Father Rakale loved to flaunt his authority. One night before dinner he cleared up any uncertainty around the latest gossip. “Masabalala and Hatshwayo have been expelled from this institution for breaking the rules. They were caught drinking. It was my decision that they should pack their belongings and leave St. Peter’s immediately. Let their dismissals be a clear warning to all of you. I shall not tolerate any wayward behavior in this school. Let us pray. May the Lord bless the food we are about to receive. Amen.”
He left the dining hall in a huff. Few of us ate our supper. We were disgusted and showed it by a combined loss of appetite and solidarity with our friends. Even though it meant I was going to have to set two fewer place settings, I was going to miss my friends.
Later that evening one of my dorm mates, Godfrey Mochochoko, complained he was not feeling well. During Father Rakale’s surveillance rounds before evening bell and lights-out, we informed him of Godfrey’s condition. He checked Godfrey and determined he had a fever. He gave him two aspirins. A few hours later Godfrey was sweating, his body shaking uncontrollably. We got the dorm prefect to call for help. Bankbroke returned only to give Godfrey two more aspirins and assure him that he would be fine by morning. During the night Godfrey became worse. The dorm prefect cursed us for wrestling him from his sleep. By morning Godfrey’s bedding was soaked with sweat and shit. He was unconscious. They took him to Johannesburg General Hospital. That afternoon we got word that Godfrey had died from meningitis. Our contempt for Father Rakale had now escalated to hate—and he didn’t care. The more we sulked, the more boys he found to slap around. It was as if Godfrey’s death had turned him into a bigger monster than he was before. Life in the dorms became unbearable as the prefects, acting as foot soldiers in Rakale’s private army, carried out his wrath at will.
Godfrey’s funeral High Mass was held that Sunday. Stompie, Solly, Woodrow, and I sat in the first bench on the boys’ side of the chapel. The nuns, priests, seminarians, and deacons sat behind Godfrey’s family, who were in the front pew. The girls sat on the other side. As the mass began, I remember thinking, Did Father Rakale really intend for Godfrey to die? Was he so blinded by hate? Should I have gotten up that night, even at the risk of a caning, and demanded that Godfrey be taken to the hospital? Before I could organize another thought, I found myself crying. Glancing at Godfrey’s parents, who were themselves graduates of the school, I wondered how they felt. Had they been told the whole truth about their son’s death? About his last night alive? About his suffering? I wondered how my parents would have felt had they lost me in such a way.
Father Trevor Huddleston, St. Peter’s chaplain, delivered Godfrey’s eulogy. As we listened to him preach in his calm, hoarse Oxford accent, there was not a dry eye in the chapel. Tall, with a lean, muscular frame, angular face, and silver hair, Huddleston spoke about the power of love, hope, mercy, compassion, strength, and forgiveness, as we tried to make sense of our friend’s death.
At the end of Huddleston’s eulogy, the intensity of the wailing was deafening. Even Father Rakale, who I had been told had been distraught since Godfrey’s death, was misty-eyed. For the first time I saw Father Rakale’s shoulders droop. On this rare occasion, I felt compassion for him and wondered what was going through his mind while we sang “Abide With Me,” Huddleston’s favorite hymn. At the cemetery, we filed past Godfrey’s grave, dropping handfuls of dirt on his coffin. We said a final farewell to our fallen colleague with an a cappella rendition of “God Is Working His Purpose Out.”
That night we went to bed in red-eyed silence out of respect for Godfrey and from emotional exhaustion. Around midnight a thunderstorm began. No one stirred. To me, it was a message from Godfrey, telling us he had reached heaven.
For the rest of the school year I struggled to put Godfrey’s death behind me. The school holidays helped because I went home to Alexandra, but seeing Godfrey’s vacant bed, school desk, and seat at the end of the dining-hall bench made me miss him tremendously. I began bonding with Stompie, Monty, and Lawrence, the sharp-dressing guys from Sophiatown. I made sure that whenever we hung out, my shoes were polished and my shirts and slacks were pressed and starched. After I started tagging along with them, the sharp-dressing movie stars they idolized began intoxicating me as well.
Stompie and Monty also knew a great deal about American and South African music. They sang along with all the big bands and knew many of the lyrics to songs by Satchmo, Billie Holiday, Billy Eckstine, and Sarah Vaughan, among others. Soon I was living in a fantasy world of music, movies, sports, clothes, and beautiful women. Studying was becoming secondary. I was even losing interest in my altar-boy and servitor duties. Our jiving became so mesmerizing and animated that we often didn’t realize the presence of the school authorities hovering around us.
Father Carter, one of the founder’s of St. Peter’s, used to admonish us, “If you boys studied the Bible and prayed as much as you talk about these worldly desires, you would know enough to get to heaven.” I fell asleep many nights thinking about heaven, Godfrey, beautiful women, nice threads, and music.
5
FEW WHITE PEOPLE IN SOUTH AFRICA were as respected and held in disdain as Father Trevor Huddleston. Revered by the downtrodden, he was a pain in the ass to the white government because of his tireless campaign against apartheid.
At St. Peter’s, “Die Gerry,” as he was also known among the township youths, took an interest in the daily lives of the students. He kept his office door open as a sign that he was willing to assist us at any time. A self-described Christian socialist, Huddleston called everybody “creature” and was always inquisitive about how you were doing and if you were being good. He loved to tousle your hair and look straight into your eyes, always smiling. If there was a social concern that needed attention, Huddleston could be found in the midst of it, listening, giving advice. Helen Navid, the director of Alexandra’s Entokozweni Family Center, and a radical antiapartheid activist, once said, “If every Christian in the world was like Trevor, I would join the church tomorrow.”
Toward the end of my first year, I was less homesick for my mother’s cooking and Alexandra. St. Peter’s was beginning to grow on me. It was November 1952, and spring was in the air. I was doing well in my classes, staying out of trouble. However, my lust for girls was beginning to overpower me. I wanted romance and sex. I had had enough of telling and listening to dirty jokes in the dark. I hungered for the real thing.
To my parents’ delight, I finished the school year in the top ten of my class. I was glad to be home for the Christmas holidays, but outside of my family, I was bored with the township scene. Even though I was still fascinated by the music of Louis Jordan, Coleman Hawkins, Johnny Hodges, Duke Ellington, and Count Basie, back at St. Peter’s the new bebop movement led by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, and Thelonious Monk, to name a few, was beginning to grab our interest—although we didn’t quite understand its complex melodies and harmonies. The big jazz collectors were touting this music heavily, with the implication that if you were still listening to swing, you were behind the times. These were the same people who set our fashion standards, and we didn’t want to be seen as square and lagging behind in our understanding of things modern. Stompie and my other friends were pretending to understand bebop, and I wasn’t going to get left behind. I found myself beginning to follow everything that Stompie said we should be doing to fit in. In the midst of all this, we began to get into trouble with the prefects, Father Rakale, and many of our teachers. And Stompie was getting me into the art of shoplifting. For example, he would start a fight with a certain shopkeeper on the Hill, the arrogant, racist Mr. Christos, who made a lot of money off the student population. While Stompie was riling him up and Christos was distracted, calling us monkeys and kaffirs, I would pocket candies and other goodies. Sometimes Stompie and I would reverse our roles, so as not to establish a pattern that Mr. Christos could detect. Our frequent clashes with Abzie and Vlieg, Bankbroke’s favorite lackeys
, as well as our talking after lights-out, had the warden calling us to his office regularly.
My second year was dramatically different from my first. Hanging around older guys who were exposed to worldly things fascinated me. I wanted to explore more of this world, but at the same time, the religious presence was very powerful. I was taking a catechism class, getting ready for my Confirmation by the archbishop, so that I could receive Holy Communion and perform altar-boy duties. Unlike most first-year students, Stompie had gotten himself a girlfriend at St. Agnes the very first week of the previous school year. He couldn’t understand why I couldn’t do the same. He asked his girlfriend, Evelyn, to introduce me to a new student at St. Agnes, Vera Pitso. Vera, a light-skinned girl from Soweto, whose face wasn’t that attractive, but had a body to die for. Although Vera never considered me for a boyfriend, she was persuaded by Evelyn and some of the older girls at St. Agnes that I was the guy for her. Soon after our courtship began, we started exchanging love letters and sitting together during movies in the dining hall. Like many of the other couples, we necked and kissed passionately. By the time the lights were clicked on, it was impossible for me to stand up because of the erection Vera had left me with. My short khaki pants would have a large wet spot on the left-hand side of my fly, caused by Vera reluctantly squeezing on my hard johnson while I tried to work my free hand past her squeezed-together thighs. With behavior like this, it was no wonder that I had so many wet dreams. I tried in vain to get her to rendezvous with me at places like the carpentry shop or Happy Valley, a favorite campus lovemaking place, or any other clandestine location around school where we would have had the opportunity to go all the way. After many months of trying, and eventually realizing that I would never get laid, I gave up and we broke up. Vera was heartbroken because she had come to love me very deeply. She was disappointed that I only seemed to want her for her body.
As the school year drew on, interest in my studies waned because of my wild escapades with Stompie. With my powerful high voice, I was still singing soprano solos in the boys’ choir. In church, I sat in the front row and sang high tenor. Although the girls thought this was very sweet and cute, they didn’t find it very romantic. I now wanted to sing bass like most of my friends and the seniors. Woodrow Lekhela, one of my deliquent friends, told me a sure way to be really “in” was to start smoking and drinking. That way, he reasoned, my voice would change even quicker. Father Rakale had warned us about smoking, but there were certain spots around the school grounds that were ideal for smoking without detection. Behind the boys’ dorm was a place called “the Trench,” where the disinfectant fumes from the urinals were so pungent that other odors went undetected by the few prefects who ventured around the area. Soon I bowed to peer pressure and smoked my first cigarette. It tasted terrible and made me cough, brought tears to my eyes, and burned my throat. Nonetheless, I quickly overcame these discomforts, and that single cigarette led to a pack of our favorite brand, Cavalla. I got hooked on nicotine. Months later my voice dropped an octave and I started singing bass, with Woodrow smiling proudly next to me.
Upon returning to school the next term, I spent most of what little money I had on Cavallas, and bummed cigarettes from other smokers when I was out. As the habit increased, so did my desire to be even more in with the guys. My wardrobe was still not up to standard, so Stompie and I would use our once-a-month Saturday privilege to stroll through the city, window-shopping and staking out certain stores for potential shoplifting endeavors. One Saturday afternoon, Stompie and I went on a shoplifting mission at OK Bazaars. Stompie pulled a large coat from a hanger in the men’s department, opened it, and held it in front of the white saleswoman standing with her back to me while he directed me to take two light windbreakers he had already folded into a small package and leave the store with them tucked under my shoulder inside my jacket. While he distracted the saleslady with a conversation about the wrong size of the coat, I snuck out of the store. I was scared shitless. I imagined what my parents would think had I got caught. When Stompie caught up with me a few blocks away at the Faraday bus station, my voice was trembling, my mouth was dry, and my heart was beating faster than a tap-dancing minstrel.
When we got back to St. Peter’s, I was ashamed that I was becoming a thief—but not that I was stealing from white folks. For decades the only thing blacks controlled, to a great extent, was the underworld. It was heroic for a black person to be good at theft, drinking, burglary, bank robbery, bootlegging, selling drugs, and being in a gang whose specialty was robbing white people. Diamond smugglers, numbers runners, and street muggers who targeted white folks were township heroes.
The better we dressed, the more respect Stompie and I commanded, but we were getting out of control and being punished for it regularly at school. One spring Saturday afternoon in September 1953, Stompie suggested that we sneak off the school grounds and go to the movies at the Harlem Cinema. He said there was a movie playing called Young Man With a Horn, starring Kirk Douglas as Leon “Bix” Beiderbecke, the talented jazz cornet virtuoso, who died in 1931, at age twenty-eight, from bootleg gin and other addictive habits. The film blew me away. Harry James’s horn solos in songs like “I’m in the Mood for Love,” “Stardust,” “My Dream Is Yours,” and “I’ll Hold You in My Dreams” had me wanting to leap out of my seat. I left the theater not caring if I got caught or what punishment it would bring. My resolve there and then was to become a trumpet player. Kirk’s portrayal of a jazz man was so brilliantly precocious and arrogant that we came out of the movie swearing to spend the rest of our lives as musicians. In the film, Kirk stood in front of the band in his snazzy threads, playing all the solos. He didn’t take any shit from anybody, and the women were crazy about him. The only people he showed any respect for were the band’s singer, played by Doris Day, and the piano player, “Smokey,” played by Hoagy Carmichael. Bix worshiped his black Hispanic trumpet teacher, played by Juan Hernandez, who always came to his assistance when he was in trouble. Everybody else could go to hell as far as Bix was concerned. Harry James’s rich, fat, burnished tone on the soundtrack was magical and hypnotizing, bouncing off the cinema walls with so much power that I found my heart skipping a few beats. I struggled to catch my breath from time to time. I was so totally bewitched that I suddenly couldn’t imagine myself doing anything else but playing the trumpet for the rest of my life. To be that independent, in demand, and virtually self-employed, never having to work for a white baas for the rest of my life; that is what the life of a trumpet player seemed to hold in promise for me. I wanted this with all my heart and being—nothing else would do!
Although I had narrowly passed my exams and was eligible to be promoted to the third-year class, the despicable behavior Stompie and I displayed in and outside of class led the principal and our teachers to recommend that I repeat my second year. The embarrassment of returning to St. Peter’s in January 1954 was tempered by the fact that a handful of other boys also had to repeat. Early in the school year, while I was sick with the flu, Huddleston, who was also disappointed that I had to repeat Form Two, came to my bedside with a big smile on his face. “Hugh, what would make you well? What do you really want to do with your life when you grow up?”
Sensing that he was in a generous mood, I said, “Father, if you could get me a trumpet, I won’t bother anybody anymore.” I still had Young Man With a Horn on my mind. Kirk Douglas blowing that horn still had a grip on me.
“Are you sure that is what you want, little creature?”
“Oh yes, Father, that is what I want. I want to play the trumpet.”
“You come and see me when you get better, and do get well,” he said.
One Saturday morning after I was feeling better, I marched into Polliacks Music Store on Eloff Street in Johannesburg with a letter Huddleston had given me for Bob Hill. An expatriate jazz bass player from Scotland, Hill was moonlighting as a musical instrument salesman. “The Fatherrr is bloomin’ crrazy! Whrr did he err hearrr that fifteen pinds
could buy a bloody troompet?” Nevertheless, I walked out of Polliacks with a gleaming secondhand horn. Huddleston had asked Old Man Uncle Sauda, the leader of the Johannesburg Municipal Native Brass Band, to give me trumpet lessons. When I returned to school, he was waiting for me in Huddleston’s office. We walked across to the Priory carpentry shop, where he proceeded to teach me the C-scale fingering and other trumpet rudiments. He came every Saturday. Every day after school I was back there in the carpentry shop, practicing my lessons like a madman. Four lessons later, I was playing “I’m in the Mood for Love” on my horn. From my piano-playing experience in Springs, I had developed a natural feeling for instrumental technique. Because I was already familiar with the science of music scales and keys, the hard work I was putting into the trumpet made it relatively easy for me to understand its mechanism. I took to it like a fish to water. I was a natural.
Political events in South Africa began to make it difficult for African students to concentrate on their studies. All African males in their teens and older would be required to carry ID papers on their persons at all times. Rumors were already afloat that Huddleston’s beloved Sophiatown was going to be torn down by the government, and its African residents relocated. A few months into the school year, all of the male students at St. Peter’s were bussed to the Albert Street government pass office to be issued passbooks. At the pass office there were long lines, thousands of men waiting in the burning summer sun to enter the cursed building, where they would be ordered to disrobe. We were escorted ahead of the long lines outside to join the hundreds inside who were already standing naked in line. It was humiliating for us to stand bare-assed with our clothes hanging from our arms alongside grown men. After eye, nose, throat, ear, and chest checkups, everybody was forced by the belligerent Afrikaner doctors to bend over for rectal and penile examinations. Following that, orders were screamed at us by black security guards to move on to the next section, where even ruder native clerks asked for our birthdates, places of birth, and parents’ names and addresses. They measured us for height and weight, photographed us, and herded us into a waiting hall where the completed passbooks, called “reference books,” were more or less thrown at us, after which we were commanded to “get the fuck out of here.” We were told that we had to keep this ninety-six-page document with us at all times, and that the police had the authority to demand to see it any time they saw fit. It was not unusual to see our paternal elders humiliated in our presence, arrested and paraded up and down the township streets, avenues, and alleys while the police searched for more victims. Beatings were common, and unreported deaths during arrests were something that came with the territory. Failure to produce the reference book on demand usually resulted in imprisonment without trial. Jails often transferred prisoners into the hands of heartless white farmers. These farmers would force them into work gangs to dig vegetables with their bare hands, clothe them in burlap sacks and house them in cold concrete shacks, and beat them mercilessly if they did not perform. Many a man died on these farms without their families ever knowing what had happened to them. Their corpses were given to medical schools to dissect. It was the beginning of the horrors of apartheid. The worst was still to come.
Still Grazing Page 8
