“I told you Mr. Littlejohn would lend them to us,” she told Safiyah. “He told me it’s called a collage when you put bits of paper together to make a picture. When you put a collage on a wall, it’s a mural.” Lucky Pendo, learning so many things at school, thought Safiyah. Between taking care of Cucu and doing chores, it took Safiyah three days to finish stuffing paper into all the cracks indoors before she could paste her pictures on the wall around the doorway outside. First she cut out just the right pieces. Then she spread them across the dirt floor of the shack to plan how to put them together. “Cucu!” she protested each time her grandmother stepped on them. “You’re leaving footprints.” Cucu was often in a hurry to relieve herself in the ditch, and then too weary to respond as she hauled herself back to bed. When Safiyah asked if she should put a blue picture next to a green or a brown one, her grandmother hardly looked at them. “You’re the artful one,” she said.
