The Housemaid's Daughter

by Barbara Mutch

  I felt my heart contract and I looked across at Mrs Cath. She nodded. Alongside me, Mr Dumise touched my arm in encouragement and murmured something I couldn’t hear. One of the community leaders leant forward and gestured for me to go. The stage was a long way off from the front row where I’d been sitting and it was all I could do to walk there in my new shoes without tripping. I dared not look back at the massed audience but rather concentrated on the piano gleaming on the stage. Mrs Cath had assured me that its keys were as good as the Zimmerman back home.

  I sat down and touched it gently, and waited for a moment. Every piano has its own heart, every piano deserves to be given its due if you want it to recognise you and give you its music.

  Mama came to me, and Phil came to me, and then Mrs Cath came to me, and finally my pale Dawn. If only she could have been here …

  I lifted my hands and the tune rose into my fingers.

  The Raindrop prelude. By Chopin.

  The first liquid notes rang out, and then the tender melody drifted into the hall, hovering and falling, and rising up again in its own time. I forgot who was listening, and I forgot where I was, and I played for those I had loved and they listened and gave my fingers wings.

  When it was over there was silence. Then I became aware of feet drumming on the floor. For a moment I was back in the township on my first day as a teacher; the youngsters were stamping to the marche militaire, they were dancing to the beat, they were flinging their bodies this way and that as if bewitched …

  But it wasn’t the township. It was the school that I hadn’t been allowed to attend. It was white students and their parents who were clapping and calling for more, more music.

  And so I gave them more. I gave them some grand Beethoven, and a little sinuous Debussy. Still they clapped and wanted more. I looked down at the audience and I saw no one but Mrs Cath, wiping her eyes. And then I took a chance. I gave them what my students loved to dance to. What Dawn loved to dance to. Township jive, like Miriam Makeba’s Qongqothwane – the Click Song – with its vibrant rhythm and its offbeat base. Pata pata. The African jazz of the Manhattan Brothers. Hugh Masekela’s golden trumpet …

  Mr Dumise was beaming in the front row, the invited black leaders were staring about them uneasily but clapping nonetheless. The smoke, the crowded streets, the baying police dogs were gone. Then, from the back of the hall came the familiar slap and slide of bare feet on floor and I glanced up quickly from the keys. It was Dawn.

  The audience turned around in surprise.

  The clapping faded, then intensified as my daughter, hair flying about her face, slender arms above her head, danced behind the back row. I heard them murmur as they wondered to each other who this pale, barefoot girl in the short skirt was. Where she had come from. Why she was here. Who she belonged to, with a skin that was neither black nor white, and eyes light as an early Karoo sky.

  And still she danced, in an ecstasy of grace and energy. Danced as if her life depended on it. Danced as if there was no tomorrow.

  Danced for me.

  * * *

  This time the police did not pound on the kaia at midnight, but knocked on the front door of Cradock House in the lazy, beetle-rasping heat of afternoon.

  ‘Ada!’ Mrs Cath rushed into the kitchen, green eyes enlarged with fear. ‘Quickly, please go to your kaia!’ She grasped my arm with fingers hard from the piano. ‘Stay there.’

  As I hurried past the apricot, past the hedge, beneath the kaffirboom, I felt the same tears that had welled in my eyes as I left the stage to embrace Dawn at the back of the hall. Some of the pupils were drumming their feet on the floor. Some were standing up, craning their necks to see my pale daughter.

  ‘You came! Oh, Dawn, you came!’

  ‘No one plays like you, Mama!’

  ‘Stay, child,’ I said over the uproar. ‘Have tea and come home for the night.’

  ‘I can’t, Mama.’ Her slender chest heaved from the effort of the dance. ‘I only came for you, I only danced for you – not these others.’ She gestured at the audience, on their feet now and still clapping. Some of the children were standing up on their chairs to get a better view. Others left their places and began to crowd around, captivated by Dawn, her lithe body, her exotic face, her wildness.

  With a final touch of her cheek against mine she was gone, bare heels flashing, the door banging behind her, out into the darkness and back to the township beyond Bree Street.

  There was no way to deny it. They saw she was my daughter in every way except for her skin. And her eyes. The eyes of her father, my Madam’s husband.

  They asked to see Edward alone but I would not allow it, so we sat in the lounge across from each other. I did not offer tea. They said it had ‘come to their attention’ that Edward had fathered a coloured child.

  ‘It’s true,’ I said, taking the initiative (I remember the conversation verbatim), for Edward appeared totally shrunken and unable to respond. ‘We do not deny it. But the child lives elsewhere. And my husband fathered her before this was a crime.’

  This wasn’t strictly speaking true, for I’d done the research. The Immorality Act was just in force when Dawn was born, but I have found that when dealing with local officialdom, an appearance of assuredness can go a long way.

  ‘We’ll need to interview the girl,’ the one in charge said, ‘and the mother.’ He was a tall man, more refined than the louts that broke into Ada’s kaia. But just as menacing. ‘Then the state will assemble its case for prosecution.’ They began to speak of witnesses, of procedures, of the statutes involved.

  I stood up.

  They looked at me, opened their mouths to say more but I pre-empted them. ‘I must ask you to leave now. Thank you for informing us. We will, of course, be engaging legal counsel.’

  They shrugged, as if nothing we could do would make any difference, gathered their papers, and left.

  I waited in the kaia until I heard their van leave. Then I went back to the house. Mrs Cath and Master were sitting opposite one another in the lounge. I watched from the crack in the door. The clock ticked. They said nothing, although Mrs Cath seemed to be expecting Master to speak, and glanced across at him from time to time. I waited. A sudden breeze rattled a window. Still they sat. It occurred to me how much time they spent together in silence, bereft of words or touch. Through Phil’s illness, and Miss Rose’s troubles. It is the opposite of what I expected married people to do. Yet maybe this is what happens in a long marriage: husband and wife turn away from intimacy, retreat into themselves, particularly if they are split by different views of the world. Or maybe it is a sign that there was not enough between them from the start.

  I lifted up my hand and tapped on the door. It was time to step out from my usual hiding place.

  ‘Come in, Ada,’ Mrs Cath said, turning away from Master and nodding at me, as if she’d known I was there all along. Master stared down at his fingers. The newspaper lay on the floor beside his chair in an untidy heap.

  ‘What do they want, Mrs Cath?’

  She hesitated for a moment, then said firmly, ‘They want to prosecute Edward.’ It was the first time she had called Master by his name in front of me. Like the moment at school when we saw each other not as madam and servant but as women, now Mrs Cath was treating me as an equal in relation to Master.

  ‘And prosecute me?’

  ‘They want to interview Dawn first.’

  ‘Dawn?’ My heart went cold.

  ‘Only to talk to her,’ Mrs Cath hesitated, glancing at Master, ‘for evidence. But, Ada,’ she added swiftly as she saw the horror on my face, ‘Dawn herself won’t be charged with any crime, you mustn’t worry.’

  But I did. For Mrs Cath had no idea what went on in the township, or the side of Dawn that lived there. Her fierce will. Her desire to prove herself, to be more black than she was, to be part of the inferno – liberation, struggle, revolution, war – that was engulfing us all.

  I didn’t care what happened to me, it was
Dawn who mattered, Dawn who must be protected. If they found her and took her away for questioning, Dawn would resist. I knew she would. She would fight, and protest, and kick and scream even though she herself might only be a witness or a victim, someone not to be charged with any crime. And at the end of it she would be forever damaged.

  ‘Ada! Ada!’ Mrs Cath rose, but I was already out of the room, out of the back door, down the garden, out of the back gate that I’d passed through with my child growing within me, down Dundas Street gasping for breath, across Church Street with my chest heaving, down Bree with a sharp pain in my side from the running, past the jail and into the township on desperate feet, even though it would soon be dark.

  Chapter 42

  ‘Stay out of sight, Dawn. And watch your tongue if they find you!’ I begged, as Lindiwe, Dawn and I sat in the gathering darkness of Lindiwe’s hut, with only a candle on the floor for light. The naked flame threw trembling shadows on the mud walls. From outside came the noise of men making their way to the nearby beer hall, their weekly wages in their pockets. It was a Friday. I strained through their shouts for the sound of police sirens coming for my child. I said nothing about being prosecuted myself.

  ‘But why, Mama? I’ve done nothing wrong.’

  Lindiwe reached a hand across and touched my arm in sympathy and then turned to Dawn. ‘No, you haven’t, but your mama gave you a skin that makes you do wild things. This is what your mama fears if they come and take you to the police station – that you will fight back.’

  ‘They have no right!’

  ‘They can do what they like, child!’ I cried. ‘It’s not a matter of rights at all.’

  Still I had not admitted that it was Master who was her father. Still I tried to keep to the fiction that an unknown white man gave her the skin she bore, that the police were confused, that their pursuit of us was a mistake. Yet she surely knew. After all, had she not left Cradock House partly to save us from the law?

  Lindiwe got up to lift her kettle off the paraffin stove. ‘Let us think what would be best,’ she said quietly. ‘What will keep Dawn safe.’

  ‘I must leave,’ Dawn murmured, her anger disappearing, the tenderness returning as she reached across and wrapped her young arms around me. ‘Then there’ll be no evidence any more. No brown skin that they can find, wherever they look.’

  ‘No, child,’ I wept against her cheek pale as tea. ‘We can manage. Maybe Mr Dumise, or the Reverend Calata will speak up for you.’

  ‘Oh Mama.’ Dawn drew away and looked at me with sadness. ‘Anyone who helps me will be under suspicion. It must end with me.’

  ‘But where will you go?’ Lindiwe, always practical, returned with mugs of strong tea that she placed on the earth floor before us.

  ‘To Jo’burg,’ said Dawn with certainty, eyes gleaming even in the darkness of the hut. ‘No one will find me there.’

  ‘Jo’burg!’ I gasped. Jo’burg, the place of trouble like Miss Rose found, like Sharpeville with its dead children. ‘So far away!’ How could I help her if she was so far away? And if I was in jail?

  ‘I’ll find work.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  Dawn had yet to finish school, the only thing she knew was what I knew: polishing, dusting, ironing. I’d taught her English and sent her to school so she could go further than just housework.

  ‘I’ll dance!’ she said then, with a quick smile. ‘Look how they loved my dancing the other night!’ She got up and began to twist and bend in the candlelight, moving to unheard music, to a rhythm that was hers alone.

  ‘If you answer their questions with politeness, they will take your answers and let you go,’ I tried again, desperate to reach the dancing figure before us. ‘But if you resist, if you argue…’

  Dawn struck a final pose and then dropped down to the floor, her supple limbs crossing beneath her like sleeves tucked into a folded shirt.

  ‘Don’t you understand, Mama? I came to the concert specially for you,’ she asserted through the gloom. ‘I danced for you, Mama. I was going to leave one of these days anyway, even if the police hadn’t come.’

  ‘Dawn!’

  ‘The Karoo’s too small, too small, Mama,’ she coaxed, trying to make me believe. ‘The future will be better in Jo’burg. More brown skins like mine, they say.’

  The future will be better in Jo’burg, Miss Rose had also said, as she waved goodbye in the blue dress and the red lipstick from the chemist. I looked at Dawn, this girl-woman who fell in between, like the colour of the Groot Vis, and I knew that nothing I could say would make any difference. From the moment I learnt about inheritance from the kind doctor whose house is no more, I knew she would never belong with me. The first raid on the kaia had strengthened her desire to leave Cradock House; this latest crisis was giving her the reason to shake the Karoo dust from her feet altogether.

  Yet who was I to judge? I myself had returned to Cradock House out of a desire to belong somewhere.

  She scrambled up and stood in the doorway, as Mrs Cath had once stood in the doorway to Lindiwe’s hut when she found me. ‘I’ll fetch my things and come back. Will you stay here, Mama?’ She took a quick step back and leant down to grasp my shoulder. ‘Stay here tonight? The train goes early.’

  * * *

  ‘I knew it was Master,’ she whispered later, as we lay in the darkness on the floor together, ‘when Miss Rose started to hate me.’

  I took her hand where it lay next to me and pressed it against my face, feeling the rough patches on the knuckles and the smoothness of the palm, inhaling the sweet youth of her. Beyond the outline of her head with its smoother-than-African hair, unexpected stars peered at us through the open doorway.

  ‘I thought it was my duty,’ the words came out of me in a rush, ‘when he came to the door – can you forgive me, child?’

  She turned to face me. Her blue eyes glittered black as coal.

  ‘I won’t forgive Master,’ she said with quiet heat, ‘and I won’t forgive Miss Rose.’

  I felt the chill in my heart deepen, for although such strength might help her survive, it might also drain the tenderness from her being. Tenderness that still laced her heart despite daily injustice. I prayed that the world would change in time, so this might never happen.

  * * *

  It was a grey dawn like the morning when my child was born and I’d walked to the water tap with Dawn on one arm and Auntie’s bucket on the other. A rim of sunrise showed on the horizon, picking out the purple shapes of the koppies where they loomed above the town. People hurried down the street, some with suitcases like Dawn, others with no possessions. It was quiet; the ‘Township Bach’ had yet to reach its usual pitch, the troublemakers had yet to fill their fists with stones.

  ‘You have the address of my friend?’ Lindiwe had checked as we left her hut.

  ‘Yes,’ said Dawn, pale but keen in the early light. ‘Thank you, Ndwe.’

  Lindiwe took her hand and squeezed it. ‘You must write to your mama.’

  ‘Yes, I will. I’ll write every week.’

  ‘And to me. It will be good for my reading.’

  They were trying, I know, to help me. Trying to cover my silence and the weight that was bearing down upon me as each step along the dirt road took us closer to Bree Street, closer to Church Street and the bridge across the Groot Vis, closer to the station that would swallow my child before the sun was up.

  A group of youngsters with Afro hairstyles waved at Dawn, their hands falling to their sides as they saw the case in her hand, and Mama’s old funeral coat over her shoulder. She didn’t stop to talk as she normally would have done, but kept on walking between Lindiwe and me. Even the jail was quiet. Police vans sat in a line outside, silent, waiting to perform the cruel business of the day.

  We reached Church Street. Dawn glanced up towards the Karoo Gardens on Market Square, where the benches I used to sit on now said ‘Whites Only’. Dawn never knew what it was like to sit on those seats and warm her feet in the s
un – the signs had gone up when she was a child.

  We turned on to the bridge. Below us the Groot Vis slouched around rocks where the first washerwomen were finding their places. Drooping weaver nests trailed close to the surface of the water. The river was low but we hadn’t taken the drift because it would have meant Dawn getting her feet wet and somehow that didn’t seem the right way to leave.

  I could see the train sitting in the station already. Shunting noises came from further along the track. Above, capturing the first rays of sunlight, was the koppie where Auntie’s outdoor church had once been. I sometimes saw Auntie in the distance but she never greeted me or Dawn. In this, she had turned out to be like Master – and many other whites: if you don’t see something with your own eyes, it doesn’t really exist. Like schools that won’t hear, and minds that can be deliberately closed to what is just around the corner.

  ‘Mama?’ Dawn took my arm and led me up the station steps, for I’d stopped and stared about me as if it was a strange place.

  ‘Yes,’ I gathered myself, ‘we must get a ticket.’

  Lindiwe had kindly offered to pay for Dawn’s ticket because in my rush out of Cradock House I had not fetched the money that lay in the slit of my mattress. I will pay Lindiwe back the next time we meet.

  ‘Johannesburg,’ said Dawn to the man behind the bars in the ticket office for non-whites. ‘One way.’

  The man looked her over, noting the cardboard suitcase, the tattered funeral coat, the luminous face against the blackness of Lindiwe and me. He licked his finger and counted the money she gave, then pushed a ticket through the opening and pointed at the waiting train.

  ‘Change at De Aar. Ten minutes,’ he said.

  There were no crowds on the platform as there had once been. No buglers playing ‘We’ll meet again’, no ladies fluttering lace handkerchiefs, not even any laughter to cover the tears.

  The train began to work up steam. I stared at the pigeons on the rafters. And then I felt Phil again, the warmth of his hug, the scrape of his cheek where he’d forgotten to shave. I turned to Dawn, who should have been his child, and took her slender body in my arms and held her as I myself had once been held.