Snake Circle

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by Roberta Sykes


  Kenton was paying off awesome debts he had amassed before I met him, and Naomi and I were living on a very tight budget as our money had to last the full academic year, but we had discovered an eatery in nearby Fresh Pond shopping complex where they served food cheaply yet maintained a nice ambience, and we occasionally went there. When Peter arrived, usually to stay the weekend, he could never join us to eat out there—unless I was willing to treat him.

  We once had a very loud argument in a bus as we travelled from Fresh Pond to Harvard Square. Peter had convinced himself that the Aboriginal Overseas Study Award system was completely merit based, and that the committee’s selection of him meant that he was somehow intellectually superior. Yes, he had a relative working in Canberra, and yes, he was on good terms with some of the people involved in the process, but no, he had been selected on merit alone.

  I had already had similar discussions with a few of the Black Master’s students at Harvard. It seemed that they were unaware of the history of collegiate integration, and also felt that their admission meant they were the finest brains in the land. I’d had the good fortune, much earlier in my time there, to talk with people who had been active in bringing about changes, even on Harvard campus, to force schools to admit both women and minorities, and to bring in quotas as a means to ensure their continuing participation. But this, these people had assured me, was not equality. It was perhaps a bridge to equality of opportunity in the future, but should not be mistaken for the existence of equality in the present. Had the Black Master’s students with whom I had had these discussions presented themselves for admission a few decades earlier, they would not have been admitted, no matter how clever they thought they were, or were even able to prove they were. And just because they had been admitted now did not necessarily mean much more than that the quota system was in place. Equally as bright Black students whose applications were received after the quota was filled were less fortunate, not less smart.

  On the bus, Peter’s increasingly loud demands that I agree he had been chosen wholly on merit irked me. I sat staring out the window at the bleak buildings we were passing on this drab day until I could take it no more.

  Turning to him, I said in a quiet and cold tone, ‘Peter, if, as you say, the Awards are based on brains alone,’ he perked up hopefully as I spoke, then how come the Australian Government would fund you to go to Clark, which most people in the country have never heard of, but would not fund me to go to Harvard?’

  He was deflated. There was no answer, and I didn’t expect one. From then on Peter was more circumspect in raising questions of this nature with me.

  Despite our various disagreements, Peter and I cooperated to a remarkable degree in trying to raise awareness within the institutions in the area about the existence and situation of Blacks in Australia. Peter, a skilled artist, designed posters for several of the exhibitions I held at Northeastern University and other venues, and arranged for me to go to Clark University as a guest lecturer. He also took many photographs of me, at work, studying, writing, and used them, mounted and framed, as part of his study portfolio. When he had finished his work, he presented them to me as a parting gift.

  On my bus trip to Clark University to give a lecture a curious thing occurred. I arrived early at the country line bus station, and indeed was the first person to board the bus. I took a seat about two-thirds down the aisle and the handful of people who followed took seats in front of me.

  We were not far along the highway when a quite tall Black man came up from behind and, standing in the aisle, leaned over to speak to me. I was really surprised because I could have sworn the bus had been empty when I boarded, and certainly no one had walked past me.

  I didn’t understand the man when he spoke, though his voice was certainly loud enough for me to hear.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ I responded, leaning towards him to better catch his accent. He repeated his words, but I still could not understand what he was wanting from me. I continued to ask him to repeat himself, which he did, and eventually he tapped the folded beret he was carrying in his hand on the top of the seat beside me for emphasis. I still did not understand his thick accent, but by this time I had picked up a slight air of desperation in his voice.

  After repeating himself four or five times, he turned on his heels and went off towards the back of the bus again.

  When he left, I kept replaying in my mind his words and his actions, trying to make sense of what had occurred. The bus pulled up at several stops, and more people came on board, until it was quite full.

  By the time I reached my destination I had worked out, more or less, what the man had said to me and what his actions had meant. He had wanted either money or my ticket, and from the crease in his folded beret had protruded a small dull grey pipe which had made a muffled metallic sound when he tapped it on the top of the seat.

  Two or three people from Clark University met me, and immediately asked, ‘How was your journey?’

  ‘I think I was held up,’ I replied, my legs trembling from the realisation. ‘Or, I would have been—if I’d understood what was being said to me.’

  ‘Yeah, well sometimes people get on the bus and they haven’t got a ticket.’

  I watched the bus draw away and saw the man looking at me sulkily through the rear window. ‘He’ll have trouble when it’s time to get off, which is when they collect them.’

  Perhaps Puerto Rican, the man had been enormously unlucky to have chosen for his mark someone who was so unfamiliar with his accent, and he with mine. He had seen me struggling to understand him and then guessed from my own accent that I didn’t have a clue. The gun in the beret, as by then I was sure it was, was no help to him, either. I concluded from this experience that sometimes it is a help not to understand what’s going on.

  Usually if I was going to New York I would catch the train, but once I went there by bus. Several hours into the journey a Black man had leaned from the seat behind to speak to me, but this one I could understand.

  ‘What you got in your bag, Momma?’ his voice sounded suddenly in my ear.

  I looked around, startled. I had a small overnight bag at my feet, as I was to spend two days with a girlfriend, Mickey Smith, in Harlem. The man was of indeterminate age, somewhere between thirty and forty, I would guess, mouth unsmiling, eyes a-glitter and something of a sly expression on his face.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I demanded sharply.

  ‘Oh, come on. Mommas’ve always got food in the bag. I’m hungry. You must have a candy bar. Won’t you share your food with me, Momma?’

  ‘Well, you’ve really lucked out. If I’d known this bus trip was going to be so long—and we weren’t going to stop anywhere—I probably would have brought myself something to eat. But as it is, we both have to starve.’

  Outside Harvard’s campus, America, for me, seemed to consist of a whole lot of disconnected vignettes. All of them added a little something to the perspective I formed about that country.

  Naomi’s first semester at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School went reasonably well. I would supervise her comings and goings, make sure she was always home on time, and keep food on the table. Often, though, I was too busy with studies, preparing for the class I was to teach, and researching and writing my thesis proposal to have time to really listen to her.

  The high school consisted of five different high schools all within one large complex. Naomi had been placed in one of the experimental, rather than traditional, schools, where, I was assured, there were a good many international students.

  After school hours, we seemed to carry on a running war between us, with Naomi straining to be allowed freedoms that I felt to be beyond her years. I knew I couldn’t keep her locked up indoors all the time, but as our apartment was on the twenty-second floor, I didn’t care much for her to play in the grounds. Our building was one of two identical high-rises, separated by a fence. It was privately owned and managed, while the other had been sold to publi
c housing.

  Naomi, when she was permitted to play outside, was always to be back in the apartment by the time the 5 pm news came on television. One day she came in a little early, her face ashen, and switched the television on even though it was not yet time for the news.

  Shortly after a news bulletin came on: it transpired that older youths often gathered in the carpark of the building next door, and on this day, an argument had developed. One boy had pulled out a gun and shot the youth with whom he had been arguing. Then, taking fright, he looked around and saw that many people in the vicinity were staring at him. So he fired the gun off repeatedly, killing a woman who was taking groceries from the boot of her car, and wounding several other bystanders, before bolting off. When this news came on the screen, Naomi began crying. She and her friends had heard the first shot, run to the fence to see what was going on, and, so I suspect, had been lucky not to have collected any of the other stray bullets.

  I was aghast, this was not the sort of life I wanted for her. I was trying to build a better life for us all, get an education, and hopefully help to resolve some of the problems of racism and inequality that existed in my own country, so children like my daughter could have opportunities which had never existed for me.

  From then on I determined to watch her as closely as I could. I eavesdropped on phone conversations she had with her friends, and met as many of them as was possible. Increasingly I became disturbed about the influence America was having on her and discussed this almost endlessly with some of my friends.

  Many students at her school were the children of international scholars and staff at the universities, colleges and institutes in the area, but there were also a lot of local children. The majority of international students, it seemed to me, were white, and the school largely drew its Black student body from around the local area. While the friends Naomi chose from amongst her classmates were not exclusively from the Black student group, a great many seemed to be so. At first I had been pleased about this. However, I had to reconsider my response when I learned that some of her companions were the younger siblings of dealers, pimps and prostitutes in the area.

  When I complained to my friends and associates that Naomi could always tell me the current code names for street drugs, even though they were changed weekly, I was told to wake up to myself, this was ‘real life’. Parents shouldn’t expect to be able to protect their children from knowing these things.

  I remained unconvinced. Knowing the street names didn’t mean my child would necessarily end up taking drugs. But not knowing them would be an additional hurdle for her should she even think of moving in that direction—a hurdle I would have liked to see remain in place.

  There was one more incident, a fight at school between boys, which I never got to the bottom of, but the upshot of all of this was that I decided to take Naomi out of school. This move almost completely divided my friends.

  On one side, a whole host of friends fell in beside me, championing my stance and voicing their willingness to assist me with her education. I was given information about the Home Schooling Movement, which I learned to be one of the fastest growing movements at that time, where curriculum was developed for situations such as ours. However, I decided that the four months left of our States-side tour of duty was not really long enough to worry about formalising the fact that I intended to take over her education myself.

  Other friends came to me with proposals, which included taking Naomi for a day to their workplace and allowing her to familiarise herself with what specific jobs entailed, such as receptionist, secretary or computer operator. Others said they would arrange for her to visit private schools in the area. Chet came by often to pick her up and have her accompany him to presentations he was to give around town. I set up a schedule which included periods of reading, writing and maths each day, as well as learning typing, note-taking and filing. This may not be all that her schooling should consist of, but it was certainly preparing her for the real world of work. Also, it gave her confidence and experiences which I felt schools often failed to provide.

  Naomi and I grew closer during this period. We coordinated our study and work so that we could watch ‘Hawaii-Five-O’ together each afternoon as a sort of relaxation period. I also obtained a month’s free entry into a women’s exercise class at a nearby gym, and we would go there to leap up and down and roll around on the floor, with Naomi being far and away the most energetic of us both. I felt this would at least do for ‘sports’ until we made it back home to Australia. Kenton also took her ice-skating, so she was kept fairly active and did not long lament the fact that she was missing mainstream school life.

  An Australian election was looming in the future, and enough time had passed for my rage at the Australian Government to have subsided to a low roar. So I contacted the Australian Consulate in New York to make inquiries about voting. I received a warm welcome from Jeff Dixon, and subsequently from Adrienne Jones, and everyone proved to be very helpful. This was in contrast to my previous experiences with Australian officialdom.

  Throughout the entire time of my studies in the US, and despite having an addiction for following global news, I saw only two news items on television concerning Australia. The first was about a drought in country New South Wales, during which kangaroos came into Dubbo and were filmed drinking from hoses in people’s gardens. This had struck me as a sort of exotic trivia piece, news for when there really was no news.

  The second news item was the election of Bob Hawke as Prime Minister. It was even carried as a small article in the Boston Globe, headlined, ‘Australia Moves to the Left’. My memory of Bob Hawke was of him, some years earlier, turning up, very late and almost falling down drunk, to a lunchtime rally at Sydney Town Hall organised by the Teachers’ Federation. He had been detained at an extremely long lunch with mining magnates, even though his fare to Sydney had been paid for by the Federation. This caused me to reflect quite negatively on what the media regarded as the ‘Left’. At the rally we had sweltered in the noonday heat waiting for the key speaker. The crowds eventually drifted away back to work and the organisers had complained loud and clear about what they thought of Hawke’s behaviour. People were even more disgusted when, after his stumbling arrival, he had refused to speak until a young man bearing a sign ‘No Nuclear Hawkes’ was removed from the crowd.

  I was disappointed at the political changes that had been occurring in my country, where the Labor Party could take on board as a leftie and its party leader a man who had obviously been in bed with mining company heads, and for whom reservations about the danger of uranium mining on Aboriginal lands were not an agenda item.

  Letters from my mother continued to arrive regularly, but I was growing concerned about her. Nothing major, just small things caused me alarm. She had always been fastidious about writing, priding herself on her spelling ability and keeping a dictionary or two always to hand, habits she had ingrained into me as a child. ‘The object of writing is to be understood,’ she had forever insisted, and I smiled to recall letters she had sent back to me over the years with words circled as misspelt, notes in the margins, like a frustrated teacher wishing to ignore the fact that I was over thirty years old.

  Now, occasionally her paragraphs petered out, as though she had lost her train of thought while writing, and had not bothered to reread her missive before mailing it to me. Once I received, on two consecutive days, very brief almost identical letters from her. Apparently she had forgotten that she had written the first.

  I awoke one night with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach and my mother’s image foremost in my mind. It was almost as though she had sent me a telegram or I had received an ominous message from her in a dream. I was unable to concentrate on my work all day, and the fact that the mail brought no epistle from her heightened my distress. It had been more than two weeks since I had heard from her, a most unusual situation. Still, my funds were always in such short supply and there had been a couple of unexpected expens
es with Naomi’s health, so I felt I couldn’t afford to phone home. That was a cost I had decided I could only incur if there was a genuine crisis. A feeling of unease did not amount to an emergency.

  During the evening Kenton became annoyed with my moping and lack of concentration, and he just picked up the phone and dialled my mother’s home. When it was answered, he passed the receiver to me.

  ‘Mum?’

  My mother’s voice came down the line, crystal clear, though shaky, over all those miles. ‘A terrible thing has happened, Roberta, and I have just this minute walked into the house. We’ve been away. We were coming back along the inland road, the New England Highway, and when we were high on a mountain a big wind came up and blew the caravan we were towing right over the cliff. It dragged the car almost over the cliff, too. We almost died.’

  Mum’s voice trembled and was interspersed with an occasional deep sob.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘All our things are gone. The caravan split open, broke into little pieces. The clothes and everything else we had in the caravan, they’re scattered all down the cliff and there was no way we could get to them.’

  ‘But you—you’re alright? You weren’t injured?’

  ‘Sick and shaken. I don’t think I’ll ever recover. But—how come you’re calling now?’

  ‘I have no idea, Mum. I felt all day that there was something wrong, that you were trying to send me a message.’

  ‘I did, dear. When I thought we were going over that cliff, that I was going to die, I thought I would never see you again and I cried out to you. Sounds silly, I know, because you’re so far away and there’s nothing you could have done even if you’re been there. But I’ll be alright now, now that we’ve arrived safely home and I’ve heard the voice of my most far-away child.’

 

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