actually found a small carded item that was a small decorative brass hasp and padlock,and two small hinges, just the right size for my jewelry box. Just like the ones you could find in Home Depot in the States. On the way to the bus rank to go home, I walked by the sewing store, and they were having a sale on black felt material. I bought a square of that. My jewelry box was going to come out nice.
I got back to my school, and during the week, I sanded my box smooth, and glued the black felt inside, and put on the hinges and the hasp and padlock. Eucalyptus is a pinkish wood when not stained or varnished, and not all that attractive in its raw form. But the little box looked fancy. I really wanted to have one of those little trays inside, that when you open the lid, it rises up and back, for putting small things in. And I built a little tray with dividers, and lined it with black felt too. It took me a whole evening working with popsicle sticks and thumb tacks, to figure out what the articulated hinges would look like, that would lift the tray with the lid, and have it move back, to make access to the bottom of the box. Lots of trial and error, but finally I had the basic idea. I took the brass plate, and with a broken hacksaw blade and a rusty file, managed to cut out the pieces I would need for the mechanism. I used my pocket knife to bore some holes for hinge pins, and made them out of some finishing nails, and with some adjusting and finagling, finally got the tray to lift up and back as I opened the lid. I was so proud of myself. My jewelry box was looking great.
That weekend, it was time for my yearly physical with Dr Fred, the traveling multi-country Peace Corps doctor. I was telling him about the jewelry box as he examined and thumped and prodded me. It turned out that Dr Fred was a closet woodworker, and he was interested in how I made the box. He told me that if I went to the pharmacy in town, and bought a small bottle of Gentian Violet crystals, which were used to treat foot fungus, and hydrated them with water, they would make a bright purple stain, and if I painted it on the outside of the box, it would stain it bright purple. But after drying overnight, it would turn the wood to a beautiful rosewood color. Cool. So I bought some, and took it back to school. On monday, in class, I mixed up the Gentian Violet solution, and painted it on, and the box turned a garish purple. The boys came by my bench, and thought it was the most beautiful box they had ever seen. But as Doctor Fred had said, the next morning, it was a wonderful deep rosewood color, like a guitar, tho the boys were disappointed, and each day for the rest of the week, I hand rubbed a coat of varnish into the outside. By friday, my jewelry box glowed like a fine piece of furniture.
On friday morning, I was just abandoning the mirror in the lid idea because I didn’t have a glasscutter, when I remembered a tv show, The Wild Wild West, where the hero guy had snatched a diamond earring off of a woman, and used it to cut the glass out of a train window, so he could get outside and defeat the bad guys. Well, I had a tiny diamond earring that I had worn for about 5 years, right there in my ear. So I took it out, and with great difficulty, holding it by the tiny post, I managed to scratch two lines across the glass, to allow me to break it to a size that would fit the lid. It didn’t break perfectly straight, but I hid the crooked edge with a small piece of trim as I fastened it into the inside of the lid. My little jewelry box, made with hand tools was gorgeous. It was the finest thing I have ever made, then and now. It sat on my desk, waiting for project day on tuesday. The boys came and opened and closed it, and locked and unlocked the little brass padlock, and were flabbergasted by it. The articulating tray particularly fascinated them, and they would open and close the box to watch it work. Some peeked in the edge as it opened, trying to catch it in the act of its magical function.
On project day, when we got to the point where I turned the class over to a student, and went and sat in his seat, and became the most obnoxious student I could be, to discuss my project, the boys thought it worth a 95%. Afterward Nkhosinathi came up to me.
Nkhosinathi: Sir, this is the finest jewelry box that I have ever seen.
Me: Oh, Thanks Nkhosinathi. I enjoyed making it.
Nkhosinathi: Yes sir, I saw that you did. But… what is it for?
And I realized that Swazis in the outback didn’t have much of what we call jewelry. They had ceremonial necklaces and bracelets, but they weren’t thought of as jewelry.
I would always sell my projects, after the boys took theirs home, to the teachers, who were the only people around with money, and I would take that money and buy paint, and glue, and varnish, and sandpaper, and the things I needed for classes. The teachers had heard about my jewelry box, and there was quite a furor on the afternoon that I put it in the teachers lounge with a price sticker on it. I was asking a lot for it. 400 emalangeni. About 35 US dollars, I think.
The next day, I walked by the teachers lounge at lunch, and found 3 teachers in a heated discussion about who would buy the jewelry box. They were saying mean things to each other, like, “What would you do with a thing so fine in your poor house?” And, “You are too young to own such a beautiful thing, You are just out of teachers college.” So, being upset that my beautiful box was sowing the seeds of dissention among my colleagues, I snatched up the box, tore the price tag off, and said, “I have decided to keep it, and not sell it after all.” And I took it up to my house, feeling sad, and threw it into the back of the closet in my bedroom. And forgot about it.
About a month later I was coming back from classes, and saw that the door on my house was open. It was the day that Fundisiwe came by to clean my house, and wax the floors. She had a key, and would come by and clean, and I would pay her so that she had tuition money, and could also buy food for her family. I stopped at the door, and took off my shoes, so that I could skate in my sock feet across my freshly waxed floors, and I skated over to the door of my bedroom. I heard a soft humming coming from my room, and I peeked in, and Fundisiwe was sitting on my floor, with the Jewelry box on her lap, and looking into the mirror in the lid, and singing softly and messing with her hair, like women do, and she looked so beautiful and innocent that I almost started crying. In the box and the tray compartments were little tchotchke things that I had sitting around in my room, mostly from packages my friends stateside had sent me. A couple of bright pink plastic paper clips. A small rubber Gumby doll. My Texas Drivers License, now expired. A day glow pink ping pong ball earring that I had made to annoy the Peace Corps director with when I had to go see him. A green plastic harmonica my sister sent me for Christmas. A couple of uninflated balloons. A US 2 dollar bill that a friend had included in her letter to me. All neatly arranged in the compartments. She was having such a good time. So I sneaked back outside, and coughed, and bumped the door coming in, and walked to my bedroom, where Fundisiwe was standing with the jewelry box in her hands. Her face flushed.
Me: Oh, Hi Fundi! I see you have found the jewelry box that I made. Do you think it is pretty?
Fundisiwe: Oh Yes, Maseko! It is very pretty! I hope you are not angry that I was looking at it.
Me: No, not at all. In fact, would you like to have it, and all the things you put in it, instead of your pay for this week?
Fundisiwe: Oh yes, Maseko. I would like that very much.
Me: Thank you for doing such a good job cleaning my house this week. I bought some rice when I was in town last weekend, and it is much more than I can eat, so please take this bag of rice home with you for your family to eat, so it doesn’t go bad sitting here in my nice clean kitchen.
I felt that she might get in trouble for not bringing home some money. Her family depended on her little bit of income that she got from me for cleaning my house. And she wandered off into the bush toward her homestead with her bag of rice and her new jewelry box, a happy girl. She never mentioned the box again, but in my imagination, I think of it as her family heirloom, and have no doubt that she is a grandmother now, with a beautiful jewelry box to show her grandkids, and tell them the story of the teacher Maseko, who made it for her.
Fundisiwe
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