She never spoke in class discussions, but the priest did. He used his old manner of the preacher to the layman for the new purpose of the black man to the white man: hearty, hand-rubbing, bright. We are all God’s children; let’s make the best of it. Sometimes there was the suspicion that he half-clowned his unctuous jolliness, wood-touching for the temerity of his equality, that he snatched with a conjurer’s patter and glee while his white audience was being amused, and his own people, in the know, demonstrated his superiority to them in their inability to follow his sleight of hand. So he apologized beforehand for any offense your whiteness might, with its awesome sensitivity, take from the innocuous, like litmus paper mysteriously turning red with immersion. And it seemed to him he got away with it; a trick kind of equality, in a trick kind of way, but still, an equality. “How are we this morning, how are we?—And is our Dr. East not ‘on time’?” He would swing round the door and pile his books on a desk in the front row, beaming at the class through polishing gestures with which he swept his hot face with a handkerchief as someone cleans a pair of spectacles preparatory to settling to work.
He did wear spectacles, but these were permanently misted by the heat of his hands, and he took them on and off as he sat, face poised beneath Dr. East like a seal waiting for the keeper’s fish to land in his mouth. The instant Dr. East paused to invite discussion, the preacher rose to it. (The subject of discussion, on one occasion I remember, was Thackeray’s discursive muse.) “Sir, well, I should like to say—in my humble opinion that is—I don’t know how my fellow students are feeling about it—but this bad habit of Thackeray’s, it makes it very difficult for the student. It is hard for him to know what is the story, if you know what I mean, and in examination it may be that you are asked a question about the story, and you know the book too well and put in what is not the story?” He smiled round the class with a slowly widening gesture, as a conductor acknowledges applause by taking it for his whole orchestra.
Dr. East had faded ginger hair and colorless eyes that had the cold snap of a pair of scissors, impatiently cutting off irrelevancies and idiocies with a look, before they could rise to articulation. After giving the preacher two or three commentless hearings, with the allowance of attention in the face of irritation which would be accorded to any foreigner, he refused any further concession. Yet he was not quite so hard on the African as he would have been on a European student: the viper-flicker of his sarcasm he kept in his mouth. “Just a moment, Mr. Thabo—” He would signal him down and raise his eyes at some other student who was struggling with the desire to speak.
The girl, as I have said, did not speak at all. She listened with the painful intentness of someone who is always balanced on the edge of noncomprehension, and she wrote things down when one could not imagine what had been said that was worth noting. Dr. East had a peculiar affection for those who did not offer dissent or opinion; probably he was grateful to be spared the risk of hearing more banalities. Yet at the same time he had the endearing quality of literary men—those in the exact sciences are much less hopeful—the belief that perhaps something fresh and intelligent is being muffled by timidity. Particularly in the unexplored country—jungle profusion? sweet grassland? silence of rock?—of the other race’s intellectual innocence. His compressed lips that twitched at the fly of impatience suddenly opened in his surprising smile; a friendly smile on big even false teeth that altered the whole set of his face and seemed to flatten his ears and his forehead with the look of pleasure that comes to the head of an animal when you stroke it. “Miss Seswayo, wouldn’t you perhaps like to say something about this?” He lifted his head courteously to the back of the room.
She would get up slowly, moving her notebook, putting down the pencil, resting her palms on the desk ledge. She shook her head carefully as she spoke, after a pause in which everyone was silent, “No. … No, thank you.”—Dr. East made a small noise of regret—“Yes, now what is it, Mr. Alder?”—and talk broke again upon the room.
Once or twice, when I happened to sit at the back of the room in line with her, I tried to see what it was that she wrote down so purposefully. But I only caught a glimpse of lines of copybook handwriting, a child’s at its most careful, with great round stops and hooked commas. One of these times a paper with the text of a literary-appreciation test was handed out round the room, one for every two students, and as she was my neighbor I moved to share mine with her. Sitting over the same printed sheet, I could see the brown, shiny plate of her breast, moving a little fast with her breathing beneath a necklace of white china beads that she always wore. I could see the very texture of her skin, sliding over the ridge of her collarbone as she lifted her arms. The top of her arm, in a brown coat sleeve, slowly sent its warmth through to where my arm touched against it.
It must have been fifteen years since I had been in such close contact with an African; not since that other breast, longer ago than I could remember, the breast of my native nanny, had I casually felt human warmth, life, coming to me from a black body.
The following afternoon I stopped to speak to her where she sat in a window embrasure in one of the wide corridors, reading a key to Chaucer whose edges were worn round as a stone. I made the usual banal overtures about our work and she answered in the faint, stilted English of the European-educated African woman, out of whom all the buoyancy, music and spontaneity that is in the voices of nursemaids and servants seem to have been hushed by responsibility.
An obstinacy of shyness made it very difficult to talk to her, but the reassurance of repeated casual meetings slowly thawed her silent, wide-eyed greeting as she hurried past into a smile. We met again in the cloakroom. Alone, this time, in the litter of lipstick-streaked tissues and balls of crumpled paper like cabbages, she was repacking her things on the floor—she always carried about with her a complication of coats, books, notes that she watched and counted with the poor peasant’s anxiety for his possessions. The tap frothed out over my dirty hands and I said: “You are loaded up. …”
It was not easy for her to speak lightly. “Sometimes I cannot seem to get it all in. It seems to get bigger and heavier as the day goes on.”
To anyone else I could have said: “But why on earth do you carry all that stuff about, anyway—but with her I could not. “You know, you frighten me with the notes you take; every time my mind’s wandering at a lecture, I see you writing away and I get an awful feeling that I’ve just missed hearing something very important.”
She smiled, and this time it was the sudden, quick, surrendering smile of the piccanin caddies at the golf course. It seemed ridiculous that here was I, talking to a little native girl about lecture notes at a University.
“Well, it is a lot …,” she admitted with the shy acceptance of a commendation, “especially with Dr. East. Everyone in the class always has so much to argue about.—The expense of all the paper is something, too.”
She takes down everything that anyone says. She struggles to get down the commonplace inaccuracies, the embarrassed critical shots in the dark, the puerile fumblings toward an opinion.—I was so appalled that I looked at her with the polite daze of someone who has not quite heard, really listened. …
“Do you—do you live here, I mean in Johannesburg itself?” It was not a question I had meant to ask, but I snatched it up as the first thing to hand.
She answered dutifully. “I have a room with a family in Sophiatown. I was at the hostel and then at Alexandra, but I moved.”
“Oh, I live at home—that is, in Atherton, on the Mine.” Questioning her about where she lived suddenly seemed too much like a mistress expecting to be decently answered by a servant, and I looked for some way to put it right.
“It’s a long way,” she said.
“An hour by train every morning.” I always said it with some sort of distasteful pride in the hardness of it.
But to her, living in a native township where people got up at five o’clock to queue for busses in order to get to work by eig
ht, it was nothing to commiserate about. She nodded politely.
“I have to go.” She smiled, with her bundles on her arm, as if she did not want to. She stood like a neat schoolgirl, feet together.
I said: “Bye now. …”—But no airiness could take from that quiet, serious little figure the consciousness of privilege that sent it, alone, down the corridors and down the flanking steps and through the gardens out into the street; into Johannesburg, to be swept aside with errand boys and cooks and street cleaners, still alone.
A susurration of voices—now and then a phrase would land, shrill on our table: “tastes like soap!” … “his FINAL YEAR, I said”—the warmed-over humidity of canteen foods, and the grinding, bursting effort of a box apoplectic with colored lights to release the snarling of a swing band—stood between Joel and his friend, and me.
“Big attraction of this tearoom, now.” The light-haired young man indicated the juke box.
“Big attraction of the other one is no juke box,” said Joel. “Let’s go.”
There nothing moved but a lethargic tearoom fly, feeling over the sugar bowl. “What happened to you?” said Joel in the hush, referring to my lateness.
“Joel, I was talking to that girl, the African girl. I discovered she takes down everything that is said. She sits at tuts taking down miles of notes. All the rubbish that everyone talks.” I sat back in my chair, looking at him.
He pursed his lips. “Just a minute—” He went up to the counter and came back with our lunch balanced; the steady, heavy approach of his legs, a thoughtful, nervous walk that I watched for assurance.
“Did you tell her, though?”
“Well, no—it was so difficult to know where to begin. If I knew her a bit better … I don’t know how not to be officious about it.”
“Showing the poor savage the ropes.”
“Yes, that’s just it.”
Joel took a long drink of cold water that made him gasp. He looked as if he had just come up from a swim under water, and somewhere, parenthetically, there was a smile in me that did not reach my face. “Still, it’s a damned shame, someone should tell her. The confusion behind it—”
“You mean it’s not the waste of effort so much, it’s that it means she doesn’t know what to take and what to leave?”
“That’s the whole thing. That’s the whole unwieldy thing.” He looked from one hand to the other as if he saw it, did not know what to do with it, lying amorphous on the table, in the air, between us. “We see only one little corner of it—this native girl needs to be told that one abstracts from lectures, discussions, what-have-you, only what is useful, relevant, illuminating. So then you find that you’ve solved nothing for her; you’ve simply twitched up and caught hold of one corner of a dilemma that shifts continually beneath everything she does here. It’s the most difficult thing in the world for her to discern simply because she has no comparative values. It’s the African’s problem all the way up through all struggles with a white man’s world. On a higher level, it’s the problem of Colley’s servant girl, who gives the cat milk out of a saucer from the best tea set, or the old kitchen one, quite impartially. She doesn’t know it is a best tea set; she simply never has known such a sufficiency of utensils that there could be gradations of use—”
“What’s this? The evils of property?” Rupert Sack, whom we had lost between one tearoom and the other, rejoined us. He had dark, theatrical eyebrows that confirmed the suspicion that the bleached streaks of his hair were dyed: perhaps his one gesture of allegiance, if a rather misplaced one, to the art of architecture, since he was sure to leave before completing his course, in favor of his father’s business, pleasantly knowledgeable about cantilevers and clear-story lighting for the rest of his life. He was intelligent but his mind wandered. He sat looking elaborately at me, one eyebrow raised in his own convention of idiotic admiration.
“And she’s never known a sufficiency of ideas?”
“From where?” Joel answered me with a question. “The life of an African—especially of her generation, pressed into a sort of ghetto vacuum between the tribal life that is forgotten and the white man’s life that is guessed at—it’s the practical narrow life of poverty. All the kinds of poverty there are: money, privacy, ideas. Even suppose she didn’t grow up in a two-room shack in a fenced location where her father couldn’t go out without a pass from his baas—she probably went to a mission school, at best. In some ways, at worst. Because in a location, in a room in somebody’s back yard, she might get some sort of idea of white people’s context. But in a mission, shut away in some peaceful white-walled place in the hills, God, her idea of the white world would be the Standard Six reader and Galilee nearly two thousand years ago.”
“Hell, that’s true, you know, Joel—” Rupert was suddenly attracted into the conversation. “It’s funny, I was talking about the same thing last night—at my sister’s place. With that chap Goddard, a pathologist I think he is; he’d been taking some medicals for some oral examinations—”
“A viva.”
“Yes—He was saying that it’s bloody difficult with these natives. Bloody difficult for them. No matter how clever they are, there’s just that lack of common background knowledge—you know, there’s nothing to back up what they’ve learned out of books. So some white fellow who messes around half the time playing poker has a better chance of bluffing his way through than the poor devil of a native who’s worked—well—like a black. …” He laughed at the lameness of his own joke.
“And that’s a purely scientific collection of subjects, medicine. Imagine how much more difficult where nothing is certain, everything’s a matter of opinion, judgment—” My voice lost itself in the prospect of the rich ambiguity of language and the vast choices of literature.
“Look, if you’re a native,” Joel was saying, “you have to be exceptional to do ordinary things. You have to be one of four in ten who go to school at all, in the first place. You have to be able to concentrate on an empty stomach because you haven’t had any breakfast, you have to resist the temptation to nip off and do a bit of caddying for pocket money you never get given to you, you have to persuade your parents, who can’t afford to keep you, to go on keeping you after you’re twelve or thirteen and could be a houseboy or a nanny and keep yourself. And that’s only the beginning. That’s what you’ve got to do to get to the point at which white kids only start off making an effort. Just to get through an ordinary schooling you’ve got to be a very exceptional kid. And from then on you’ve just got to be more and more exceptional, although in your school life you’ve used up enough determination and effort to put a white boy right through to qualification in a profession. That’s how it is.” He sat back, looking at us.
“Okay-okay,” said Rupert, staring at his coffee. He had listened with the subdued attention that comes over a shady character in the presence of a person of authority.
Joel began to eat. “Butter, please—Helen and I, here, we never had a chance to hear any music when we were small. You don’t, in a little mining place like Atherton. Or you might, if your parents knew about it. But my folks were poor, and in any case they haven’t had any education at all—neither of them can even write English. And Helen’s—well, they like a bit of musical comedy, but that’s all. So now when Helen and I go to a concert we like everything, good, bad, indifferent. We like the noise. The suits the orchestra wear. … You see?” He laughed.
I knew it wasn’t true of Joel, but it pleased me not to have to bear my ignorance on my own. “We do not! I don’t even have to be stopped from clapping between movements any more!”
“You should hold her hand,” said Rupert. “That’s the way to teach her.”
“I should do just that,” said Joel, seriously.
We ate in silence for a few moments, lapsing into that abstracted service to necessity that breaks up the surface of attention. We burrowed away off into our separate thoughts.
I shook my head without knowing.
&
nbsp; “What?” said Joel, apologetic, as if he thought I had spoken and he had not listened.
“Nothing—” Suddenly I was embarrassed to speak. “She said something about the expense of the paper—” The little fact, so bald and paltry, a matter of sixpence or a shilling, was silencing in a different way. It seemed to grow in the dignity, the reality, the harshness of a need, something felt instead of thought, experienced instead of spoken.
“Of course,” said Joel. “Nothing’s happened. Just talk. You’re right.”
Chapter 14
My parents had gone to a braaivleis on a West Rand a West Rand mine, fifteen miles the other side of Johannesburg. My excuse was work. “That’s all very well,” said my mother, fastening her pearls. “But you don’t get out and meet people.”
“Isn’t she meeting people all the time at the University?” My father patronized her a little, smiling at me.
My mother settled the pearls on her neck. She looked herself over in the mirror, shook out her gloves, looked again, herself and her mirror self challenging each other for correctness. “I mean her own kind of people.”
They would be standing under the trees, the corseted women, the thin, gracious women who always dressed as if for a garden party, the satellite young daughters in pastel frocks. Where the drinks were, the men would be, faces red from golf and bowls, voices loud, laughing and expansive in departmental allusions as cosy as family jokes; the older men spry or corpulent with position, the up-and-coming younger men showing here a hinted thickness of neck, there a knee peaking up bony that assured that when the first lot died off, the second would be ready to replace them identically. As the darkness tangled with the trees, and the boys “borrowed” from the office or Compound brought the braziers to the right stage of glow, the daughters and the young sons would stand well away to avoid splashing their light frocks and blue suits and patent-leather shoes while they roasted lamb chops stuck on long forks. The smell of hair oil and lavender water would come out in the heat, mixed with the smoke and acridity of burning fat. They would giggle and lick their fingers, eating with the small bites of mice. And run over the lawns back to the house to wash their hands and come back, waving handkerchiefs freshly charged with lavender water. I had been there many times. I knew what it was like; a small child in white party shoes that made my feet big and noisy, tearing in and out among the grownups, wild with the excitement of the fire and the smoky dark; and then grown-up myself, standing first on one foot, then the other, drawing patterns with my toe on the ground, feebly part of the feebleness of it all, the mawkish attempts of the boys to entertain, the inane response of the girls: the roasting of meat to be torn apart by hands and teeth made as feeble as a garden party. That was what these people did to everything in life; enfeebled it. Weddings were the appearance of dear little girls dressed up to strew rose petals, rather than matings; death was the speculation about who would step up to the dead man’s position; dignity was the chain of baubles the mayor wore round his neck.
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