My Son's Story

by Nadine Gordimer

  —Outside the Palace of Justice?—It was at that rendezvous that he had stood trial. His dark, cocky grin that came from prison, happy for battle, delighted her.—Unfortunately I’m going to have to hurry back. There’s a meeting around five—I imagine the ceremony should be over by four-thirty … if the police don’t shut it down long before. Hadn’t you better get dressed? What time’s your bus leaving?—

  —Oh it doesn’t take me ten minutes …is that for me?—He had thrown the carryall in the boot but absently brought in the rose with his briefcase.

  —For the graves.—

  —What a lovely thing to do.—

  He could not lie to her.—My daughter gave it. She came in this morning.—

  —Good for her. I must pick up some flowers, too, on the way.—

  The face of a woman who uses no make-up has unity with her body. Seeing Hannah’s fair eyelashes catching the morning sun and the shine of the few little cat’s whiskers that were revealed, in this innocent early clarity, at the upper corners of her mouth, he was seeing the whole of her; he understood why, in the reproductions of paintings he had puzzled over in the days of his self-education, Picasso represented frontally all the features of a woman—head, breasts, eyes, vagina, nose, buttocks, mouth—as if all were always present even to the casual glance. What would he have known, without Hannah!

  She had picked up his hand and buried her big soft face in it, kissing the palm. When she lifted her head her cheeks were stinging pink, slapped by pride.—I’m so glad you’re the one chosen to speak.—

  Sunday peace.

  The combis that, sending gusts of taped reggae and mbaqanga into the traffic, transport blacks back and forth between township and city, now carry a strange cargo of whites. The street committees in the township have advised that this is the way to bring them in, the nature of the vehicles in themselves giving the signal to the people that these envoys from outside the siege are approved.

  Through the white suburbs. Past bowling greens where figures like aged schoolboys and girls in banded hats genuflect over balls; past the Robin Hood fantasy of an archery club, the whoops of regular Sunday tennis partners in private gardens, the nylon frills and black suits of the congregation leaving a Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk, and the young girls with cupboards full of clothes who choose to stroll barefoot in jeans slashed off at the thigh. Past electronically-operated gates pinnacled with plaster eagles, spike– and razorwire-topped walls behind which peacock-tails of water open over flowers and birds sing. Sunday peace. If it were not for the combi owners’ township names and addresses painted on the vehicles, the convoy might be some sort of charity outing on its way to a picnic. Now and then it is paced by joggers who drop back without noticing it.

  Mechanical knights—vehicles visored in steel-plating and chain-mailed in thick mesh—barred the turnoff to the township. Before them were mounted police and soldiers with automatic shotguns and R4 rifles, standing legs planted apart.

  To most of the white people in the combis the yellow armoured vans, the clumsy brown armoured cars the blacks dub zoomorphically ‘Hippos’, the stolid figures with the power of death in their hands were ranged like the toys of war children set up. Or it was as if someone suddenly flipped the switch of a TV programme selector and a scene from some mini-series flashed on. Violence was so thin an appearance in the living-room that the shadow of someone’s head, moving across the room, was enough to blot it out. Now, why, you could see the hair on a policeman’s forearm. No matter if the person in the next seat stood up; when he shifted again, armoured cars, police guns were there. The steel whips of aerials swung in the sun. Alsatian dogs—once desirable and beautiful pets, now tails down in the cowed and coiled bearing of readiness to attack—were weapons leashed in the fists of police handlers.

  Everyone had been briefed about how to behave: each combi had its marshal. Accept police provocation calmly, leave the talking to those appointed to do it. Some people climbed out to stretch their legs, proving they were not afraid, and were sent back to their seats. Lawyers and civil rights leaders among the groups were conferring with the comrades from within the township who had arrived to meet the convoy in an old American car lumbering low on its suspension. Others were negotiating with the police. The group broke up and re-formed, gesticulating individuals shouldered their way in upon it, left to approach others, ran back. The group moved, as they argued, from one side of the blockade to the other, pulled this way and that in the arena of their contention; a process in dumb show people encapsulated in the combis craned their necks to interpret. Look at that! That policeman shaking his fist! Can’t you see? Next to that Hippo. He hit him, he’s hit him! Oh my god … No no no nobody’s been hurt! Just look at those brutal clots, that one could press the trigger easily as he’s scratching himself … Oh don’t you worry, they’d think twice before firing at us—we’re white … The major or whatever-he-is—he’s walking away—What’s happening? No he isn’t, he’s just giving some instruction. They’re arresting someone! Who? Can’t see—oh my god, it’s Dave! Dave Seaton. No that’s not Dave …

  Alarm and excitement died away into impatience and a new kind of boredom: was it possible to be bored while in an extraordinary situation? In one of the combis a lay nun in ankle socks offered round a plastic bottle of water, and there was the rustle of rolls of peppermints being peeled. The difference is, if we were black we’d at least be singing. Well, come on then! We were told to keep out of it … Singing! Not to sing! Well, freedom songs could be provocation … Who knows the words … Some students did, they belonged to the new generation who learned from blacks; but freedom songs need volume, and the older people from the church and civil rights movements could participate only by smiling solidarity.

  A young marshal raced up and down with her walkie-talkie. Everything about her was in movement, long hair, breasts and rubber-thong sandals bobbing, swirling in contrast with the police planted with guns at their posts. Harassed and grinning, she pulled herself up to the windows of each combi.—They say we can’t enter. But Allan and Dave have shown them the statute, it’s not against the law, they can’t stop us!—She dropped and was off before questions could reach her. People gabbled suppositions; in the silence of others was concealed disappointment—or relief. Who could tell from their faces? In a few minutes the girl was back again, running her open-fingered hand to lift her hair high off her forehead.—They say we’ll be killed. We go in at our own risk—She was fighting her own elation. She burst into laughter. People in the combi rose from their seats—but she was gone. Some climbed out of the combis and grouped in an exchange of rumours and opinions, bravado and caution. Marshals ran like sheepdogs between them, getting them back into the combis. No-one sat where they had before, everyone competed for attention, I think, I said, I told … And then the lawyers did the rounds. There was silence.—We’ve decided to go in. The comrades from the street committees are going to escort us—they have many more of their ranks inside and they’ll be with us all the way. But anyone who feels, because of family or any other circumstances, he or she should not ignore the police warning, should feel free to leave us now. There’s transport for those who wish to return to town. Please. And no stigma whatever attached to this choice … I assure you. None of us will draw any wrong conclusions. So …—

  But it was not possible for anyone to find the courage to get up and leave; no fear equal to that. There was a moment like a breath held. And then all faces were turned to him:—You’re coming?—And the company applauded; applauded each other, themselves. If they never were to meet again, each would have this moment of self-respect ratified between them. The Hippos, the police, soldiers, horses and dogs, guns, opened a way. The black drivers who had been chatting and smoking with the detachment of hired onlookers accustomed to dealing with the police every day, jumped into their vehicles and drove their passengers where many had never been before.

  Across the veld.

  Hannah was in one of the combis. O
f course, she had crossed the veld from many cities, towns and dorps, many times before. She sat quietly in the illusion sunglasses give that one is behind them in some kind of hide, able to think of what was most concealed, surely, among all the secret thoughts of the people around her—her anxiety whether Sonny had evaded the police by choosing some other way into the township, and—most unimaginable of all, by those whose shoulders were touching hers—what the man who would speak to them at the graves was to her. So the experience for her surely was unlike what it could be for anyone else. She had met with police interference often before, she was one of their film stars … if a policeman recognized her (she took off the sunglasses) among the collection of whites in the convoy, he would know that the ex-political prisoner who was to speak at the graves was her lover. It sometimes happened that there was this crazy bond of confirmation in their eyes when hers met those of some plain-clothes man.

  The combis plunged into the township—into the valley where the township had proliferated over three generations, and into the thick-layered human presence of Sunday, when all the life that is dispersed across the veld in the industrial areas and the city during the week has crammed back. Everyone home: ‘home’ the streets; a habitation without barriers, the houses’ breached walls spilling inmates, the tottering fences one with the components—tin, hubcaps, rotting board—of totemic rubbish mounds. Workers’ dungarees were the flags hung out, drying spread cruciform with the logos of construction companies and soft-drink plants stitched across them. Drumming at yard church meetings thumped across the gibber of radio commercials and ragged singing from beer-drinks. The convoy pitched and tossed over the gullies that were the streets and also the children’s sandpits, the fecal streams, the fodder-ground of pigs, chickens and dogs. If the way was not demarcated by cambering and sidewalk gutters as the whites were accustomed to, it was defined by people who ran towards the combis and gathered ahead on either side of the route. An avenue of black faces looked into the windows, pressing close, so that the combis had to slow to these people’s walking pace in order not to crush them under the wheels. No picnic party; the whites found themselves at once surrounded by, gazed at, gazing into the faces of these blacks who had stoned white drivers on the main road, who had taken control of this place out of the hands of white authority, who refused to pay for the right to exist in the decaying ruins of the war of attrition against their presence too close across the veld; these people who killed police collaborators, in their impotence to stop the police killing their children. One thing to read about them in the papers, to empathize with them, across the veld; Hannah felt the fear in her companions like a rise in temperature inside the vehicle. She slid open the window beside her. Instead of stones, black hands reached in, met and touched first hers and then those of all inside who reached out to them. The windows were opened. Passengers jostled one another for the blessing of the hands, the healing touch. Some never saw the faces of those whose fingers they held for a moment before the combi’s progress broke the grasp. In the crush outside faces gleaming in welcome bobbed up. There were the cries, Amandla! Viva! and joy when these were taken up by the whites, and there were the deep dreamy intonations of the old-time greetings, ‘nkos’ from people too ancient to grasp that this, granted to whites, now represents shameful servility. In the smiling haze of weekend-drunks the procession of white people was part of the illusions that softened the realities of the week’s labour, and made the improbable appear possible. The crowd began to sing, of course, and toyi-toyi, the half-dance, half-procession alongside the convoy bringing, among the raised fists of most in the combis, a kind of embarrassed papal or royal weighing-of-air-in-the-hand as a gracious response from others.

  At the graveyard Hannah saw him. Sonny, the detainee in his cell, the political personality, the gentle lover—all these personae were present to her in the sight of him. He stood with his friend Father Mayekiso and some young white people from the End Conscription Campaign. As she watched his curly black hair rise away from his head in the dusty wind, moving over forgotten graves with the party from the combis she stumbled on a broken plastic dome of paper flowers and was quickly caught and put on her feet by a black man in torn and dirty clothes: sorry, sorry. They were all around, those who had followed the convoy, and those who were streaming down from all parts of the township to the graveyard. Smoke from the night’s cooking fires hung its acrid incense over them. The old graves and leaning crosses were disappearing under the feet of the living. They stopped at nine fresh mounds. Hannah wanted to say—but only to him, over there with Father Mayekiso—these aren’t graves yet, not yet, it’s too soon, they are beds, the shape of sleeping bodies with a soft cover of this red, woolly earth drawn over the heads. She knew that the young men down there were between fifteen and twenty-six years old; she did not know what to do with her emotion. She pulled some irises from the bunch she had bought and gave them out to people around her.

  The blacks were accustomed to closeness. In queues for transport, for work permits, for housing allocation, for all the stamped paper that authorized their lives; loaded into overcrowded trains and buses to take them back and forth across the veld, fitting a family into one room, they cannot keep the outline of space—another, invisible skin—whites project around themselves, distanced from each other in everything but sexual and parental intimacy. But now in the graveyard the people from the combis were dispersed from one another and the spatial aura they instinctively kept, and pressed into a single, vast, stirring being with the people of the township. The nun was close against the breast of a man. A black child with his little naked penis waggling under a shirt clung to the leg of a professor. A woman’s French perfume and the sweat of a drunk merged as if one breath came from them. And yet it was not alarming for the whites; in fact, an old fear of closeness, of the odours and heat of other flesh, was gone. One ultimate body of bodies was inhaling and exhaling in the single diastole and systole, and above was the freedom of the great open afternoon sky.

  At a gesture from someone, whites turned heads; on the rise on the side of the graveyard opposed to that of the township the whole force of police and soldiers had reassembled. The yellow vans and brown Hippos made an horizon, the mounted men before them, and, in front, the line on foot. But these were no longer standing stolidly as they did at the road-block. They were half-crouched, their rifles and shotguns pointing down straight at this body, the body of the gathering. Blacks didn’t bother to look. The police, mingled with army conscripts from whom they were indistinguishable most of the time, because they often wore the same camouflage outfit, had been camped on the township soccer fields for weeks. There was no getting away from them. They were life; and death. They had shot the nine young men lying in the graves where the earth had not yet settled.

  The priest led prayers in Twsana and Pedi, and hymns, banners of sound, were borne away into the sky, over to the battle-lines on the hill. One of the young white men who had refused conscription to join those up there, and were ready to go to prison for this decision, told the gathering why the white people had come to the people of the township. We’re here to show you that whites don’t have to come to kill. We come to share your anger and sorrow at the killing of these, our brothers. We come to tell you that we’ll take no part in the army or the police who do these things to you. The interpreter’s translation into one of their own languages set off freedom songs among the people but the street committee comrades skilfully led a transition to hymns; the armed onlookers on the hill must not be provided with any pretext that this was a subversive gathering.

  Hannah knew Sonny’s speech. That is, she knew his thinking, his way of expressing a political line in a manner, as far as feasible, his own way, part of which had been developed in his long dialogue with her, another part of which came from some source in him as the sea is in human blood from the time when humans were creatures of some other element. She did not know him there in his old element, nor could he make himself known to her. H
e was perhaps even ashamed of this base as too uninformed and simple; could not know that she observed it in him as a quality that drew her to him more than anything they shared. She kept for herself something she would never speak, not to anyone, certainly not to him—his mystery: He’s a good man.

  Sonny was wearing the hand-dyed aubergine shirt she had given him and the rich colour accentuated his darkness—no-one could say Sonny wasn’t black enough to be a spokesman of the people, either in terms of his skin or his actions! When he spoke now of detentions and imprisonment, he had been there; when he spoke now of the deaths of the nine young men by police brutality, he himself had risked such a death in his own life. His existence gave her the surety: that was what authority meant, it was not the authority of the weapons on the hill. If he used the vocabulary of politics because certain words and phrases were codes everybody understood—no interpreter necessary, even in the English in which they were formulated they expanded in each individual’s hearing to carry the meaning of his own frustrations, demands and desire—Sonny did not adopt the usual mannerisms the vocabulary produces. He did not have a calculated way of standing or using his hands, when the eyes of a crowd were on him. When he posed some rhetorical question, his eyes, all pupil in their intensity, would come, as if in ordinary conversation, to some individual for the response that would influence his own reflections. When he paused before explaining a point, he was unembarrassed by the moment he created, confident there would be acceptance of it, and he would use a gesture, more of an aid to clarity of thought, used in private discussion—maybe turning up his palm and looking down to trace in it a circular movement with the thumb of the other hand. He also had the gift of spontaneity, drawing into his own discourse his response to previous speakers, so that what he said never seemed prepared in advance, but to have come to him from his colleagues and the vitality of the crowd before him. Watching Sonny, listening to Sonny, she felt at last she could define sincerity, also—it was never speaking from an idea of oneself. And frankness: frankness, something dangerous and beautiful. The subterfuges of an illicit love made the frankness of its emotions possible; the subterfuges of resistance made frankness in a lying society possible. Sonny once said, what the oppressors call subversion is the exposure of the rot in the State.