The Power of One (35 page)

Letters were becoming a big thing at the prison, and Doc wrote most of them as Geel Piet dictated to him. The little man could remember the contents of entire letters, together with the addresses of a dozen or more black prisoners at a time. Doc would write them at night. He would then write out a sheet of music theory for my homework and attach the letters to the back of it. Any search would quickly have revealed them, but Doc was not a naturally cunning man and I think in his mind he regarded my music book as somehow, like the Steinway, above the possibility of question.

The letters were much of a muchness. Men not accustomed to writing are apt, in any language, to reduce their words to simple formalities such as telling their families they were all right and inquiring after the health and welfare of the wife and kids, all the small, important human things that make us all, in the end, exactly the same. Some would include a request for money, although most knew this to be impossible and were too proud to impose such a burden on their families. It was not unusual for a family not to know that a husband had been arrested or where he was detained. He had simply disappeared and was often sent to a prison some distance from the place of his arrest. To trace him without the cooperation of the police was nearly impossible, and so the letters provided a vital link in the spiritual welfare of the prisoners.

Mrs. Boxall acted as postmistress, and I must say she ran a pretty slick operation. The letters would be dropped in after school. Using the large square stamp used for marking the inside covers of books which read “BARBERTON MUNICIPAL LIBRARY, de Villiers St., Barberton,” we stamped a blank envelope, attached a postage stamp to it, and included it in the original letter with instructions to the receiver to use it as the return envelope. We also wrote the name of the sender on the inside of the return envelope. This was done because we often received letters which started “Dear Husband” and carried no other identification. Finally, Mrs. Boxall or I would address the outgoing envelope and send it off.

She explained these elaborate precautions to me. “The world is full of sticky beaks. If we get a lot of letters addressed to the library in primitive handwriting, the postmaster just might smell a rat. I've been sending out overdue notices to country members for years which include return addressed envelopes using the library rubber stamp. He won't suspect a thing.” And he didn't. The system worked perfectly, and returned letters were taken into the prison and locked away in Doc's piano stool, to which only he and I had a key, though I'm sure Geel Piet could have picked the lock any time he chose to do so.

The money prisoners received from outside was generally in the form of a postal order for two shillings. As all incoming mail was opened by Mrs. Boxall, she cashed the postal orders, put the money into the envelopes and wrote the names of the recipients on the front. I pasted the envelope back together using the large pot of library glue and a slip of rice paper to cover the slit where the envelope had been carefully opened using Mrs. Boxall's letter knife. The knife had a handle striped red and white like a barber's pole, and on the blade on one side was written “Have you written to your sweetheart?” and on the other, “A souvenir from Brighton 1924.” I used to wonder who had Mrs. Boxall for a sweetheart, but I think I already knew it was nobody.

And so a regular mail system in and out of the prison was established, with Mrs. Boxall cheerfully paying for the stamps and stationery. She would often sit and read a letter to one of the prisoners from a wife, written by someone who could write in English, and as she read it to me the tears would roll down her cheeks. The letters were mostly three or four lines, often in a huge, uncontrolled, childlike hand.

My Husband Mafuni Tokasi,

How are you? The children are well. We have no money only this. The
baas
says we must go from this place. There is no work and no food. The youngest is now two years. He looks same like you. We have no other place to go.

Your wife,

Buyani

A postal order for two shillings in the letter meant that the whole family might not have eaten for two days or more. Mrs. Boxall would wipe her eyes and say her conscience was quite clear and even if she was arrested she knew she was jolly well doing the right thing. She badgered friends and people coming into the library for clothes and these she sent off to needy families, even sometimes sending off a postal order of her own to a prisoner's family. She referred to prisoners as “Innocents, the meat in the ghastly sandwich between an uncaring society and a vengeful state.” Her code word for these families became simply “sandwich”: “We need more clothes for the sandwiches,” or “Here's a poor sandwich for whom we'll have to find half a crown.” She kept a forty-four-gallon drum in the library which had a six-inch-wide slot running almost the width of its lid like a huge money box. On the side was written
cast-off clothes for the sandwich fund
. People would bring lots of stuff, and no one ever asked what the Sandwich Fund was.

“People feel they ought to know, so they don't dare ask,” she would say. She once told me that the sandwich was named after the Earl of Sandwich, who was a terrible gambler and because he was always so busy gambling he had no time to take meals. To overcome the problem, his butler had made him two hunks of bread with something in between them. These were the first sandwiches. “If anyone ever asks, we'll say it's the famous Earl of Sandwich Fund for the Poor. That ought to shut them up, don't you think, Peekay?”

Eventually someone must have asked, because the Earl of Sandwich Fund became the most social of all the war effort funds in Barberton, even more important than knitting socks for prisoners of war. At the Easter and Christmas fetes held in Coronation Park, Mrs. Boxall and I ran a sandwich stand where cakes and other delicacies donated by the town's leading families were sold. My mother sent pumpkin scones baked by Dee and Dum, who were also allowed to work at the stand. Mother made two identical pinafores and caps for them, and they worked from dawn until dusk laying out cakes on the trestle tables and cutting and buttering bread and making sandwiches.

Because I was on the boxing squad and regarded as one of the prison kids, the wives of the warders baked for days for the sandwich stand and gloated when their cakes and cookies were the first to go. Boer baking was generally superior to that of the town's leading socialites. The rather snobbish Earl of Sandwich Fund sandwich stand earned enough to pay for the entire mailing system and to send money and clothing to a great many destitute families.

When the tobacco crisis came, we solved it through the Earl of Sandwich Fund. Mrs. Boxall sent a note to the headmaster of our school requesting that children bring in cigarette butts from home. She even managed to get the butts from the sergeants' mess at the army camp. Everyone assumed the recycled tobacco was going to the prisoners of war, as Mrs. Boxall simply referred to them as prisoners. Some kids brought half packets of unsmoked cigarettes from a parent's precious ration, a sacrifice to the war effort. I took half a packet of smokes to Geel Piet, who thought all his Christmases had come at once. The bags of butts were taken to Doc's cottage, where Dee and Dum, their noses masked by dish towels, spent Sunday afternoon shredding the week's tobacco supply. Geel Piet never had it so good. When the new crop came from Marie's farm, it was with some dismay that he was forced to switch back to straight tobacco leaf.

What I didn't know was that little by little the prisoners had pieced it all together and I had been given the credit for everything. I was enormously surprised when one day, passing a gang of prisoners who were digging a large flower bed in the town hall gardens, I heard the chanter, who was calling the rhythm so the picks all rose in unison and fell together, change his song at my approach.

“See who comes toward us now,” he sang. “Tell us, tell us,” the rest of the work gang chanted back. “It is he who is called the Tadpole Angel,” the leader sang. “We salute him, we salute him,” they chorused.

I glanced around me to see whom they were singing about, but there was no one to be seen. The warder, who recognized me, obviously didn't know Zulu. He called out to me, “How things going, man?” and I replied, “Very good, thanks.” The warder, who was bored, obviously wanted me to stop for a chat.

“He who is a mighty fighter and friend of the yellow man,” the leader continued. “The Tadpole Angel, the Tadpole Angel,” the chorus replied, their picks lifting on the first Tadpole Angel and coming down on the second. I realized with a shock that they were talking about me.

“I hear the lieutenant is going to let you fight in the Under-Twelve Division in the Lowveld Championships in Nelspruit this weekend.”

“Ja,
Fll be the smallest, but he thinks I'll be okay.”

“We thank him for the tobacco, the sugar, and the salt and for the letters and the things he sends to our people far away.” “From our hearts, from our hearts,” came the chorus.

“Nine is not very old, man, eleven can be blery big with a Boer kid.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “I am ten in two weeks.” I was trying to hide my embarrassment at the salutation going on around us.

“Ja,
man, and the kid you fight will be most likely twelve in two weeks,” he said gloomily.

“I have to go, I'm late for the library.” I wanted only to get away from the chanting of the prison gang.

“You'll be okay, man, I seen you sparring, you fast as buggery.” He looked at me closely and grinned. “You is a funny bloke, Peekay. Now why you blushing like mad suddenly, hey?”

“He is the sweet water we drink and the dark clouds that come at last to break the drought,” the leader sang. Up came the picks, “Tadpole Angel.” Down they went in perfect unison, “Tadp9le Angel. We salute him, we salute him.” I started to run toward the library and broke out in a sweat, my embarrassment consuming me.

I tackled Geel Piet about the matter the next morning, and he admitted that this was my name. “It is a great compliment, small
baas.
For them you are a true angel.”

Doc was listening, as Geel Piet and I now spoke in English when we were with him.
“Ja,
and for you we are all angels, Geel Piet.” He chuckled. “You are a rich man, I think,
ja!”

Geel Piet made no attempt to deny it. “Big
baas,
it is always like so in a prison. If I am discovered, I will be killed, so I must have something for risking my life. Thirty percent is not so

much. In Pretoria and Johannesburg it is fifty percent, in Robbin Island and Pollsmoor it is sixty percent.”

“I think you are a
skelm,
Geel Piet, but we will say no more.” Doc, like Mrs. Boxall, had come to realize how important the letters were and how the small amount of contraband made life bearable for men who were shown no compassion and whose diet of mealie meal and a watery stew of mostly cabbage and carrots with an occasional bit of gristle floating on the surface was only just sufficient to sustain them, though not sufficient for the brutally hard work on the farms or in the sawmills or the granite quarries. He had also come to accept the role Geel Piet played in the distribution system, knowing that without it chaos would ensue. “Inside all people there is love, also the need to take care of the other man who is his brother. Inside everyone is a savage, but there is also happening tenderness and compassion.” Doc sighed and took out his bandanna and wiped his face as though trying to wipe the prison atmosphere from his skin. “When man is brutalized in such a place like this, always he is looking for small signs. The smallest sign that someone is worried for him is like a fire on the dark mountain. When a man knows somebody cares, he keeps some small place, a corner maybe of his soul, clean and lit.”

While the food allocated for each prisoner was insufficient to keep a man doing hard physical labor, whoever hired a gang was expected to supply a meal at noon. It was this meal that kept the prisoners alive, for the regulations required it to be a vegetable and meat stew consisting of eight ounces of meat per prisoner and a pound of cooked mealie pap. I sometimes heard the warders discuss a scam whereby they tried to get a contractor to cut the rations in half, pay the warder ten shillings, and save himself ten shillings. This only worked when gangs were hired for short periods; otherwise the men soon grew too weak to work. It was a big risk. Lieutenant Smit rotated warders so they had a different gang each week and couldn't set up a scam. The prison authorities depended on this one good meal a day from outside so they could cut rations on the inside. Although, I must say, Geel Piet told me this story and so it is not necessarily the entire truth. If a warder was caught in a scam, he was not only dismissed but drafted into the army. Nobody in the boxing squad ever tried a scam. They were all Lieutenant Smit's men and, even more than the good musicians, were considered special, seldom having

to go out with gangs and mostly getting guard duty on the day shift.

While no more than a quarter of the prisoners were Zulus, they held the highest status in the prison. Work songs were mostly composed in Zulu, and it was always a Zulu who called the time and set the working pace. Zulu is a poetic language, and while many songs are traditional, the ability to create spontaneous new lyrics to capture a recent incident or pass information on was almost always handled by a Zulu prisoner whose gift for poetry was greatly respected.