READER’S GUIDE

Introduction to Nature Lessons

As fearless as J.M. Coetzee, as compelling as Nadine Gordimer, as engrossing as Bryce Courtney, Lynette Brasfield in her debut novel, Nature Lessons, offers readers an accessible window into two equally tumultuous landscapes: South African society and mental illness in the family. Kate Jensen’s identity is shaped by a childhood that resonates with pain and promise, much like the country in which it takes place.

Dysfunctional relationships are plentiful in contemporary literature, but the impact of mental illness on the fragile bonds of family is not commonly examined in fictional form. In Nature Lessons, Lynette Brasfield explores this territory in a mother-daughter story that is thoughtful, brutally honest, yet always engaging, as a young girl finds herself caught in the quagmire of her mother’s delusions, which may be rooted in reality. Renamed Kate Jensen after her father’s sudden death and displaced from Johannesburg to Durban, Kate as a child—and later as a grown woman—grapples with issues of identity, social consciousness, and personal responsibility in her relationships with friends, potential life partners, and peers, both black and white.

Nature Lessons weaves back and forth between 1960s apartheid South Africa and post-apartheid 1995, and Brasfield deftly maneuvers between the changing politics of a racially divided country and the personal story of a daughter struggling to make her way in a puzzling world. As the story unfolds, Nature Lessons provides glimpses into a spectrum of racial perspectives and moves beyond a simplistic white versus black conflict. But it is Kate’s relationship with her mother that embodies the heart of this novel: Violet Jensen is an intriguing, subtly drawn character who illustrates the complexity of mental illness and the shadowy line between sanity and insanity. Kate’s denial, guilt, and then acceptance of her mother’s condition and her own childhood in a troubled country serve to shape her adult identity.

Though its subject matter can be searing, Nature Lessons is ultimately a hopeful story, laced with wry humor, about the enduring nature of family bonds even under the most difficult of circumstances.

Excerpts from Nature Lessons 

Chagrin Falls, Ohio
October 1995

Durban, South Africa

Dear Kate,

Last week, I was taken from my flat and incarcerated in hospital. They say I have cancer (which is absurd – no one in our family has ever had cancer). This is your Oom Piet’s doing, of course. He is afraid I will expose him as a murderer. It’s sad that you have an uncle who is a murderer, but there it is. We can’t choose our relatives.

      Since you left I have told you to stay in America, thinking you were safer there, but now you will need to came and rescue me, I’m afraid. There is a nurse here, Miriam, who has agreed to mail this letter. She will draw a map on the other side of this page. DO NOT ALERT THE HOSPITAL AHEAD OF TIME THAT YOU ARE COMING! OR OOM PIET!

      I hope you haven’t cut your lovely curls, poppet. Your head is the wrong shape for short hair.

                                                                                                            Love,

                                                                                                            Mother

      …In the dim, firelit family room, I reached into my pocket for Simon’s handkerchief and held it to my nose, breathing in its fresh-laundry smell. I’d loved the way he carried a handkerchief. It reminded me of my dad, who’d used his to wipe chocolate from my mouth or tears from my eyes. Once, when we were at a cricket match in Johannesburg, my father had knotted each corner and put the square of cloth on his head to protect his bald patch. I’d draped it over his face when he died. His nose had made a small hill in the fabric.

      Was that when my mother’s troubles started? When my father had his heart attack? Or had she been ill before then?

      Years ago I’d stopped thinking about the whens and whys and hows of my childhood, believing my past irrelevant to the person I’d become. Why revisit it now?

      Outside, the sky had turned ebony. The Milky Way glimmered with the ephemeral light of today’s and yesterday’s stars, and, on the horizon, a pale three-quarter moon kept its shadowy secrets. An owl hooted in the darkness.

      I opened the front door to the crisp-apple smell of a fall night and sat on the steps, listening.

***

Johannesburg, South Africa

July 1966

When my father died, on my eleventh birthday, July 10, 1966, my mother said the government was responsible, and that was the first time I heard about The Plot to Split Us Apart.

            Dad had been helping me blow out my candles. 

            The cake was chocolate sponge topped with scalloped icing and blue sprinkles.  It sat on a doily on a china plate.  I’d helped Prudence mix the batter and put the pan in the oven.

            We were sitting on three sides of the dark oak table in the dining room.  I faced the bay window.  The winter sun cast straggly shadows across the lawn and rockery, one of my favorite places.  Among the stones I liked to corral snails, grow daisies, and stage long-running plays in which my Barbie dolls fought off dinosaurs beneath the ferns or picnicked with large, friendly bears among lilac and white alyssum.  Ken kept house.  In summer I read books in a hideaway between the oleander bushes near my mother’s rose garden.  While I explored the Indian jungle with Mowgli, or Equatorial Africa with Rider Haggard’s heroes, the breeze carried a ferment of smells and sounds into my lair—the fragrance of roses, the warble of yellow-breasted bokmakieries, and the low hum of conversation between my mother and our gardener, Winston, as they discussed pruning and watering and the curse of mildew.  Winston was a tall Xhosa man with a broad chest and ropy arms.  I liked him because he helped me plant seeds and made mud swimming pools for my dolls.  He explained interesting things about shongololos—shiny black centipedes—and spiders and worms.  Most days, he wore old pinstriped suit-pants around his waist with a piece of string.  He was smart:  he’d spent several years at Fort Hare University studying botany.  His bare chest shone as if polished with floor wax, and he smelled of Lifebuoy soap.

            Late afternoons, gray clouds would belly across the sky like herd of rhino and I’d run for shelter before the stampede turned to rain.

            Next to my cake stood a jug of milk and three glasses.

            Behind my dad at the head of the table hung a framed photograph of my Welsh grandparents.  They pointed to the longest sign in the world, which read LLANFAIRPWLLGWYNGYLLGOGE--

RYCHWYRNDROBWLLLLANTYSILIOGOGOGOCH.  It means, “St. Mary’s church in the hollow of the white hazel near a rapid whirlpool and the church of St. Tysilio of the red cave.”  Dad could say it in Welsh without spitting, which he said was quite an achievement.  My grandfather—a doctor—and grandmother had died in a bombing raid in London during World War II, leaving my father an orphan at fourteen.  He’d become a janitor in a medical office and educated himself by reading magazines in the waiting room, from Ladies’ Home Journal to Reader’s Digest.  He knew interesting, odd things.  Like, if you throw boiled spaghetti at the wall and the noodle sticks to the paint, it is ready to eat.  And earthworms could be their own brothers or sisters.  For a while I wished I were an earthworm, since I it didn’t seem like our family was going to get any bigger.

            Dad sold detergent to large stores such as Greenacres and Belfast.  My mother said he wasn’t a traveling salesman—he was in retail.

            When he lit the candles on the cake, the flames waved like flags.  He sat back and ran his fingers through his curly sandy hair, which resembled mine except for his bald island.  Mom fussed with the napkins.  She was slim, dressed in a navy-blue shift with pearls, her chestnut hair framing high cheekbones and a wide mouth.

            Dad had played golf earlier in the day.  He walked eighteen holes and he looked pale and tired.  “The wax is dripping into the icing,” he said.  “Time to blow, Katie.”  He scooped up a dollop of chocolate and licked his finger....

            “Help me, Dad,” I said, giggling.

            He leaned forward and blew hard.  All but two candles stopped burning.  Then, with a look of surprise, my father placed his hand on the left side of his chest as if he were about to sing our national anthem, “Die Stem.”  He took a couple of shallow breaths and toppled sideways off the chair.  I thought he was pretending to be one of the Three Stooges.  But he’d crashed to the floor quite hard.  I peered at him over the edge of the table.  “Dad?”

***

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