—He sings in their languages, too. Come on Gert, one of their songs. Come on. Please.—
It is always difficult for anyone to refuse Hillela; even people who don’t have, like Pauline and Olga and the family, a duty towards her. She butts the boy with her guitar. He takes it with lowered head but when he begins to sing, in the black man’s voice and cadence, in the black man’s language—as white people hear work-gangs sing in the street, only their song making them present among the whites driving by—his inarticulacy, his fumbling self is broken away. That he is singing against the sobbing beat of a pop singer does not matter; a song that is not his own sings through him.
Hillela asks him to tell what he’s singing about; producing him for Sasha; she knows the sort of thing Sasha likes to know.
At once there is difficulty, again, finding words. —Not really a song. Not really. It’s like, you know, it’s a native boy who’s come here to town to work. He’s singing, saying, we come to Jo’burg because we hoping we get something nice, but now we don’t get it. That’s all it’s about.—
When the joint comes round Sasha feels her—Hillela—look to him before she takes a draw. But she needn’t have worried, the weed has been smoked traditionally, long before white kids discovered it, by the local people in the country where he goes to school; he hasn’t ever brought any home only because he doesn’t want to be the one to be blamed for corrupting the two girls. And Hillela doesn’t drink; he sees that.
Hillela was all right that night;—a member of the family, after all, was keeping an eye on her. Sasha had his mother’s car to take her home in. First they delivered a lot of other people to various parts of town. It was late. Pauline was away at the All In African Conference in Maritzburg. Joe and Carole were so deep in the hibernation of the small hours that the house seemed empty; without Pauline all the watchtowers of the spirit were unattended, its drawbridges down. Anything could be let in, nothing would be recorded. Hillela fell asleep in Sasha’s bed, this bed which his cousin and sister used to raid, beating him with pillows. There had been a coup; he had usurped and was on guard in place of his mother. He kept himself awake and measured the passing of darkness by the soft sensation of the girl’s breath spreading on his neck and then drawing back like breath clouding and disappearing on a window pane. When he gauged he must, he separated her warmth from his own, so that once again she became herself, he became himself.
Carole did not know that her cousin was home from a party, had come into their bedroom and slid into her own bed.
Sasha switched on the witness of his lamp and searched his sheets for frail dark question-mark hairs that Bettie, who insisted on making his bed as a holiday treat for him, would recognize as not his brassy-blond sheddings. He did not want to be reminded—to have to remember in the morning.
Opportunities
Hillela could have been like anybody else. She had the opportunity. The same opportunity as Carole and Sasha. Or Olga’s spoilt children—if that had been what she preferred. She was a white child, with choices; that was the irony of it. Young blacks had no choice, only necessity and plenty of ignorance about how to deal with that, in addition. Alpheus was so ambitious, so eager to better himself, become a lawyer, and now he had to saddle himself with a girl and baby on the way.—The trouble is we’re much too timid in these matters. Scared of appearing to boss them around—but, in the end, it’s not a kindness or a respect. When I saw the girl was living there, I should have told Alpheus straight out that he must take her to a birth control clinic. I should’ve taken her myself.—
Joe always listened to Pauline patiently. —Oh come on.—
—Well, damn it all, I’m paying for his courses, maybe I should use that to stop him making things impossible for himself. Nineteen years old. A baby, and next year another baby, how will he support them on a clerk’s salary? We undertook to subsidise his studies, not a family.—
—Oh ma, it’ll be lovely to have a little baby— Carole had pleaded happily, like that, for a puppy or a kitten.
—Oh lovely. A squalling infant while he’s supposed to be studying for exams. I fixed up the garage so’s he wouldn’t have to live in a crowded location room, so’s he’d have the kind of working conditions you kids have.—
—Bettie says, God has sent a child, what can you do.— Hillela quoted, and she and Carole laughed.
—She knows damn well. I had her fitted with a loop years ago. Alpheus’s poor mother, doing four washes a week—
—And breaking the washing machine once a month.— Joe settled back into his soft chin philosophically.
—Rebecca’s beaming all over, ma, she says her son is going to have a clever son like himself.—
—Poor old Rebecca! Where’s he going to find to live?— Pauline’s defiant eyes, questioning—them all: the room, the walls, and beyond. Philosophers like her husband had no answers, they knew only how to accept problems. Carole was a good enough little girl without the originality to swerve aside and seek answers to her mother’s questioning, which she followed as naturalists say a duckling follows the first pair of feet it sees when it hatches. And Hillela—when did that intelligent girl (more intelligent than her own daughter, Pauline confessed confidentially to Joe; an intelligence more like Pauline’s own than that Carole had inherited) when did the girl receive questions, or the possibility of answers, as addressed to her? —A whole family pushed into a garage in the yard. We can’t have them here living under conditions as bad as those in a location. That wasn’t the intention. Alpheus knows it. Rebecca knows it.—
If Sasha had been there he might have answered Pauline.
When Sasha was home Joe had to think of conversation that would start up their father-and-son relationship again; the battery went flat in the long partings, he himself away where the clamorous struggle between power and powerlessness was reduced to a sleepy hum and rustle of courtrooms through whose high windows light slanted as in a church, the boy away at that school for the future which had to be hidden in a little green African kingdom belonging to the 19th century. Joe had come out of his working cubbyhole on a Sunday morning. They were stretched on the grass drinking beer together. Joe mentioned young Alpheus had moved a girl into the garage and got her pregnant—Pauline felt she ought to have done something about it.
Sasha rolled right over before he spoke. —Emasculate him?—
A response lifted clean out of some five-finger-exercise liberation theology picked up from black boys at the school. It was easy for a youngster like Joe’s to see things that priggishly hysterical way. Joe patiently ignored, patiently explained. —He’s had a poor schooling and it’s a hell of a struggle for him to keep up with the courses he’s doing. She’s absolutely right, the last thing he needs is a wife and kid as well. If he were a white boy, we’d all be calling it hopelessly irresponsible, and that’s what it is. Towards his mother, to us, as well as himself. But what can one do.—
This question was not a question, was the summation of more than the small nuisance of Alpheus. Adults, who always knew what the children should do, at this time were withdrawn, in the presence of the children, into a state of waiting to be told or given a sign. For themselves. In various countries and eras children understand marriage as what it is for their parents in that place and period. Living with Pauline and Joe, the children saw that the meaning of marriage was that Pauline and Joe expected this sign from one another. The volume of the cheerful, restless house was turned down (as Pauline would sometimes stride into the girls’ room, pulling a mock-agonized face, and turn down the volume of their record-player). The rooms strewn with evidence of everyone’s activities were under dustsheets of adult preoccupation. The newspapers Pauline and Joe read and had always let pile up beside sofa and chairs, where they served in place of Olga’s coffee tables, gave information but no guidance. Carole lifted her head like a young buck alert to something—what, it does not yet know—the mature animals have noticed, and Hillela went on with her translation of Tartarin
de Tarascon while Pauline read out aloud to Joe: —‘I don’t want to be equal with Europeans. I want them to call us baas. I wish I can live till we rule, I will do the same to them: I will send the police to demand passes from whites. Their wives are going to wash the clothes for our wives. We don’t want to mix with whites, we left the African National Congress because we saw Europeans among us. We are fighting for the full rights of Africans. We do not fight to dance and sit with Europeans.’—
—The government bans a non-racial movement like the ANC, it gets black racists as primitive as its white ones. It bans again; and an even worse reaction will come. Are you surprised?—
When Pauline left the drawbridge down and the watchtowers unguarded she had been at a conference where blacks sat with whites. Only as an observer—she had got in with the help of black friends—the Chief had been a guest in her house. The civil rights organization to which she belonged was one of those that had decided not to take part; they said the All-In African Conference was a front, dominated by communists who had indoctrinated and infiltrated the African National Congress and its allies.
There were chants and freedom songs one didn’t need to know the language to respond to with an almost physical expansion of being; after having been shut away, so white, so long. For herself, she came back home with ‘Nelson Mandela’s words in my ears, something you can’t stop hearing’. Carole and Hillela saw her unblinking hunter’s eyes stilled and magnified with real tears when she played the tape she had run while the man spoke for the first time in nine years (he had just been released from bans) to the assembly of all colours, to the government, and to the whole country. He knew what he could do. He called for a national convention. —Explain to the girls what that is, Joe.— And Joe explained that a national convention would be that meeting to culminate all meetings, one where white leaders from up there in the House of Parliament in Cape Town (on holiday one year, Olga had pointed out to Hillela and her sons the beautiful white building among oak trees) and black leaders emerged from prison, Underground and exile would decide in a proper and constitutional manner upon the dismantling of apartheid. Sasha, Carole and Hillela had been taken to see a court in session, once. While Joe explained, they would be visualizing something rather like that, the solemnity at mahogany tables, the carafes of water, the security men standing round the walls to keep intruders from shouting we do not fight to dance and sit with Europeans.
Mandela’s voice said that should the government fail to summon a national convention before declaring a republic, all sections of the population would be called on to stage a stay-at-home, a general strike, for three days. This would be a protest against the establishment of that republic based completely on white domination over a non-white majority, and also a last attempt to persuade the government to heed blacks’ legitimate claims. The last day of the strike would coincide with the day on which the government intended to proclaim the republic. Pauline read out something again: Nelson Mandela’s statement to the press that these demonstrations would not be anti-white, and would be peaceful.
Round about the Easter holidays—must have been; Sasha was home—a heavy brown paper parcel arrived at the house. Joe saw it first. —What’s this?—
—Leave it to me.— Pauline slit the wrapping with a bread-knife, taking care not to penetrate the contents. Inside were piles of leaflets with the terminology that brought comfort, a confirmation of what that house was, as the art dealers’ catalogues, giving evidence of the survival of rare and beautiful objects, did in Olga’s house. All freedom-loving South Africans are called upon to make the next six weeks a time of active protest, demonstration and organization against a Verwoerd republic. Carole went round the neighbourhood stuffing the leaflets into people’s mailboxes and racing embarrassedly away while their dogs barked to get at her; Pauline kept a pile in her car from which she stuck sheets under the windscreen-wipers of other cars all over town, wherever she happened to park. Joe could not make any unprofessional outward show of partisanship but even Sasha put up a leaflet on the door of his room. It was discussed at table that blacks were stock-piling mealie-meal, sugar, and cheap tinned fish, in some rumour or premonition of being starved into submission while the police would hold the townships under siege.
Sasha was in a phase of anxious concern for physical fitness; he and Hillela played squash at a health club, that month before the stay-at-home. So it was known where Hillela was passing her time. Sasha and Hillela also went very often to the cinema together on those Highveld autumn afternoons when there is no wind, no cloud to move across the sun, summer growth has ceased but no leaf falls: the day stands still. A crime to be inside a dark stale cinema on such an afternoon, Pauline would have said. There were few other people; expanses of empty seats separated dim figures. Sasha’s forearm stayed aligned, rigid and tight, against Hillela’s along the single armrest between them. They saw any film, many films; neither ever told Carole, Pauline or Joe about these films.
Sasha did not accompany his cousin again to her warehouse haunt; no-one was surprised that that sort of thing did not have much appeal for him. He played chess with his father, instead. One evening Joe got up in the middle of the game the moment Pauline came home. In Joe’s pale face expression was buried in complicated folds; even urgency did not show.
—You’d better get rid of those leaflets.—
—I don’t think there are more than a dozen or so left … why? What’s happened?—
—Get rid of them now, tonight. It’s what might happen. There are raids all over the place. Four whites have been detained in Pretoria. Liberal Party people. They’re watching everybody.—
—Are we going to burn them?—
Pauline didn’t answer Carole; her big head was lowered, not seeing her invisible audience, now.
—Put them down the lavatory, do whatever you like. Only get rid of them. And Pauline, we’d better go through other papers arid stuff we may have. If they come, there isn’t anything they won’t manage to find incriminating, at the moment. And don’t use our dustbin. They grub everywhere.—
Joe took two cartons of papers away in his car before he and Pauline went to bed. But nobody noticed that Sasha had not taken the leaflet off his door. All freedom-loving South Africans are called upon to make the next six weeks a time of active protest. Only Hillela. —What about that?— She was passing him in the passage.
—What about it?—
It was not for her to say. She was accustomed to different practices in the different houses where she was taken in as one of the family.
He did not like to linger with Hillela just outside his bedroom door. He went inside and closed it.
On the Highveld in May the sun is still bright—always bright, up there, while the air enters the nose with a whiff of winter’s freezing ether; something to be remembered in tropical parts of Africa, where much of the time it gives great heat but no light, buried in soggy cloud. May was the month when Olga changed her wardrobe. When Hillela used to come back from Rhodesia to spend the holidays with her, she would help Olga carry silky dresses and delicate-coloured sandals to the store-cupboards, and bring back from them garments of suède and angora against which she would pass her cheek. Olga still regarded it as her pleasure and her duty to fit out the girl at the same time as she shopped, each change of season, for new fashions for herself. An arrangement had been made for Hillela to come shopping with her, but she telephoned to postpone their date. —People say there’s some trouble in town. We’ll put it off until things settle down again.—
It was the appointed day for the beginning of the stay-at-home. As young freedom-loving South Africans Carole and Hillela had been kept home from school.
—Olga planned to take you shopping this afternoon? Today?—
Pauline smiled, shook her head, shook her head, over her sister. —Hundreds of people are being arrested, but of course they’re black, and so far as they’re concerned, she only knows her treasure Jethro and her treasure the cook a
nd her treasure the gardener. Meetings are prohibited. You can be detained without trial. The place is swarming with police. And Olga’s shopping trip is postponed.—
Hillela went to the city, anyway—with Carole and Pauline, to see how effective or not the strike was. Joe had told Alpheus not to come to the office but the black servants went about their work and moved as usual along their own backyard network, placing ten-cent bets with the Fah-Fee runner and borrowing a cup of sugar or an onion in the exchange of plenty from white kitchens. The garbage had not been collected but rot doesn’t begin to smell in one day. All the white suburbs were quiet.
So was the city; but it was a different kind of quiet. There was only the static cackling gibberish from radio communication in passing police cars. Without its volume of blacks the city had gone mute. Without its blacks it was a place of buildings. —Like Sunday.— Carole was right; on Sundays the blacks were in their ghettos, that was where they were supposed to be, then, but this was a Monday, and they had not come back. The rhythm of life of this city, that had its black morning spate and black afternoon ebb, was withheld. The half-empty streets waited for a drama that was still to be written. For the present, there was an aspect strange as natural disaster, about which there is never anyone to question: the few blacks in straggling queues at the bus-stations, in the streets, looked the woman and two girls in the eye without a flicker of any acknowledgement. Why they had come to work, whether these white people approved them as the good kind of black or thought them traitors to their cause—that was not whites’ business.
Pauline drove out in the direction of Soweto but could not risk getting too near, with the girls in the car. There were police patrol cars everywhere. From the vantage point where Pauline, Carole and Hillela stopped, the distant cubes of Soweto houses were miles of tombstones in a vast graveyard; yet all the life that was gone from the city was down there; if you had been able to get near enough.
A Sport of Nature Page 8