July's People

by Nadine Gordimer

  —Throwing South African army hand-grenades to protect some reactionary poor devil of a petty chief against the liberation of his own people.—

  She took her hands from under her arms and they clapped listlessly together: oh all that. The phrases they had used back there.

  —Wha’d’you think I am.—Anger began to turn in him a wheel that would not engage.

  —What’ll you do if he does come. If he walks over for his lesson in marksmanship.—

  —What rubbish. One shot-gun. A toy—this is bush warfare.—

  —He thinks of it only as a sample, a demonstration model. There’ll be other weapons—as you said, South African hand-grenades. The last handout from the government to their homeland chiefs. So if he comes… —

  Pragmatism, that’s all, she had said when they first arrived in this dump and she had reproached herself for learning ballet dancing instead of—at least—the despised Fanagalo. And he had said, of back there, if it’s been lies, it’s been lies. He struggled hopelessly for words that were not phrases from back there, words that would make the truth that must be forming here, out of the blacks, out of themselves. He sensed for a moment the great drama hidden in the monotonous days, as she was aware, always, of the yellow bakkie hidden in the sameness of bush. But the words would not come. They were blocked by an old vocabulary, ‘rural backwardness’, ‘counter-revolutionary pockets’, ‘failure to bring about peaceful change inevitably leading to civil war’—she knew all that, she had heard all that before it happened. And now it had happened, it was an experience that couldn’t be forethought. Not with the means they had satisfied themselves with. The words were not there; his mind, his anger, had no grip. —You saw he ‘let me’ drive, going there? … A treat for me. July’s pretty sure of himself these days. He doesn’t seem to think much of his chief, anyway. You heard the way he talked.—

  She blinked slowly two or three times. —I think July was talking about himself.—

  —Himself? How?—Now she was actually saying something, not provoking him to give himself away in some manner he didn’t understand; he didn’t want either to slip the frail noose or tighten it on himself by the wrong reaction.

  —He always did what whites told him. The pass office. The police. Us. How will he not do what blacks tell him, even if he has to kill his cows to feed the freedom fighters.—

  —But it will come better from them.—(Some of the old phrases were real.)—For his own people. Even if they do need the help of the Cubans and Russians to bring it about.—

  —So July won’t fight any Holy Wars for that old man. He didn’t murder us in our beds and he won’t be a warrior for his tribe, either.—

  —Oh murder us in our beds!—Moving after her along this track and that, losing her. —You don’t think (he stopped) you’re not thinking he was a sell-out to bring us here—are you? Not that?—

  —What do the blacks think? What will the freedom fighters think? Did he join the people from Soweto? He took his whites and ran. You make me laugh. You talk as if we weren’t hiding, we weren’t scared to go farther than the river?—

  —Of course we’re hiding. From (his neck stiffened, his head shuddered frustration rather than shook denial)—from … temporary rage and senseless death. He’s hiding us.—

  —He’s been mixed up with us for fifteen years. No one will ever be able to disentangle that, so long as he’s alive; is that it? A fine answer to give the blacks who are getting killed to set him free.—

  —Good god! He runs the risk of getting killed himself, for having us here! Although I don’t think he realizes, luckily …—

  —Then we’d better go.—

  She was looking at him as he had never seen her before, with dead eyes, triumphantly, as if he had killed her himself, expecting nothing of him. —So we’d better go, then. You can’t be a mercenary. He didn’t join his own people in town.—

  The two of them were regarding—he himself was conscious of—a heavy blond man, his reddened skull wrinkled with anguish above angry eyes. —Where? Where?—

  At the same instant both heard (again, strangely, the couple in the master bedroom about to be burst in upon while making love on Sunday morning) the approaching voices of their children.

  But she would not let him avoid the logical conclusion of his question. She was telling him as Royce raced up, prancing, tripping and shadow-boxing one of his own heroic fantasies of adult life: —How. And how?—

  Chapter 17

  The white woman did not understand they were going to cut grass, not gather leaves for boiling. She followed, and pointed at the old woman’s sickle, silver-black, slick as a snake’s tongue, with cowhide thongs woven round the hand-piece. It had been taken down from the dark of the special hut where the wooden yoke and chains for the plough-oxen were kept. Martha had her one-year-old hump of baby on her back and on her head an enamel basin with a small machete, cold pap tied in a cloth, and an old orange-squash bottle filled with a pale mixture of water, powdered milk and tea. She shaped for the white woman the few Afrikaans words she could find; these included a slang catch-all brought back from the mines and cities by men of the village who were the gang labourers of poorly-educated white foremen: Dingus, thing, whatsis-name. —Vir die huis. Daardie dingus.—Her hands were free, her head steady under its heavy crown, she lifted elbows and sketched the pitch of a roof. The old woman half-closed her faded eyes and growled low and friendly affirmation. While her daughter-in-law tried to satisfy the questions of this white woman who had had to be taught the difference between a plant that even a cow knew better than to chew, and the leaves that would make her children strong, the old woman had the chance to look at her closely in the satisfying, analytical way she didn’t often get without the woman disguising herself by trying, with her smiles and gestures, to convey respect etc. as she thought this was done by black people. July had told his mother again and again, the white woman was different at home. He meant that place that had a white china room to do your business in, even he had one in the yard. She had never worked for whites—only in weeding parties on their farms, and there in the lands they didn’t tell her where to go and do it. She wouldn’t be told that by whites!

  The grass was the correct height, the weather neither too damp nor too hot and dry—exactly right for cutting thatching grass, and she, who knew the best sources for all the materials she used for her brooms and her roofs, was on her way to a stretch up-river she had been watching for weeks. Since before her son brought his white people. She grinned with top lip pursed rubbery down over her empty gums and pointed a first finger as if to prod the white woman in the chest: You, yes you.

  But the white woman didn’t understand she meant the grass was to thatch the house the white woman had taken from her. Martha reproached her mother-in-law in their language; yet it was true; and she could say what she liked, anyway, the woman understood nothing. The poor thing, the nhwanyana (July’s mother used the term, my lady, that had come down to her attached to any white female face, from the conquests of the past), the white woman was grinning back to show she had taken up the joke, whatever she imagined it was … They have money, let them go to their relatives, to other white people, if they’re in trouble: the old woman talked as the little party went through the bush. If her daughter-in-law didn’t or wouldn’t listen, the words became simply a refrain.

  —Now they have been there. He’s greeted them.—

  Several days after he had taken the white people to visit the chief, July’s wife spoke to July of what she was thinking. She was not used to having him present to communicate with directly; there was always the long wait for his answering letter, a time during which she said to herself in different ways what it was she had wanted and tried to tell him in her letters. Once she sent a telegram. There had been trouble with her younger brother; fighting, and a hut burned. But the man who knew how to go to the white farm store that was also a post office said never mind, he knew what you said in telegrams, and wrote MO
THER VERY SICK COME HOME.

  Now her man was in her hut, she was giving him his food, he was there to look at her when she said something. —The chief can give them a place in his village, then.—

  When July didn’t answer at once she couldn’t wait. —Perhaps he’s going to.—

  Trying to hem him in with her reasoning; she thought she was chasing a chicken? —Why should the chief do that? Who told you that?—

  —Nobody told me.—After a moment: —You took them there.—

  —So you yourself are the one who thinks the chief will give them a house.—

  —Did you ask him?—

  He scooped and balled the pap vigorously between his fingers and ate a mouthful; lifted a graceful smeared hand to show he would have something to say in a moment, in a moment.

  She could wait; perhaps he was trying to think of an answer to all the questions she might have for him, who had learned so much she did not know.

  —You are the one who is asking him. Aren’t you? Not me. I saw, you’ve put the bundles of thatching grass outside their house—all right, mhani’s house, I know. But why did you do that?—He added what both knew was not the reason for his objection. —Their children are playing with it. It will all be broken and spoiled. You’ll waste your work.—

  —She said it was time. The grass was right. She wanted to cut before the other women took the best. I can’t tell your mother she mustn’t do what she wants. I am her daughter, I must help her. Perhaps you have also forgotten some things.—

  —What do you mean?—

  Her head on one side again, to ward off anger, but not afraid, her wheedling cringing force. —You have to learn all their things, such a long time. When you go.—

  —More than fifteen years. Yes … The first time was in 1965. But I didn’t work for them, then. I worked in that hotel, washing up in the kitchen. I had no papers, that time. All of us in the kitchen had no papers, the owner let us sleep in the store-room, he locked us in so nobody could steal and take food out.—An old story, his story; her head nodded to check each point. —That was the place that burned down, afterwards, in the winter their paraffin stove started a fire there, they couldn’t get out. God was good to me.—

  He had not burned to death in the white man’s city, he had brought home from that job the money to pay her father (he had already paid the cattle). She had had her first child by then, and she became his wife. That was what happened to her, her story; he came home every two years and each time, after he had gone, she gave birth to another child. Next year would have been the time again, but now he had brought his white people, he had come to her after less than two years and already she had not bled this month.

  He looked at her, painfully, pityingly, as if by so doing to block out seeing something or someone else. He spoke with the rush of an enthusiasm there was not time to examine. —When the fighting’s over I’ll take you with me, I’ll take you back and show you, you’ll stay there with me. And the children too.—

  Her chin thrust forward, mouth jaunty, eyes sliding to the corners of her lids, she seemed to be discovering herself in the eyes of other people. —Me, there! What would I do in those places.—Gasping and making scornful, tender clicks in her throat. —Can you see me in their yard! How would I know my road, who would tell me where to go?—She laughed and shivered bashfully. She made to take the food away but he put out his hand to show he was not finished, although he didn’t eat, again seeing something she could not know about; those Ndebele women who came in from the veld north of the city and crossed the streets bewilderedly under backward glances and giggles, their tall vase-shaped headdresses of clay-and-hair covered by striped hand-towels, old canvas football boots on their feet below cylinders of brass-wire anklets.

  Laughter, the bashfulness sank slowly from the settling muscles of her face, and the baby boy, loosed from the pouch on her back, pulled at the objects that were her nose, her lips, her small black ears and the tight string of dirt-etched blue beads, prescribed by a tribal doctor, she was always armed with against misfortune. —After the fighting is over, perhaps you can stay here. You said the job was finished. If we get more lands and we grow more mealies … a tractor to plough … Daniel says we’re going to get these things. We won’t have to pay tax to the government. Daniel says. You wouldn’t have to pay the whites for a licence, you could have a shop here, sell soap and matches, sugar—you know how to do it, you’ve seen the shops in town. You understand as well as the India how to buy things and bring them from town. And now you can drive. For yourself. I see those men of our people who drive big lorries for white men. But you drive for yourself.—

  The vehicle that had brought his white people had never been mentioned between the two of them. She had not remarked upon or praised his prowess while he was learning to drive it. He had said nothing; it was natural for him to assume she saw him serving his white people in this way just as he took them wood and had given them his mother’s house and the pink glass cups and saucers.

  There was complicity growing in the silence. He broke it. —After the fighting … If you could have seen how it was in town. I was there. You die just like that.—There were thoughts that had to be tried out on someone. —I left my money. I couldn’t fetch it, anyway. Everything was closed up. Finished.—

  In the shoulder-bag AEROLINEAS ARGENTINAS his white man had passed on after the return from the architects’ congress in Buenos Aires he kept the simulated-calf wallet they had given him one Christmas. It was flattened and softened to its contents by the years he had carried it always against the contours of the body in hip or breast pocket; his passbook that his employers had to sign every month, his post office savings book, the building society savings book with its initial deposit entry of one hundred rands they had given him in recognition of ten years’ service, five years ago. The figures in his post office book rose and fell, from three figures sometimes to one. He put in five rands of Fah-Fee winnings when he was very, very lucky, he took out sums to send home when there was a crisis in his family, far from his intervention—the only authority left to him, at that distance, was money. He withdrew the savings of two years’ work, his entire capital, all he was worth to the city he was spending his life in, all that there ever was between him and a slump, unemployment, sudden disaster, old age and destitution, each time he went home on leave. He never had withdrawn anything from the United Building Society account with the hundred rands, and it had grown by itself, a rand or two a year: they explained interest to him, how money could be earned without working for it, the system whites had invented for themselves. He had never seen the money they gave him, or touched it, but it was there. They had saved him, when first he came to them, from his country ignorance, keeping his money in a cigarette tin under his mattress.

  —How much?—She knew what his monthly wage was, and didn’t tell anyone else because people always ask to borrow. But she didn’t understand the source of other odd sums that came his way and sometimes were passed on to her and his mother—not always, she saw that when he used to come home on the railway bus in new clothes; this last time, two years ago, in blue jeans and matching zip-up jacket. She did not know what other money there was to be gained, or how, and on whom he spent it. The gambling game was not one that was played here at his home. A backyard, back-lanes game where the money rolled from white houses.

  They had told him his money was safe, written down in those books. But now that they had run away, those books were just bits of paper. Like the other things he and his wife and his mother and all the people here kept in the dark of huts because there was so little left over from the needs of each day: the safety medal someone brought back from the mines, the Mickey Mouse watch Victor had ruined in the bath, the receipt for the bicycle paid for six hundred kilometres away.

  He made a rough equivalent for her. —More than a hundred pounds.—The people here at home had never changed their calculation to the currency of rands and cents, the Indian store still marked in
the old British currency the price of Primus stoves and zinc finials which, for those who could afford them, had replaced the cone of mud packed on the apex of roofs to secure the highest layer of thatch.

  He thought of the pass-book itself as finished. Rid of it, he drove the yellow bakkie with nothing in his pockets. But he had not actually destroyed it. He needed someone—he didn’t yet know who—to tell him: burn it, let it swell in the river, their signatures washing away.

  Chapter 18

  Aman in short trousers came along the valley carrying a red box on his head. She was watching him all the way; she could no longer stay in the hut while the blond man fiddled with the radio. The children had stood obstinately before her, squinting into the sun through wild hair, when she forbade them to go swimming in the river, and she could hear their squeals as they jumped like frogs from boulder to boulder in the brown water with children who belonged here, whose bodies were immune to water-borne diseases whose names no one here knew. Maybe the three had become immune, too. They had survived in their own ability to ignore the precautions it was impossible for her to maintain for them. Victor was forgetting how to read, but did not miss his Superman and Asterix; she sat outside the hut and could not understand I Promessi Sposi. It was translated from the Italian but would not translate from the page to the kind of comprehension she was able to provide now. Only the account of bread riots in Milan in 1628 produced in her, in reflex, an olfactory impression of bread, and even that was not a craving for bread (there was none here, mealie-meal pap was bread), for the supply from the supermarket that was always ready, wrapped in plastic bags, in the freezer back there—was not a real connection made between her normal sense of self and her present circumstances, but simply the statement of the bread Lydia baked once a week. In the kitchen of the Married Quarters house on the mine, along the passage—as you opened the door, the house bloomed with the slightly fermented scent. And it was Lydia’s heavy brown bread in brick-shaped loaves. Rather tasteless; it had given all in what it breathed through the house.