When Morning Comes
Page 1
Praise For When Morning Comes
“This timely reminder of the power and passion of young people contextualizes current student protests by honoring those of the past.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Raina’s story powerfully demonstrates the high stakes of the teenagers’ choices while maintaining a bracing pace that builds steady tension.”—Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)
“Raina’s novel provides a riveting and candid depiction of life in South Africa at the cusp of an uprising which would eventually dismantle apartheid. But it is also a story of complicated friendships, a doomed love affair and the surprising strength and resilience of four young people living in impossible times.”—Canadian Children’s Book News
“When Morning Comes . . . has an in-the-moment, documentary feel that puts historical realism and authenticity first.”—The Globe and Mail
“Readers . . . will recognize parallel themes from youth involvement in the American civil rights movement (and) historical fiction fans will find common ground here with teens who favor dramatic thrillers.”—Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books
“This novel presents an excellent starting point to inspire curiosity, and serves as a bold and dignified testament to a struggle that shouldn’t be forgotten.”—Quill and Quire
“An eye-opening view of a rarely covered time and place in YA literature, this title offers rich opportunities for discussion and classroom sharing.”—The School Library Journal
“Class and race intersect at a pivotal moment in history as the compelling characters—a wide cross section of South Africans—offer their stories, and a day in the life of a country in crisis comes into focus.”—Booklist
“(This) novel itself is a far stronger exposition of the students’ anger and power than any historical commentary could be.”—Resource Links
“At its best, historical fiction allows us to feel as if we are living through something we have only read about. That is especially true in the case of When Morning Comes.”—The Montreal Gazette
When Morning Comes
ARUSHI RAINA
Tradewind Books
Vancouver • London
Published in Canada and the UK in 2016 Published in the USA in 2017 Published as an ebook in 2017
Text © 2016 by Arushi Raina Cover illustration © 2016 by Elisa Gutiérrez Cover design by Elisa Gutiérrez Book design by Jacqueline Wang
The paper is 100% post-consumer recycled and processed chlorine and acid-free.
Printed in Canada by Friesens
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 800, Toronto, Ontario M5E 1E5
The right of Arushi Raina to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.
Cataloguing-in-Publication Data for this book is available from The British Library.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Raina, Arushi, author When morning comes / Arushi Raina.
ISBN 978-1-896580-69-2 (hardback).--ISBN 978-1-926890-14-2 (paperback)ISBN 978-1926890-73-9 (web pdf)ISBN 978-1926890-77-7 (ebook)
I. Title.
PS8635.A427W44 2016 jC813’.6 C2016-901027-9
Tradewind Books thanks the Governments of Canada and British Columbia for the financial support they have extended through the Canada Book Fund, Livres Canada Books, the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council and the British Columbia Book Publishing Tax Credit program.
The publisher wishes to thank Ayushi Nayak and Olga Lenczewska for their editorial help with this book.
Acknowledgements
Even imagined uprisings rely on many voices. Thanks to Tevin Radebe for his handy advice on Zulu and Xhosa. To Vis Naidoo—a pamphleteer in his time. To John Wulz for helping Meena dissect and examine bodies for causes of death.
Thanks to my publishers, Mike and Carol, for believing in this book when it most mattered, for their passionate support for the stories less told. And to Sue Ann for caring so deeply for Meena, Jack, Zanele—even Thabo. To Christianne, for the fierce loyalty, wisdom and compassion she brings to all things. Thanks to Cecil Hershler for his encouragement.
To Don Foster for teaching me to use words with care and to Michael Joyce for giving me the confidence to take chances. Thanks to the 2014 Senior Composition class at Vassar and to my thesis advisor, Amitava Kumar, for the critical energy that propels stories forward. Thanks to some of my first “real” readers: Ethan, Rhea, Bridget. To Arman, for reading earlier drafts of earlier books that never made it out in print. And seeing something in them. To Sitara and Alice for the many ways they supported this book and made it better. To Isaac, Maria and Jinjoo for listening, always. And thanks to my mother, for always pushing for the difficult voices and the harder stories from home.
To some kick-ass primary and highschool teachers back in Joburg: Mrs Harvey, Mrs Gray, Mr McMahon and Ms Tommei.
The history of 1976 has been put together through oral narratives and texts from survivors, historians and educators. I am grateful to the authors of the books Soweto Explodes, by Masala Mosegomi and The Road to Democracy in South Africa:Vol II, by the South African Democracy Education Trust, as well as to online sources such as South African History Online and I Saw a Nightmare, by Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, among countless other sources.
WHEN MORNING COMES
Prologue
Jack
I dream of Zanele at the wheel, her knuckles and face outlined by streetlights. We speed past vacant lots. She’s driving too fast. Rain comes thick and heavy on the windows. It’s the kind of storm that happens only on the highveld, the thunder loud and rapid. She doesn’t speak. I need her to. Maybe she’s counting the people who’ve died since we first met.
I calculate how fast the storm is coming up behind us—as if that helps. Zanele is taking us somewhere only she knows.
The things I am good at, lying and mathematics, are useless now. In the moments before the end, I can do nothing.
We crash onto the highway railing, the front chassis crumpling into the windscreen.
Another scandal, a black girl and a white boy found in a car with no explanation besides the obvious one.
That’s what I do now—sleep and wake up and go over things that have already happened or might have happened. I eat breakfast, a boiled egg and four slices of white bread, while I wait for a phone call that I know won’t come. In Soweto, smoke rises from the shacks. Meena says that ever since the protest the police fire at plastic bags, animals, little boys—anything that moves. I read the newspaper over and over, thinking they’ll mention Zanele. But they don’t. The same footage on the protests repeats on the television. I call Meena at the shop and she tells me no news is good news.
I ask for less and less as the days pass. First, I wanted Zanele to apologize for all the things she didn’t tell me, to apologize for disappearing without warning. Then all I wanted was for her to come back. Then it didn’t matter if I didn’t see her again. As long as she was alive.
One
Zanele
We were going to put dynamite under the powerline towers. There were three of us that day at the Orlando power station. Billy, Phelele and me. It was after school, and we’d come to make sketches—sketches that would show where the dynamite needed to go.
On the other side of the wire fence, children stared at us. They stood barefoot on long grass that had turned brown with the cold. Behind the fence and the children, the land dipped and rose. I could barely make out the road back to Soweto.
As we walked back, we saw rows and rows of corrugated roofs turned copper as the sun went down. And I imagined the Orlando power station exploding—the black bars of the towers flying apart and the lights going off in white people’s homes. For a moment, it would be a blackened white city. It would warn the mlungus of what we would do if they didn’t give us what we wanted.
In his shack, Billy made the sketches of the power station to send to the Umkhonto We Sizwe in Mozambique. They had explosives. They would slip back across the border and blow up the towers.
With a sharpened pencil, Phelele added arrows to the drawing to show where the dynamite should be placed.
They gave me the finished sketches. I had to drop them off at the train station. The envelope taped under the bench. I went alone, taking the path past the shebeen where Mankwe sang.
Before the power station, Billy, the meetings, I had just been Mankwe’s sister, the Mankwe with the magic voice.
Now I was the sister who helped plant explosives.
After Billy and Phelele were arrested, I waited for the police to come for me. But they didn’t. In court a month later, they and two others I didn’t know were charged with terrorism. The court ruled that Billy had recruited students to join military cells in Mozambique that were plotting to overthrow the government.
Now the four of them, chained, are walked out of the court with their arms cuffed behind them. The cuffs are in the space between the sleeves of Billy’s nice coat and his hands. I look away but I see the cuffs everywhere, metal glinting in the afternoon light.
Billy starts singing as he walks past us. Asibe sabe thina. I reach out and the blue fibre of his coat gets caught in my nails. Then the policeman pushes him. Billy’s voice is low, soft, always the one the gogos in church liked best. We all join in with Billy, but Phelele is silent, head bowed. The policemen let us sing, because they don’t understand what the song means. Or they don’t care. They have Billy and Phelele. It doesn’t matter if we sing that we do not fear them.
As the van doors slam shut, Phelele’s eyes meet mine through the metal grating. This could be the last time I will see her. The policemen get inside the cab, red-faced and satisfied. The front doors close and the van pulls out. Everyone runs after it.
And I wonder who told the police about Billy and Phelele.
“Come, Zanele.” Vusi takes my shoulders, turning me away from the crowd. “Time to go home.”
We walk past a long, clean black car. A blond yellow-haired man sits in the back seat, watching us and smoking. In the front, a black driver and a white policeman. I can’t see their faces. Behind them, buildings form an outline of grey rectangles against the sky. Hillbrow Tower stands above the rest of the city. I’ve heard there’s an elevator that takes you to a restaurant at the top.
We were thinking of targeting that too.
Later that night, I put on lipstick and glitter, and slip into my sister’s sequined dress. It is my night to sing at the shebeen. And I am back to being the person I used to be, before all of this happened.
Jack
Oliver, Ricky and I graduated from Jeppe High School last December and started crashing parties soon after. We didn’t have anything better to do. Oliver was at Tucks for engineering, Ricky was “taking some time off” and “thinking of studying in the States” and I was free till August, when I’d leave for Oxford.
So far, we’d been to dozens of them, including a cabinet minister’s birthday party and Miss South Africa’s charity gala.
I was always the one who talked our way in. People wanted to believe me. Oliver liked the planning, planned more than we needed. And Ricky came along because he liked to boast in a casual way about what we’d done, how we’d got away.
At the gala last weekend, we tried on tuxedos and bad American accents. We finished trays of champagne and skewered chicken because everyone there had been pretty boring. Miss South Africa even fawned over us for a few seconds, though Oliver was too nervous to say anything to her. Ricky thought she was average-looking. Later I went over to Megan’s and told her that the whole thing had mostly been a waste of time.
I was having dinner in the garden with my parents when the phone rang. I left the table.
“I wish you wouldn’t let Megan call at this time,” my mother called after me. She didn’t like Megan, but everything she said to me these days was easy to ignore.
I walked past the new television set. The phone was next to my letter from Oxford and a picture of my parents in the veld, my father holding her shoulder with one hand and a gun in the other. He had shot two kudu that trip and their heads were up there now, on opposite sides of the living room.
I picked up the phone.
“Ready for tonight, bru?” It wasn’t Megan but Oliver. He sounded keyed up, bothered by something. Probably about his father finding out about what we’d been up to.
“What’s tonight?”
“You’re not going to believe—”
“What is it?”
“We’re coming over.”
I put the phone down and glanced at the television.
My father had just bought it yesterday. “Nineteen seventy-six, and the South African government finally allows its upstanding citizens to own a television,” he’d said as the salesman put it in the boot of the car. “Jack, anything can happen now.”
Out on the patio, my father ground a cigarette into his silver-green ashtray. He lit another while my mother fiddled with her wedding ring on her fine-boned fingers. The new maid came around and laid out dessert. My mother corrected her, using a patient voice. It had just turned six o’clock.
At nine, Oliver arrived with Ricky and four bottles of black face paint left over from last year’s rugby matches.
They sat in my bedroom, Ricky fiddling with the case of new cufflinks my father had bought me.
“So?” I waited.
Oliver held up the face paint as if it explained everything. In his other hand he had a folded map.
“We’re going to a shebeen.” Ricky got up from my desk and flicked the glass cabinets that held my sports trophies. “In Soweto.”
It had to be Oliver’s idea. From the look on Ricky’s face, I could tell he was daring me to back out. And backing out would be the safe, sensible thing to do. You didn’t just go to Soweto—three white guys in an old Mustang, in the middle of the night. You just didn’t.
“I’d rather not do the face paint,” I said. “It’s ridiculous.”
“Come on Jacky boy, where’s the fun?” Ricky said. “It’s about dressing the part. I thought you’d love it.”
“Not really,” I said, but I took the bottle of face paint from Oliver’s hand.
As we passed Parktown, I took the turning into the highway that cut through the city and down to the Cape. The Mustang’s engine strained as we picked up speed. There was something off about the nights in Johannesburg. Too quiet. As if, emptied of all the blacks at night, the city shut down.
Next to me, Oliver opened out a map of the city in grid format with little red dots.
“Police raids,” he said, tracing a path from one dot to the other.
I knew he wanted me to ask how he’d managed to steal the map from the police station.
“You think you’ll be coming back after Oxford?” Oliver asked.
“Don’t know,” I replied.
“What I know is that this car’s a piece of junk,” Ricky said from the back. “Oxford boy or not.”
“It’s a Mustang, just leave it,” Oliver said.
“My Ford runs way better,” Ricky said. “And it’s older.”
“And where’s your car, Ricky?” I asked.
“In the States.”
Ricky came to Joburg four years earlier, because his father had got a high-up job at Anglo American. He still hadn’t got over leaving the States, never would.
“So what drinks do they have there?” Ricky said. “I don’t want any of that crappy beer. Can I ask for a gin and tonic, or will that be too fancy for them?”
“Ricky, I already told you,” Oliver said. “All their stuff’s really cheap.”
“And once we’re there, don’t complain,” I added. “No need to get a mob after us.”
“They’ll moer us,” Oliver said. “Actually, the police will moer us too, if they find us.”
“Your father will get us out if there’s trouble with the police. No worries,” Ricky said.
Obviously Ricky still didn’t understand that Oliver would get in even more trouble because his father worked right under the police commissioner.
Oliver had probably organized all this to get back at his father without his father knowing it. That was the only way Oliver knew.
“We’re not going to get caught, anyway,” Ricky continued. “That’s the point, right?” Ricky passed his flask of brandy over to Oliver. I braked for a traffic light. He lurched. Brandy spattered all over the back seat.
“No one talks to anyone except me,” I said. I glanced at the map again, scanning our route. It got complicated once you got in the township. No road signs or street names marked on the map. I smelled the brandy, turned the air conditioner up.