by Solomon, Barbara H. (EDT); Rampone, W. Reginald, Jr. (EDT)
At the front again, I went up the steps where we used to sit scratching noughts and crosses while my father was in the house. Not that our families had been friends; only the children, which didn’t count—my father and mother were white, my father a member of the Legislative Assembly, and Inkalamu’s wives were native women. Sometimes my father would pay a call on Inkalamu, in the way of business (Inkalamu, as well as being a trader and hunter—the Africans had given him the name Inkalamu, “the lion”—was a big landowner, once) but my mother never accompanied him. When my brothers and I came by ourselves, Inkalamu’s children never took us to the house; it didn’t seem to be their home in the way that our small farmhouse was our home, and perhaps their father didn’t know that we came occasionally, on our own, to play, any more than our mother and father knew we secretly went there. But when we were with my father—there was a special attraction about going to that house openly, with him—we were always called in, after business was concluded, by Inkalamu Williamson, their white father, with his long yellow curly hair on to his shoulders, like Jesus, and his sun-red chest and belly folded one upon the other and visible through his unbuttoned shirt. He gave us sweets while those of his own children who had slipped inside stood in the background. We did not feel awkward, eating in front of them, for they were all shades of brown and yellow-brown, quite different from Inkalamu and my father and us.
Someone had tied the two handles of the double front door with a piece of dirty rag to prevent it from swinging open, but I looped the rag off with a stick, and it was easy to push the door and go in. The place was not quite empty. A carpenter’s bench with a vise stood in the hall, some shelves had been wrenched from the wall and stood on the floor, through the archway into the sitting room I saw a chair and papers. At first I thought someone might still be living there. It was dim inside and smelled of earth, as always. But when my eyes got accustomed to the dark I saw that the parts of the vise were welded together in rust and a frayed strip was all that was left on the rexine upholstery of the chair. Bat and mouse droppings carpeted the floor. Piles of books looked as if they had been dumped temporarily during a spring cleaning; when I opened one the pages were webbed together by mould and the fine granules of red earth brought by the ants.
The Tale of a Tub. Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Little old Everymans, mixed up with the numbers of The Farmer’s Weekly and Titbits. This room with its crooked alcoves moulded out of mud and painted pink and green, and its pillars worm-tracked with mauve and blue by someone who had never seen marble to suggest marble to people who did not know what it was—it had never looked habitable. Inkalamu’s rolltop desk, stuffed like a pigeon loft with accounts ready to take off in any draught, used to stand on one of the uneven-boarded landings that took up more space than the dingy coop of rooms. Here in the sitting room he would perform formalities like the distribution of sweets to us children. I don’t think anyone had ever actually sat between the potted ferns and read before a real fire in that fireplace. The whole house, inside, had been curiously uninhabitable; it looked almost the real thing, but within it was not the Englishman’s castle but a naive artifact, an African mud-and-wattle dream—like the VC10 made of mealie stalks that a small African boy was hawking round the airport when I arrived the previous week.
A grille of light gleamed through the board over my head. When Inkalamu went upstairs to fetch something, his big boots would send red sand down those spaces between the boards. He was always dressed in character, with leather leggings, and the cloudy-faced old watch on his huge round wrist held by a strap made of snakeskin. I went back into the hall and had a look at the stairs. They seemed all right, except for a few missing steps. The banisters made of the handrails of an old tram-car were still there, and as I climbed, flakes of the aluminium paint that had once covered them stuck to my palms. I had forgotten how ugly the house was upstairs, but I suppose I hadn’t been up very often; it was never clear whether Inkalamu’s children actually lived in the house with him or slept down at the kraal with their mothers. I think his favourite daughters lived with him sometimes—anyway, they wore shoes, and used to have ribbons for their hair, rather pretty hair, reddish-dun and curly as bubbles; I hadn’t understood when I was about six and my brothers rolled on the floor giggling when I remarked that I wished I had hair like the Williamson girls. But I soon grew old enough to understand, and I used to recount the story and giggle, too.
The upstairs rooms were murmurous with wasps and the little windows were high as those of a prison cell. How good that it was all being taken apart by insects, washed away by the rain, disappearing into the earth, carried away and digested, fragmented to compost. I was glad that Inkalamu’s children were free of it, that none of them was left here in this house of that “character” of the territory, the old Africa hand whose pioneering spirit had kept their mothers down in the compound and allowed the children into the house like pets. I was glad that the school where they weren’t admitted when we were going to school was open to their children, and our settlers’ club that they could never have joined was closed, and that if I met them now they would understand as I did that when I was the child who stood and ate sweets under their eyes, both they and I were what our fathers, theirs and mine, had made of us . . . And here I was in Inkalamu Williamson’s famous bathroom, the mark of his civilization, and the marvel of the district because those very pipes sticking out of the outside walls that I had clung to represented a feat of plumbing. The lavatory pan had been taken away but the little tank with its tail of chain was still on the wall, bearing green tears of verdigris. No one had bothered to throw his medicines away. He must have had a year or two of decline before he died, there must have been an end to the swaggering and the toughness and the hunting trips and the strength of ten men: medicines had been dispensed from afar, they bore the mouldering labels of pharmacists in towns thousands of miles away—Mr. Williamson, the mixture, the pills, three times a day; when necessary; for pain. I was glad that the Williamsons were rid of their white father, and could live. Suddenly, I beat on one of the swollen windows with my fist and it flung open.
The sight there, the silence of it, smoking heat, was a hand laid to quiet me. Right up to the house the bush had come, the thorn trees furry with yellow blossom, the overlapping umbrellas of rose, plum and green msasa, the shouldering mahogany with castanet pods, and far up on either side, withdrawn, moon-mountainous, the granite peaks, lichen-spattered as if the roc perched there and left its droppings. The exaltation of emptiness was taken into my lungs. I opened my mouth and received it. Good God, that valley!
And yet I did not stand there long. I went down the broken stairs and out of the house, leaving the window hanging like the page of an open book, adding my destruction to all the others just as careless, that were bringing the house to the ground; more rain would come in, more swifts and bats to nest. But it is the ants who bring the grave to the house, in the end. As I pushed the swollen front doors roughly closed behind me I saw them, in their moving chain from life to death, carrying in the grains of red earth that will cover it.
They were black, with bodies the shapes of egg-timers. I looked up from them, guilty at waste of time, when I felt someone watching me. In the drive there was a young man without shoes, his hands arranged as if he had an imaginary hat in them. I said good morning in the language of the country—it suddenly came to my mouth—and he asked me for work. Standing on the steps before the Williamsons’ house, I laughed: “I don’t live here. It’s empty.”
“I have been one years without a work,” he said mouthingly in English, perhaps as a demonstration of an additional qualification.
I said, “I’m sorry. I live very far from here.”
“I am cooking and garden too,” he said.
Then we did not know what to say to each other. I went to the car and gave him two shillings out of my bag and he did what I hadn’t seen since I wa
s a child, and one of Inkalamu’s servants used to take something from him—he went on his knees, clapped once, and made a bowl of his hands to receive the money.
I bumped and rocked down the drive from that house that I should never see again, whose instant in time was already forgotten, renamed, like the public buildings and streets of the territory—it didn’t matter how they did it. I only hoped that the old man had left plenty of money for those children of his, Joyce, Bessie—what were the other ones’ names?—to enjoy now that they were citizens of their mothers’ country. At the junction with the main road the bicycle on its side and the man were still there, and a woman was standing on the veranda of the store with a little girl. I thought she might have something to do with the people who owned the land, now, and that I ought to make some sort of acknowledgement for having entered the property, so I greeted her through the car window, and she said, “Was the road very bad?”
“Thank you, no. Thank you very much.”
“Usually people walks up when they come, now. I’m afraid to let them take the cars. And when it’s been raining!”
She had come down to the car with the smile of someone for whom the historic ruin is simply a place to hang the washing. She was young, Portuguese, or perhaps Indian, with piled curls of dull hair and large black eyes, inflamed and watering. She wore tarnished gilt earrings and a peacock brooch, but her feet swished across the sand in felt slippers. The child had sore eyes, too; the flies were at her.
“Did you buy the place, then?” I said.
“It’s my father’s,” she said. “He died about seven years ago.”
“Joyce,” I said. “It’s Joyce!”
She laughed like a child made to stand up in class. “I’m Nonny, the baby. Joyce is the next one, the one before.”
Nonny. I used to push her round on my bicycle, her little legs hanging from the knee over the handlebars. I told her who I was, ready to exchange family news. But of course our families had never been friends. She had never been in our house. So I said, “I couldn’t go past without going to see if Inkalamu Williamson’s house was still there.”
“Oh yes,” she said. “Quite often people comes to look at the house. But it’s in a terrible mess.”
“And the others? Joyce, and Bessie, and Roger—?”
They were in this town or that; she was not even sure which, in the case of some of them.
“Well, that’s good,” I said. “It’s different here now, there’s so much to do, in the territory.” I told her I had been at the independence celebrations; I was conscious, with a stab of satisfaction at the past, that we could share now as we had never been able to.
“That’s nice,” she said.
“—And you’re still here. The only one of us still here! Is it a long time since it was lived in?” The house was present, out of sight, behind us.
“My mother and I was there till—how long now—five years ago”—she was smiling and holding up her hand to keep the light from hurting her eyes—“but what can a person do there, it’s so far from the road. So I started this little place.” Her smile took me into the confidence of the empty road, the hot morning, the single customer with his bicycle. “Well, I must try. What can you do?”
I asked, “And the other farms, I remember the big tobacco farm on the other side of the river?”
“Oh that, that was gone long before he died. I don’t know what happened to the farms. We found out he didn’t have them any more, he must have sold them, I don’t know . . . or what. He left the brothers a tobacco farm—you know, the two elder brothers, not from my mother, from the second mother—but it came out the bank had it already. I don’t know. My father never talk to us about these business things, you know.”
“But you’ve got this farm.” We were of the new generation, she and I. “You could sell it, I’m sure. Land values are going to rise again. They’re prospecting all over this area between the bauxite mines and the capital. Sell it, and—well, do—you could go where you like.”
“It’s just the house. From the house to the road. Just this little bit,” she said, and laughed. “The rest was sold before he died. It’s just the house, that he left to my mother. But you got to live, I mean.”
I said warmly, “The same with my father! Our ranch was ten thousand acres. And there was more up at Lebishe. If he’d have hung on to Lebishe alone we’d have made a fortune when the platinum deposits were found.”
But of course it was not quite the same. She said sympathetically, “Really!” to me with my university-modulated voice. We were smiling at each other, one on either side of the window of the big American car. The child, with bows in its hair, hung on to her hand; the flies bothered its small face.
“You couldn’t make some sort of hotel, I suppose.”
“It’s in a mess,” she said, assuming the tone of a flighty, apologetic housewife. “I built this little place here for us and we just left it. It’s so much rubbish there still.”
“Yes, and the books. All those books. The ants are eating them.” I smiled at the little girl as people without children of their own do. Behind, there was the store, and the cottage like the backyard quarters provided for servants in white houses. “Doesn’t anyone want the books?”
“We don’t know what to do with them. We just left them. Such a lot of books my father collected up.” After all, I knew her father’s eccentricities.
“And the mission school at Balondi’s been taken over and made into a pretty good place?” I seemed to remember that Joyce and one of the brothers had been there; probably all Inkalamu’s children. It was no longer a school meant for black children, as it had been in our time. But she seemed to have only a polite general interest: “Yes, somebody said something the other day.”
“You went to school there, didn’t you, in the old days?”
She giggled at herself and moved the child’s arm. “I never been away from here.”
“Really? Never!”
“My father taught me a bit. You’ll even see the schoolbooks among that lot up there. Really.”
“Well, I suppose the shop might become quite a nice thing,” I said.
She said, “If I could get a licence for brandy, though. It’s only beer, you see. If I could get a licence for brandy . . . I’m telling you, I’d get the men coming.” She giggled.
“Well, if I’m to reach the mines by three, I’d better move,” I said.
She kept smiling to please me; I began to think she didn’t remember me at all; why should she, she had been no bigger than her little daughter when I used to take her on the handlebars of my bicycle. But she said, “I’ll bring my mother. She’s inside.” She turned and the child turned with her and they went into the shade of the veranda and into the store. In a moment they came out with a thin black woman bent either by age or in greeting—I was not sure. She wore a head-cloth and a full long skirt of the minutely-patterned blue-and-white cotton that used to be in bales on the counter of every store, in my childhood. I got out of the car and shook hands with her. She clapped and made an obeisance, never looking at me. She was very thin with a narrow breast under a shrunken yellow blouse pulled together by a flower with gaps like those of missing teeth in its coloured glass corolla. Before the three of them, I turned to the child rubbing at her eyes with hands tangled in the tendrils of her hair. “So you’ve a daughter of your own now, Nonny.”
She giggled and swung her forward.
I said to the little girl, “What’s hurting you, dear?—Something wrong with her eyes?”
“Yes. It’s all red and sore. Now I’ve got it too, but not so bad.”
“It’s conjunctivitis,” I said. “She’s infected you. You must go to the doctor.”
She smiled and said, “I don’t know what it is. She had it two weeks now.”
Then we shook hands and
I thought: I mustn’t touch my face until I can wash them.
“You’re going to Kalondwe, to the mine.” The engine was running. She stood with her arms across her breasts, the attitude of one who is left behind.
“Yes, I believe old Doctor Madley’s back in the territory, he’s at the W.H.O. centre there.” Dr. Madley had been the only doctor in the district when we were all children.
“Oh yes,” she said in her exaggeratedly interested, conversational manner. “He didn’t know my father was dead, you know, he came to see him!”
“I’ll tell him I’ve seen you, then.”
“Yes, tell him.” She made the little girl’s limp fat hand wave goodbye, pulling it away from her eyes—“Naughty, naughty.” I suddenly remembered—“What’s your name now, by the way?”; the times were gone when nobody ever bothered to know the married names of women who weren’t white. And I didn’t want to refer to her as Inkalamu’s daughter. Thank God she was free of him, and the place he and his kind had made for her. All that was dead, Inkalamu was dead.
She stood twiddling her earrings, bridling, smiling, her face not embarrassed but warmly bashful with open culpability. “Oh, just Miss Williamson. Tell him Nonny.”
