The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena

by Elsa Joubert

She’s doing housework, the woman replied, she’s what we call a char.

  The woman carried her suitcase and they walked to the bus terminus. Poppie looked up at the double-decker bus and was scared.

  I’m not getting in there, she said. Not with the child on my back.

  The woman prodded a child sitting on a downstairs seat. Get up, give the sisi your seat, can’t you see she’s not used to climbing upstairs.

  Poppie’s mama was living in a location near Lansdowne Road, called Brown’s Camp.

  Your ma hasn’t got her own house, the woman told her. She’s rooming with people from Lamberts Bay.

  From the bus Poppie watched the locations they were driving past, the houses all alike, row upon row. Hauk, she said. Look at these houses. Why is there no house for my ma?

  Wait till you see where she lives, the woman answered. It’s not like this, it’s still raw.

  Where the bus stopped, they started walking. The streets came to an end and they walked through stretches of sand. The shacks were hidden amongst the bushes, and behind the shacks they could see sand dunes. There were no adults around, in the backyards children played, the bigger children carrying small ones on their backs, the small boys playing in sandy patches amongst the stones. One of the boys recognised Poppie. It was Jakkie. He came closer to her, but was too shy to greet her at first. He had grown taller and thinner and his round baby face had changed.

  Molo sisi, he said at last, walking alongside her. The woman with her took a key from her handbag and unlocked the door of a house.

  This now is sisi Nonceba’s house, she said. There’s nobody at home, you must wait here till they come back from work this afternoon. My house is the one opposite.

  It was hot inside the tin shack. There were four rooms one of the two bedrooms was rented by mama. Lay your child down on her bed, said the woman.

  When they were alone Poppie called Jakkie to her. To make him feel less strange, she opened her basket and gave him a leg of chicken to eat. Stay with the baby, she said, so that I can go outside to rinse his nappies.

  Mama’s bed took up all the space in the room. At night another mattress could be squeezed in between the bed and the wall; it was now set upright against the wall.

  Poppie was weary. She lay down on the bed and waited for Pieta and Katie to come home from school. They were happy to see her.

  Sisi, they asked, have you come to stay with us?

  Yes, I have come to stay, said Poppie.

  We like it here. We go to the Dutch Reformed school, and we have made many new friends.

  They were hungry and Poppie gave them what remained of the food she had brought. She saved some chicken for mama.

  Katie had to take off her school uniform and put on old clothes before she started cleaning the house. I do mama’s share, she told Poppie.

  Mama came at dusk. She had to travel by two buses and a train to get home from work.

  My, see how big my baby has got! she exclaimed when she saw Bonsile.

  Mama was weary too. I don’t like this rooming business, she complained. We were brought here to Cape Town, and now there’s no housing for us. But old Mbatane has managed to get an erf in Elsies, and he is planning to build us a shack. They call the place Elsies because the people were moved from Elsies River, said mama. All the people you see around us were moved from somewhere, now they call the new parts after their old homes like Kraaifontein and Jakkalsvlei.

  Mama made them a pot of tea. Mbatane is working at a garage, she said, but not being married to him caused a lot of bother, so we got married two months ago in the Native Affairs department, to qualify for an erf.

  Mama sighed. They were still sitting in the kitchen but would have to move to the bedroom shortly. It would be cramped in the bedroom. You must try to live in peace with Mbatane, Poppie, mama said.

  There won’t be trouble, mama, said Poppie.

  But our marriage was blessed in church, said mama who was defending Mbatane. In the Dutch Reformed, because they haven’t built the Methodist in Jakkalsvlei yet.

  And my brothers, mama? asked Poppie.

  Hoedjie works in the bar of the Carlton Hotel, he works late.

  Mosie has a job with Jews in Camps Bay. He has dropped his name of Mosie, they call him by his English name, Wilson.

  What kind of job?

  He’s a houseboy. It’s a sleep-in job, which is much better because we’ve no room for him to sleep here as well.

  But is that not woman’s work, mama? Ouma Hannie had reared them so strictly, the girls do the housework, they gather wood, they smear the floors.

  Don’t ask me, said mama, ask him yourself when he comes home on Sunday.

  The next morning when the others had gone to work and the children to school, Poppie and Hoedjie were alone.

  I’ll wash your clothes for you, Hoedjie, she told him, your nice white waiter’s jacket.

  I don’t wear a white waiter’s jacket in this place, Poppie, said Hoedjie. I work at the wash-ups, I clean the glasses. I don’t like the work, they are always shouting at me.

  When Poppie tackled Mosie on his Sunday off, he made excuses. There are other women in the house to do the woman’s work, he said. A cook and a housemaid. And a driver called Major. We’re four who work for the Jews.

  But what do you do for them?

  Other work, said Mosie. He didn’t like being questioned. He wouldn’t tell them that he washed the kitchen floor and polished the stoep. He was angry at Poppie for asking.

  It’s not that I was so mad about taking the work, he said. I also said to myself: That’s woman’s work they make me do. But here in Cape Town if you don’t take a job you get no pass. So I had to take what I could get, because of this pass business.

  The pass business was something quite new to Poppie.

  You know we had no papers in Lamberts Bay, said Mosie. How could I know we have to have papers in Cape Town? If they had told us about the papers, we would have been prepared like. But they just said: Go to Cape Town, there’s place prepared for you in Cape Town, they kept shouting – go to Cape Town, go to Cape Town. So we go. And now we’re here, now they mess us around. We must do this, we must do that, nothing comes right.

  Actually my brothers didn’t have so much trouble getting work, Poppie says. Their names could be entered on to mama’s house-card. But because I was a married woman, I couldn’t get on to her card. Buti Plank fixed his pass, and he sailed with the fishing boats from Hout Bay to Lamberts Bay, Lüderitzbucht and Walvis Bay. We only saw him every few months.

  But our greatest problem was getting somewhere to live. Even when buti Mbatane had built his shack in Elsies River and they moved in, it was overcrowded before they had settled down. They only had two rooms and mama and buti Mbatane and their three children lived there and Hoedjie came in at all hours of the night from the hotel, and slept during the day, and buti Plank when he was home from sea, and I and my child moved in as well.

  After a few months of living alone in Lamberts Bay, tata-ka-Bonsile chucked up his work, broke down the tin shack with his two hands, and stored the stuff and went to Eendekuil where he knew some people. He was looking for a place to work where I would be allowed to come and stay with him, but the pay was very little at Eendekuil and so he couldn’t take the job. In Moorreesburg he couldn’t get work either. He was very discouraged and got on to the train to come to Cape Town where I was. He didn’t tell us he was coming, he just arrived one day. The two-roomed shack was so crowded that a few of us went to sleep with sisi Anna who lived close by. She also came from Lamberts Bay. But it didn’t work out well.

  Then one day another auntie, sisi Violet, a Cape Town woman whose husband also belonged to the Mqwati clan, knocked at mama’s door.

  We have heard that people from the district of Herschel have moved into this house. It’s not according to our way that a son-in-law stays in the house of his wife’s people, she said. Mama poured her some tea and she spoke again: My husband says the buti of hi
s clan must leave and come to live with him.

  Their house was not far away from mama’s house, also in Jakkalsvlei. Jakkalsvlei was only bush and sand and small footpaths leading through the bushes to shacks made of corrugated iron. The streets were made later. Tata-ka-Bonsile agreed and we moved from mama’s house to the house of his clansmen. But I wasn’t happy there.

  I don’t get on with this sisi Violet, Poppie complained to mama. Our ways are different. She isn’t my mother-in-law, why must I listen to her? And she has so many children, there’s no place for us to sleep in her house.

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  Poppie thought: There is no other road for me, I must go find a job. There’s no place for me to sleep here. Mama has no other small child now, she can look after my baby. Then tata-ka-Bonsile can stay with his sisi Violet and I’ll take a sleep-in job.

  We can’t all stay with you, mama, said Poppie. And at auntie Violet’s place we don’t get on.

  Mama agreed. The baby can stay with me, she said, but now what will I do the day that I go to char and the madam says I can’t bring the child along?

  Poppie didn’t care. Then Katie must stay out of school and look after my baby. As I looked after mama’s’ baby.

  The auntie next door knew about a job and took Poppie along with her, first by bus and then by train and then by bus to Constantia. It was a sleep-in job at a plant-growing nursery. The woman didn’t pay much, six pounds a month, but Poppie thought: We’ll see how it goes, till tata-ka-Bonsile finds work. The work was hard. There were nine white people living in the house, the man and his wife and his wife’s sister and her baby and five more children.

  It was then the first time she and tata-ka-Bonsile and the child were living completely apart. It was the first time in her life that Poppie slept alone in a room. She was nineteen years old. The room was the end one in a barrack-like building occupied by the black garden labourers. At night she could hear them talking and laughing and fighting. On Saturday nights the noise went on the whole night long.

  Stone was uneasy when he brought her back on Sunday evening after her afternoon off. Must I leave you here alone with all those men next door to you? It makes that the room isn’t so quiet, she said. But they don’t come and bother me.

  At five o’clock the workers in the rooms next to hers rose. They went outside in the dark, emptied their bladders in the bushes, stuck their heads under the water taps. The smoke from the fires where they cooked their mealie porridge started curling up. An old man was always the first one to break the kindling and poke at the ashes.

  At six o’clock Poppie had to be in the kitchen. The work in the dark of early morning was the best time for her, with the garden workers gathered round their fire and dawn breaking. She boiled water on the Primus. Then she took coffee to the nine white people. Cups of coffee to the three grown-ups, mugs to the children, and a dash of coffee in the bottle of milk for the baby in the cot.

  It was strange to her to go into the rooms where the white people slept. The woman, still as a corpse, on her side, the blankets pulled up high over her shoulders, the man on his back with his mouth open, his chest bare. It was as if everything was dead in the room when she went in.

  Draw the curtains, Rachel, the madam said as she put down the cups next to the beds. She worked under her English name.

  But the moments when she stood in the dark, not knowing if they were awake or asleep, were to her the strangest.

  The work was heavy. The white woman stood behind her back and said: Come, come, come, haven’t you finished yet? The woman’s sister, who lived with them with her baby, unlocked the kitchen door in the mornings, because she woke up early and was in the habit of lying in the dark, smoking. Poppie could see the little red spot of the cigarette moving in the corner where her bed stood.

  Clean the ashtray for me, she’d say. She had gone back to bed after unlocking the door, and the child had fallen asleep with its bottle of coffee.

  While the adults had breakfast, the baby sat on its mother’s lap, pushed forward on her knee so that the cigarette should not burn it. The child hit at the table with its arms and hands and splattered porridge to all sides.

  Wipe up, Rachel, before we step in it.

  She had to make the beds and clean the floors while the people ate, and put away the children’s things lying around. The man left his pyjamas lying on the floor. She picked them up and folded them. It was just the pyjama trunks. Before she went to the nursery, the madam threw all the washing in a pile in the passage. She looked through the washing that the children had left in the bathroom the night before and added it to the heap. The sister brought the pail full of nappies.

  Poppie washed by hand in the cement washtub in the yard. She heated the water in pots on the stove and carried it outside.

  The sister was very particular about the nappies. I like my nappies to be white, she said, snowy white.

  I had to bleach the nappies, and sprinkle them with water every now and then, says Poppie. Every day there was a heap of washing, because there were school-going children in the house. I think there were five of them and there wasn’t a washing-machine. The madam did the cooking herself, but I laid the table and prepared the vegetables. After lunch I washed the dishes and at about three o’clock I could leave the kitchen to have a rest. At four o’clock I started the ironing. While I ironed, the madam did the cooking. They ate dinner late at night, and at nine o’clock perhaps, I finished up in the kitchen.

  I worked till I couldn’t work any more.

  I got sick at the work, but the madam said to me: You can’t be sick here, you must go to Nyanga, I’m too busy to look after a sick person. But I was never flat on my back, I just felt the pain in the lower part of my body. Then she’d say: Work has never made anybody sick. It hurt me very much when she said that, because I was still young, but the work was just too much; she had so many sheets to wash, and every day school clothes and nappies.

  The children weren’t naughty, they were just like other children. I was used to children because I come from a big family, but they didn’t know how to do anything for themselves and they messed up the kitchen when they came home from school. I was fond of the little girl, Chrissie. In the afternoons when I was ironing she used to come and talk to me. Then she told me how many servants her mother had had, and how her father hit the maids if they didn’t want to work; I think it was a coloured servant, who drank a lot, that he used to beat. But when I was there he must have quietened down a lot, because I never saw him beat anybody.

  Her mother never liked the children to gossip with me.

  Sunday nights, after my time off, I had to come back. After I had seen my child and given my mother the stuff I brought her, then my husband and I had to come right back, we couldn’t sit down to talk, the place was too far out. No more than a half an hour, then we had to leave again, perhaps when the child had fallen asleep or Katie had taken him out of the room to give me a chance to get away.

  From Nyanga we took the Claremont bus, then the train to Wynberg, then the bus to Constantia.

  The bus conductor got to know her.

  Come, come, he’d say to Poppie when she got on the bus on her afternoon off. He was a coloured man, and spoke Afrikaans to her.

  Don’t you ‘come come’ me as well, said Poppie. Where I work it’s ‘come come’ from the moment I get up.

  He was kind to her and used to wait when he saw her hurrying to the bus stop.

  She had grown accustomed to the electric trains and wasn’t frightened as she used to be when she first heard the sighing bang of the doors or the shrill whistle. She liked the train, it gave her a moment of rest, her body folded into the movement of the train, she closed her eyes. A few moments of rest between her jobs, the white woman who was for ever thinking up new things for her to do, and the time when she arrived at mama’s house.

  At the bus stop at Claremont rows of people were waiting. The faces of some had become familiar to her. The weather had changed, the wi
nd was blowing and a fine mist, like the sea mist, swept past them, transforming itself into wetness on their faces. She pressed her bag to her bosom, and raised her arm to protect her face. The warmth of bodies and human breathing came to her. Molo, she greeted those whom she knew, but there was no chance to talk, because she dared not lose her place. She was first in the queue when the buses arrived to take home the five o’clock city workers.

  It was nearly dark and close to six o’clock when she arrived. Her ma was working in the kitchen and the children sat around her while she prepared their food. In the light of the Primus stove Poppie could see their faces turned up to her. Her eyes searched out her child, sitting on Katie’s lap. Katie sat flat on the floor with her back against the wall; she picked up pebbles from the floor and dribbled them through her fingers to keep Bonsile’s attention. Poppie put down her bag and picked up the child.

  Son-in-law! Ma called at the kitchen door and tata-ka-Bonsile came in from the backyard.

  He’s been waiting for you ever since he came back from work, mama said.

  Has he then got work?

  No matter how much Stone had tried, he could not get a permit to work in the Cape.

  He stood next to her, and she felt his body against hers as he took the child from her. She did not want to talk about his work in front of his people-in-law.

  Mama poured them tea and they sat down at table.

  Where is Mosie? Poppie asked, because he too was off on Thursdays.

  He is singing tonight, mama said. The church group asked him to come.

  Strange feelings were taking root in Poppie’s heart. Tell him he can sing for my part too.

  What is this that you have against Mosie, asked mama. She did not know the new tone in Poppie’s voice.

  They are four servants working for two people, I am one working for nine. And she started to cry. I’m tired, mama.

  She did not drink her tea, but took the child back from her husband, felt if his nappy was dry, then gave him back to Katie.

  I must go now, mama, otherwise I won’t catch the bus.