Love in the Driest Season
...is a story about families, race and about what love is and is not, and joy - and the cost of it. "There are times in life, no more than two or three," the narrator says at the outset, "when everything changes and you find yourself swept along in a series of events that are beyond your measure."
The extraordinary series of events at the heart of Driest Season begins with a mysterious incident in the highlands of central Zimbabwe in the dry season of 1998: A girl-child was left to die on the day she was born, abandoned beneath an acacia tree in the rural areas. By the time a village woman found her, hundreds of ants were feeding on the child's still-attached umbilical cord. They were eating her right ear.
Orphanage matron Stella Mesikano and two orphans at Chinyaradzo
For Neely Tucker, a foreign correspondent who had worked in dozens of countries across Europe, Africa and the Middle East, war, conflict and misery were nothing new. But when he and his wife, Vita, met the child in an orphanage in the Zimbabwean capital of Harare, everything began to change. The orphanage was at the epicenter of the world's AIDS crisis. The death rate for infants read like a typographical error. The girl-child weighed 4.3 pounds. She had pneumonia. She was losing weight. She was not expected to live. Her name was Chipo, the Shona word for "gift."
The potters' field where orphans from Chinyaradzo were buried (note the ages on the markers)
In a simple but fateful decision, the couple decided that she would be their only child.
The odds for an American couple to both keep the child alive and then adopt her as foreign nationals in a nation that all but outlawed the practice, were dismal. But they were an interracial pair who already knew something about long odds. Neely grew up on a small farm in segregated Mississippi during the 1960s and 1970s; Vita, 11 years older, came of age in the black-power-and-Motown days of Detroit. They met as next-door neighbors in downtown Detroit; they were married in their backyard in Warsaw, Poland.
Against a backdrop of a nation falling into violent political and social turbulence in which foreign correspondents were declared "enemies of the state" and forced from the country, Driest Season unfolds as a race against time; as a haunting, ever-deepening love story.
