And that’s another story. You’re not responsible for your ancestry, are you.
But if that’s so, why have you marched under banned slogans, got yourself beaten up by the police, arrested a couple of times; plastered walls with subversive posters. That’s also the past. The past is valid only in relation to whether the present recognises it.
How did that handsome man with the beckoning gaze, the characteristic slight flare of the nostrils as if picking up some tempting scent (in every photograph), the strong beringed hands (never touched a spade) splayed on tight-trousered thighs, live without his pretty London bedmate all the nights of prospecting? And the Sunday mornings when you wake, alone, and don’t have to get up and get out to educate the students in the biological facts of life behind their condomed cavortings – even a diamond prospector must have lain a while longer in his camp bed, Sundays, known those surges of desire, and no woman to turn to. Five years. Impossible that a healthy male, as so evidently this one, went five years without making love except for the brief call on the conjugal bed. Never mind the physical implication; how sad. But of course it wasn’t so. He obviously didn’t have to write and confess to his young wife that he was having an affair – this is the past, not the sophisticated protocol of suburban sexual freedom – it’s unimaginably makeshift, rough as the diamonds. There were those black girls who came to pick up prospectors’ clothes for washing (two in the background of a photograph where, bare-chested, the man has fists up, bunched in a mock fight with a swinging-bellied mate at the diggings) and the half-black girls (two coffee one milk the description at the time) in confusion of a bar-tent caught smiling, passing him carrying high their trays of glasses. Did he have many of these girls over those years of deprived nights and days? Or was there maybe a special one, several special ones, there are no crude circumstances, Frederick himself has known, when there’s not a possibility of tenderness coming uninvited to the straightforward need for a fuck. And the girls. What happened to the girls if in male urgencies there was conception? The foreigners come to find diamonds came and went, their real lives with women were Elsewhere, intact far away. What happened? Are there children’s children of those conceptions on the side engendered by a handsome prospector who went home to his wife and sons and the gem business in London and Amsterdam – couldn’t they be living where he propagated their predecessors?
Frederick knows as everyone in a country of many races does that from such incidents far back there survives proof in the appropriation, here and there, of the name that was all the progenitor left behind him, adopted without his knowledge or consent out of – sentiment, resentment, something owed? More historical fall-out. It was not in mind for a while, like the rendezvous with the stuff in the black bag, forgotten with his father. There was a period of renewed disturbances at the university, destruction of equipment within the buildings behind their neo-classical columns; not in the Department of Biology, fortunately.
The portrait of his great-grandfather in its oval frame under convex glass that had survived unbroken for so long stayed propped up where the desk moved to his new apartment was placed when he and his ex-wife divided possessions. Photographs give out less meaning than painted portraits. Open less contemplation. But he is there, he is – a statement.
One-sixteenth black.
In the telephone directory for what is now a city where the diamonds were first dug, are there any listings of the name Morris? Of course there will be, it’s not uncommon and so has no relevance.
As if he has requested her to reserve cinema tickets with his credit card he asks his secretary to see if she can get hold of a telephone directory for a particular region. There are Morrises and Morrisons. In his apartment he calls up the name on the internet one late night, alone. There’s a Morris who is a theatre director now living in Los Angeles and a Morris a champion bridge player in Cape Town. No one of that name in Kimberley worthy of being noted in this infallible source.
Now and then he and black survivors of the street marches of blacks and whites in the past get together for a drink. ‘Survivors’ because some of the black comrades (comrades because that form of address hadn’t been exclusive to the communists among them) had moved on to high circles in cabinet posts and boardrooms. The talk turned to reform of the education system and student action to bring it about. Except for Frederick, in their shared seventies and eighties few of this group of survivors had the chance of a university education. They’re not inhibited to be critical of the new regime their kind brought about or of responses to its promises unfulfilled. ‘Trashing the campus isn’t going to scrap tuition fees for our kids too poor to pay. Yelling freedom songs, toyi-toying at the Principal’s door isn’t going to reach the Minister of Education’s big ears. Man! Aren’t there other tactics now? They’re supposed to be intelligent, getting educated, not so, and all they can think of is use what we had, throw stones, trash the facilities – but the buildings and the libraries and laboratories whatnot are theirs now, not whitey’s only – they’re rubbishing what we fought for, for them.’
Someone asks, your department OK, no damage?
Another punctuates with a laugh. ‘They wouldn’t touch you, no way.’
Frederick doesn’t know whether to put the company right, the students don’t know and if they do don’t care about his actions in the past, why should they, they don’t know who he was, the modest claim to be addressed as comrade. But that would bring another whole debate, one focused on himself.
When he got home rather late he was caught under another focus, seemed that of the eyes of the grandfatherly portrait. Or was it the mixture, first beer then whisky, unaccustomedly downed.
The Easter vacation is freedom from both work and the family kind of obligation it brought while there was marriage. Frederick did have children with the second wife but it was not his turn, in the legal conditions of access, to have the boy and girl with him for this school holiday. There were invitations from university colleagues and an attractive Italian woman he’d taken to dinner and a film recently, but he said he was going away for a break. The coast? The mountains? Kimberley.
What on earth would anyone take a break there for. If they asked, he offered, see the Big Hole, and if they didn’t remember what that was he’d have reminded it was the great gouged-out mouth of the diamond pipe formation.
He had never been there and knew no one. No one, that was the point, the negative. The man whose eyes, whose energy of form remain open to you under glass from the generations since he lived five years here, staked his claim. One-sixteenth. There certainly are men and women, children related thicker than that in his descendant’s bloodstream. The telephone directory didn’t give much clue to where the cousins, collaterals, might be found living on the territory of diamonds; assuming the addresses given with the numbers are white suburban rather than indicating areas designated under the old segregation which everywhere still bear the kind of euphemistic flowery names that disguised them and where most black and colour-mixed people, around the cities, still live. And that assumption? An old colour/class one that the level of people from whom came the girls great-grandpapa used must still be out on the periphery in the new society? Why shouldn’t ‘Morris, Walter J.S.’ of ‘Golf Course Place’ be a shades-of-black who had become a big businessman owning a house where he was forbidden before and playing the game at a club he was once barred from?
Scratch a white man, Frederick Morris, and find trace of the serum of induced superiority; history never over. But while he took a good look at himself, pragmatic reasoning set him leaving the chain hotel whose atmosphere confirmed the sense of anonymity of his presence and taking roads to what were the old townships of segregation. A public holiday, so the streets, some tarred and guttered, some unsurfaced dirt with puddles floating beer cans and plastic, were cheerful racetracks of cars, taxis and buses, avoiding skittering children and men and women taking their right and time to cross where they pleased.
No one took much
notice of him. His car, on an academic’s salary, was neither a newer model nor a more costly make than many of those alongside, and like them being ousted from lane to lane by the occasional Mercedes with darkened windows whose owner surely should have moved by now to somesuch Golf Course Place. And as a man who went climbing at weekends and swam in the university pool early every morning since the divorce, he was sun-pigmented, not much lighter than some of the men who faced him a moment, in passing, on the streets where he walked a while as if he had a destination.
Schools were closed for the holidays, as they were for his children; he found himself at a playground. The boys were clambering the structure of the slide instead of taking the ladder, and shouting triumph as they reached the top ahead of conventional users, one lost his toe-hold and fell, howling, while the others laughed. But who could say who could have been this one or that one, give or take a shade, his boy; there’s simply the resemblance all boys have in their grimaces of emotion, boastful feats, agile bodies. The girls on the swings clutching younger siblings, even babies; most of them pretty but aren’t all girls of the age of his daughter, pretty, though one couldn’t imagine her being entrusted with a baby the way the mothers sitting by placidly allowed this. The mothers. The lucky ones (favoured by prospectors?) warm honey-coloured, the others dingy between black and white, as if determined by an under-exposed photograph. Genes the developing agent. Which of these could be a Morris, a long-descended sister-cousin, whatever, alive, we’re together here in the present. Could you give me a strand of your hair (his own is lank and straight but that proves nothing after the Caucasian blood mixtures of so many following progenitors) to be matched with my toenail cutting or a shred of my skin in DNA tests. Imagine the reaction when I handed in these to the laboratories at the university. Faculty laughter to cover embarrassment, curiosity. Fred behaving oddly nowadays.
He ate a boerewors roll at a street barrow, asking for it in the language, Afrikaans, that was being spoken all around him. Their mother tongue, the girls who visited the old man spoke (not old then, no, all the vital juices flowing, showing); did he pick it up from them and promptly forget it in London and Amsterdam as he did them, never came back to Africa. He, the descendant, hung on in the township until late afternoon, hardly knowing the object of lingering, or leaving. Then there were bars filling up behind men talking at the entrances against kwaito music. He made his way into one and took a bar stool warm from the backside of the man who swivelled off it. After a beer the voices and laughter, the beat of the music made him feel strangely relaxed on this venture of his he didn’t try to explain to himself that began before the convex glass of the oval-framed photograph. When his neighbour, whose elbow rose and fell in dramatic gestures to accompany a laughing bellowing argument, jolted and spilled the foam of the second beer, the interloper grinned, gave assurances of no offence taken and was drawn into friendly banter with the neighbour and his pals. The argument was about the referee’s decision in a soccer game; he’d played when he was a student and could contribute a generalised opinion of the abilities, or lack of, among referees. In the pause when the others called for another round, including him without question, he was able to ask (it was suddenly remembered) did anyone know a Morris family living around? There were self-questioning raised foreheads, they looked to one another: one moved his head slowly side to side, down over the dregs in his glass; drew up from it, when I was a kid, another kid . . . his people moved to another section, they used to live here by the church.
Alternative townships were suggested. Might be people with that name there. So did he know them from somewhere? Wha’d’you want them for?
It came quite naturally. They’re family we’ve lost touch with.
Oh that’s how it is people go all over, you never hear what’s with them, these days, it’s let’s try this place let’s try that and you never know they’s alive or dead, my brothers gone off to Cape Town they don’t know who they are any more . . . so where you from?
From the science faculty of the university with the classical columns, the progeny of men and women in the professions, generations of privilege that have made them whatever it is they are. They don’t know what they might have been.
Names, unrecorded on birth certificates – if there were any such for the issue of foreign prospectors’ passing sexual relief – get lost, don’t exist, maybe abandoned as worthless. These bar-room companions buddies comrades, could any one of them be men who should have my family name included in theirs?
So where am I from.
What was it all about.
Dubious. What kind of claim do you need? The standard of privilege changes with each regime. Isn’t it a try at privilege. Yes? One up towards the ruling class whatever it may happen to be. One-sixteenth. A cousin how many times removed from the projection of your own male needs on to the handsome young buck preserved under glass. So what’s happened to the ideal of the Struggle (the capitalised generic of something else that’s never over, never mind history-book victories) for recognition, beginning in the self, that our kind, humankind, doesn’t need any distinctions of blood percentage tincture. That fucked things up enough in the past. Once there were blacks, poor devils, wanting to claim white. Now there’s a white, poor devil, wanting to claim black. It’s the same secret.
His colleagues in the faculty coffee room at the university exchange Easter holiday pleasures, mountains climbed, animals in a game reserve, the theatre, concerts – and one wryly confessing: trying to catch up with reading for the planning of a new course, sustained by warm beer consumed in the sun.
‘Oh and how was the Big Hole?’
‘Deep.’
Everyone laughs at witty deadpan brevity.
Stories Since 2007
Parking Tax
Round the corner from the bank, a roofless two-sided enclosure on the pavement by sections usefully taken from a cardboard packing case bears a home-drawn sign: Shoe Soles. Within the demarcation a man of indeterminate age has his awl, his rags and pot of treacle-black potion, his small stack of thick plastic material curling up at the edges as if already treading the streets.
Between the supermarket and the intersection where taxi-buses swerve to answer the finger language of people signalling where they want to go, the client of a woman who braids hair with amplifying swathes of other people’s hair sits on an upturned fruit box filched from supermarket trash.
At the patch of ground somehow overlooked when the freeway rose at the intersection in the area where panel-beating workshops are the beauty salons for luxury cars, a painted shed has been provided and there are set out oranges, peanuts, cigarettes, jars of Vaseline, packets of condoms and mobile phone batteries.
In the entrance to the enclave between the pharmacy and the liquor store, where there is an ATM dispensing cash, someone has been granted shelter to set up her one-woman craft accommodated on her ample lap. She sits threading necklaces and beading badges, safety-pin backed, which display the red twist emblem of support for people living with HIV Aids.
These are enterprises of the Informal Sector, now a category in the new theory of the economic structure of the country, which declares that the price of the privilege of recognition is a share of the responsibility in reducing unemployment. The unemployed must rouse – not arise, in protest against their condition – and do something for themselves. The shoe repairer’s premises are a Small Business venture as defined within this initiative. The bank belongs to an international consortium which gives modest grants, get-started cash, to encourage such entrepreneurs. He was supplied with his awl, glue and plastic material. The hair artist, with a sum to purchase, as she must know where, from people who grow their hair as a crop. The man in his shed, its array spread on the ground before it, is aware from his own streetwise experience as a customer, what will sell and has had a one-off provision to begin his stock.
The men and women who sleep in the toilet block at the park nearby meant for people who walk their dogs and g
ays who cruise there, have made it disgustingly unusable, can’t be regarded as part of the Informal Sector. Many are illegal immigrants, refugees from the civil wars in neighbouring countries, they’re just an inflation of unemployment figures, uncounted, rivals for any work to be come upon.
There are other initiatives that if they may be minimally self-supporting don’t seem to qualify for the Informal Sector standard. There’s the man who attempts to sell greeting cards mostly for occasions already outdated, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, from a tray suspended round his neck. Perhaps people might buy them and paste an Easter message over the greetings? The cards may be charity dumping from the stationer’s. Anyway, he is at least in the class of economic activity above the one who has no set stand but hawks brooms made of dried grass-stalks up and down the street.
Beggars have no status whatsoever.
Responsibility, when you operate among others practising the same initiative, implies leadership if you mean to qualify for the collective challenge of the Sector’s recognition; that first indication that you’re going to be let in to the Formal Economy. Some time. But a leader must have an organisation, and here, coming up with a self-invented occupation, what high-ups call initiative, is the personal property of each one alone; to share it is to risk having it seized away from you. In place of leadership there can only be domination. And that’s a matter of discovering something which is inside you. Politicians have it, or they couldn’t win elections and recognise, at last, whether for their own purposes or something better, an Informal Sector.
The man who found the something in himself was one of those who wave in a car’s path to a vacant parking space, arms wing-wide, and then perform a repertoire of gestures, warnings, encouragements to the driver successfully to occupy it. Some driver-clients dub the process Parking Tax along with all the other taxes of the Formal Sector they occupy. It’s surely some sort of recognition above the patronage of a tip, when they give the Parking Tax man some coins as they drive away.
Life Times Page 58
