Tandia (23 page)

Madam Flame Flo had never moved from the spot Geel Piet had found for her to live. First she'd bought the room, then the house, and then the three small houses surrounding it. She had dug a septic tank and constructed a four-bedroom red-brick home with two bathrooms, where visitors would bring their children to inspect the indoor toilet. Behind the house WaS a large shed where the forty-four gallon drums of Barberton were brewed. Directly under the floor of this outhouse were several large tanks into which the fermented drink was strained and poured. Beside the shed, resting on its own concrete platform, was a huge round corrugated-iron rainwater tank which used the roof of the main house as its catchment area. This was the water used to make Barberton, and the whole set-up became Madam Flame Flo's brewery. Buried in the yard was a forty-four gallon drum into which the slops were emptied. This drum existed essentially as a decoy for police raids. While Madam Flame Flo paid police protection as a matter of routine, as an equal matter of routine she was regularly raided. She was too big an operator to go unnoticed; any policeman with a nose on his face could detect the slightly sour smell of the fermenting kaffir-corn and yeast simply by walking past the house.

In the strange game of corruption which existed in Sophiatown between the white police officers and the inhabitants, several unspoken rules applied. In Madam Flame Flo's case raids took place without warning so that she was obliged to pay protection to half-a-dozen street gangs. These comprised mostly teenage boys, no less vicious for their youth, and responsible for a great deal of mayhem and quite often even murder in the township. A police presence in numbers in the vicinity of Madam Flame Ho's end of Good Street would always be reported in time for her to empty the above-the-ground brewing vats into the below-the-ground tanks, and to appear innocent but for the single forty-four gallon drum conspicuously buried in the back yard. There was a second implicit law which applied in Sophiatown, this being that what is in the ground belongs to the ground. The police, after a lot of pretentious looking around, would eventually come upon the buried drum. It would be dug up and confiscated and Madam Flame Flo would be duly charged with allowing persons unknown to conceal liquor on her premises. This offence carried a biggish fine which she duly paid, though not without vehemently protesting her innocence.

The big Packard arrived in Good Street followed by a pack of yelling urchins curious to inspect the new arrivals. Madam Flame Flo, impatient to greet her sister, couldn't wait for Mama Tequila to get out of the car. She opened the back door and climbed into the rear seat as the Packard came to a halt outside her house. The two sisters embraced loudly and with copious tears.

Madam Flame Flo was already chatting as she entered the car, so that her words came out punctuated by sobs of welcome. 'The white bastards are going to take my beautiful home away! Come, my sister, your room is ready, at least you can enjoy it one last time. How are you,
liefling?
I have food, you must eat, we can still eat, though God knows how much longer before those Boer bastards take the food from out our mouths!'

Tandia, not wishing to be a part of the emotional sistering taking place in the back seat, got out of the car and was immediately surrounded by more than a dozen ragged black children who seemed to range from about seven to ten years old. Juicey Fruit Mambo was attempting to shoo them away, but these kids were city bred and they stood their ground, prepared to run only when they felt real danger which, in the way slum kids know these things, they sensed wasn't coming from Juicey Fruit Mambo's fierce-looking scowl.

'Oh my, I am so heppy you have come! We must talk plans, you hear?' Madam Flame Flo cried to Mama Tequila. 'In Sophiatown it's finish and klaar. God, I can't tell you what I been through! I'm telling you, any day now they going to come and fetch me and take me to Sterkfontein Mental Hospital. God's truth!'

'And the business? How is the business, Flo?' Mama Tequila laughed, patting her scrawny sister on the back with a heavily jewelled hand.

'That, God be thanked, is first class. With so much trouble and people losing their houses and going to Diepfontein and Meadowlands there is a lot of need. Business is good, that I got to say! But soon, no more! When they move the coloured folk out, that the end. The police already told me, no Barberton in the resettlement area. "What are the people going to drink, skokiaan?" I ask that big Dutchman, Potgieter, who is the crown sergeant at the Newlands police station. You know what he say, ousie? He says, "The government is trying to make a place for decent boesmen to live, no more blerrie shebeens, you hear, no more Barberton, no more skokiaan, we going to build a big beer hall!"

That's what the dumb bugger says. So I look at him all solcastic. Since when does a coloured person drink kaffir beer? I ask him. "Here!" he says and scratches his big
dom kop,
"Maybe the authorities forgot we not mixing boesmen with black kaffirs no more. I seen it on the plans, they got a big soccer stadium and a beer hall in all the drawings!" So maybe there's a chance, hey? I ask him. That Potgieter he's the biggest crook, no way he going to run a clean show, no way, man! He looks at me sideways and his piggy blue eyes is all small in his fat face and his mouth goes like he's sucking a lemon, "Maybe you should start a brothel, hey?" he says. "Maybe that would be not such a bad thing for the boesman in the new place?" He laughs and then he says, "I seen a beer hall, but I didn't see a brothel in those plans." He picks his nose then and looks at me and then down at what he took out his nose. Sies, man! What a disgusting type, hey? "Ja, I think a brothel, that better than selling Barberton and we only charge a fixed sum every week for police protection and no fines," that's what he says to me.' Mama Tequila laughed. 'We talk inside, Flo, I been sitting in this lousy car seat since seven this morning.'

Flo clambered out of the rear of the car backwards and Juicey Fruit Mambo began the complicated process of extracting Mama Tequila from the Packard. In the last year or so she'd put on nearly forty pounds and while getting into the car wasn't too difficult, extracting her had become somewhat of a traumatic experience for them both. First he moved Mama Tequila's legs so they protruded out of the door; then he moved around to the other side of the car. Climbing into the back, he pushed her further along the seat until her legs could reach the ground. He then moved back to Mama Tequila's side of the car and while she propped the soles of her shoes against the uppers of his boots to prevent her slipping forward, Juicey Fruit Mambo began to rock her, slowly increasing the rhythm until with a final jerk he pulled her up out of the seat. The crowd around the car applauded as Mama Tequila arrived in a vertical position. Juicey Fruit Mambo's brow was covered with beads of perspiration from the effort.

Mama Tequila acknowledged their tribute by beaming into the crowd, which now consisted of even more kids and quite a few adults as well. The original gang, the discoverers of this diversion, had a proprietorial look about them, as though they expected to be congratulated for finding so curious a spectacle on an otherwise dull Monday.

Still panting from the effort of getting out of the Packard,

Mama Tequila started to walk slowly towards the house. 'Howdy folks, I do declare, it sure nice to be in this fine town of yours! Yessiree!' She looked at the shacks and shanties, leaning fences and dusty trees in the dirty street. 'It just the nicest place I ever did see!' she declared; then looking around, beamed again at the crowd. 'And I can tell, it gonna be real friendly, just like being home!'

A small gasp of appreciation went up from the crowd. In Sophiatown anything American was a very big deal. The small crowd welcoming her with their eyes decided that the enormous woman with the big, shiny American car was a celebrity, and that the beautiful young girl with her was probably also one. Someone whispered the words, 'Fillim stars!' An excited murmur swept through the crowd.

Mama Tequila, her timing as usual immaculate, took her sister by one arm and Tandia by the other and moved towards the house. 'I so excited to be here, honey!' she said in a voice loud enough for the onlookers to hear. 'My, my, now ain't that something else?' she indicated the red brick house as though she'd suddenly stepped around a corner and seen the Taj Mahal. Madam Flame Flo grinned. Mama Tequila had visited her a dozen times before at this same house, but she liked the showmanship; it couldn't do no harm anyway. Mama Tequila, still beaming, climbed the steps onto the front stoep, insisting that her sister and Tandia enter the house first. She turned at the door to face the crowd, and bringing both heavily bejewelled sets of fingers to her lips, she blew them a kiss. A spontaneous cheer broke out. Mama Tequila knew that her arrival would be the big news in town that night.

Madam Flame Flo seemed to Tandia to be everything Mama Tequila wasn't. She was thin as a wisp of morning smoke. Her voice was pitched high and she spoke rapidly.

Her every movement was quick and impatient as though she was spring-loaded and would go off at the merest touch. She had prepared a huge lunch, mostly of cold meats: beef and mutton, silverside, salami, polony and cold pork sausages. Mama Tequila lost no time tucking in.

She hadn't eaten since just after five that morning and declared herself to be starving. To her delight, the kitchen maid entered with a large bowl of roasted corn cobs. Sinking her fork into one end of the cob so it acted as a handle, Mama Tequila ripped the hot golden seeds of corn from the husk with her teeth. Yellow butter ran down the corners of her mouth onto the napkin she had carefully folded around her neck.

Tandia was too excited to eat. Johannesburg with its yellow mine-dump mountains and the tall buildings reaching up into the sky made Durban seem like a small
dorp.
This was the big time all right! From the moment she'd been accepted by Natal University, Tandia knew where she was headed. Nothing was going to stop her. If a person made a name for herself in a place like this, she would be known in the best white circus all right! And she wanted that, though not the way Patel had craved it. Tandia would be known as the black woman who fought on even terms with the white oppressors of her people. A black who would spit in the face of apartheid. When she thought like this she would develop a glow, a burning deep within her. She wasn't even sure she understood what it was, whether love for her kind or hate for the whites, but it came increasingly and it gave her a strength which transcended even her fear of Geldenhuis.

Even Sophiatown was a surprise to Tandia. She'd never before witnessed a multiracial society and while poverty was evident everywhere, this place on the fringe of the big time had a non-interfered-with look about it. By contrast, Cato Manor, where she had been born and brought up, was an orderly urban slum kept under the heel of authority, which bred a passive resignation in its inhabitants. Cato Manor had none of the dynamism of this place on the high veld where the air seemed lighter and where the sky, a washed-out blue, seemed higher.

She'd warmed to the dusty-ankled, bright-eyed ragamuffins who'd run behind the car, yelling and cheering their progress. Some rolled hoops made from the spokeless rim of a bicycle wheel, guiding them with short sticks held into the grooved rim; others pushing skeletal motor cars shaped entirely out of bits of wire and driven by long sticks, each attached to a small wire steering wheel with which the driver turned the wheels. Catapults dangled around the necks of the kids, bouncing on their chests as they ran.

Juicey Fruit Mambo had slowed right down to navigate the ruts and the puddles of dirty rainwater and the kids were thumping the back of the car with the flat of their hands as they cried a good-natured welcome.

Tandia sensed that the people, the crowd who had gathered around them when they'd stopped outside Madam Flame Flo's home, were different. For the first time she felt she belonged to something larger and more important than herself, that she was to be given a reason why her life was turning out so well. It was silly she told herself; how could she feel so much about this place? She hadn't walked more than fifty feet, the distance from the street into the dark cool house. And yet she sensed all of these things clearly. It was as though Sophiatown was the first place that made perfect sense to her in her life, this dirty little township where the spirit of her people rose above the squalor, the thuggery and the exploitation.

'So what do you think, ousie?' Madam Flame Flo leaned with her elbows on the dining-room table, her chin resting on her hands. 'What do you think about a brothel for coloured folk in the new township they calling Coronationville they making for us? Give us your honest answer. Not what you think you'd like me to hear! No soft pedalling you hear? What do you say, hey?'

Mama Tequila had settled herself down to some serious eating. 'Sshhh! Flo, not so much talk! You like a blerrie machine gun!' She had reverted to the Transvaal pronunciation of the word 'bloody', switching automatically from the more anglicised Natal 'bladdy'. She wiped her mouth with the butter-stained napkin around her neck and brought her coffee cup to her lips. She took a lingering sip from the cup. 'It all depends, Flo, what kind of whorehouse you want,' she said finally.

'The kind that makes lots of money! That the kind I want! What other kind is there?'

'Ja, of course, but in this new place you got only coloured trade. That means trouble, because you can't run a good whorehouse with only coloured people. You most likely got to run a BB-TM!'

'So, what's so wrong with that? In a BB-TM the money comes fast. No fancy overheads. Like
you
in the war. Jesus! You was raking in cash like it was going out of style!'