Burger's Daughter (28 page)

I had the passport on the shelf in the wardrobe. In the leather collar-box with the medical corps brass serpents and my father's watch—I have given away everything of his that might continue to be of use to others, even his medical library, but the only person I'd have liked to have had the watch was Baasie, and I don't know where to find him. The passport was there the day I went to Flora Donaldson for lunch. I thought of it while Flora stood carving the leg of lamb, her voice pitched to penetrate the several conversations at table.—Well-done, pinkish ?—would anyone prefer quince jelly to mint sauce—There was childish satisfaction in imagining how she would react (point of knife in air with a bit of meat dangling, face excruciatingly mobile between amazement, curiosity, and indecision whether to be delighted or shocked) if she were to know. She would probably have decided celebration was the correct reaction : everybody! we have news—William was the one who had been offended by the suggestion, when she was busy managing my life for me just after Lionel died, that I would ever consider leaving the country. He isn't really one of our kind but he understands what it means to be one, whereas good old Flora is an amateur in her perceptions as well as her acts. A talented and brave one, sometimes; the faithful have to be alert for adventurism among themselves, but it can be made use of when it is found in the temperament of others —it was Flora who had Nelson Mandela successfully hidden in her wine cellar when he went in and out of the country illegally before the Rivonia Trial. What her husband William sees in me when I am sitting (a daughter of the house, Flora likes to think of me: Lionel Burger's daughter) on his right at table, is a professional, like my father.

Flora didn't say it was going to be a lunch party. She'd implied wistfully she and William and I had not had a quiet talk and a meal together, just us, for too long. There were three other people; a handsome, semitic-looking Indian lawyer from Durban (for me ?—he was allotted to my right at table), a white woman lawyer so perfectly groomed she appeared to be under glaze; and Mrs Daphne Mkhonza, a vast expanse of navy blue crimplene, patent shoes, gilt costume jewellery, like an Afrikaans cabinet minister's wife at the opening of Parliament. Flora still manages to have these 1960s mixed lunch parties although it must be difficult to find blacks, now, who will come to them.

Mrs Mkhonza is often ‘featured' in the women's pages of white newspapers as an example of what black people can achieve despite their disadvantages. She is one of the rare black petty capitalists—what Marisa's cousin Fats would call a tycoon, who somehow manages to circumvent some of the laws that prevent blacks from trading on a scale that makes white tycoons. She has petrol service station concessions all over the Transvaal black areas, general stores and—Marisa adds to the story of success and enterprise—is a rent racketeer, obtaining leasehold over township housing by bribing officials, and then profitably letting out rooms in her slum yards to people for whom influx control makes it hopeless to expect to find somewhere to live legitimately. Marisa herself sometimes uses Mama Mkhonza, when it is urgent to find ‘somewhere to stay' for one whose presence in Soweto is not open; Mrs Daphne Mkhonza may be an exploiter of blacks, following the example of the whites who admire her self-improvement initiative, but she's also a black woman: she's accepted, like the black policemen.

When we sat down to lunch the white woman lawyer was emphasizing the sociological aspects of legal cases referred to her—she is consultant to an advice bureau dealing mainly with coloured women, squatters, indigents—the prosecutions for incest, rape and desertion as an indictment of living conditions rather than individual criminal tendencies. Whom to punish, how to redress ? What she said was concisely analysed, true; her napkin-touched lips shaped and her hands with their pushed-back cuticles outlined human destruction. The smugness of her appearance was perhaps a defence against the self-defeating nature of the good work she did. In such company no one has the bad taste to point out this common characteristic of ‘working within the system'. We all listened respectfully under Flora's eye; William with politeness that hopes it will do for admiration or whatever else is called for. The Indian lawyer exchanged a few professional anecdotes in the same context, with a slight change of emphasis—there were laws—did we know ?—laws still in force in Natal, whereby an Indian husband could have his wife imprisoned for adultery. A relic of the days when labourers imported from Gujerat were indentured to work in the sugar-cane fields, a perpetuation of the image of the South African Indian as eternally a foreigner in the country of his birth, living by mores that set his behaviour patterns apart. The general theme of conversation and the current preoccupation of Flora were the same. Mrs Eunice Harwood wanted to make black and white women aware of such rights as they had, over their children, their property and their person, for a start; Mrs Daphne Mhkonza was not only an economically-emancipated black, she was a black woman beating white businessmen with their own marked cards. In her mood of political ecumenism, Flora no doubt saw engagement in a struggle for black rights as a natural extension of the limits of the woman lawyer's scrupulously constitutional commitment, and Mama Mkhonza's recruitment to the system—Orde Greer would expect me to phrase it that way—as a raid upon it. The current ground of common cause was women's liberation, the roast lamb was victualling Flora's little caucus for a meeting that was going to take place that afternoon.

—Where ?—If it's true William has decreed Flora must stick to harmless liberal activities these days, he felt obliged to show some interest in them.

She put down her knife and fork and opened her eyes at him, smiling round to draw everyone into the spectacle:—Here, my darling, here. In your house.—The coquettish wifely frankness was that of a woman who no longer has adultery to conceal and enjoys displaying an innocent flirtation. Let him be grateful it was only to be a meeting that was to be there, in his house, quite harmless, too innocuous, maybe, to provide anything much of interest to BOSS, whose man—or rather woman, on this occasion—certainly would be present as a matter of routine observation of any assertion of common purpose between whites and blacks.

And of course I was to be drawn in, too—that was why I had been produced at lunch, although Flora knows quite well that as a named person my position at meetings is a delicate one. Someone like me may attend, so long as the purpose of the meeting is not to be construed as in any way political. One may take part in discussion, yes; but the contribution can't be recorded in the minutes or reported in the press. Meanwhile surveillance has taken down what one has said. And if the subject touches upon political rights, for example the rights of women as our kind (the faithful and their faithful hangers-on, the Floras) see these: the oppression of black women primarily by race and only secondarily by sex discrimination... My attendance could bring me into court as a contravention; Flora offered her statement, prepared for this :—You're William's visitor, not mine. Mnh ? Isn't that so ? Why shouldn't she be ? You simply happened to turn up to see him while I was having a meeting in our livingroom.—

It is true that her friends—of our kind—are old hands at breaking the minor hobbles of the restrictions on their lives. I should know as well as anyone how to make a nuisance of myself, using the courts as the only political platform I could get at, getting my name in the papers, starkly eloquent of the gag on my mouth I've inherited in the family tradition, since only my name—Lionel Burger's daughter, last of that line—can be reported, not my ‘utterances'. That's how they perceive her, people who read the name. I am a presence. In this country, among them. I do not speak. Except to you, out of a habit, formed in the dark in your cottage, that came late.

William made objections, naturally. Rosa was not going to run any risk of being picked up just because of some damn meeting. I laughed to stop them bickering about me. Mrs Eunice Whatnot, her face worked-over as if it were a portrait rather than a face, looked at what a named person was like. Mama Mkhonza majestically bridled on my behalf.—Ter-rible. Honestly! These people! Really terrible. What do they want with a young girl ? Why can't they leave you alone just to live!—

—Like anyone else: I had undertaken to Brandt Vermeulen. And I could see, I alone, as I did the passport in the wardrobe, Flora's meeting as what could stop me. I had only to jeer kindly at William's fussing, come up to Flora's expectations and sit in quietly among the women listening to the proceedings; stand up and have my say. I have faith in BOSS; one of the faces, not so easy to pick out as the men's usually are, but surely there, would make a note of the presence—my presence. Unknown to anyone the passport in the wardrobe nobody knew about would be listed invalid by the Department of the Interior. The police would demand its surrender forthwith. I could give it back without having used it. Maybe there wouldn't be any charge or court appearance; simply the demand for the passport, their side of the bargain withdrawn.

—They'll be a mixed crowd of females. God knows. All kinds, I hope. But concerned. We've more or less restricted it to representatives of various organizations, with a few outstanding individuals, old Daphne Mkhonza, yes—we don't just want a lot of do-gooders and church women, we must drop white urban values and rope in some of the toughies with guts, the flamboyant ones. I wish the shebeen queens would come; and white prostitutes—why not? I don't delude myself we'll reach the radical black girls in the student movements, though I've got a hopeful contact or two for Turfloop and the Western Cape. Never mind. Even if we can close up a bit—close the hiatus between the politically-aware young women, those smashing black girls with the
holoha
hairdos—don't you love the way they look? That sort of ‘Topsy, and fuck-you'—and the ordinary black woman. Get her to regard herself as someone who can do something again, you're too young to remember, but the women's movement in the ANC was a force—and at the same time get these white suburban good souls (basically, they're really concerned) to tackle human rights as
women...
together... I think it's possible to tap new resources, maybe—Eunice Harwood's
terrifyingly
professional, isn't she ?—Flora had me to herself for a quick briefing away from the others; we buttered scones.

I kept out of the way while people were arriving; William and I sat with the cold coffee cups from lunch, in the little paved courtyard Flora has made off the diningroom, hearing car doors bang and the eager pitch of welcome, the breathy laughter and African organ-note murmur of polite responses, and the enumerative intoning by which introductions could be recognized without names being audible to us. Both too comfortable—too marginal—to get up, he to demonstrate, I to see for myself, we discussed pointing from our chairs how he decided which shoots to train where on the plants he has espaliered against the walls.—Don't you think pomegranates hanging down, that red against the white-wash... I want to have a go with a pomegranate. You've seen those miles of peach and pear espaliered on frames along the roads of the Po valley—considerate William at once shifted the tactless reference to the ease with which he could go about the world, making over the question into a small marital joke—Don't see why it's any more unnatural for a pomegranate to be trained to grow in a regular pattern, do you ? Flora keeps accusing me, but then so's it ‘unnatural' to prune any tree.—The arrivals seemed all to be behind doors, now; each catching the other's eye, we giggled quietly.—Quite a mob.—William assumes in me an affectionate tolerance like his own, for Flora's activities, which he himself is supposed to have circumscribed. When I put down my section of the
Guardian Weekly
we were sharing and went indoors he looked across from the sheets he held but said nothing. The moment in which he might have questioned where I was going was really made by me; I caught myself, an instant almost of shame, in the misreading his concern would be victim of. But I had always made free of their home; I might just as well be going upstairs for a doze on the bed in ‘my' room or to the downstairs lavatory with the Amnesty International poster for contemplation on the back of the door.

I skirted Flora's assembly and sat down at the back. The meeting had just begun. After the cube of courtyard sun, dark breathing splotches furred with light transformed the big livingroom. Everyone—I began to see them properly—bunched together in the middle and back seats, the black women out of old habit of finding themselves allotted secondary status and the white ones out of anxiety not to assume first place. Flora's gay and jostling objections started a screech of chairs, general forward-shuffle and talk; I was all right where I was—her quick attention took me in, a bird alert from the height of a telephone pole. After the addresses of the white woman lawyer and a black social welfare officer, a pretty, syrup-eyed Indian with a soft roll of midriff flesh showing in her seductive version of the dress of Eastern female subjection, spoke about uplift and sisterhood. Flora kept calling upon people—masterly at pronouncing African names—to speak from the floor. Some were trapped hares in headlights but there were others who sat forward on the hired chairs straining to attract attention. A white-haired dame with the queenly coy patience of an old charity chairwoman kept holding up a gilt ballpoint. Along my half-empty row a black woman urged between the whispers of two friends could not be got to speak.

In respectful silences for the weakness of our sex, the flesh that can come upon any of us as women, black matrons were handed slowly, backside and belly, along past knees to the table where Flora had a microphone rigged up. Others spoke from where they sat or stood, suddenly set apart by the gift of tongues, while the faces wheeled to see. The old white woman's crusade turned out to be road safety, a campaign in which ‘our Bantu women must pull together with us'—she trembled on in the sweet, chuckly voice of a deaf upper-class Englishwoman while Flora tried to bring the discourse to an end with flourishing nods. A redhead whose expression was blurred by freckles floral as her dress asked passionately that the meeting launch a Courtesy Year to promote understanding between the races. She had her slogan ready, SMILE AND SAY THANKS. There was a soft splutter of tittering crossed by a groan of approval like some half-hearted response in church, but a young white woman jumped up with fists at her hips—Thank you for what ? Maybe the lady has plenty to thank for. But was the object of action for women to make black women ‘thankful' for the hovels they lived in, the menial jobs their men did, the inferior education their children got ? Thankful for the humiliation dealt out to them by white women living privileged, protected lives, who had the vote and made the laws—And so on and so on. I saw her falter, lose concentration as three black girls in jeans who had only just come in got up and walked out as if they had come to the wrong place. A white woman had thrust up an arm for permission to speak—We don't need to bring politics into the fellowship of women.—Applause from the group with whom she sat. Black matrons ignored both the white girl and black girls, busily briefing each other in the susurrations and gutturals, clicks and quiet exclamations of their own languages. They responded only to the sort of housewives' league white ladies who stuck to health services and ‘commodity price rises in the family budget' as practical problems that were women's lot, like menstruation, and did not relate them to any other circumstances. The black ladies' fear of drawing attention as ‘agitators' and the white ladies' determination to have ‘nothing to do' with the politics that determined the problems they were talking about, made a warmth that would last until the teacups cooled. Dressed in their best, one after another, black women in wigs and two-piece dresses pleaded, were complaining, opportuning for the crèches, orphans, blind, crippled or aged of their ‘place'. They asked for ‘old' cots, ‘old' school primers, ‘old' toys and furniture, ‘old' braille typewriters, ‘old' building material. They had come through the front door but the logic was still of the back door. They didn't believe they'd get anything but what was cast-off; they didn't, any of them, believe there was anything else to be had from white women, it was all they were good for.