One night Miriam and I slept at Mike “Mazurkie” Phahlane’s home. An arts critic for Drum magazine and a dear friend, Mazurkie lived in a two-room shack behind his parents’ home. The three of us left from the BMSC to Western Native Township, where Mike lived. On our way, we met Boykie and Kit, two members of the township’s Corporatives gang. They were bullies who loved to terrorize women artists at concerts. Boykie was a massively built weightlifter who had tried many times to abduct Miriam, but had failed at every such instance, usually because someone bigger and stronger got in his way. When we ran into him on this night, however, we were sure he was going to take her. His one-legged friend, Kit, was dancing about on his crutch, whispering, “Let’s take her, Boykie, let’s take her.” But Mike said, “For the two of you to do that, you’re gonna have to kill me first.” Boykie pointed at me. “Come on, man, he’s only a little kid and has no business being with the babe.” Mike repeated, “You heard what I said? I really mean it, you’re gonna have to kill me.” Realizing that Mike was serious, Kit and Boykie walked away, but not before Boykie screamed, “Yeah, Makeba, you got away this time, but I’ll get you one day. My day will come.” That night I realized that being Makeba’s boyfriend was not necessarily going to be a joyride.
Each morning after leaving my grandmother’s fish-and-chips shop, I now went directly to the Bantu Men’s Social Center or the recording studios to work with the older musicians. I had to be around music. My skills were improving so much that I was being touted to replace one of my mentors, Elijah Nkwanyana, as the lead trumpet player of the African Jazz and Variety Revue. My only problem was convincing my parents that this opportunity was the gateway to my future.
One evening in late July 1956, I was pretending to be reading my history textbook at the kitchen table when my father came home. At first there was nothing out of the ordinary. He greeted everyone, then asked me, “So, boy, how’s it going at school?” I barely got out two words when he kicked the chair from under me. “You little bastard, Sister Michael came by my office today and told me you had not been to school in three weeks. Where do you go every day?” By now I was up against the wall, shaking like a lamb about to be slaughtered. He came at me with fists and feet swinging in all directions. My mother, Johanna, and Elaine started crying. My mother begged him to stop slapping me around. I was dazed.
“Stop, Thomas, before you kill him,” my mother said. My father whacked me a few more times before he stopped. He left the house breathing heavily, muttering disgust at my lies and deceit.
My mother sent me to the faucet outside to wash and change my shirt, which was now torn and buttonless. My grandmother fixed me something to eat, but I didn’t have any appetite. My father returned long after dark. I heard him park his car in the garage, and counted his footsteps to the kitchen door. The house was quiet. My father went straight to his bedroom, where I overheard parts of my parents’ muffled talk. I was too afraid to move. About an hour later, after their light went out, I got dressed, grabbed my trumpet case and a few clothes, and tiptoed to the kitchen, where I quietly wrote a letter to my parents.
Dear Mama and Papa,
I am very sorry to be a disappointment to you, but I cannot be what you had hoped I would amount to. I have lost total interest in school. I cannot hear what the teachers are saying; all I hear is music in my ears, nothing else seems to matter. What I am doing is not meant to hurt you. I love both of you very much, too much to want to wrong you, but I have made up my mind to be a musician. I know that I am good at it and that I will achieve great things in the world of music. If you cannot be on my side, I don’t blame you. But I am going to follow what I think is right for me. I am leaving home. Do not worry about me. I will be all right.
All my love to you,
Your son, Minkie
I left the letter unfolded on the kitchen table. Then I eased out the back door, locked it, and slid the key under the door. It was a chilly winter night. I remember the sky, a spooky mixture of stars, scattered clouds, and a quarter moon. I strolled into the night and caught a bus at the corner of my grandmother’s fish-and-chips shop. In town I caught another bus from Diagonal Street to Western Native Township, where I went to Mike’s place. Noticing that I was alone this time, Mike didn’t ask any questions. He made a bed for me on his floor. I went to sleep without a clue what the next day was going to bring. It didn’t matter. The rest of the night I willed my worries out of my soul. Only music rang in my ears.
For the next few nights, Mike and I cruised the shebeens around Western Native Township and Sophiatown, hanging out with friends. Dropping out of school and running away from home meant I had to find means to support myself. Finding work was easy. EMI and Gallo Records had studios and offices next to each other in downtown Johannesburg that attracted a steady flow of musicians who would mingle in front of the buildings, trying to spot a black recording scout who might give them a shot.
Dolly Rathebe was right: As bad as things in South Africa were for Africans, the government could not take away our music. But whites had figured out how to exploit it financially since 1916, when Gallo was established. Africans knew little about the business of music. They played and were paid what whites felt they were worth, which was very little. None of them were paid royalties for their songs. Hundreds of African, colored, and Indian musicians died penniless. Their families were left with nothing. The record companies, meanwhile, made hundreds of millions of dollars off their recordings. It’s a practice that continues today, albeit not as badly as before.
Four days after I left home, Bra Zakes Nkosi hired me to play third trumpet in a band recording session at EMI. I was overjoyed. I was sitting in the studio next to my idols Elijah and Bangani and alongside Bra Zakes, Bra Gwigwi, Bra Kippie, and Bra Ntemi on saxophones, Jeff “Hoojah” Cartriers on bass, Zakes Mawela on drums, Lucifer on guitar, and Gideon Nxumalo on piano. This was a dream orchestra. I was smack in the middle of these giants of South African music.
I was given a solo, and while I was in the middle of rehearsing my part, my parents walked in with three of my uncles. I continued playing, but was very nervous. I tried not to make eye contact with my family—especially my father. I couldn’t figure out what was going on. My heart was racing, my lips were dry, and my throat parched. Was my father going to snatch me out of the studio in front of all these people? How had they known where I was? Who had told them where to find me? I collected my thoughts and looked around the room. Bra Zakes’s smile gave him away. He was a good friend of my parents.
Bra Zakes confessed that he had invited my folks to the studio. He said my parents needed to see me in a musical environment, observe how I interacted with professional musicians, and really hear how good I was. He said that was the only way they could be assured I truly had the potential to be successful in the music business. The session ended about an hour later. Bra Zakes led me to my parents. I stood before them in silence. I still couldn’t make eye contact with Thomas. My mother hugged me and gave a big kiss on the cheek. “Come on, Boy-Boy,” my mother said. “Let’s go home. Everything is going to be just fine. You need to eat a good hot meal.” I was relieved. My uncles were all smiling as we walked out of the studio.
Once we got outside, my father tossed me the keys to his new 1956 Chevy Impala. I was confused. He let me drive home. During dinner, no one said a word about my running away, the beating, or my decision to quit school. Because the winter school break had just started, my father had planned a family trip to Durban. Not only did he let me drive, but when we reached our destination, he shared his cigarettes and brandy with me. Although I was enjoying his camaraderie, I was still suspicious about why I was being treated as his buddy and peer. In Durban, we stayed with Aunt Clara, my father’s youngest sister, who was the chief administrator of McCord’s Hospital. The day after we arrived, we fetched my sister, Barbara, from Inanda Seminary, outside Durban, where she was a boarder. Barbara and I had visited Aunt Clara previously a couple of times. But my parents, my
grandmother, Elaine, and Sybil had never seen the ocean before. Johanna was the most overwhelmed by the sea, which to her seemed like a biblical spectacle. She sat on a sand dune, marveling. With tears rolling down her cheeks, she said, “Now I can die. I have seen God at last.”
During the vacation, my parents and Aunt Clara reopened the subject of my returning to school, but I stuck by my decision. My parents dropped their objections. I had convinced them I was serious about wanting to pursue a professional music career.
With things settled somewhat at home, I began putting my life plan into action. I continued playing with the Huddleston Jazz Band, with whom we recorded four 78-rpm records for Gallo. There was no contract, and we were paid only twenty-four pounds. I also played with the Merry Makers, and tried getting whatever recording sessions I could find. I kept writing to Father Huddleston, who was now in England, asking him to help me obtain a music scholarship overseas. His replies affirmed his commitment to help me, but I was feeling increasingly desperate.
The government was harassing the shit out of the arts community. My continued association with the deported priest and with his political allies caused the Special Branch Police to keep me under surveillance. All of us African artists, however, carried on the best way we could with our professions. Before Huddleston had departed, he’d started a foundation called the Union of South African Artists, whose mandate would be to assist African artists with the development of their skills and to protect their rights, especially in the case of record royalties. Union Artists, like the touring African Jazz and Variety Revue, promoted a concert series called “Township Jazz” that played for months at the Johannesburg City Hall. The sold-out shows were segregated and didn’t have any activist content, because the government would have closed them down immediately and detained everybody. This was a very sensitive period: the ANC’s Defiance Campaigns were in full force and many of the organization’s leadership were appearing in the country’s first treason trials. In Alexandra Township the ANC had just launched a bus boycott that lasted for more than a year, during which time the majority of the township’s workers walked ten miles to their jobs in downtown Johannesburg and another ten miles home in the evenings. Because they walked through the city’s white northern suburbs, the white residents were pressuring the government to stop this uprising, but it was impossible to break the back of Alexandra’s determination.
The Union of South African Artists’ headquarters was at Dorkay House, a four-story building next to the Bantu Men’s Social Center on Eloff Street. Musicians from all over Johannesburg and the Witwatersrand townships were drawn to there—it was the only creative enclave at that time for African musicians, artists, poets, actors and singers. Bra Gwigwi Mrwebi quit his job at Drum magazine to become general secretary of Dorkay House alongside Myrtle Berman, an activist friend of Huddleston, who became managing director. Her husband, Monty, was an ex–concert pianist turned furniture designer who was also a radical political activist. Both were members of the South African Communist Party, as were most of South Africa’s other radical politicians. They came in all colors, and had such a strong influence on the direction of our liberation struggle, that in the late 1950s the apartheid government introduced the Suppression of Communism Act, which not only helped it to curtail radical protest in South Africa, but justified murderous incursions into neighboring countries in southern and central Africa in the name of anticommunism. This was at the time when the McCarthy anticommunist witch hunts were terrorizing the lives of many popular artists in America, permanently destroying their careers.
The government, greedy white promoters, and the record companies were uneasy with what they saw as Dorkay House’s radical agenda, and kept it under constant surveillance. Because it was now illegal for Africans to be on the streets after dark without proper documents, it was difficult for musicians, who worked mostly at night, to move about.
One night I was hanging out with some of the cast of African Jazz and Variety at Dorkay House. This was before I joined the group, but they were grooming me because there was a possibility that I’d be hired. I was asked to attend a few of their shows so I could learn their music. Before heading for their show at the Orange Grove Hotel, they sent me to buy some Gilbey’s Gin from Wemmer Hostel, behind the BMSC, a spot where some of the inmates sold liquor illegally. As I was hurrying back, a passbook raid was taking place right in front of the Bantu Men’s Social Center. The cops had a whole line of black men up against the wall, checking their passbooks. Bra Gwigwi’s whistling from the fourth-floor window caught my attention. He mimicked to me that I should drink the booze in a hurry because no African wanted to get caught with illegal liquor. I looked heavenward and gulped the whole pint of gin, wiped my lips and chin, and chucked the bottle in some bushes in front of the Jubilee Center. The evidence was destroyed, but my throat and stomach were a rumbling inferno. I flipped my passbook from my rear pants pocket and showed these two Afrikaner cops my passbook without their asking. All they did was look me in the face. I was careful not to breathe on them or make eye contact. A cop shoved my passbook back into my hands, creasing the pages. They saw a cluster of black adults trying to make their way to Faraday Train Station, and hurried down the street like wolves after sheep; they were eager to fuck with somebody else. By the time I stumbled to the third floor, I was a drunken mess.
A few weeks later I got word that Alfred Herbert, the owner of African Jazz and Variety, had finally agreed to hire me. Herbie, as we called him, was the slick-talking son of South Africa’s queen of Jewish vaudeville theater; he’d been raised backstage.
I was ecstatic. Soon I would be traveling with fifty-nine of some of the country’s baddest musicians and singers. After rehearsing for a few weeks, we left for Cape Town, the first stop on a six-week tour. My Huddleston band buddies were happy for me, but heartbroken at the same time because I was leaving a big hole in the band. Miriam and I were so much in love that I ached at the thought of being away from her for six weeks. Johanna and Polina were at the train station. My mother managed a stiff upper lip, but my grandmother couldn’t stop drying her eyes with her handkerchief. The opportunity had finally arrived for me to do what I loved best.
After settling in my compartment, I found some quiet space on the balcony of one of the cars and let my mind roam. As the train made its majestic, solitary passage, I marveled at the never-ending expanses of meadows, rivers, dams, and streams that made up the handsome province of the Orange Free State. The sky was a crystalline blue speckled with clouds. There were bolts of lightning on the horizon where the Drakensberg mountain range rose. I was experiencing the full beauty of this breathtaking land called South Africa, a land whose fertile and mineral-rich soil inspired bloodthirsty greed in the hearts of its European settlers, whose heartlessness and bigotry prevented them from sharing South Africa’s bounteous wealth with its native population. My people had been vanquished and manipulated into a cheap labor pool, forced to reside in the squalor of the townships outside the Western architectural monuments of Caucasian conquest. I thought to myself, I belong to these conquered people whose pride and self-esteem speak to the indestructible fact that you can conquer a people, but you cannot take away their knowledge of themselves or the deep well of pride from which springs poetry, prose, song, dance, architecture, style, cuisine, gait, laughter and courage, a legacy that can’t be taken away even in the most demeaning and cruel of circumstances. Rest in peace, Hopane and Mamoshaba and all your forebears and brothers and sisters.
King Jarvis, the company comedian and veteran vaudevillean actor, came to the balcony where I was contemplating the awesome heavens of my people’s land and rudely interrupted my euphoria with his drunken arrogance. He figured since I was so young and new to the troupe, he could bully me. He started poking his fingers in my chest, telling me what a bad motherfucker he was. His sour, alcohol-laced breath was disgusting. I pushed him aside and told him to fuck off. I made my way to the compartment I was sharing with five ot
her cast members. The collapsible table was stacked with about a dozen cans of cold Castle beer and three bottles of South African brandy. My compartment mates and I settled down to some serious drinking as darkness enveloped the countryside. The train’s coal-driven engine unleashed a screaming flow of steam that whistled and echoed into the star-filled, half-moon night, possibly pissing off lovemaking rabbits, raccoons, wolves, foxes, bucks, birds, jackals, and other creatures hustling for survival in the eerie night of a racist kingdom whose bloody history they would never know.
6
AFTER TWO NIGHTS ON THE TRAIN, our troupe finally pulled into the Cape Town station. We checked into the Tafelberg Hotel, in the District Six section of the Mother City, set aside originally for coloreds. Soon the government would displace this entire community and relocate its members to barren flatlands on the outskirts of town. Our hotel was surrounded by the magical Table Mountain and its mysterious tablecloth of clouds, below which the Atlantic Ocean and the Indian Ocean meet. This place is one of the world’s wonders, its coastline lined with mountain ranges, bays, and peninsulas rich in almost every kind of marine life imaginable.
The African Jazz and Variety repertoire comprised covers of popular songs of the time. Ben “Satch” Masinga sang Louis Armstrong’s “Blueberry Hill” and “Mack the Knife.” He also sang a duet of “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” with Louisa Emmanuel, à la Ella and Satchmo. Louisa sang Doris Days “Secret Love,” Joey Maxim sang Billy Daniels’s “Old Black Magic,” and did impersonations of Jerry Lewis. Isaac Petersen, whose voice resembled Nat King Cole’s, sang “Mona Lisa.” The Woodpeckers sang Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O!” dressed in calypso dance outfits. Sonny Pillay, the star of the show, sang Frank Sinatra favorites. Dorothy Masuka sang “Let Me Go, Lover,” and Dolly Rathebe sang Bobby “Blue” Bland’s “It’s Gone and Started Raining.” Because most of the white audiences were Jewish, all the top stars of the revue had to sing Yiddish tearjerkers like “My Yiddishe Momma.” There were forty singers on stage sitting on chairs, minstrel-style, with choreographed hand moves. The men wore beige suits and white gloves. The show was a mixture of vaudeville, cabaret, comedy, musical theater, and smoky nightclub jazz. The only township song was the finale “Into Yam’,” which was a vocal dance hit, popularized on record by Dorothy Masuka. Here the cast went wild with all kinds of township dance routines. The highlight of the song came when all the women stood in line next to the footlights downstage, turned their backs to the audience, shook their large behinds up and down in rhythm, and then exited the stage with the male members of the cast lustily dancing in pursuit. This always brought the audience at Sea Point’s Weizman Hall to its feet.
Still Grazing Page 12
