Sarah wanted to keep tradition and so she brought to the Cape Flats table some of her own childhood memories. She would make sure there were tickeys (five-cent coins) buried in the Christmas cake and the children would, on cue, scramble to find the precious coins. Everyone around the table had to put on one of those colourful tissue-paper hats and then find a partner to pull on the other end of a Christmas cracker from which popped the predictable little plastic toy. Each of the children would receive a nice Christmas present, such as toy racing cars for the boys or dolls for the daughter, alongside a sensible one – like a pocket copy of the New Testament or a pair of socks.
Abraham playfully resented the fact that he was a Christmas baby because he was not the centre of attention for too long. After all, Christmas was everybody’s birthday. The excitement of the day almost over, Sarah’s closest friends from church would dutifully show up for a relaxed evening of eats, jokes and just cooling off after another hot summer’s day. This was a happy family, and behind the scenes it was Sarah orchestrating the mix of activities that made Christmas memorable for the children.
Naomi remembers...
Turning out (spring-cleaning) was what the Johnson girls had been taught by their mother Katie. This was where Sarah’s habits came from. Her five children had daily and weekly chores that rarely proceeded without incident. For example, Sarah would inspect the just-washed dishes leading to the unceremonious dumping of any half-cleaned cutlery right back into the sink with dirty dishwater splashing up into the face of the sulking dishwasher.
XV
Doughnuts and duty
Under her roof Sarah’s family were together as one, steered by an undiluted value system that cherished hard work and complimented discipline. There was no room for lazing about. On the first day of the school holidays or any Saturday morning there was nothing more deflating than Sarah storming into the boys’ bedroom at 7am to open the curtains with the words, ‘Die son sê ting... and you’re still sleeping.’ Why did she always have to speak Afrikaans only in unpleasant moments? And since when does the sun utter the meaningless word ting?
Wash the dishes, feed the dog, clean the yard, go to the shop... how did she make up so many chores in one breath? Nothing upset Sarah more than sloth. It was pure joy when Sarah worked the day shift as a nurse because then at least the children could sleep in or just hang about. The Port Jackson always had a way of discovering chores not done. And as the tree branch shed its leaves off your body, Sarah recited her own poetry about children trying to deceive parents; her favourite was Dink jy ek is onder ’n kalkoen uitgebroei? (Do you think I was hatched under a turkey?) Or the other animal reference, Moenie vir my sê bokdrolletjies is rosyntjies nie (Don’t tell me buck droppings are raisins).
Sundays were the worst for family busyness. You would be greeted by the smell of freshly baked doughnuts from the nearby kitchen, an activity started by Abraham and taken over by Sarah as their popular koeksisters were in demand by church people and neighbours alike. In time you got to hate that smell because it signalled the start of a very busy Lord’s Day.
The family had no car for periods of time and so everybody walked the forty minutes from Retreat to the far end of neighbouring Steenberg to attend the 10.30am Sunday-morning service. You spent an hour and a half in the service and then walked all the way back. Lunch followed, and then you trekked back to church for the Sunday-school service, and home again an hour later. Then back again for the gospel service at 7.00pm. Up and down, up and down. You literally grew tired of church but Sarah made sure her children were lined up for the marches to and from the Steenberg Gospel Hall.
Sarah in her fifties, on a Sunday after church, standing in the garden of No. 51. The little garden was her pride and joy – behind her lurks the painful Port Jackson tree
The lessons of Sarah were not easy but they made all the difference. Under her roof the children were safe; outside her influence danger lurked on every corner. The gangs were everywhere, from the Americans to the Mongrels, and a wayward boy would easily find solace and self-esteem inside those organised groups of school dropouts and drug addicts who spent their time alternating between Pollsmoor Prison and the streets. Hardly a week went by without one of those young men ending up in Grassy Park or Muizenberg cemeteries as a result of a stabbing here or a gunfight there.
Buried in memory are so many of these tragic encounters, like watching the feared Martin twins from up the road beating each other senseless on the tarred road right in front of Sarah’s house. One day Firstborn witnessed, from inside the schoolyard, two gangs approaching each other along the narrow, fenced-in throughway that ran between the school and the endless series of block flats buildings. Within seconds, sharpened spades and iron pitchforks came down on male bodies as blood spat everywhere, all within sight of traumatised young schoolchildren. Schools were not equipped with psychologists offering trauma counselling in those days. For Sarah such terrifying events were cautionary tales – what would happen if you stepped out of line.
Naomi remembers...
The same dining-room table that doubled as a table-tennis board in one of the rooms of the Council house went screeching across the smooth Cobra-polished, brown-tiled floor as the two older boys, Jonathan and Peter, laid into each other because of childish disagreements about one thing or another. Boys! Taking this not-so-serious fight into the angled path outside the front door or, God forbid, outside the front gate, never seemed to be an option if only for a more spacious fighting arena. Fights, even pretend skirmishes, happened inside the house.
The Martin twins down the road seemed to have a different law in their house — entertain the entire neighbourhood with bloody spats of spade battles with each other as everyone watched in horror. In Sarah’s home, no fighting was tolerated so the boys took their chances when she wasn’t home. Swearing was out and woe betide the person who even dared to use the words ‘shut up’ towards a sibling, because a hiding was the inevitable outcome and, not uncommonly, a healthy serving of pepper to the foul mouth as well. The fear of God and the wrath of Sarah worked jointly to prevent these child fighters from leaving a single mark on the body of the other. The fighting turned out to be more like wrestling.
After all, Sarah did not raise skollies.
XVI
The teacher must have had a reason
In Sarah’s era parents had a much more formal relationship with their children. There were no hugs at every turn or whooping expressions of delight when children brought home a good report card. This was before the age of Oprah when television shows conveyed new norms into working-class homes a continent away for how parents related to children. That was a time when a child running home to complain about a hiding from a teacher was very likely to get a second hiding – from the parent. ‘Your teacher must have had a reason for caning you...’ and right there the complainant was subject to another aspect of Sarah-iah law. You learnt very quickly never to complain about teacher discipline. Things are different today; parents take lawyers to school and some even threaten to ‘sort out’ the disciplining teacher on the Flats. Not in Sarah’s day.
The closest form of touch in some families those days was the kiss. You kissed your parents when you came home or left home every day. It got worse, you kissed every aunt or grandmother who visited. Just a peck on the lips, often, but then there was always that oversized auntie who seemed to relish smacking you with a slobbery wet kiss. You avoided them like the plague unless you were trapped and subjected to the first piece of emotional blackmail: ‘Come here and greet me, or are you too big for your shoes?’ Any further hesitation on the part of a grown-up child and then the auntie would go really low: ‘I used to change your nappy, hey!’ The nappy argument would melt all youthful defences.
That was the problem, you could go into adulthood in some families and still be caught in the kiss-your-fat-auntie trap. For some of the friends it was worse – even the men kissed e
ach other, such as father and adult son. In the course of time the physical kiss was replaced by the ubiquitous hug. Oprah had changed other people’s cultures.
Sarah at her seventieth birthday at Suikerbossie Restaurant with her children and grandchildren; missing is Denzil, her youngest son, who died in a car accident
Aunties in Sarah’s times shared responsibility for rearing the children of relatives. Whether it was an aunt from upcountry living in the corner house or a babysitting aunt while Sarah was not home, each and every one of them took delight, it seemed, in beating the children for the slightest of offences. There was no point in complaining; it was an unwritten rule that these aunts could pull the children into line.
Of course in those days everybody known to the family was an aunt or uncle, not Mr Jacobs or Mrs Fredericks; it was Uncle Japie and Auntie Lily whether or not these people were related to you. They were the friends of your parents, and the more intimate greeting conveyed respect. This was a difficult form of greeting especially as the children grew older and became aware of the fact that some of these aunts and uncles were actually not much older than the young adults in Sarah’s home. Nevertheless, you showed respect rather than talk about it.
While parents like Sarah did not say ‘I love you’ at every turn, or ever, this did not mean you were not loved. Quite the opposite; love was what parents did for their children, not the words they used. Sarah’s way of communicating love was through the demonstration of her labour – she worked for you; you were supposed to see that and be grateful. No need for words. By the time grandchildren came along the social world of family emotions had changed, even on the streets of the Cape Flats.
Children would stare in amazement at how the grandparents treated their children’s children. Suddenly there were hugs everywhere and expressions of love. Sarah would call all the time – ‘When are you coming over again?’ Of course she wanted to see her children, but it was the grandchildren, really, that Sarah could not wait to have around her. Worse, the grandchildren could do and say things the children of Sarah would not even have dared to contemplate. And when you tried to discipline your own child with a milder form of what you received from your parents, guess who would plead for leniency? The grandparents, of course.
Naomi remembers...
On Sunday evenings after the gospel meeting, the regulars would make their way to Sarah’s house for home-made bread, a raisin loaf and the obligatory doughnuts. A separate loaf of bread would be kept aside for Mr and Mrs Jacobs, the most regular visitors among the regulars. They were the friends who would pop in for tea between Sunday lunch and the evening service, sometimes accompanied by the elderly twin sisters, Mrs Bam and Miss Gordon. Uncle Japie was a sleek-haired, blue-eyed Coloured man whose family could easily have been classified White in those years; in fact, some relatives took that option. Together he and Auntie Maggie had ten children, apart from the children they’d lost at birth. He had this very simple belief in God that came through in an unwavering commitment to raise his six daughters and four sons in the ways of the Lord.
Uncle Japie also believed that his wife’s place was at home while he provided for them by mending and transporting crates for the fresh produce market in Epping. He would sometimes come driving down Tenth Avenue to collect his Jansen friends to get them to the Sunday-morning church services and save them the 40-minute walk. Sally’s children would learn about friendships simply by observing the close and sincere relationship between the Jansen and Jacobs families.
XVII
The skin off your hands
Sarah’s greatest fear was that her four boys and one daughter would become victims of the dangerous world around them. As children, you saw that world when you went to school or marched to church or played outside the house. The streets had their own demons and they could certainly swallow you up. The best way Sarah knew to protect the children was through solid family values in the home and strong spiritual bonds to the local church.
The mechanism for communicating those values was a daily mix of family homilies (such as, arm maar ordentlik, poor but proper) and biblical truths (such as, honour your father and mother). Those two sets of messages were injected into the hearts and minds of Sarah’s children until the sayings themselves became unforgettable. Whatever mild resentment the adolescent children might have had when hearing those words, they would catch themselves using some of the same moralising messages on their own children.
True, under Sarah’s roof, words and whippings existed in happy symbiosis. But Sarah worked with the light she had and that was about all she could offer her family – devotion, discipline and discipleship.
It was all very hard on this Cape Flats mother. Her resolve would be tested over and over again. You could see the frustration on her face with those impossible working hours at the Princess Alice. The nurses there worked shifts announced as numbered pairs. A 7/11 meant you started at 11 in the morning and knocked off at 7 in the evening; that was merciful. A 7/7 meant you worked through the night and that was the tough stretch because after labouring for twelve hours you came home to sleep before the next shift. Problem was, everyone was up either going to school or coming home from school while nurses struggled to catch some sleep. Sarah preferred night duty because then, at least, she could keep an eye on the children during the day. The downside was little sleep, especially if the City Council labourers decided to dig up the street outside or some noisy people hung out on the corner. On such days you could see the red in Sarah’s eyes and the inevitable moodiness.
Sarah after working one night, in the kitchen
The children learnt during such times to stay out of the way. It was tough, especially when the body had to become used to a day shift one week then a night shift another week and then a half-day, half-night stint after that. All of this while doing washing and cooking, praying and disciplining.
Ek werk die vel van my hande af en dit is wat julle doen? It was difficult to forget those heartfelt pleadings when the children did something wrong: I work the skin off my hands and this is how you repay me? A child would feel like a lowly slug when Sarah took that road because it was so clear that her life was tough and keeping children together on the straight and narrow was even tougher.
Those skinned hands of the Cape Flats mother bore the marks of labour and of love, as Jennifer Davids would portray in ‘Poem for my mother’:
to you hunched over the washtub
with your hands
the shrivelled
burnt granadilla hands
covered by foam
Or as Jennifer Joseph in her poem ‘Moeder’ praised those same hands:
Daai hande omskep ’n
Hel van ellende
Those hands convert a
Hell of suffering
Many years later, in his early twenties, Firstborn would tell some friends that he wished his mother stayed home to see the children off to school and to receive them after school with sandwiches and cold drinks ‘like other mothers’. He did not know Sarah was standing behind him taking in this criticism. As Firstborn turned around, there she was, eyes filled with tears. Sarah seldom wailed; her eyes simply welled up with tears.
Of course Sarah the breadwinner had no option. Without her salary the Jansen family would have gone from mere survival to a situation of desperate poverty. The family might not even have had the money to cover the nominal rent on the Council house, which was paid forever but never owned in those days. Firstborn would come to regret that he did not make those calculations before blurting out such a selfish statement and hurting Sarah in front of his friends. Sarah did not say a word and yet her eyes said everything for this mother wore her emotions on her sleeve.
Every Cape Flats child gradually came to appreciate the almost superhuman sacrifices of the mother. You might have brought her pain and suffering, but your mother was your nurturer and protector, the centre of your lif
e. Stories would often be told of how it was always the naughtiest child who would go berserk with regret at a family funeral and threaten to jump into the hole to join the departed mother. Whatever heartache the child caused, his mother’s honour had to be defended at all costs. A Cape Flats boy would easily fly off the handle on hearing those four trigger words regarding his mummy: Jou ma se...
Naomi remembers...
Sarah was exhausted. The hospital shifts were merciless. She was the main breadwinner. How does one work a 7/7, in effect a twelve-hour night shift from 7pm to 7am? Sure, the patients at Princess Alice were mostly settled during the night but to make sure that she remained at the ready after settling them for the night, medication administered and so on, she’d take mountains of laundered clothes that belonged to the family to work, and return with them all beautifully ironed in the morning. This was the thing, she always came home. Her actions were predictable and this provided the necessary stability in the lives of her brood. She always had an evening meal prepared, she always kept her home clean, she made sure that there was soap even if that meant old bits of soap melted together to form a new bar.
She would make sure that we had paraffin to keep the Primus and Beatrice stoves burning to cook family meals as economically as possible. School uniforms were clean and ironed every Monday morning. She would look out of the backdoor in the direction of the Silvermine mountain range to predict whether rain was coming to drench her outside lines of washing. On a rainy day Sarah would call out to Auntie Lily next door to go and claim her dry washing, as she ran out to rescue her own. She created indoor washing lines in the warm kitchen and bathroom to get the washing dry. This was necessary during those rain-soaked winter months. Socks and underwear were placed in the warm drawer of the Dover oven to get perfectly dry. It never did occur to us that the warm drawer was actually intended to keep food warm! A plate of food was normally kept warm by being placed on top of a pot of boiling water and covered with the lid.
Song for Sarah Page 6
