My Son's Story (3 page)
Authors: Nadine Gordimer
What did it matter that the seaside hotels, the beaches, pleasure-grounds with swimming-pools were not for us? We couldn't afford hotels, anyway; a fun fair for the use of our kind came to our area at Easter, the circus came at Christmas, and we picnicked in the no-man's-land of veld between the mine-dumps, where in the summer a spruit ran between the reeds and my father showed us how the weaver birds make their hanging nests. There, on our rug, overseen by nobody, safe from everybody, the drunks next door and the municipality in the town, my father would lay his head in my mother's lap and we children would lie against their sides, under the warmth of their arms. A happy childhood.
But at fifteen you are no longer a child.
Â
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Halfway between: the schoolteacher lived and taught and carried out his uplifting projects in the community with the municipal council seated under its coat-of-arms on the one side of the veld, and the real blacksâmore, many more of them than the whites, âcoloureds' and Indians counted togetherâon the other. His community had a certain kind of communication with the real blacks, as it did with the town through the Saturday dispensation; but rather different. Not definedâand it was this
lack of definition in itself that was never to be questioned, but observed like a taboo, something which no-one, while following, ever could admit to. The blacks appeared in the community hawking tomatoes and onions, putting up a fence, digging a trench, even hanging out the washing in those households a rung more affluent than that of a schoolteacher. Their languages, their laughter yelled from block to block, sounded unceasingly through the day as cicadas thrum during hot hours. They went back to their own areas when the work was done; removed from the community as the community was from the white town. Out of the way. Better that way. The sight of them was a stirring deep down: it was because of
them
that the schoolteacher's community was what it was: cast outside the town. Needing uplift. It was because of
them
whose pigment darkened the blood, procreated a murky dilution in the veins of the white town, disowned by the white town, that the community was disqualified for the birthright of the cinema, the library, the lavatories and the coat-of-arms. To be confronted with the monumental, friendly high-riding backsides of the women, the dusty felted heads of the men, the beauty of the lolling babies on the mothers' backsâit was surely only to see and know that if you wanted to claim a self that, by right, ought to be accepted by the town, you had another self with an equal rightâone that was a malediction, not to be thought ofâto be claimed by
them
. With that strain of pigment went more interdictions, a passbook to be produced tremblingly before policemen, dirtier work, even poorer places to live and die in. Better to keep them at a distance, not recognize any feature in them. And yet they were useful; the self that recognized something of itself in the franchised of the town inherited along with that resemblance the town's assumption that blacks were there to do things you didn't want to do, that were beneath your station; for nothing was beneath theirs.
lack of definition in itself that was never to be questioned, but observed like a taboo, something which no-one, while following, ever could admit to. The blacks appeared in the community hawking tomatoes and onions, putting up a fence, digging a trench, even hanging out the washing in those households a rung more affluent than that of a schoolteacher. Their languages, their laughter yelled from block to block, sounded unceasingly through the day as cicadas thrum during hot hours. They went back to their own areas when the work was done; removed from the community as the community was from the white town. Out of the way. Better that way. The sight of them was a stirring deep down: it was because of
them
that the schoolteacher's community was what it was: cast outside the town. Needing uplift. It was because of
them
whose pigment darkened the blood, procreated a murky dilution in the veins of the white town, disowned by the white town, that the community was disqualified for the birthright of the cinema, the library, the lavatories and the coat-of-arms. To be confronted with the monumental, friendly high-riding backsides of the women, the dusty felted heads of the men, the beauty of the lolling babies on the mothers' backsâit was surely only to see and know that if you wanted to claim a self that, by right, ought to be accepted by the town, you had another self with an equal rightâone that was a malediction, not to be thought ofâto be claimed by
them
. With that strain of pigment went more interdictions, a passbook to be produced tremblingly before policemen, dirtier work, even poorer places to live and die in. Better to keep them at a distance, not recognize any feature in them. And yet they were useful; the self that recognized something of itself in the franchised of the town inherited along with that resemblance the town's assumption that blacks were there to do things you didn't want to do, that were beneath your station; for nothing was beneath theirs.
The schoolteacher always had been aware of the blacks in another way; well, this was nascent in that vague yet insistent sense of responsibility he had. In the years when he was getting the lint of his father's trade out of his curls, carrying his books to the light from the moted gloom where the pouffes and sofas from big houses in the town were pinned into new velvet like women for whom his father, on his hunkers, was the dressmaker, the blacks were clustering around enormous ideas. Equality. At so much a day; while he was a child it was expressed that humble way: a pound a day, that's all. The people in his community were underpaid, too. As an adult, he earned less than a white teacher with the same level of qualification. But he was set on sitting up at night studying for a higher qualification, maybe even getting a university degree; that was how he would better himself, not by going to meetings or getting arrested on the march. Equality; he went to Shakespeare for a definition with more authority than those given on makeshift platforms in the veld. The trouble was, he didn't feel himself inferiorâinferior to what, to whom? He was so preoccupied with an inner life that he took little notice of the humiliations and slights that pushed and jabbed at him the moment he ventured outside the community. If, like the rest of his kind, he was a Sebastian, the arrows did not penetrate his sense of self. If they hadâif he had been really black?âhe might have joined, waved a fist. Admiring the real blacks from this sort of distancing, he left it to them. It seemed more their affair; they had no family resemblance that might somehow, someday, promote them to acceptance among the townspeople. And in this spectator status he was not alone; the community had hopes of the blacks, and also scepticism about these hopes. There was fervent stoep and yard talk,
they going to moer the lanies you'll see ou they quite right make the Boers shit their pants there in Pretoria what you think you talking about they going to get a rope round their
necks that what they putting up their hands for, bracelets man bullets up the backside you can't win against whitey.
Only a few would cross the veld to join them.
they going to moer the lanies you'll see ou they quite right make the Boers shit their pants there in Pretoria what you think you talking about they going to get a rope round their
necks that what they putting up their hands for, bracelets man bullets up the backside you can't win against whitey.
Only a few would cross the veld to join them.
He had cousins in the Cape who belonged to a resistance movement of their kind's own, and one of them came up with his mate to stay in the old people's house for a weekend while trying to get a branch going in the community, but they could see that somehow, although he was so intelligent, and at first they were encouraged by his clear grasp of their aims, Sonny would not be the one to take on the task. He told himselfâseeing their expressions, hearing snatches of their remarks in his mind, a day or two afterwardsâthat he must first get his higher certificate and then he'd see. On the train going back to Mannenberg the cousins dismissed him between themselves as useless, a sell-out, interested in getting some piddling bit of paper that would make him the paid agent of handout education.
He followed political trials in the newspaper; he didn't know any of the accused personally although their names had become familiar as brand names around stoeps and yards. He had read a copy of the charter that had come out of a great meeting while he was himself not yet twenty, and that you could go to prison for possessing. There came a point, not possible to determine exactly when, at which
equality
became a cry that couldn't be made out, had been misheard or misinterpreted, turned out to be something elseâfiner.
Freedom.
That was it. Equality was not freedom, it had been only the mistaken yearning to become like the people of the town. And who wanted to become like the very ones feared and hated? Envy was not freedom.
equality
became a cry that couldn't be made out, had been misheard or misinterpreted, turned out to be something elseâfiner.
Freedom.
That was it. Equality was not freedom, it had been only the mistaken yearning to become like the people of the town. And who wanted to become like the very ones feared and hated? Envy was not freedom.
After he was married, while the children were still small, although he knew that the instinct of responsibility extended beyond his part in maintaining the safety-net of families a marriage
brings together, he thought he had found the instinct's natural bounds in the time, energy and imagination he put into his projects for the community and the participation of his family in these. The Rotary Club and the Lions granted money for Aila and the committee of housewives she had mustered to set up a crèche, impressed by the respectability of the schoolteacher from across the veldâhis distinction, if they could go so tar as to use that surprising term in description of one of those who made Saturday a day to avoid shopping in town. Baby was a member of the Junior Red Cross (community branch, segregated from that of the town) and went solemnly, holding hands with a small companion, from door to door with a collection box. And little Will was a keen Scout Cub (community troop) by the time another small boy, running with a crowd of older schoolchildren towards the police, was shot dead, and a newspaper photographer's picture of his body, carried by another child, became the
pietÃ
of suffering happening everywhere across the veld where the real blacks were.
brings together, he thought he had found the instinct's natural bounds in the time, energy and imagination he put into his projects for the community and the participation of his family in these. The Rotary Club and the Lions granted money for Aila and the committee of housewives she had mustered to set up a crèche, impressed by the respectability of the schoolteacher from across the veldâhis distinction, if they could go so tar as to use that surprising term in description of one of those who made Saturday a day to avoid shopping in town. Baby was a member of the Junior Red Cross (community branch, segregated from that of the town) and went solemnly, holding hands with a small companion, from door to door with a collection box. And little Will was a keen Scout Cub (community troop) by the time another small boy, running with a crowd of older schoolchildren towards the police, was shot dead, and a newspaper photographer's picture of his body, carried by another child, became the
pietÃ
of suffering happening everywhere across the veld where the real blacks were.
When did distinction between black and real black, between himself and them, fade, for the schoolteacher? That ringing in the air, âequality' beginning to be heard as âfreedom'âit happened without specific awareness, a recognition of what really had been there to understand, all the time. All his time. In the year after the
pietÃ
(he had a photograph of the one in Rome, reproduced in one of the books in his bookcase) was re-enacted in the black areas that were everywhere across the veld outside the towns, the children at his school began to stay out of class and stand about in the schoolyard with bits of cardboard slung from their necks. The lettering generally ran out of space before the message was completed, but it was so familiar, from pictures and reports of what was happening in the schools of real blacks that it could be read, anyway. WE DONT WANT THIS RUBBISH
EDUCATION APARTHEID SLAVVERY POLICE GET OUT OUR SCHOOLS. They were copying the real blacks, the headmaster told his staff meeting, and he would have none of it. They would not grow up to carry passes, their schools were better than the blacks', they were advantagedâno, he did not say it: they were lighter than the blacks. But the hardest-working, best member of his staff was thinking how children learn from modelling themselves on others, mimicking at first the forms of maturity they see in their parents and then coming to perform them cognitively as their capacities grow; why should they not be learning something about themselves, for themselves, by mimicking the responsibilities recognized precociously by certain other childrenâtheir siblings. To recognize the real blacks as siblings: that was already something no irritated, angry headmaster could explain away as a schoolyard craze, wearing bottle-top jewellery, passing a zoll round in the lavatories.
pietÃ
(he had a photograph of the one in Rome, reproduced in one of the books in his bookcase) was re-enacted in the black areas that were everywhere across the veld outside the towns, the children at his school began to stay out of class and stand about in the schoolyard with bits of cardboard slung from their necks. The lettering generally ran out of space before the message was completed, but it was so familiar, from pictures and reports of what was happening in the schools of real blacks that it could be read, anyway. WE DONT WANT THIS RUBBISH
EDUCATION APARTHEID SLAVVERY POLICE GET OUT OUR SCHOOLS. They were copying the real blacks, the headmaster told his staff meeting, and he would have none of it. They would not grow up to carry passes, their schools were better than the blacks', they were advantagedâno, he did not say it: they were lighter than the blacks. But the hardest-working, best member of his staff was thinking how children learn from modelling themselves on others, mimicking at first the forms of maturity they see in their parents and then coming to perform them cognitively as their capacities grow; why should they not be learning something about themselves, for themselves, by mimicking the responsibilities recognized precociously by certain other childrenâtheir siblings. To recognize the real blacks as siblings: that was already something no irritated, angry headmaster could explain away as a schoolyard craze, wearing bottle-top jewellery, passing a zoll round in the lavatories.
The schoolteacher walked back to his empty classroom; stood there at his table alone; then picked up a red marker with a broad tip and went out among his boys and girls. They stirred with bravado and fear; they had had many calls for silence from teachers who came to harangue them with orders and even to plead reason to them. But he went from cardboard to cardboard correcting spelling and adding prepositions left out. Giggles and laughter moved the children now, like one of the gusts that kicked dust spiralling away in the trampled yard.âLet's take your placards into class and rewrite them. When you want to tell people something you have to know how to express it properly. So that they will take you seriously.âAnd they followed him.
But it was not always so easy. Knowing
he
took them seriously they expected much of him. Not only his own class, but the rest of the senior school. They quickly picked up a kind of pidgin terminology of revolutionary rhetoric that was the period's
replacement for schoolboy slang, and their demands as well as their actions became more and more strident. They came to him, they expected him to stand between them and the principal. He persuaded the principal to let him go with them when they determined to march across the veld to show solidarity with the children who had been locked out of their school by the police, after a boycott of classes; black solidarity. He took responsibility for keeping stones out of their hands. And he succeeded. For the first time, the old people saw his distinction ratified in a newspaper: not one of the important dailies, only a weekly published for the interests of people like themselves, but there he was above the bobbing corks of children's heads, tall and thin with dark newsprint caves where his eyes would be. The picture was cut out and passed round cousins, aunts and uncles. It was very likely the first time his photograph went into police files, as well. And when the police did come to his school because some of the children had set alight a bus in frustration that found release in ugly elation at destruction, the children expected him to stand between them and the police; he had not been able to keep petrol and matches out of their hands as he had kept stones. He went to the police station when seven among them were detained; but all that was achieved was, in trying to find out where they were being held, he had to give his name and address, and so the police had that confirming identification to file along with the newspaper photograph; he received no information.
he
took them seriously they expected much of him. Not only his own class, but the rest of the senior school. They quickly picked up a kind of pidgin terminology of revolutionary rhetoric that was the period's
replacement for schoolboy slang, and their demands as well as their actions became more and more strident. They came to him, they expected him to stand between them and the principal. He persuaded the principal to let him go with them when they determined to march across the veld to show solidarity with the children who had been locked out of their school by the police, after a boycott of classes; black solidarity. He took responsibility for keeping stones out of their hands. And he succeeded. For the first time, the old people saw his distinction ratified in a newspaper: not one of the important dailies, only a weekly published for the interests of people like themselves, but there he was above the bobbing corks of children's heads, tall and thin with dark newsprint caves where his eyes would be. The picture was cut out and passed round cousins, aunts and uncles. It was very likely the first time his photograph went into police files, as well. And when the police did come to his school because some of the children had set alight a bus in frustration that found release in ugly elation at destruction, the children expected him to stand between them and the police; he had not been able to keep petrol and matches out of their hands as he had kept stones. He went to the police station when seven among them were detained; but all that was achieved was, in trying to find out where they were being held, he had to give his name and address, and so the police had that confirming identification to file along with the newspaper photograph; he received no information.
He was doing it all for the school, for the children of the community. Aila knew that. He didn't keep anything from her. She knew some of the parents had complained about his having marched with the children over the veld to the blacks' school: a teacher should not be allowed to encourage such things. She knew that when the principal informed him of this it was a
warning. The principal looked as if he were about to say what his fifth-form teacher was expecting from him; but his authority always wavered before this particular member of his staff; he added nothing. And Aila did not need her husband to spell out realization that including the community in one's concerns was bringing something the innocence of good intentions hadn't taken into account: risk to the modest security of the base from which that concern reached outâhis job, the payments on the car and the refrigerator, the stock of groceries brought home every Saturday. After such signals as the interview with the principal they went matter-of-factly about the occupations of the day. But in their bedroom, the sight of her folding their clothes away, brushing the jacket he wore to school, told him that this was, that night, a ritual defending her family, asserting the persistence of the familiar against any unknown; and the awareness, for her, that he had lowered his book and was looking at her (she met his eyes in her mirror, he was behind her, lying in bed) while she plaited her hair, was a compact in which they would together accommodate the unforeseen. They were not really afraid; only on behalf of the children. And if it had been only a matter of being able to continue to feed and clothe them! Baby was nearly twelve; some her age were already running excitedly with the crowd, stones in hand, as the first child to be shot had done. Baby displayed no interest in such solidarityâshe was absorbed in her dancing lessons, pop-star worship and bosom friendships, but who knew for how long? Will was too young to be at riskâin this community, unlike the black ones across the veld where no-one was too young to be out in the streets, caught between crossfire.
warning. The principal looked as if he were about to say what his fifth-form teacher was expecting from him; but his authority always wavered before this particular member of his staff; he added nothing. And Aila did not need her husband to spell out realization that including the community in one's concerns was bringing something the innocence of good intentions hadn't taken into account: risk to the modest security of the base from which that concern reached outâhis job, the payments on the car and the refrigerator, the stock of groceries brought home every Saturday. After such signals as the interview with the principal they went matter-of-factly about the occupations of the day. But in their bedroom, the sight of her folding their clothes away, brushing the jacket he wore to school, told him that this was, that night, a ritual defending her family, asserting the persistence of the familiar against any unknown; and the awareness, for her, that he had lowered his book and was looking at her (she met his eyes in her mirror, he was behind her, lying in bed) while she plaited her hair, was a compact in which they would together accommodate the unforeseen. They were not really afraid; only on behalf of the children. And if it had been only a matter of being able to continue to feed and clothe them! Baby was nearly twelve; some her age were already running excitedly with the crowd, stones in hand, as the first child to be shot had done. Baby displayed no interest in such solidarityâshe was absorbed in her dancing lessons, pop-star worship and bosom friendships, but who knew for how long? Will was too young to be at riskâin this community, unlike the black ones across the veld where no-one was too young to be out in the streets, caught between crossfire.
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