Tandia

by Bryce Courtenay

  After settling her in, Geel Piet had stolen five pounds from her handbag, her entire stake for a new life in the big city. He had returned just after eleven o'clock curfew that night with an armful of groceries, handing the destitute and distressed young mother twenty pounds. Geel Piet was a racing man extraordinaire and had brought home two winners at Turffontein racetrack that afternoon.

  Geel Piet didn't stay in Sophiatown long. Over the ten years that followed, he used to visit Madam Flame Flo occasionally, always between bouts in prison. Even after she had become rich and a famous figure in Sophiatown, she never turned him away. Perhaps the only clean sheets and soft bed Geel Piet ever knew were in the spare bedroom of her large house. In her mind he'd laid the foundation for her fortune and Madam Flame Flo wasn't a fair-weather friend, the sort of person to forget a thing like that.

  On the morning following her arrival in Sophiatown, Geel Piet had shown Flo how to brew a concoction which he'd learned to make in Barberton Gaol, a small but notoriously brutal and greatly feared prison in the Eastern Transvaal. The home-made liquor consisted of yeast, a quantity of the small-seeded brown maize known as kaffir-corn, brown sugar and the coarse brown bread the natives ate. It was all mixed together in a four-gallon paraffin tin filled with water and allowed to stand overnight. The result was a pungent brew with a real wallop! Flo had named it Barberton and dispensed it in jam tins at a nice profit to the Saturday-night Good Street crowd.

  Over the years many shebeen queens had produced their own liquor, but Flo's special brand 'of Barberton was never seriously challenged. Some people said that her secret ingredient was arsenic, others claimed it was cyanide pinched from the gold refinery at Modderfontein, others that it was the rainwater she used from her big round tank. Madam Flame Flo never told, and in a country where liquor was forbidden to blacks (except for the sour, fermented porridge-like kaffir beer served' in government drinking compounds), she became a very rich and even, in her own way, powerful woman.

  In 1945 Madam Flame Flo had heard of Geel Piet's death at the hands of a warder named Kronkie in the very same Barberton prison from which her famous concoction was derived. She had ordered a polished granite tombstone on which she'd inscribed:

  GEEL PIET

  We drink to

  his

  sacred memory.

  DIED 1945

  She'd loaded the headstone onto the back of a bakkie, driven the three hundred and forty miles to the tiny mountain town of Barberton, and arrived at the notorious prison. There she had demanded to see where Geel Piet had been buried.

  At first the Kommandant had refused to take her seriously. 'Hey, jong, he was just a boesman who died. We just dug a hole and put him in. Dood vlies is dood vlies! Dead meat is dead meat. Who you think he was, Jesus Christ in disguise?'

  But Madam Flame Flo had persisted, and eventually she had been shown the plot where the prisoners who hadn't made it through their sentences lay buried: a large bare piece of ground where two or three hundred round boulders no bigger than a man's head were arranged in rows approximately five feet apart. The prisoners called it amaTshe and the warders simply translated this into die Klippe, the Stones. The boulders were all approximately the same size and of a whitish stone cut from a local quarry. Prisoners working in the quarry, when given the task of making a headstone, would shape it into a rough approximation and size of a human skull. At first glance, laid out in rows, the stones looked like a neatly organised killing field, which was a fairly accurate description of the state of affairs. Barberton wasn't a big prison, but it had more prisoner deaths than any in the country. The institutional joke among the Boer warders was that when a magistrate sentenced a black man to Barberton, he turned white. The Stones testified to the grim reality of this puerile joke.

  The warder had waved his hand expansively over the stone-studded plot. 'Take you pick!' he had said, amused.

  Madam Flame Flo had paid the man a pound to get three prisoners to unload the headstone from the bakkie and transport it by wheelbarrow to the Stones. Word had gotten around, and by the time the prisoners arrived, several more warders had gathered to witness the weird stone-laying ceremony for a beaten-up little boesman who wasn't worth a pinch of shit.

  'Was die Hotnot jou soetman? Was the Hottentot your sweetheart?' one of them shouted, and the others all joined in the laughter. There was no doubt about it, kaffirs were funny buggers, but these boesmen were fucked in the head spending good money on a tombstone for a worthless piece of shit like that.

  Just then a tall, fair-haired warder arrived on the scene. 'Are you the woman looking for Geel Piet's grave?' he asked, more or less politely, in Afrikaans.

  'Ja, baasie.' Madam Flame Flo answered, not knowing what to expect from the white man.

  'Kom!' he instructed, and started to walk to the very centre of the plot where Madam Flame Flo noticed a white boulder perhaps one-and-a-half times larger than the others, and quite nicely carved into an almost completely round ball. The warder waited for her to arrive. 'Put it here,' he said, and, turning, whistled to the prisoners who had reached the edge of the graveyard. To Madam Flame Flo's surprise the young warder dropped to his haunches and rolled the whitewashed stone away.

  The headstone must have been very heavy, for the metal wheel of the barrow cut a clear rut into the hard red clay. With great difficulty the three men lifted it from the barrow and placed it where the boulder had been. It sat in the centre of the bare plot, an obscenely new and extravagant symbol set amongst the humble skull stones. There seemed nothing more to say. 'Dankie, baasie. Can you tell me please when he died, do you know the date?'

  The sergeant smiled. He had a pleasant, open face and his expression wasn't in the least condescending. 'That's easy, man. It was the night the Germans surrendered.'

  Madam Flame Flo thanked the warder again as the three prisoners, laughing among themselves, left, one of them wheeling the barrow containing the rock which had now been replaced by the ludicrous tombstone.

  The warder looked directly at Madam Flame Flo for the first time and offered her his hand. Surprised, she accepted it. 'My name's Gert. I'm not saying the boesman was a good man,' he grinned at the memory, 'he was a proper skelm, but he was also a real man. Geel Piet was the best boxing coach I ever saw.' He turned abruptly and walked away.

  Madam Flame Flo turned back to the polished headstone. Behind it the green hills rose up and rolled back and tumbled into mountains blued and smudged in the high distance. It was a beautiful place for an old lag to die. 'Slaap lekker ou maat! Sleep well, old friend,' she said quietly, and then added, 'Thanks, you hear? Thanks for everything you done for me.' Then she began to weep quietly, less for her friend than for the hopelessness of her kind, the twilight people who didn't belong, the new children of Africa spawned from the ugly, guilty lust of white for black and unwanted by both. She thought of her daughter with her fair skin and blue eyes who had escaped the tyranny of colour but who could never have a child lest it throw back and condemn her for the fraud she was.

  On her return to Sophiatown Madam Flame Flo tried to re-name her liquor. She wanted to call it Geel Piet, but the name never caught on. The original name, Barberton, stood for something, and that sort of thing is not lightly put aside.

  Tradition in a daily start-from-scratch town like Kofifi, with few routines and even fewer laws, is important for continuity, a powerful emotional glue which holds people together.

  A person can't just go around changing things willy-nilly, even if the sentiment is a good one.

  Barberton, and for that matter its many imitators, produced an affliction known as 'liquor flame' amongst its often poorly nourished drinkers. Liquor flame was a skin disease which resulted in the top layer of the skin peeling away. It was this affliction which gained Flo her nickname. Far from being ashamed of it, Madam Flame Flo regarded the appellation with a great deal of pride.

  Madam Flame Flo
had never moved from the spot Geel Piet had found for her to live. First she'd bought the room, then the house, and then the three small houses surrounding it. She had dug a septic tank and constructed a four-bedroom red-brick home with two bathrooms, where visitors would bring their children to inspect the indoor toilet. Behind the house WaS a large shed where the forty-four gallon drums of Barberton were brewed. Directly under the floor of this outhouse were several large tanks into which the fermented drink was strained and poured. Beside the shed, resting on its own concrete platform, was a huge round corrugated-iron rainwater tank which used the roof of the main house as its catchment area. This was the water used to make Barberton, and the whole set-up became Madam Flame Flo's brewery. Buried in the yard was a forty-four gallon drum into which the slops were emptied. This drum existed essentially as a decoy for police raids. While Madam Flame Flo paid police protection as a matter of routine, as an equal matter of routine she was regularly raided. She was too big an operator to go unnoticed; any policeman with a nose on his face could detect the slightly sour smell of the fermenting kaffir-corn and yeast simply by walking past the house.

  In the strange game of corruption which existed in Sophiatown between the white police officers and the inhabitants, several unspoken rules applied. In Madam Flame Flo's case raids took place without warning so that she was obliged to pay protection to half-a-dozen street gangs. These comprised mostly teenage boys, no less vicious for their youth, and responsible for a great deal of mayhem and quite often even murder in the township. A police presence in numbers in the vicinity of Madam Flame Ho's end of Good Street would always be reported in time for her to empty the above-the-ground brewing vats into the below-the-ground tanks, and to appear innocent but for the single forty-four gallon drum conspicuously buried in the back yard. There was a second implicit law which applied in Sophiatown, this being that what is in the ground belongs to the ground. The police, after a lot of pretentious looking around, would eventually come upon the buried drum. It would be dug up and confiscated and Madam Flame Flo would be duly charged with allowing persons unknown to conceal liquor on her premises. This offence carried a biggish fine which she duly paid, though not without vehemently protesting her innocence.

  The big Packard arrived in Good Street followed by a pack of yelling urchins curious to inspect the new arrivals. Madam Flame Flo, impatient to greet her sister, couldn't wait for Mama Tequila to get out of the car. She opened the back door and climbed into the rear seat as the Packard came to a halt outside her house. The two sisters embraced loudly and with copious tears.

  Madam Flame Flo was already chatting as she entered the car, so that her words came out punctuated by sobs of welcome. 'The white bastards are going to take my beautiful home away! Come, my sister, your room is ready, at least you can enjoy it one last time. How are you, liefling? I have food, you must eat, we can still eat, though God knows how much longer before those Boer bastards take the food from out our mouths!'

  Tandia, not wishing to be a part of the emotional sistering taking place in the back seat, got out of the car and was immediately surrounded by more than a dozen ragged black children who seemed to range from about seven to ten years old. Juicey Fruit Mambo was attempting to shoo them away, but these kids were city bred and they stood their ground, prepared to run only when they felt real danger which, in the way slum kids know these things, they sensed wasn't coming from Juicey Fruit Mambo's fierce-looking scowl.

  'Oh my, I am so heppy you have come! We must talk plans, you hear?' Madam Flame Flo cried to Mama Tequila. 'In Sophiatown it's finish and klaar. God, I can't tell you what I been through! I'm telling you, any day now they going to come and fetch me and take me to Sterkfontein Mental Hospital. God's truth!'

  'And the business? How is the business, Flo?' Mama Tequila laughed, patting her scrawny sister on the back with a heavily jewelled hand.

  'That, God be thanked, is first class. With so much trouble and people losing their houses and going to Diepfontein and Meadowlands there is a lot of need. Business is good, that I got to say! But soon, no more! When they move the coloured folk out, that the end. The police already told me, no Barberton in the resettlement area. "What are the people going to drink, skokiaan?" I ask that big Dutchman, Potgieter, who is the crown sergeant at the Newlands police station. You know what he say, ousie? He says, "The government is trying to make a place for decent boesmen to live, no more blerrie shebeens, you hear, no more Barberton, no more skokiaan, we going to build a big beer hall!"

  That's what the dumb bugger says. So I look at him all solcastic. Since when does a coloured person drink kaffir beer? I ask him. "Here!" he says and scratches his big dom kop, "Maybe the authorities forgot we not mixing boesmen with black kaffirs no more. I seen it on the plans, they got a big soccer stadium and a beer hall in all the drawings!" So maybe there's a chance, hey? I ask him. That Potgieter he's the biggest crook, no way he going to run a clean show, no way, man! He looks at me sideways and his piggy blue eyes is all small in his fat face and his mouth goes like he's sucking a lemon, "Maybe you should start a brothel, hey?" he says. "Maybe that would be not such a bad thing for the boesman in the new place?" He laughs and then he says, "I seen a beer hall, but I didn't see a brothel in those plans." He picks his nose then and looks at me and then down at what he took out his nose. Sies, man! What a disgusting type, hey? "Ja, I think a brothel, that better than selling Barberton and we only charge a fixed sum every week for police protection and no fines," that's what he says to me.' Mama Tequila laughed. 'We talk inside, Flo, I been sitting in this lousy car seat since seven this morning.'

  Flo clambered out of the rear of the car backwards and Juicey Fruit Mambo began the complicated process of extracting Mama Tequila from the Packard. In the last year or so she'd put on nearly forty pounds and while getting into the car wasn't too difficult, extracting her had become somewhat of a traumatic experience for them both. First he moved Mama Tequila's legs so they protruded out of the door; then he moved around to the other side of the car. Climbing into the back, he pushed her further along the seat until her legs could reach the ground. He then moved back to Mama Tequila's side of the car and while she propped the soles of her shoes against the uppers of his boots to prevent her slipping forward, Juicey Fruit Mambo began to rock her, slowly increasing the rhythm until with a final jerk he pulled her up out of the seat. The crowd around the car applauded as Mama Tequila arrived in a vertical position. Juicey Fruit Mambo's brow was covered with beads of perspiration from the effort.

  Mama Tequila acknowledged their tribute by beaming into the crowd, which now consisted of even more kids and quite a few adults as well. The original gang, the discoverers of this diversion, had a proprietorial look about them, as though they expected to be congratulated for finding so curious a spectacle on an otherwise dull Monday.

  Still panting from the effort of getting out of the Packard,

  Mama Tequila started to walk slowly towards the house. 'Howdy folks, I do declare, it sure nice to be in this fine town of yours! Yessiree!' She looked at the shacks and shanties, leaning fences and dusty trees in the dirty street. 'It just the nicest place I ever did see!' she declared; then looking around, beamed again at the crowd. 'And I can tell, it gonna be real friendly, just like being home!'

  A small gasp of appreciation went up from the crowd. In Sophiatown anything American was a very big deal. The small crowd welcoming her with their eyes decided that the enormous woman with the big, shiny American car was a celebrity, and that the beautiful young girl with her was probably also one. Someone whispered the words, 'Fillim stars!' An excited murmur swept through the crowd.

  Mama Tequila, her timing as usual immaculate, took her sister by one arm and Tandia by the other and moved towards the house. 'I so excited to be here, honey!' she said in a voice loud enough for the onlookers to hear. 'My, my, now ain't that something else?' she indicated the red brick house as though she'd suddenly stepped around a
corner and seen the Taj Mahal. Madam Flame Flo grinned. Mama Tequila had visited her a dozen times before at this same house, but she liked the showmanship; it couldn't do no harm anyway. Mama Tequila, still beaming, climbed the steps onto the front stoep, insisting that her sister and Tandia enter the house first. She turned at the door to face the crowd, and bringing both heavily bejewelled sets of fingers to her lips, she blew them a kiss. A spontaneous cheer broke out. Mama Tequila knew that her arrival would be the big news in town that night.

  Madam Flame Flo seemed to Tandia to be everything Mama Tequila wasn't. She was thin as a wisp of morning smoke. Her voice was pitched high and she spoke rapidly.

  Her every movement was quick and impatient as though she was spring-loaded and would go off at the merest touch. She had prepared a huge lunch, mostly of cold meats: beef and mutton, silverside, salami, polony and cold pork sausages. Mama Tequila lost no time tucking in.

  She hadn't eaten since just after five that morning and declared herself to be starving. To her delight, the kitchen maid entered with a large bowl of roasted corn cobs. Sinking her fork into one end of the cob so it acted as a handle, Mama Tequila ripped the hot golden seeds of corn from the husk with her teeth. Yellow butter ran down the corners of her mouth onto the napkin she had carefully folded around her neck.

  Tandia was too excited to eat. Johannesburg with its yellow mine-dump mountains and the tall buildings reaching up into the sky made Durban seem like a small dorp. This was the big time all right! From the moment she'd been accepted by Natal University, Tandia knew where she was headed. Nothing was going to stop her. If a person made a name for herself in a place like this, she would be known in the best white circus all right! And she wanted that, though not the way Patel had craved it. Tandia would be known as the black woman who fought on even terms with the white oppressors of her people. A black who would spit in the face of apartheid. When she thought like this she would develop a glow, a burning deep within her. She wasn't even sure she understood what it was, whether love for her kind or hate for the whites, but it came increasingly and it gave her a strength which transcended even her fear of Geldenhuis.