My father spoke to Joel about “your people” and “the customs of your people” with the same air he used to surprise the Portuguese market gardener with a few words of Portuguese, or, when once we drove through Zululand, a Zulu tribesman with a brisk question in his own language. But though I sat in awkward silence, Joel answered with patient explanation, as the cultured native of a country ignores the visitor’s proud clumsy mouthing of a few words of vulgar patois, and returns patronage with the compliment of pretending to mistake it for real interest. “That’s a well-mannered boy,” my father informed me. “They know how to bring their children up to respect older people. And of course they’re clever, it goes without saying.”
Some weeks later I told my mother that Joel had asked me to go with him to a faculty dance. She put down an armful of clean laundry in alarm. “You wouldn’t go when Basil asked you! And the Blake boy.”
“So?”
She stood there looking at me. Her face had the fixed, sham steadiness of someone who does not know how to say the unexpected. The impact of her thoughts left a sort of stinging blankness on her cheeks. As usual, she took refuge in an unspecified umbrage, her suffering of a complaint against me for which I must bear the burden of guilt without knowing its cause. She buried herself in the counting of shirts, left my pile of underclothing and handkerchiefs abandoned on the kitchen chair and swept away with the rest of the bundle to the linen cupboard.
I went after her. “Why don’t you want me to go?”
Her tactics were common ones, and always the same: she went about a succession of household tasks with swift effort as if you were merely a distraction on the perimeter of her concentration of duty. When, as a child, I had wanted to be forgiven for some piece of naughtiness, I had had to follow her about the house like this, watching her hard, slender hands ignoring me. I asked her again:
“Why shouldn’t I go?”
She hated to answer. By withholding her complaints, her accusations, her arguments, she withheld also the risk of their refutation and kept for herself the cold power of the wronged.
So now she said tightly: “You wouldn’t go with Basil or the other one.”
I laughed. “Because I didn’t want to.”
“They’re not your type.” It was a quotation.
“No, they’re not. It doesn’t mean that because we happen to come from the Mine we’ve got to stick to one another at University. Basil’s never ever been a friend of mine—we’ve nothing in common.”
“And you have,” she stated, meaning Joel and me.
“We get on well. He’s intelligent, and well—nice, that’s all. …” It was almost an appeal; my tightening of irritation unwound into a desire to have my mother agree with me, to accept her. A feeling of tears coming in a longing for her approval, even if she was wrong, even if we were different.
She ignored it off the hard back of her understanding; it slid, harmless. …
“As I say, you certainly do have the queerest taste.” There was something indescribably insulting in the casualness with which she dissociated herself by this callow, mild cliché; she would not even give me the blunt words of her real objections, trouble herself with an examination of what she felt. The Petrie man and now the Jewish storekeeper’s son: Well, it’s so, isn’t it? her back turned on me said.
I believe that was the only dance Joel took me to; he had little money, many things he wanted to do, and as he was two or three years older than I was it was only the interruption of the war that made him an undergraduate when, in himself, the stage had already passed. And curiously, I did not mind. The one dance had somehow not been an entire success; Joel and I could not hold hands, dance with my cheek raised and his lowered like love-stalking birds. We could talk endlessly, spend more and more time together, meet each other’s faces above other people’s chatter with the sudden comfort of each other’s understanding; but this we could not do. Perhaps for dances something in me wanted the tall, fair-haired boys who could clown over beer bottles and flirt with me in the permissive code of gentlemen of my own blood. With one of them I did not have to meet the purposefully unremarking smiles of my classmates (we think nothing of it!) nor did I feel, as I did when Joel stopped to speak to a group of friends, the sudden insipidity of the blue organza dress my mother had made me, the locket on a chain round my neck, in contrast to the interesting dramatic clothes of the friendly Jewesses, bold in their ugliness, bold in their beauty, outdistancing me either way.
This need of mine existed not only outside but also in contradiction to the expansion of my confiding intimacy with Joel Aaron. Out of the silences that followed some minor confession—the silence that is really the rise of sudden floodwaters of words, blocking by pressure the trickling release of speech—came the real unburdening. I told him of my gradual suspension from the life of the Mine … my voice tailed off in what seemed tame and not quite the truth. We were silent, or spoke of something else. Then all of a sudden it came: I told him about Ludi. He himself seemed to impose the limitation of what I should tell him. “It’s a pity to give it away,” he said, combining, as usual in his manner, the immediate sympathy of a contemporary with the comforting, dispassionate remove of a much older person. “When you tell someone else about someone you have loved, you always have the misgiving afterward that you’ve given that much of it away.”
“You sound like a romantic.”—For him, at this time, it was a term of scorn and like a simple object that has been handled by the great, I was fascinated to be able to use it, for it belonged to the vocabulary of that group with the sense of self-ordainment to a sharper, warmer, ruthlessly honest life which exists in every university, and whom, through Joel, I was beginning to hear around me.
He spread out his dark hands stiffly in the pleasure of yawning.
“Only in love. Which is the right place.”
One subject that often brought us to near-argument was my mother. A curious kind of struggle seemed to go on between us at the alert of her name, a battle in the larger air above our heads, the clamor of which reached us only faintly in the reasonable sound of our two voices. She and I had argued again one evening about my going to live in Johannesburg, and after dinner I had heard her in the kitchen, behind the muffle of the door, discussing me with Anna. When Joel arrived to see me with a book he had found for me, I was withdrawn into irritation.
“—She’s been shut in the kitchen since dinner, discussing me over the dishes with the native servant.” We were sitting on the porch; moths and rose beetles from out the summer night beat a tattoo against the wire gauze that enclosed us in light. Joel sat, looking at but not seeing his hands hanging between his knees.
“Her opinion’s so valuable, you know—Naturally, she’s been absorbing my mother’s personal homespun philosophy for fifteen years—she’s the one person calculated never ever to disagree with a single word; and that’s how my mother likes it. It’s a wonder she doesn’t buy herself a parrot. That would be more dignified, anyway, than discussing me with a servant.”
Joel’s silence annoyed me because its questioning suggested the fear that somehow I might be in the wrong. I stared at him for answer, but he merely widened his nostrils as if he were stifling a sigh as one stifles a yawn. The blood trapped in his forgotten hands showed veins crossed and wound like tendrils of a creeper that has come to life round the fingers of a broken stone hand in a garden. Something in the heaviness of his look, a look passing like a river beneath the dark arches of his eyes, reminded me of his mother; of the way she sank, sometimes, out of the family talk; was her, despite her white shoes that were never cleaned, the big hairpins that fell out of her thin hair and smelled, when you picked them up, of the greenish tinge of metal and old frying. Suddenly I wanted to make him move; I said: “Joel?”—to do that, rather than to urge him to speak.
He said: “You discuss Professor Quail’s shortcomings with Mary Seswayo.” Mary Seswayo was the African girl I had seen in the cloakroom when first I went to the Univ
ersity, and to whom I had begun to speak lately.
I was angry. “Ah, you know it’s not that!—It wouldn’t matter if Anna were white, yellow—whatever she was—she’s a servant, an illiterate. It’s humiliating for a woman to discuss her private family affairs with a servant, someone who isn’t even capable of forming a judgment—”
“You don’t like the way your mother speaks about natives. You told me only the other day that it ‘made your blood boil’ when you heard her describe someone’s way of living as ‘worse than a native.’ To prove your enlightenment as opposed to her darkness, you pursue a poor frightened little native girl who happens to have passed English I, or whatever it is, round the Arts block, offering a rare tidbit of white acquaintanceship—”
“I want to talk to her as I might want to talk to any other student. I don’t see why I should be debarred by my white skin? Why, it’s from you yourself—”
“—And then when your mother puts aside considerations of status and color and talks—as one woman to another, mind—to Anna, your blood boils just as hard again.”
“You’re deliberately choosing to misconstrue. You know that’s just what I cannot stand about my mother’s attitude: making use of Anna as a friend and conveniently ignorant yes-woman, elevating her to the status of a confidante, and at the same time pushing her, along with her whole race, into a categorical sloth—of moral, spiritual—everything—inferiority. It’s a variation on the same old theme—you know; of course, you’re different, you’re my friend, it suits me to like you, even though you’re a Jew. Isn’t it the same, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is. And so is your attitude, neatly inverted. Your mother succeeds in the personal relationship; she fails in words, in the theory. Your theory’s sound all right, but you betray it in the heat of personal involvement; your blood lets you down. In fact, it boils when it shouldn’t. You can’t recognize that your mother’s heart-to-heart talks with Anna are the real thing, the thing we’re all piously rolling our eyes to heaven for—a contact between a white and a black simply as human beings—nothing else.”
I felt moody. “Simply, nothing—it’s simply the Trusted Black Mammy situation, that’s all. And you know how much good that sort of good will has done for race relations.”
He gave a little patient smile at the term, hearing it new on my tongue, as one hears someone use the vogue-word of a particular set, and so knows where his affinities, like antennae, are taking him. He shrugged. “None at all. About as much good as those militant liberals who love humanity but can’t stand men and women.”
I was still young enough to lose my temper and be a little ridiculous when I felt I was losing ground. “I’m going to be one of them, I suppose?”
“Don’t be a coy bluestocking,” he said aside, smiling. “—I hope not—” he commented, as if he feared it was something he might be responsible for.
Somehow one of the hard, round-backed beetles had got in. It hit the reflections of light wavering like smoke rings on the ceiling, slithered down the brittle burning surface of the globe itself, and dropped onto Joel’s head. With the calmness of the male, who distinguishes between the biters and the harmless hateful, he scooped it absently into his hand and threw it onto the floor. I put my heel down on it; like crunching a nut. We were in the unsatisfactory listless state of people who have argued about something other than the argument’s cause. I had the sudden impatient feeling that all this talk that I sought after and felt was so important at the time of talking was nothing, was of no interest to me: all that I really cared about was what happened directly to myself; there was nothing and no one in the world beyond the urgent importance of me, of a burning, selfish grasp of what would happen to me, alone. This feeling held me glowering, like a fit of sulks.
After a few minutes Joel began to tell me of a mix-up on the telephone in which he had been involved with his married sister, Colley, but though I accepted the amusing way he told the story, I ignored the change of mood, and flung out, like a challenge and an excuse for a return to disagreeableness: “Joel, why do you always side with my mother against me?” It was spoken as pettishly as it was phrased.
He looked as if he had been expecting it. Again he became heavy, wary. “Do I?”
I waved it aside. “You know what I mean. If I tell you anything about her—not disparaging, exactly, but anything to which one might expect you would agree was unreasonable on her part—you shut up like a clam. I don’t understand it.”
“Look, Helen, I don’t side with her—”
“But so often she’s wrong, quite wrong, and you’ll never give me the satisfaction of admitting it!”
“Of course I know she’s wrong; difficult, anyway. But it doesn’t matter. You can’t do anything about it, so it doesn’t matter. You can’t change them, her or your father, you can’t make them over the way you think—we think—they ought to be or the way we believe we’d like to have them.”
He saw the dissatisfaction in my eyes. “But you can’t get rid of them, either.”
I was shocked, at myself rather than his words. “—What a way to put it.”
“Making them over would be getting rid of them as they are. Well, you can’t do it. You can’t do it by going to live somewhere else, either. You can’t even do it by never seeing them again for the rest of your life. There is that in you that is them, and it’s that unkillable fiber of you that will hurt you and pull you off balance wherever you run to—unless you accept it. Accept them in you, accept them as they are, even if you yourself choose to live differently, and you’ll be all right. Funnily enough, that’s the only way to be free of them. You’ll see—really, I know.”
I protested. “But I tell you I don’t want to ‘get away’ in that sense. I don’t want to change them, really. … I just want them to be a little more understanding … to let me think my way. To have some respect for the things I want to do, the things I think are important.” I was amazed to have put these reasons to Joel, with whom I had discovered the extent of the gulf between the life of my parents and the life I wanted for myself. Joel, with whom I was hearing live music for the first time in my life; who said, Come on, I’ve got something to show you—and, between lectures, pushed me before him onto a tram to town to see exhibitions of painting and sculpture, showed me the inside of the municipal art gallery that all my life till now had been a gray stone exterior from which one might take one’s bearings, like the magistrates’ courts, or a fire station. Joel, from whose books and whose talk I was even beginning to see that the houses we lived in in Atherton and on the Mine did not make use of space and brightness and air, but, like a woman with bad features and a poor complexion who seeks to distract with curls and paint, had their defects smothered in lace curtains and their dark corners filled with stands of straggling plants which existed for these awkward angles between wall and wall, as one evil exists simply for another.
“Still in the Second League. Been in the Second League, every year for twelve years. My mother tells everybody who comes. Soon it’ll be awful; the way all the Mine people repeat to one another with awe: the Compound Manager’s wonderful old mother! That wonderful old Mrs. Ockert! And why is she wonderful? Because she’s eighty-two. …”
Joel smiled.
I said: “I suppose I make them seem …” He nodded. I looked at his hands with their sensitive-tipped fingers that always moved a little on the surface on which they rested, as the nose of a sensitive animal responds constantly to the mere fact of being alive; his broad, European peasant body, the curious, patient, implied shrug of his people: he had eyes that one could never imagine closed, like a light that is never put out.
It was as if I had blundered into the fact of his parents; I felt as if I had suddenly said, aloud, There!—and produced them, bewildered, ignorant, embarrassing, blinking like moles brought up into the unaccustomed light of Joel’s world of books and music and houses clean, sharp as beautiful paper shapes. He had said: I know. I sat staring at my own silence ha
rdening around me; a person who suddenly remembers that the illness of which he has been talking with unsparing clinical thoroughness is the very one from which his companion must be suffering.
Chapter 13
Getting to know Mary Seswayo was like gently coaxing a little shy animal to edge forward to your hand.
There was, as Joel had inferred, something of a collector’s suppressed eagerness in the trembling bait I held out to her from time to time; and we were afraid of each other, she of the lion-mask of white mastery that she saw superimposed on my face, I of the mouse-mask of black submission with which I obscured hers. Yet there was the moment in the cloakroom; a meeting of inherited enemies in the dark in which they mistake one another for friends. And it is never forgotten: not the fact that enemy could be mistaken for friend, but the shared bewilderment of the darkness each recognized in the other’s eye. That is a moment of fusion that cannot be taken back and discussed with one’s own side, for it is a moment for which they too are the enemy. It has none of the sentiment of the armed truce, the soldiers of warring armies drinking beer together on Christmas Day and going back to killing one another on Boxing Day, but is more in the nature of an uncomfortable secret.
When after almost six months at the University I started my first year proper, I found myself in an English tutorial group that included two Africans. One was a fat, pompous teacher-priest “continuing his studies,” the other was Mary Seswayo. When she came in, walking with her head down to the back of Room 325, we knew each other, though I did not look up as she passed the desk at which I was already seated. The native girl from across the washbasin that day. (”African” was an acquired word, preferred by non-Europeans and liberals not only because it was a more accurate designation, but rather because it was as yet clean of the degrading contexts in which the other had been dyed more deeply than with color—in the unself-conscious privacy of my thoughts I still used the old inherited word.) I felt that now and then she looked at me; felt the gentle, curious glance of her recognition touching my back.
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