My Son's Story Read online

  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 else—finer. 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 veld—his 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 pietà 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, ‘equality’ beginning to be heard as ‘freedom’—it 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 pietà (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 advantaged—no, 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 children—their 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.—Let’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.—And 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 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 out—his 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 solidarity—she 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 risk—in this community, unlike the black ones across the veld where no-one was too young to be out in the streets, caught between crossfire.

  No wonder parents wanted removed from the school a teacher, one of their own kind, who led their children over there.

  What made him allow himself to be seen with his woman in a public place? What made him go with her to th
at cinema, in a smart complex of underground shops and restaurants, moving stairways and piped music? Well, what made me go there: I thought no-one’d see me. No-one would know me. A suburb where well-off white people lived, always had lived; at a cheap cinema in one of the grey areas where we’d moved in there’d be bound to be people who would have recognized me. Recognized him. Seen him with her.

  So we both went across the city, tried to get lost in foreign territory, deceiving each other. Though I flattered myself; he certainly didn’t have me in mind as I, fifteen, had him, the parent, in mind when I bunked study leave that afternoon. Do you ever forget about them, the parents, for a moment? They are always there in the hesitations—whether you will obey or defy—the opinions—where did you get them from?—that decide what you’re doing. Because even while you defy the parents, deceive them, you believe in them.

  And then there he was. What are you going to see? he said. But I had seen. He kept his distance from me because he thought he must smell of her arm and shoulder pressed against his. Perhaps he’d been touching her in the dark. His hand worming up her sleeve and feeling her breast. We try it with girls at parties when someone turns off the lights.

  He had shown me something I should never have been shown.

  I came into the kitchen for supper when the others were already at table. I had stopped outside the door before I went in, my whole body shying away. He was there in his usual place, as if he were my father again, not the man with his blonde woman in the foyer of the cinema. I slid into my place beside my sister on the bench he had made himself—and I had helped him—when he was assembling the do-it-yourself ‘breakfast nook’ unit for my mother. In the ease of the family presence we often didn’t actually greet each other at meals; it would have been like talking to oneself. So I didn’t have to speak. He was shaking the salt cellar over his food, I saw his hand and I did not have to see his face. My mother was talking softly, commenting on something or other Baby must have mentioned, as she went between stove and table as a bird flies back and forth with food to drop into the open beaks of her young.—Sit down and eat. He can help himself.—My father spoke of me like that; he spoke with gentle consideration to my mother. Then I looked up at him, perhaps he was willing me to do so. We saw each other again.

  Nothing happened; as if nothing had happened. My mother said I looked tired.—I think he ought to be taking Sanatogen.—

  —Oh Aila, you don’t believe that nonsense!—He was smiling at her.

  —Well, everybody took it for exam nerves when I was at school. Will, won’t you have a glass of milk? Don’t you think he’s done enough, he’s been at it all day, Sonny, he should close his books and have an early night. Tell him.—Although my father was no longer a schoolteacher she kept the habit of referring to him as the expert in matters affecting our education. And those deeply-recessed eyes gazed at me across the table: —Now that’s a good idea. Sleep’s the best tonic. What’s the subject you write next week?—

  I spoke to him for the first time.—Biology. On Tuesday.—And so there was complicity between us, he drew me into it, as if he were not my father (a father would never do such a thing). And yet because he was my father how could I resist, how could I dare refuse him?

  It might even have been that the principal protected the schoolteacher for some time. Conscience—the principal’s own, that he didn’t follow—or loyalty to his own kind against the power of the town’s and the government’s authority might have moved him; in the community there was no-one so determined to stay out of trouble that he would not secretly admire one who was not afraid to get into trouble. The schoolteacher did not lose his post during the period when the children were disrupting the school just as if they were really black.

  But he had ventured outside the harmless activities of good works for which funds could be begged from the Rotarians and the Lions, and approved by them at their weekly lunches in the town’s appointed hotel. People in communities like his own, in other areas of the Transvaal, got to hear of him—probably it was the newspaper photograph that started it. Proclamations in the Government Gazette were being enacted in these areas—literally, as the script of a play is enacted by the voices and movements of players, by government trucks carting away people and their possessions and by bulldozers pushing over what had been their homes. Shopkeepers who were not really black but not white, either, were being moved out of the shops they had occupied for generations in the white towns. There were people like him in these communities, people who felt responsibility beyond their families, and they were eager to recruit anyone who showed a sign: he had marched across the veld; he was marked. Although no family was losing its home as yet in his community it was obvious he was the kind of man who would realize that all communities of his kind were in fact one and if that one were threatened by a white town this month or year, this one could be the next. He was approached to form a local committee, he was elected to a regional executive, he studied government white papers in the tin-trunk archives of township proclamations, and title deeds old people had kept; he stood on the creaking boards of a church hall and made his first speech.

  He had stayed the children’s hands when they picked up stones. But words, too, are stones. Now he had taken up the sling, another David among many singling themselves out to be marked—again, by the eyes of Goliath.

  Unexpectedly, he proved to be one of the best speakers in the movement and at weekends was needed to address gatherings around the province. His name appeared on posters in dorps where they were scrawled over obscenely or torn down by local whites. ‘Sonny’, in quotes, was printed between his first and surnames, in the lists of speakers, the childish appellation became a natural political advantage, stressing approachability and closeness to the people he would address. And when there were combined meetings with real blacks, his own dark skin, in contrast with the lighter colouring of most of his kind, surely helped reduce superficial differences between those who were entirely black and those who had something of the white man in their veins. Colleagues, more politically sophisticated than he, saw the usefulness of these attributes. He himself was innocent of the fact that they could be used in any way; was only gratified that his years of reading—that individualistic, withdrawn preoccupation, as he was beginning to think of it—were being put directly to the use of the community in providing him with a vocabulary adequate to what needed to be said. Words came flying to his tongue from the roosts of his private pleasures. When he was told he was good he laughed and said embarrassedly that he was a teacher, a public speaker in the classroom every day of his working life.

  The principal came to the teacher’s house on a Saturday afternoon. Aila opened the door and in her face (the principal always had thought her beautiful, but in the way of one of those national costume dolls brought back from foreign countries, too typical) he saw such instant comprehension and dread that, having never ever dropped in, before, what he came out with was something ridiculous: I was just passing … She led him in, in silence. She went to fetch her husband from the back yard where for privacy, under the shelter of the grapevine he’d grown, he was in a meeting with his new associates. They saw her face. They rose quickly to their feet.

  —No, not the police. The principal.—

  The associates sat down again; one gave a gesture of relief, excusing the teacher for the interruption, as he himself might have given a pupil permission to leave the classroom.

  The education department responsible for people of their kind had informed the principal that this teacher was to be dismissed.

  The teacher smiled as one does at something expected, feared, and already dealt with at four in the mornings, lying quite still so as not to disturb the sleeper sharing the bed.

  —Man, what can I do. I tried to stop it.—The principal’s lower jaw jutted and pushed his lips and moustache up towards his nose; that comic grimace so familiar to his staff whenever he had something unpleasant to say and the muscles of his face sought to disguise
his nervousness by assuming a fearsome aspect, the way a defenceless animal changes colour, or bristles.

  —It’s all right.—

  —Sonny, I held them off … I told them, you’re one of my best. I told how popular you are with the kids. What you’ve done for the school.—

  But he had said the wrong thing again. It was exactly what the teacher had done for the school that had opened the dossier which had led to this: dismissal. In distress the principal unburdened himself of the worst.—You know … don’t you …man, it’s bad. The Department won’t allow any other school to give you a post.—

  Aila came in with a tray of tea.

  She did not look up at either of the men and left without breaking the silence, for them.

  Benoni—son of sorrow.

  My father, who didn’t have a university degree (unlike that woman he admires so much) used to have the facility for picking up incidental knowledge that only intelligent people whose formal education is limited, possess. He drew fragments of information to himself as I drew my mother’s pins to the horseshoe magnet. One time he told me what the name of the town meant. I don’t know where he learnt it. He said it was Hebrew.

  I was born in that town, his son. I think now that this sorrow began when we left it. As long ago as that. Even before. When he had to stop being a teacher and his profession and his community work were no longer each an extension of the other, something that made him whole. Our family, whole.

  They found a job for him in an Indian wholesaler’s—the people of the committee against removals which was now his community work, taking him all over the place, speaking on platforms and attending meetings outside the community of our streets, our area. He no longer had a profession; his profession had become the meetings, the speeches, the campaigns, the delegations to the authorities. The job—book-keeping or something of that kind he quickly taught himself—was not like teaching; it was a necessity that fed us and that was got through between taking the train to the city every morning and returning every evening. It had no place in our life. He did not bring it home, it was not present with us in the house as his being a teacher always had been. I was eleven years old; he went away every day and came back; I never saw that warehouse at the other end of the train journey. Men’s and boys’ clothing, he said: I had asked what was in it. Imagine him in cave after cave of shoes without feet, stacks and dangling strings of grey and brown felt hats, without heads or faces, he who had been surrounded by live children. He used to read to us at night, Baby and me, whenever there were no meetings. Baby didn’t listen, she would go into the kitchen with her little radio. He had taught me to read when I was less than five years old but I still loved best to be read to by him. Sometimes I made him read to me from the book he himself was in the middle of, even though I didn’t fully understand it. I learnt new words—he would interrupt himself and explain them, if I stopped him. When grownups asked the usual silly question put to children, Baby answered (depending on whether she was out to impress the visitor or be saucy) she would be ‘a doctor’, ‘a beauty queen’, and I said nothing. But he—my father—would say, ‘My son’s going to be a writer’. The only time I had spoken for myself everyone laughed. I had been taken to the circus at Christmas and what I wanted to be when I grew up was a clown. Baby called out—bright little madam, everyone dubbed her—‘Because your feet’s so big already!’ My mother didn’t want to see my feelings hurt and tried to change the derision to a rational objection. But clowns are sad, Will, she said.