When Morning Comes

by Arushi Raina

  “Where’s the fun in that for us?” Ricky said.

  “Guys, just be quiet,” I said. “Nod. Can you manage that?”

  “You think you’re God, don’t you, Jacky boy?” Ricky said.

  “Show him, Jack. He doesn’t believe you,” Oliver said.

  I took the turning into the Moroka Bypass. The lights were fewer and farther between now. Behind us, the rest of Johannesburg, its sheet of reds and blues, sank from view. Now, long yellow mounds of dirt on the side of the road—mine dumps—shone when the headlights glanced off them. I turned left at an old, deserted stadium.

  “Okay,” I said, catching Ricky in the mirror. “Baas, I just need ten rand for my grandmother. Just ten rand, baas Ricky.”

  “See, in the dark he’ll sound just like a black. Just like one,” Oliver said. “Our gardener Wilbur talks just like that.”

  “Okay.” Ricky tapped Oliver’s shoulder with a cassette. Oliver slipped it into the player. “You do the talking, as always.”

  The cassette started playing. This time it was Miles Davis, one of Ricky’s new obsessions, smuggled in from the States in Ricky’s suitcase. The music circled back and forth with its itchy blend of guitar and trumpet. The face paint felt sticky and wet on my skin.

  I passed a wire fence in front of the Orlando police station. Two dim points of light behind the fence.

  Oliver was quiet. We had entered Soweto now and there was no turning back. Not just yet.

  • • •

  I parked between a Chevrolet and a flashy silver Chrysler without number plates. We walked around the walls of bent, corrugated metal.

  The entrance was a six-foot-high hole. Two men stood on each side. Singing and shouting drifted out.

  “Whose idea was this again?” I asked.

  “Yours, Jacky, all yours,” Oliver said. He was seconds away from running back to the car. I put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him forward. “No undercover police here to check you’re out past your bedtime, promise.”

  Ricky pulled his hat over his face and pulled up his collar. I did the same, stepping in front of him. From my pocket, I took out three rand and slipped it to one of the bouncers, a fat man with a scar on his face and a good portion of his ear missing.

  “They’re with me,” I said, keeping my voice low, the accent thick. The man looked at the money I put in his hand. For a moment he paused. Then he smiled and put the money in his pocket. Silent, Oliver and Ricky followed me inside, into a large, low-ceilinged room and the smell of beer.

  “You tricked them, Jack.” Oliver gripped my shoulder.

  “Don’t get too excited,” I said, steering them to a corner. “We just paid him to let us in. Doesn’t mean he’s not going to tell his friends to take a shot at us.”

  On the left there was a bar counter, crowded with men spilling glasses of cheap beer. There was another smell too, that African beer they made from sorghum or something. A band played in front of us and couples danced across the narrow floor. The mikes were terrible, but the saxophone player and pianist were okay.

  A young woman was singing with the band, and not well. Terrible pitch and no pace. In between songs, she made comments—a mixture of jokes and insults thrown at people she picked from the crowd. The audience seemed to enjoy this, though it was unclear why being insulted was so appealing.

  “What’s she doing?” Ricky put a hand over his face.

  The singer’s voice got louder. She was ignoring the music. The pianist tried to match her note for note, but she’d fall an octave or two and leave the guy scrambling. The sax guy just shook his head, laughed, and continued playing.

  There was a man by the front of the stage who wasn’t dancing. He wore a hat that kept his eyes in shadow, and a black suit with silver suspenders. In between songs, he scanned the room and exchanged nods with the bouncers. At the end of each song, he clapped loudly.

  “Terrible music. Get me a drink, Jacky boy,” Ricky said, waving his flask upside down. He hadn’t painted the spaces around his eyes well. Even in the badly lit room, I could see white showing through. “I’m all out, and it doesn’t look like I’ll be able to handle this party sober.”

  That’s when we heard the police sirens.

  The people sitting at the bar sobered up very quickly. They jumped off their stools and made for the exit. On the floor, some men dragged their partners out. The others let go of the women and ran.

  “Raid!” Everyone kept shouting, “Raid!”

  Only the man with the wide-brimmed hat seemed untroubled. He took a position by the bar, crossed his legs and started another cigarette. “Make room for Zanele, Sunny,” he said, his voice cutting over the chaos. The bouncer with the scar pushed people aside. The singer unplugged her microphone, put it down, and walked slowly out behind the others.

  Because we were behind her, we got a path through the crowd too. The sirens were very close now, as were the sounds of pounding footsteps and car doors opening and closing.

  The singer walked around the shebeen and into a side street, turned right and took a few steps down. We followed. Some others were already there, waiting it out. It looked like they were used to this kind of thing.

  Oliver, Ricky and I took a place near the wall a yard or so away from the singer.

  “Who were they looking for this time, Zanele? What did Thabo do this time?” one of the men asked, holding his knees. His breaths steamed up his large square glasses. Through the worn patches in his green sweater, thin elbows poked out.

  “How would I know?” The singer took a place against the wall and crossed her arms.

  Another man wearing an orange bow tie passed her his jacket. “Here sisi, take this.” He said it like he was used to offering jackets to girls outside shebeens.

  “You know Thabo very well, Zanele,” said the man with the glasses. “Which means you know why the police are here.”

  The singer put on the jacket and ignored him.

  We waited. Oliver slipped down against the wall and covered his face with his coat—terrified that his dad would find him here, even though he knew his dad was too high up in the police to go on raids himself.

  I counted at least twenty men and five women standing around, including the singer.

  Then we heard the sound of breaking glass.

  “Aye, Sam. Sounds like Thabo is cleaning out his umqombothi for the police.” The man with the glasses laughed.

  “The police might as well drink it. Good whisky, some good beer. Do they think we are hiding guns between the bottles? What domkops,” said the man with the bow tie.

  “But what will the Black Berets do to Thabo for losing all their liquor?” asked the man with the glasses.

  “I don’t know, Professor, cut off something? An arm, if he’s lucky,” answered the man with the bow tie. “That’s their style.”

  “Don’t call me Professor.”

  “Too late, bhuti. All of Soweto calls you that.”

  The singer took off her shoes and dropped them to the ground. There was something nervous, impatient about her.

  “Zanele,” said the man with the glasses, “What time is school tomorrow? Going to have to change out of those woman clothes now, aren’t you?”

  The singer said nothing, but turned her face toward the road, toward us, angry. She had high cheekbones and large eyes. Her eyebrows were thin and slanted. She was maybe seventeen or eighteen, but the make-up tried to hide it.

  “Don’t bother her, Professor,” the one called Sam said. “Thabo will send his boys to give you a few klaps, and you won’t like that.”

  “Thabo is being raided, so he might not last till tomorrow.”

  “Professor,” the singer said, “try to teach your worthless lessons without falling down from all the whisky you’ve drunk. Your students never listened to you in English. Afrikaans is going to make
you look like a fool. Thula and worry about your headache tomorrow.”

  The men in the alley laughed. The man with the glasses made for the singer.

  “Be quiet, girl. Remember who your father was. No one like him with his whisky.”

  “Careful,” the singer said. “You don’t want to fight me.”

  The other men in the alley gathered behind her.

  The man with the glasses tensed.

  “Agh Zanele, you know Professor. He likes to tell us what to do. Just leave it.”

  Professor turned away from the singer and leaned back against the wall. Some laughed.

  The sounds of the sirens were fading; the police were gone. Ricky nudged Oliver with his foot. We started walking away.

  “Ja, now that was close. Pa would’ve slaughtered me.” Oliver picked himself off the ground and followed me.

  “Don’t tell me we have to go back in there and listen to that terrible singing,” Ricky said.

  I laughed—forgetting for the moment that we were in a narrow space, that our voices were too loud, and that we were talking like the white people we were.

  “What did you say?” The singer was behind me. She pulled my shoulder back. I smelled cheap perfume and hairspray. We were face-to-face now, and she took her time looking at me. There was glitter at the end of her fake eyelashes. Her make-up followed the sharp lines of her face, the high cheekbones, the thin, slanted brows.

  “He doesn’t like your singing,” I said, in my black accent. “That’s all.”

  The singer grabbed my collar. “Sam, Professor, look. Mlungu has painted himself black.”

  I jerked my collar out of her hand. It tore. And then Oliver, Ricky and I ran. We went through the alley, then turned left, breaking washing lines heavy with wet school uniforms. For all their drinking, the men behind us were fast. Ricky was falling behind.

  And then, from somewhere, kids with stones in their hands. They ran after us, yelling “mlungu” and other things that I didn’t understand.

  “The car,” I shouted to Oliver, who was ahead.

  Oliver turned left. I threw him the keys as we ran out onto the road. The men and children chasing us were just a yard from Ricky now.

  But Oliver had reached the Mustang. I heard him start the car, and then the headlights came into view, doors swinging open at the back. He turned and made as if to drive right into them. They fell aside. A stone hit the car’s headlight, splintering flecks of glass. Oliver kept driving. I caught the roof frame and pulled myself onto the back seat. Ricky, panting, threw himself behind me. I closed the door.

  The engine rattled as Oliver accelerated. He made for the highway.

  “What a crappy car,” Ricky said, between breaths.

  I ignored him, my shirt still smelling of perfume.

  There had been murder in that singer’s eyes.

  Two

  Zanele

  “Can you believe it? Three mlungu in black face paint. Even Professor helped us chase them out of Soweto. If I find him again, Mankwe, I will ring his neck like a chicken.”

  “Him?”

  “Their leader.”

  “And what will that do?”

  “Make him sorry.”

  My sister leaned back against the bedstead and smiled. She was pale and tired, her skin damp and cold.

  “Ah, Professor doesn’t like to run. So it must have been something serious.”

  I rolled up the plastic over the window. In front of us was all of Jabavu, its corrugated roofs and washing lines, red and pink clothes stretched out into the dawn.

  “What are you thinking about, Zani?” Mankwe asked, turning on her pillow to look at me. Most of the time when she made jokes about Professor, I laughed. Now I was thinking about something else.

  “I don’t think the police took anybody.”

  “This time,” my sister said. We both knew that, one of these days, Thabo was going to get caught. And there were so many kids tonight, it was difficult to know if any of them had been taken.

  I stepped out of my sister’s dress and laid it over the bedstead. It was four in the morning. School was in a few hours.

  “How was the show?” Mankwe asked.

  “What do you think? The same as it always is. Thabo just stands there, I sing badly, and everyone either pretends that they don’t know I sing badly, or laughs at me. Professor is ruder than usual because he’s disappointed you didn’t come.”

  “You are always picking a fight. It can’t be that bad, Zani.”

  “It is.” I put my hands on her forehead, then over her hands. She was in Mama’s bed, and I hoped it would keep her warmer than our mattresses on the floor in the next room.

  “Thabo didn’t let you play the piano?”

  “When does he ever let me play? He always has Solly. He might let me stand in for you, but not Solly.”

  It was funny how alike we looked, my sister and I, and how different we were. Creamy and rich, her voice poured into the shebeen and made you forget things you shouldn’t. Made the shebeen boys think they were rich—even as they were spending the last of their wages on umqombothi. Even Professor spent all his money in the shebeen, so he could listen to Mankwe and pretend he wasn’t a coward who followed the government’s new baas law without question.

  Before all this, he had been a student at Fort Hare. He’d gone around telling everybody that he was going to be a professor. The name stuck.

  He would come in the evenings, stare at Mankwe’s lashes in the dim light. Her voice would make him forget who he was. He loved to listen to Mankwe sing Summertime, an American song about having a rich father and a good-looking mother and fields of cotton. I don’t know why Mankwe sang it so much. Mankwe didn’t even know what cotton fields looked like.

  Or it was Sophiatown. Mankwe could make you cry about a dead place over and over, and Professor’s eyes would fill up.

  Still, I shouldn’t have said that to Professor, even though he had insulted Baba. Professor was scared of everything, even me, and everyone in that alley had known that.

  “Go to bed,” my sister said. “School tomorrow.”

  “When is Mama back?”

  “Same as usual. Friday.”

  “Those new people are slave drivers.”

  “Agh, thula, Zanele. Go to sleep.”

  I took my hands away from my sister’s forehead, hoping I’d sucked the cold from her for a little while. There were so many secrets Mankwe and I kept now, even from each other. Court cases and dynamite. I didn’t know what her secrets were.

  It started to rain. Now that it was pounding on the roof it was hard to sleep. All night, my mind kept turning over plans, and failed plans. Billy. Phelele in that police van.

  That was a month ago and it felt as if the court case hadn’t happened. I imagined Billy in a cell, repeating hymns to himself to keep sane. For Billy it would be hymns. There was something about the red brick of Regina Mundi Church, the long lines you had to wait in before entering, that he liked more than anything else. I hadn’t been to that church since I was a child. Mama had stopped making the walk there on Sundays after Baba had left.

  In the next room, my sister was still, except for the breaths going in and out of her body. Even though there was a leak in my mother’s room, she didn’t notice. That’s the way she was. It took a lot to wake her up.

  Thinking of Mankwe made me think of Baba. Like my sister, Baba could sing—Xhosa songs he remembered from his childhood, Zulu songs, English songs, and Afrikaans songs. On good days, he sang and drank, and everyone crowded into our shack. Everybody loved Jonas.

  In my family, no one spoke Afrikaans like my Baba. He was young when he’d left home to work in the mines.

  He made sure to learn the way the baas wanted things done. He learned quickly. It took him a long time to realize that the baas didn’t care
, would never care, no matter how hard he worked. By then, it was too late. His lungs were full of dust from the mines, his Afrikaans was perfect, and he was bitter.

  I didn’t know where he was now. Maybe still somewhere in the city, drinking and working out his last years. A tall dark man with ruined lungs. A walk that swung from side to side that I would recognize anywhere.

  My mother’s Afrikaans was good, but not like my Baba’s. When you worked in someone’s house like Mama did, doing their laundry and feeding them, sometimes you pretended that it was your laundry, your family. The few Afrikaans words you used were gentle. Mama must have liked the little children of the white family she worked for before this one. Marlene and Rosie. When they were little, they would see my mother coming and stream out of their house, white arms extended. “Nanny,” they’d shout. “Nanny’s home.”

  I used to have this plan about finishing university and living in the Bantustans, working as a lawyer. The only people I’d see were black. Black people would pay me my wages, I would buy my food from a black person—I wouldn’t have to see a Boer for the rest of my life. Mama and Mankwe had let me plan. But, like everything else, what they told us about the homelands was very different from how it was.

  Whatever I had, and whatever I would ever have was right here in this shack.

  And of course the Boers always kept trying to make us more like them, but stupider, so that wherever we were, they’d own us. It was law now that all grade eight, nine and ten students had to learn everything in Afrikaans—and everyone, Thabo, Mankwe, Mama—expected me to ignore it. School had to be taught in Afrikaans so that we could serve tea better to the Afrikaner, say “baie dankie ” every time he threw us a crumb.

  I was in grade twelve, so the baas law didn’t apply to me. I could finish my exams in English then graduate. Let the young ones take care of themselves. Agh, they’d survive.

  I had been told all my life to agree with the Boer and his police. So what if people disappeared and were never heard of again. Mama told us those stories all the time, to warn us. But Mama thought that her life, cleaning after white people who spent most of the time pretending she didn’t exist, was a life worth living.