The Housemaid's Daughter

by Barbara Mutch

  * * *

  Ada left her clothes behind, ironed and neatly folded on her bed. The house was immaculate. She set out a full lunch for Edward and me, and even had a stew on the stove for our evening meal.

  It was a departure perfectly calculated to cause us – to cause me – as little inconvenience as possible.

  But why did she not say goodbye? Even in a note to me privately? Left here, on my dressing table, beside my diary?

  What event can have taken place that so unnerved her as to make her unwilling to say goodbye – and yet leave the house in perfect order?

  This is what I cannot understand.

  While Auntie sleeps, I keep myself awake at night and practise the fingering for the march that I will play on the first day of school. Perhaps it will be a marche militaire, or perhaps a military polonaise. I call up their melodies in my head and my fingers follow where they lead. I wonder if the baby can feel my fingers over his body, I wonder if he can put together the notes that I play to make a tune in his own head?

  I am excited. I fall asleep with the music and the heavy Beethoven rush of the Groot Vis in my ears.

  Chapter 23

  On the day I started as a teacher, something changed.

  It was a cold day. The river was no longer angry and racing beneath the iron bridge, but rather making a mist that curled around the bluegums and dissolved into the hard blue of the sky as it rose. Our neighbours had been up since dawn to fetch water once more from the communal tap since the rain had dried up. Paraffin stoves were lit, crying children were fed their porridge. It was the same day as it was every day, and yet somehow different. Auntie left for the riverbank with the first bundle of washing. She said nothing as she went. She had said nothing to me for some time. I told myself that it was still part of negotiation and that I must not weaken.

  I walked to school in my carefully smoothed overall, and the shoes I’d tried to clean with spit and a cloth. It was as I pushed through the crowded streets that I felt the newness rise up in me like when the child first touched me like a butterfly from within. I stopped for a moment against the elbowing tide, and looked about with fresh eyes, but little appeared different from what I’d come to expect. The streets still reeked of uncollected rubbish, the faces in the crowd were thin and struggling, the maize meal turned my stomach, the latrines overflowed. And yet … among the filth and the struggling was there an opening? A way past the loss that had lain on my heart since I left Cradock House? Could this rising newness, this fresh calling, in fact be the future that young Master Phil had said I would have when I grew up?

  I pressed on. The ‘Township Bach’ swelled. The river ran quietly beneath it. Miss Rose said I would never have a future unless I went to school, so there. Other white people said you needed money in order to have one. But maybe my future was different. It was possible that white people were wrong when they insisted on a connection between money and a future.

  * * *

  ‘Miss Hanembe! Miss Hanembe! Mary!’

  I turned quickly. I must be careful to remember I am now Mary Hanembe. The noise and the bustle of pupils was making me dizzy and forgetful. I wanted to go away and sit down somewhere quiet but the headmaster was standing further along the passage, impatient, waiting for me. He wore the same clothes as when I had seen him before. His shirt collar still needed proper ironing.

  ‘Yes, good morning, Mr Dumise.’ I fought my way to his side past a surge of children in every sort of tattered clothing. I need not have worried about my overall and my scuffed shoes; I fitted right in among the pupils.

  ‘We’re about to begin in the hall,’ he said hurriedly. ‘You must go in and start playing. Liphi,’ he tapped the shoulder of a barefoot boy talking in a group nearby, ‘take Miss Hanembe to the hall.’ The boy broke away from his friends, looked me over, taking in the baby, pointed a thumb down the passage and headed off. I followed him. And that is how my teaching future started.

  The hall was already filled with more boys and girls than I had ever seen in one place. I hesitated, but the boy Liphi disappeared and no one took any notice of me so I pushed through the crowd and went over and opened up the piano and sat down on the wobbly stool. There were some teachers talking in a group on the stage beside the drooping curtains but they also paid me no attention. The windows high up had been opened and the musty smell was gone and a cool breeze touched my neck and made me feel better. I rested my hand on my stomach for a moment to quieten the child’s kicking, and thought of Madam with her hands on either side of mine, encouraging me, and then I began.

  A marche militaire.

  The piano was still tinny but I remembered which of the keys were broken so they didn’t bother me, and I used extra pedal to make up for their lack. Strangely, as soon as I started, a great silence came over the hall and the notes echoed off the walls and over the heads of the teachers on the stage. I looked up quickly, worried that they did not like what they were hearing. But I kept going and played the march a full three times through. By the third time, I could feel the floor and not just the stool shaking, as hundreds of feet jumped in time with the music. As the last chord died away, they began to clap – even the teachers on the stage – and I felt my face go hot and I knew that it would be all right.

  The headmaster held up his hand for them to stop and said I was the new music teacher and they clapped and whistled once more and the headmaster joined in as well. He also said a few other things about what was to happen that day at school – I later learnt that this was what an assembly was for – and then sent them off to their first lesson. He looked down at me and nodded and I started to play again, this time a Chopin polonaise. The youngsters chattered and danced their way out of the hall. The teachers came down off the stage and stood around watching me play. Once I had finished, they came forward.

  ‘What a surprise,’ said a woman in a blue dress with long sleeves that rode up her thin arm when she reached over and shook my hand. She said her name was Mildred.

  ‘Well done,’ said another, a man this time, with thick glasses and a jacket with holes in the elbows. ‘Do you play jive?’

  They seemed not to notice my faded overall with its weight of child, or my broken shoes, and they wished me luck and said it was the first time many of the children had ever heard a piano.

  I wish I could say that it went easily from then on, that the clapping and whistling in the hall meant it was going to be a good future, that I and my child might find a place here to work and be accepted by my colleagues and stay out of trouble. But another challenge had lately arisen – the matter of birthplace. Proof would soon be required, the headmaster said wearily to his staff, to show that all teachers had the right to live and work in Cradock.

  ‘But why?’ demanded an excitable man called Silas, who was the deputy head and taught history. ‘We must go where the work is. This is not a crime!’ Several teachers sitting on low benches clapped. We were on the stage in the hall at the time, in a loose circle around the headmaster. Behind us, the drooping stage curtains gave off a smell of mildew. From outside came the din of rough sport in the playground.

  ‘In Johannesburg they call for us to burn our Passes!’ hissed the man keen on jive. His glasses reflected in the single light that hung over our heads. Some of the older staff exchanged nervous glances and muttered amongst themselves. The noise level rose to muffle the shouting from outside.

  ‘That’s wild talk,’ said Mr Dumise loudly over the upsurge, from his position in the centre of the stage. ‘If we keep our heads down, they’ll forget about us. Reverend Calata at St James School is sure of this. If we cause trouble,’ he shot a warning glance across at the deputy, ‘then we call attention to ourselves.’

  ‘I say we ignore their stupid rules,’ retorted a young woman named Dina, who wore a different coloured turban on her head each day.

  The circle splintered into groups, each taking a particular position. I realised this was a debate, and it occurred to me that debate was altog
ether different from negotiation, but that both involved trying to be on the winning side.

  I kept quiet. They no doubt had papers to prove their background and their work history. But when the time came to gather such proof, what would the authorities do to me – a girl with no family, no training, no references and no Pass document in the name of Mary Hanembe? It was already a surprise that Mr Dumise had not asked to see my Pass. I lived on the edge of discovery. Yet why should the matter of skin be subject to rules? And what would Master Phil have made of this alliance between skin and the law?

  My pupils gave me no time to dwell on these latest developments. After the excitement of that first assembly, they proved to be as rough as Mama and Mrs Pumile had warned. Many of them lived on the street and had no parents and were always hungry. That made them fight, like they saw men fight outside the shebeen, or fight over a woman, or over ownership of a goat. On the street, disputes were only ever settled by fists or knives, and so it was at school. I learnt to shrink back against the wall to protect myself and my child from their rampaging. This was passion such as I’d never felt before. And fevered air such as I’d never breathed before.

  Mr Dumise said that the poor behaviour was because we had more street children on our side of the river than Rev. Calata had at the strict St James School in the township past Bree Street. And that criminals hid from the law on our side of the river and set a bad example. It was true that our township was not as well organised as theirs. And we did not have a township leader like Rev. Calata, a man respected even by the white mayor at the town hall. Perhaps, I thought to myself, it was also the presence of the nearby jail that made the St James children behave better.

  In the matter of teaching, I was luckier than my colleagues because my subject offered respite in the midst of turmoil. Music both settled my pupils down and gave them wings. It helped them forget, for a moment, all the things that made their lives so discordant. Just as music had shown me a world beyond Cradock House, so it let these young ones fly away from the township to a new place where there was no hunger or blood. Each day they leapt into the hall eager to escape their lives – and the harder subjects of numbers and words – and demanded more jazz and more syncopation every time. In the first weeks of my job, I played every lively piece I knew. ‘More township jive, Miss H,’ they would shout, ignoring everything I tried to teach about the music I was to play. ‘More jive!’ They forgot their hunger and their disputes, flung off their thin jackets and danced and stamped their feet in time and tired themselves out as much as I tired my fingers out and the child inside me. It was glorious. I reasoned that if I gave them everything they wanted now, then at a later stage they would be prepared to listen to what I wished to say if they wanted me to play for them again. It was, I suppose, a sort of negotiation, but without money. I think Master Phil would have approved. But the noise from the hall must have been a severe trial for teachers in nearby classrooms.

  ‘You are more tired with this teaching than with my washing,’ Auntie said crossly, breaking her silence after the first few days when I returned to the hut and lay down on my piece of floor in the middle of the afternoon.

  ‘It is true,’ I said, feeling my eyes droop and sleep approach.

  ‘You must think of the child,’ Auntie muttered.

  I tried to hold back a smile. It was the first time that Auntie had taken the part of my child against me. Dear Lord, I told myself, wait until she sees the colour of this child that she defends!

  And then I slept.

  Does Ada remember us?

  I think of her every day as I write this diary.

  Did we drive her away by some form of neglect of which we were not aware?

  Was it that she missed Miriam so much she had to be among her own people? This is Rosemary’s view, from Johannesburg, but I don’t think it is correct.

  Has she gone to KwaZakhele? I have asked the maids of my friends but none of them has heard of her whereabouts. Even Mrs Pumile has no idea where Ada is, although she said Ada did not look well the last time she saw her. On the other hand, Mrs Pumile has benefited from Ada’s absence; she now earns a tidy sum ironing for us.

  Edward says that after all we did for Ada and Miriam, even if she comes back we must never employ her again. He is most insistent upon this. He also insists that I forget about trying to find her.

  The school was the first place where I met black men and women who had learning. At the start I was nervous, although Lindiwe said I should not be. But they had been to school and I had not, I said to her. They were trained to deal with children in a classroom and I was not. They may be suspicious that the headmaster, Mr Dumise, was willing to spend some of the school’s small amount of money on me instead of on books for more important subjects.

  ‘No matter,’ Lindiwe said with finality, shouldering her latest load of washing. ‘None of them can do what you can do on the piano.’ If Lindiwe had been Miss Rose, she would have added: ‘So there.’

  But the teachers didn’t complain, or look on me with suspicion. Instead they accepted me, they ignored my poor clothing, they didn’t look down on my lack of schooling and training, they seemed ready to take my piano playing as a good enough substitute. And they also didn’t complain – at least not to me – that my arrival had raised the noise level in the school to even greater heights. What was more difficult to deal with was their curiosity. Curiosity about where I came from, how I learnt the piano so well and – they didn’t ask this but I saw it in their eyes – whether I had a father for this baby that I was carrying.

  ‘How did you learn to play like that?’ asked the numbers teacher, a quiet and serious young man called Sipho Mhlase who had been silent during the debate about the right to work in Cradock.

  ‘Who was your teacher, child?’ This from Veronica, an elderly lady with a craggy face like Auntie’s, who had shaken her head at the jive man’s comment about burning Passes. Veronica took the younger children for reading when not busy calling from the classroom window to her chickens that roamed the back yard of the school. The same bad people that stole washing off bushes at the riverbank would steal Veronica’s thin birds if she relaxed her guard.

  ‘Where do you come from?’ The pretty young teacher, Dina, attacked the matter of my pregnancy from the angle of geography. She leant on the piano as I finished playing the morning march one day, and took in the swelling of my stomach beneath Auntie’s overall.

  I hesitated.

  ‘You don’t have to say, Mary,’ she glanced down at my swollen belly again, ‘but people wonder…’ Dina was the closest to my age on the staff. She was wearing a different coloured turban again and the boys followed her with their eyes, like men had followed Miss Rose with their eyes. But she wasn’t selfish like Miss Rose and sometimes offered me bread and jam from her own lunch.

  ‘I come from KwaZakhele,’ I said hurriedly, closing the lid of the piano and heaving myself up off the wobbly stool. ‘I worked for a Madam in Port Elizabeth who taught me to play.’

  There was a beat of silence in Dina, like a rest in music.

  ‘You don’t need to call people Madam and Master,’ she said in a quite different voice. ‘Just because she taught you doesn’t put her above you.’ She stared at me. I could see the clever folds on the top of her blue turban. ‘We take what whites teach us and use it to get ahead. But we don’t grovel to them.’ Her eyes flashed at me. ‘We don’t grovel!’ I remembered Mrs Pumile saying the word ‘apartheid’ to me with the same heat through the hedge at Cradock House.

  ‘One day, Mary,’ she pulled my arm through hers as we left the hall, ‘we’ll call white people by their names – yes,’ she nodded as I gasped, ‘just like they call us by our names. And there’ll be no shame in it.’

  ‘How could I call Madam “Cathleen”?’ I murmured to myself.

  ‘Cathleen? So…’ Dina’s turban nodded.

  The child kicked again and I felt a dizziness that made me sink to my knees on the linoleum. No one mus
t find out! No one must look for a Madam who knows the piano and is called Cathleen! Pray that the hadeda birds do not hear gossip from Dina and bear it back to Cradock House … I tried to rise but the walls crowded upon me like in church when young Master Phil had gone to God the Father and the organ had wept and Madam and Master had not touched one another for comfort.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Dina whispered, crouching down beside me and putting an arm round my shoulders.

  ‘Miss Hanembe? Dina?’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir.’ I breathed deeply to still my fearful heart. Mr Dumise’s concerned face swam into view. ‘It won’t happen again.’

  ‘Take Mary home,’ said Mr Dumise to Dina in a low voice.

  ‘She can rest and then come back when she feels better.’ He turned away and went back into his office.

  I waited till his door closed. ‘I can go on my own,’ I said, not wanting Dina to see my poor circumstances at Auntie’s hut or to learn more about me than I had already given away. What if Auntie was there and addressed me as Ada?

  But Dina tossed her turbaned head and took my hand firmly and led me out of the school and across the playground. The Groot Vis rushed gently in the background, still carrying spare water from the floods.

  ‘You are kind,’ I said to Dina when we got to Auntie’s street. ‘I will go on myself from here.’ But Dina ignored me again and waited until I led her right up to the open doorway of Auntie’s hut.

  ‘I have no milk to give you tea,’ I said, squatting down on my mat while offering Auntie’s narrow bed to Dina. She stayed in the doorway, her eyes slowly adjusting to the darkness inside as mine used to do when I came to visit with Mama all those years before.