by Bessie Head
“Are you the friend of Mma-Millipede?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“She said I’d meet you today,” he said. “But she omitted to give me your name.”
Paulina told him her name and he bent his head for a while concentrating on putting a coat of pitch on the lightweight roof to make it waterproof.
“How many women would like to grow tobacco?” he asked.
“Every woman in the village,” she said.
“Are you sure?” he asked, looking up.
She looked down at him, and smiled. “We who are here are the bravest,” she said. “We are the only women who have smoked cigarettes and drunk beer. That is why whatever we do is also done by the other women, though they are afraid to smoke and drink because they will be beaten by their husbands.”
Gilbert looked down but he smiled in huge enjoyment. “Has Maria smoked cigarettes too?” he asked.
Paulina looked across at Maria, who stood opposite her, and Maria stared back. The girl had never been a part of them. She had just always lived her own life in which no one shared and she was full of quiet shocks. It wouldn’t surprise anyone, except perhaps Gilbert, if she declared herself unmarried within a few days, as she had been known to say grass was green on one day and then flatly announce that it was yellow on the next. She must not only have smoked, Paulina suspected, but also reeled with beer. If so, she kept this experience to herself, as though everything she did was special and exceptional. You either had to say very bad things about Maria or leave her alone. Therefore, Paulina kept quiet. Maria looked at Gilbert’s bent head and she only straightened one small foot to emphasize her point.
“I haven’t smoked cigarettes, Gilbert,” she said in that flat, dry voice of statement. “And women who do so aren’t brave. They are only boasters.”
She looked across at Paulina with hostility. She really feared her as a woman. Like all the other women, she suspected that men secretly liked Paulina, and she did not care for the thought that Gilbert might find her gay and carefree generosity appealing. Gilbert looked up and caught this exchange of hostile looks between the two women.
He turned to Makhaya who was approaching and said, “Mack, you’d better take my wife home. See you get something other than worms to eat. I’m going to stay here a bit and wind up the work.”
Makhaya stood looking at Paulina for a brief moment, a faint smile on his face. She was entirely unaware that her skirt was the same flaming colour as the sun, which was about to go down on the horizon, and that both were beautiful to him. But being Makhaya, he kept this to himself and started walking away. Then the group of women also filed out and stopped to chat with their new casual friend awhile and walk on. Then the small girl with bright, black beady eyes stepped into the yard, her tiny skirt swishing about like a gust of wind with the rhythm of her walk. Makhaya stared at her in surprise and delight and then bent his head attentively to what Maria was saying, and they walked away together. Paulina noticed all this with a strange, black, helpless rage in her heart. Why did everyone she ever wanted have to go away? And always in the company of women who did not particularly want them. She was a little startled that the child had been tugging at her hand for some time.
“Mama,” she said. “Mama, who put the trees in my village?”
“It’s Gilbert’s friend. You must run and thank him.”
The child sped out of the yard and Paulina looked at Gilbert, who was still intent on finishing the roofs.
“Will you have some tea before you go, Gilbert?” she asked, suddenly remembering polite Batswana customs.
“Yes, make some tea,” he said without looking up, but once she had turned her back he rested on one knee and looked at her with a strange expression. She was invaluable to him, and without her energy and initiative nothing would start, and more than anything else in the world he wanted one hundred women, at least, to start growing tobacco. But perhaps she cared only about Makhaya and not the tobacco, at least so it seemed to Gilbert, and if something went wrong with her intentions towards Makhaya and he took up with someone else, she might collapse, everything might collapse. Far too many of his calculations depended on the unpredictable human factor, and it wasn’t like machines and experiments which you could control. He couldn’t judge what Makhaya would do once he became aware of the woman’s interest. Like Mma-Millipede, Gilbert suddenly found himself plunged into anxiety. He stood up and walked over to where Paulina was busy near the fire.
“You know, Paul,” he said: “To get one hundred women organized into a tobacco growing co-operative will be a lot of hard work. I’d like you to be put down officially as part of the staff and on a salary. Would you agree?”
Paulina swung round with her quick, generous smile. “The job has to be a success first,” she said. “You mustn’t worry about the tobacco, Gilbert. The women will grow it as they have never worked for money before, and we Batswana like money.”
The child stepped back into the yard and Gilbert suddenly felt light-hearted. He liked optimism too; in fact, he knew he could build a world on nothing. He swung the little girl on to his lap.
“How many children do you think I ought to have, Paul?” he asked.
“Goodness, I don’t know,” she said.
“I think I’ll just close my eyes and make as many as I want,” he said gaily.
He took the cup of tea she held out to him and drank it quickly because it was nearly pitch dark. Then he set the child down and swung his way homeward. No sooner had he left than Paulina turned to the child eagerly.
“What did the friend of Gilbert say?”
“He said I have no grass for my cattle and goats to graze on, Mama.”
“Is that so?” Paulina said, half-talking to herself and smiling. “Did he say he’d make some?”
“Yes,” the child said.
Paulina gazed thoughtfully into the fire. It had surprised her when Makhaya had inquired about the child. Batswana men no longer cared. In fact, a love affair resulting in pregnancy was one sure way of driving a man away, and it was a country of fatherless children now. Perhaps, she thought, this man still had tribal customs which forced him to care about children. Every protection for women was breaking down and being replaced by nothing.
And there was something so deeply wrong in the way a woman had to live, holding herself together with her backbone, because, no matter to which side a woman might turn, there was this trap of loneliness. Most women had come to take it for granted, entertaining themselves with casual lovers. Most women with fatherless children thought nothing of sending a small boy out to a lonely cattle post to herd cattle to add to the family income. But then, such women expected life to give them nothing. And if you felt the strain of such a life, all the way down your spine, surely it meant that you were just holding on until such time as a miracle occurred? And how many miracles an ordinary woman needed these days. Paulina sighed bitterly and deeply, exhausted by the tensions and excitement of the day. Who was she after all to imagine that such a strange and complex man like Makhaya would love her? She turned on the small girl and spoke to her with a sharp note of exasperation in her voice.
“Now, why are you just sitting there?” she said. “Fetch the plates and I’ll dish up the porridge.”
The small girl looked at her startled. That tone of voice was most unlike her gay mother, but she sprang quickly and obediently to her feet, dropping a small ball of wool and some knitting she had been busy on. Paulina picked up the piece of knitting and could make nothing of the untidy jumble of stitches. She smiled to herself, and yet perversely spoke in the same sharp tone to the child when she returned with the plates.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“I am making a cap, Mama,” the little girl whispered.
“You silly thing,” Paulina said, half-wanting to laugh. “Why didn’t you ask me to help you? Are you keeping secrets? Is this cap for a boyfriend at school?”
“No, Mama,” the child said, a
look of frightened guilt on her face. “The cap isn’t for my boyfriend. It’s for Isaac.”
“So you keep boyfriends at school and tell me you’re making this cap for your brother at the cattle post,” Paulina persisted, oddly enjoying torturing the child.
The small girl squirmed. She and her brother Isaac had always had secrets between them that they did not care to share with adults. But how could she let her mother accuse her of having a boyfriend at school?
“When we were at the cattle post the other day, Isaac asked me to make him a cap,” she whispered faintly. “He said he had a bad cold and was coughing every day.”
As she feared, this bit of whispered information seemed to make her mother more cross than before because she fell into this sudden, brooding silence and did not eat her porridge. Then she picked up the knitting and bent towards the firelight and unravelled it. Then she picked up the needles and, with quick rapid movements of her hands, began knitting the cap. The small girl kept her eyes glued on this handwork, in fascination, watching a cap grow before her very eyes under the click, click of the needles. After half an hour, Paulina paused abruptly, broke off the thread of wool and spread the garment out on her knees. She looked considerately at her daughter.
“I’m sending this cap to Isaac tomorrow,” she said. “Also a bottle of cough mixture. Now, you must keep this a secret. I’m going to send a message that you made the cap for him.”
She peered closely at her daughter’s face, and the child looked down in embarrassment.
“But if he is ill, he needs the cap quickly,” the mother said, guilty of having spoiled the pleasure of her child.
To her surprise, the small girl burst into a flood of tears. It wasn’t that Paulina did not feel like crying too. They were afflicted by the same ailment – loneliness. But if a grown woman cried, all those hot tears might melt the iron rod that was her backbone. Then how would she arise on the morrow to face another day? The note of exasperation crept back into her voice.
“Go to bed,” she said, crossly. “And I want no more noise.”
Far away, at the cattle post, the small boy Isaac was already asleep in his hut. The nights were bitterly cold, in these winter days, but for some time now he had fallen asleep in a hot, flushed daze, with a high fever. It wasn’t a bad cold that troubled him. He had tuberculosis.
Nine
The busy brown birds shrilled the day long in the bush, long contented shrills, punctuated by the rasping flutter of their wings as they hopped from thorn tree to thorn tree. In fact, the whole earth had this contented feeling because it was July. No one liked June and its icy blasts, nor the sandstorms and high winds of August and September. And no one liked the summer months, when it might or might not rain and when it was always too hot to live and breathe. But July was like living at the bottom of a deep, blue ocean because it was really as though winter had settled a sheet of glassy blue light over the earth. You were never without the cloudless desert sky in Botswana, but in July the sunlight had to filter through a dense, blue cloth, and this filtered light covered everything with a glossy, soft sheen. Mysterious blue mists clung like low, still clouds, all day long, on the horizon, and at evening they trailed in cold draughts along the winding footpaths.
Makhaya found his own kind of transformation in this enchanting world. It wasn’t a new freedom that he silently worked towards but a putting together of the scattered fragments of his life into a coherent and disciplined whole. Partly life in the bush was like this. In order to make life endurable you had to quiet down everything inside you, and what you had in the end was a prison and you called this your life. It was almost too easy for Makhaya to slip into this new life. For one thing he wanted it, and for another he had started on this road, two years previously in a South African prison, the end aim in mind being a disciplined life. But the Botswana prison was so beautiful that Makhaya was inclined to make a religion out of everything he found in Golema Mmidi. It did not amount to much. It even seemed as though the population of goats exceeded that of people. They certainly produced more babies than the women of Golema Mmidi who were chronically short of male companionship, and as though the mother goats sensed this they paraded their babies up and down the village, the little ones trailing obediently behind them, nodding their small, tired heads. All the planning and projects Gilbert discussed with him, night after night, were on a very small scale and the smallness of it all was to ensure its success. Gilbert felt that you could not plunge a community that had lived off subsistence farming for generations into large-scale production overnight.
It was as though the concept of working with acres and acres of land was incomprehensible to the majority of poverty-stricken people, who were content to scrape a living off a thin ribbon of earth. There wasn’t much bother and fuss about subsistence living either. Large chunks of the year went by just watching the sunrise and sunset, and who knew too if the subsistence man did not prefer it this way? It was easy, almost comparable to the life of the idle rich, except that the poor man starved the year round. Not in Africa had the outcry been raised, but in the well-fed countries. Something had to be done about the man who lived on subsistence agriculture, because without his co-operation the world could not be properly fed. Gilbert took this a little further. Voice had to be raised in Africa too, and they had to come from men like Makhaya who deeply craved a better life, not only for themselves but for all these thousands and thousands of people who walked around with no shoes.
Maybe, some people would have been surprised and amused at Makhaya’s many private speculations on Gilbert and also the exaggerated importance he attached to the personality of Gilbert. Maybe they were accustomed to accepting and treating white people as ordinary human beings, but for Makhaya this was a completely new experience. At first Makhaya thought it was the agriculture that made him feel so at ease and at peace in Gilbert’s company, but then the agriculture was something he grasped at to save his own life and there was still the man, Gilbert, who sat there talking and for whom Makhaya could not account. He had been accustomed to reacting in only one way to a white man and that was with a feeling of great unease. Most southern Africans reacted in this way, and few black men in their sane mind envied or cared to penetrate the barrier of icy no-man’s-land which was the white man and his world. The black man preferred to retreat to his own world among all the garbage and filth and noise, where a lot of people would be real and familiar and to whom your reactions would be such as to fill you with a sudden flood of relaxed warmth. It just surprised Makhaya that he had this feeling in the company of Gilbert all the time, and he would often sit and look at Gilbert with a slightly puzzled expression on his face. In the end Makhaya reduced it all to his one criterion for judging all of mankind – generosity, of soul and of mind. Many experiences had led him to the belief that the peace of the world rested with that one word. Because of this, it had become a policy with him to give immediately whatever was asked of him, and he really only felt a hatred towards people who consistently displayed selfish attitudes.
Makhaya’s other griefs were more difficult to resolve, as these turned inward to his own life and his own need to attach a meaning to it. It was because his inner life had been a battleground of strife and conflict that made him attach such importance to its meaning. There was something in this inner friction that had propelled him, all by himself, along a lonely road, and he could not help noticing its loneliness because everything he desired and needed seemed to be needed by no one else in his own environment, among his own people or clan. This was aggravated by the fact that he had been born into one of the most custom-bound and conservative of tribes in the whole African continent, where half the men and women still walked around in skins and beads, and even those who moved to the cities moved with their traditions too. There seemed to be ancient, ancestral lines drawn around the African man which defined his loyalties, responsibilities, and even the duration of his smile. There was some woman he had to buy at some stage, the way you
bought a table you were going to keep in some back room and not care very much about. It was only once his father had died that he was able to come forward with his own strange Makhaya smiles and originality of mind. It was a new young man who stood there, quiet and dignified, gentle and relaxed, but there was nothing in his own environment to account for all the secret development that had taken place in him.
Things wouldn’t have been so bad if black men as a whole had not accepted their oppression, and added to it with their own taboos and traditions. One he had pulled away from these taboos, he found the definition of a black man unacceptable to him. There were things like Baas and Master he would never call a white man, not even if they shot him dead. But all black men did it. They did it. But why? Why not be shot dead? Why not be shot dead rather than live the living death of humiliation? And this agony piled up on all sides in a torrential fury because it was not just that one thing that was wrong, it was a thousand others as well.
He had seen it in the slums of all the cities of South Africa where black men had to live and how a man walked out of his home to buy a packet of cigarettes and never returned and how his seemingly senseless murder gave a brief feeling of manhood to a man who had none. Thousands of men died this way to boost up the manhood of a manless man. But there were many other reasons why a man became a murderer, and at one stage Makhaya had acquired enough hatred to become a mass murderer. He lived on this touch-and-go line with his sanity, finding nothing to stabilize him. Of course, there was the gorgeous, exotic, exuberant round of the black man’s life – his prostitutes, his drink, his music, his warm happy laughter. Eventually he slipped into this gay, happy round of living, but not before he had had a look at the type of woman he was supposed to marry and have children with.
