Instead, I shout to be heard above the noise. “Uphi uNomsa?”
They cannot hear me. I pull Langa close and speak directly into his ear. “Where is Nomsa?”
He looks close to tears. “Andazi.” I do not know.
He pulls at my arm again, wanting me to go with them, but I cannot turn my back on the vision of hell that has opened up before me. There is a river of blood in the street and the children are floating in it. They lie in unnatural shapes, limbs bent at awkward angles. Some of them are facedown, drowning, while others lie on their backs gazing up at the sky; they are human debris swept along in a flood of destruction.
Discarded shoes, placards, tear gas canisters, hats and bags are littered between the bodies. My suitcase, lying in the middle of all the carnage, looks like a relic from some bygone era; a time before it was acceptable for white armies to harvest black children’s lives like crops. I note with detached interest that the case has split apart; my clothes are strewn across the road and one of my dresses is covered in blood. My bible lies open next to it, the soiled pages fluttering gaily in the dirty breeze.
Is God watching?
Dumi links his arm through mine while Langa pushes me from behind. I know they want to get me to a place of safety but I cannot leave. I pull away from my nephews and try to find my balance as I make my way towards the body that is lying closest to me.
It is a girl. Her school dress is torn and raised up over her buttocks so that her white cotton underwear is showing. I gently roll her over and pull the dress down to give back the dignity taken from her. Her eyes are open and she is staring fixedly up at the heavens. She no longer sees the blood and violence of this world, and for that, I am grateful. She is seeing a better place, one in which singing voices are not greeted with bullets; a world in which innocent children are not murdered because their skin is a color that white people find offensive. I touch her eyelids with my fingers, drawing them closed.
Rest, my child. Go with God.
From there, I keep moving from one body to the next. Some of the children are still alive; they are either too injured or too terrified to move. They clutch my hands and ask for their mothers. I tell them that their mothers are coming soon and that they are loved. I make the promises they want to hear, the ones I would want Nomsa to hear, and wipe the blood and the dirt and the tears from their faces. I ask names and bear witness.
Zanele. Twelve years old. She is bleeding from the ear.
Goodness. Her lips tremble and her tears are hot against my skin but she still manages a smile.
Kidebone. Fifteen years old. Her lips are shiny with Vaseline.
Jabu. Fourteen years old. He is the man of the house after his father died in a rockfall underground.
Fumani. Wonders if I am an angel.
Thandeka. Asks if I have seen her younger sister.
Sipho. Has never met his father.
Kleinboy. Says he is late for school.
Six
ROBIN
16 JUNE 1976
Boksburg, Johannesburg, South Africa
I was in a tight race for first place, pedaling furiously. I knew I had the best bike in the neighborhood; no other set of wheels could measure up to my candy-apple-red Raleigh Chopper with its distinctive banana seat and monkey handlebars. All I had to do was prove that I deserved to be the one riding it.
My adversaries were neck and neck as we neared the finish line. I’d have to reach deep to find the energy to claim victory. I was already tired—the circuit had taken us around the neighborhood twice—but I refused to be beaten. There was no second place; there was only the first person who’d lost. I pumped my legs as hard as I could; they felt independent of my body, spinning like the arms of a windmill. The multicolored streamers attached to the handles fluttered in the breeze as I picked up speed, and the scent of burning rubber wafted up to greet me.
I pipped my closest rival at the post, winning by a hair’s breadth, and the crowds went wild. I celebrated my victory by popping a triumphant wheelie and was nearly unseated by the patch of loose gravel beneath my tires. When the twenty-inch back wheel almost gave out from under me as the bike bucked like a startled horse, I lost my concentration and the ability to maintain the fantasy. The crowds and competitors all vanished and I made my way home alone at a slower pace.
Flecks of ash, like torched snow, began to drift down all around me. I realized that the smell I’d thought was burning rubber from my tires was actually the stink of a veld fire. They were common in winter when all the open land surrounding our suburb became dry and parched from the lack of rain, and a cigarette butt flicked from a car window could set it all alight in a few seconds. I sometimes worried about our houses—and our lives as we knew them—going up in smoke when the flames got too close, but my father assured me the fire trucks would put them out way before they reached us. The fire department even sometimes started the fires themselves to burn controlled breaks.
It was nearing 6 p.m. when I parked the Chopper in the garage and headed into the kitchen where I found Mabel ironing and listening to her “story.” South Africa had finally lifted its ban on television that year, but we didn’t have a TV set because my father said we weren’t the Rockefellers. So we listened to programs on the radio though ours were very different from Mabel’s. My favorite program, which was on at 7:30 p.m. every Friday, was “Squad Cars,” a cracking series about detectives at the Brixton Murder and Robbery Squad who solved crimes no one else could.
The opening sequence made my pulse race: the wailing of a lone police siren, the slamming of brakes, rapid gunfire and the heralding of trumpets followed by Malcolm Gooding’s deep voice intoning, “They prowl the empty streets at night . . . in fast cars and on foot . . . living with crime and violence . . . these are the men of ‘Squad Cars.’” I tried to solve their cases as I listened, and was sure that if I could just get to the Brixton police station, they’d hire me as part of their elite squad.
I couldn’t understand any of Mabel’s stories because they were all in Sotho and sounded mostly like a lot of people fighting. When I asked her why black people shouted so much, she said they had a lot of reasons to be angry, but she wouldn’t say why. When my own pestering made her start yelling, I took her at her word and dropped the subject.
I left Mabel to it and walked down the passage to my parents’ bedroom. I didn’t know where Cat was; she’d gone off in a sulk when I’d refused to give her a lift on my bike’s sissy bar. (Cat refused to race on her own bike because she was scared of getting a scarf caught in the spokes and crashing and losing all her front teeth like a girl in our school had done. “Oh for heaven’s sake,” my mother had said, “you don’t even own a scarf!” But Cat couldn’t be swayed and would only go for rides as a passenger on mine. It slowed me down in the races so I wasn’t always prepared to humor her.)
My father was pulling on a pair of shoes and sitting on their bed to do the laces up when I swung through the door. I caught the scent of Sunlight soap combined with the Johnson’s baby powder he used on his feet to stop his rubber boots from chafing after hours of trudging up and down the underground stopes. My father always showered at the mine before coming home, shedding the layers of sweat and grime from a day spent with men before returning, clean and fragrant, to his household of females.
“Daddy!” I cannoned into him and he laughed.
“That’s quite a tackle you’ve got there, Freckles. I think we have a rugby player in the family.”
“Why are you getting dressed again?”
“Your mother and I have a function tonight.”
I went into the bathroom where my mother was getting ready and greeted her with a hug before I pulled the lid of the toilet seat down to use as a chair. I loved watching my mother get “dolled up,” as my father called it, though I didn’t enjoy being left behind when they went to their functions.
“Hurry up, Jolene. Stop faffing around.” My dad ducked around the bathroom door with a dark green tie, which he started knotting.
“I’m sorry, but two hours’ notice is a bit ridiculous. If I’d known about this yesterday, I could have arranged to come home earlier.”
“Ja, sorry about that. Hennie was supposed to go to represent the proto team, but he has gippo guts. He spent the whole day on the bog stinking up the place. The okes eventually told him to piss off home and clog up his own toilet instead.”
“Sounds like he has the same stomach bug as Edith.”
My mother was pumping a mascara wand in and out of the tube before applying another layer to her sticky lashes, and my dad stilled his own activity to stare at her. We were both mesmerized by how her mouth gaped in a large O whenever she carried out this ritual, and I sometimes discovered my own mouth to be open in unconscious mimicry.
My dad shook his head and smiled. “You look like a demented goldfish when you do that.”
My mother closed the mascara and launched it at him, laughing when he pretended to be mortally wounded as it bounced off his chest. She undid the knot he’d made and pulled him close for a kiss. “Let me do this for you or else we’ll be here all night.”
He studied her face while she was distracted with the tie. “You look beautiful, Jo.”
I squirmed with pleasure as I watched them be all lovey-dovey with each other for a change. My father wasn’t lying; my mother was beautiful. She had wispy brown hair that fanned from her face like a dandelion, drawing attention to her arched eyebrows and high cheekbones. Her large brown eyes contrasted with my father’s blue ones, and although hers were pretty, I was glad that mine were like his. I also would have preferred his blond hair to the dark brown I got stuck with, but as they both frequently reminded me: life wasn’t fair.
When she was done with the tie, my mother swatted him away, bent to pick the mascara up off the floor and returned to the mirror. “You always say that no matter what I look like. Is this dress okay? Those women have already got a lot to say about my working and my delinquent daughter,” she said as she shot me a rueful look. “I don’t want to give them more to talk about.”
“You look perfect. The dress is perfect. Can we go now?”
“Just give me a minute.” She picked up a necklace from the counter, one with a delicate gold chain and a gleaming black onyx pendant, and clasped it around her graceful neck. “Where’s Mabel?”
“She’s in the kitchen finishing the ironing. I’ll go tell her she needs to stay in.”
Mabel’s duties as our maid included cleaning the house, washing, ironing, cooking and taking care of us, duties she was expected to perform every day except on some weekends when she had a Sunday off. On weekdays, she’d fetch us from school and keep an eye on Cat and me until our parents came home from work. If they were going out and couldn’t take us with, it was understood that Mabel would stay inside and look after us until they came home. I’d never heard my parents ask Mabel if she would be free; it was just presumed that she’d do it and wouldn’t be paid extra for it.
As my father swung out of the bathroom, I hopped off the toilet seat and followed him down the passage, my takkies squeaking on the polished wood, towards the kitchen. A pot of water simmered unsupervised on the stove, and he pulled it off the element before he opened the back door and called, “Mabel?”
There was a faint reply, but I couldn’t make out what she’d said. We stepped outside and headed for the maid’s quarters, a tiny room with a separate toilet that was attached to the house but had its own entrance. I could make out the voice of the newsreader on Springbok Radio, coming from inside.
“—over twenty thousand black school pupils from Soweto high schools went on the rampage this morning, rioting and throwing stones at armed police forces. The riot began as a protest against the introduction of Afrikaans as the language of instruction in local schools. The angry mob attacked the police, and over—”
My father banged on the metal door and the commentary from the radio stopped abruptly. He pushed the door open and stepped into the threshold of Mabel’s darkened room while I peeped around him. I made out her silhouette as she stood up from her single bed. She was tying her doek around her head as she slipped past us and pulled her door closed once we’d followed. I caught the faint scent of Vaseline and snuff that was so particular to Mabel.
“How many times must I tell you not to leave food cooking on the stove when you’re in your room? If it’s not the oven, it’s the iron left on. You burn my house down, Mabel, and you see what I do to you.”
“Yes, baas. Sorry, baas.”
“Don’t ‘yes-baas-sorry-baas’ me! Listen to me the first time when I speak to you. You’re worse than a child.”
Mabel pulled the pot back onto the element, switched it on and reached for the packet of Iwisa from under the kitchen sink. The white maize meal was the staple of her diet. She ate it with a tomato-and-onion gravy, and a vegetable dish called morogo that came from wild spinach picked in the neighborhood, but she’d make mine with sugar and butter when I asked for some.
“I heard you were listening to the radio now. Did you hear what those kaffir kids did today in Soweto? Running around, throwing rocks at the police, necklacing innocent people, starting fires—”
“Why were they giving necklaces to people?” I asked. My father ignored my question so I tried again. “Giving necklaces is a nice thing to do, isn’t it?”
“Robin, ‘necklacing’ means they put a car tire over your neck and then set it alight so you burn to death. It isn’t a nice thing.”
“Baas,” Mabel said before I could ask why anyone would do something so horrible, “the march was peaceful and then the police, they come and they shoot at the children.” She spoke to the pot as she added the white Iwisa powder to the boiling water and reached for the wooden spoon.
Mention of the police gave me a fluttery feeling in my stomach because when Cat and I were younger, Mabel would sometimes tell us she was phoning them to come get us when we misbehaved. This was her only way of enforcing any discipline; she wasn’t allowed to smack or punish us in any way no matter what we did and we knew it.
The thought of cops shooting at children made me nervous, but before I could ask my father if the police would come to Boksburg to shoot us as well, my father raised his voice in reply. “They’re lucky they even have schools, which is where they should have been this morning instead of in the streets looking for shit.”
My mother clattered into the kitchen on a pair of strappy heels, shrugged into a coat and dropped her lipstick into her handbag. “Who was looking for shit?”
“Those coon kids rioting today. Twelve- and thirteen-year-olds went on the rampage in Soweto. They’ve had to call the bloody army in with tanks and everything because of the little savages. Didn’t you hear the helicopters overhead from your office?”
“No, the typing pool makes such a racket, you can’t hear a thing. What about the mine? Are you guys safe there underground with all those miners? What is there? Like one white guy to every hundred blacks?”
My dad started answering but was drowned out by Mabel hitting the wooden spoon against the pot to dislodge the sticky pap. He nudged her arm to still the activity. “They said we’ve got nothing to worry about, but the mine security will be stepped up from tomorrow just to be on the safe side. These bastards will just as soon slit your throat as look at you.”
Mabel jerked the pot from the stove and turned the heat down.
“Well, can you blame them?” my mother asked.
My father shot her one of his dirty looks and waited for Mabel to leave the room. “You sound just like your bleeding-heart sister. Today was a big fucking deal, Jolene. Word is they’ve never seen an uprising like this before. The blacks are getting cheekier by the day, and the government is finding it harder and harder to control the
m. Today will just get the rest of them riled up. Do you want to live in a country with all the kaffirs running loose, doing whatever the hell they want, feeling like they’re entitled to help themselves? Soweto is only fifty kilometers away from here. That’s nothing!”
Cat had come out of our room, probably drawn by my father’s raised voice, and was standing next to me. She tugged at my elbow, though it wasn’t necessary; I already knew what she was thinking. Cat got scared when my father spoke this way. She worried that a black man would slip into our house one night and kill us or, even worse, take us away for some unspeakable purpose. From what my father and Piet’s father said, it was clear that the blacks were dangerous, though Mabel wasn’t that scary. I’d told Cat it was probably just the black men who were evil, not all blacks, and so she lived in constant fear of them; though to be fair, she lived in fear of almost everything.
“I don’t want you to go tonight. Please don’t.”
“You’ll be fine here with Mabel, don’t worry.”
“But Cat’s scared.”
My mother sighed. “Cat’s scared or you’re scared and you’re just putting words in her mouth?”
I glared at Cat wishing she’d speak up for herself. “She’s scared.”
“What of?”
When Cat still remained resolutely silent, staring at her feet rather than at our mother, I spoke on her behalf. “She’s scared of the veld fire. What happens if it gets near the house?”
“I passed it on my way home. It’s just a small one and it’s way over by the main road. The fire trucks were already there putting it out.”
“She’s also scared that you won’t come back.”
Hum If You Don't Know the Words Page 5