Doris Lessing - The Sun Between Their Feet - Collected African Stories Volume Two

This was not criticism. Or rather, while with one part of the collective ethos the white men might say, He’s gone native! and in anger; with a different part of their minds, or at different times it could be said in bitter envy. But that is another story …

Johnny Blakeworthy was of course asked to stay for supper and for the night. At the lamplit table, which was covered with every sort of food, he kept saying how good it was to see so much real food again, but it was in a vaguely polite way, as if he was having to remind himself that this was how he should feel. His plate was loaded with food, and he ate, but kept forgetting to eat, so that my mother had to remind him, putting a little bit more of nice undercut, a splash of gravy, helpings of carrots and spinach from the garden. But by the end he had eaten very little, and hadn’t spoken much either, though the meal gave an impression of much conversation and interest and eating, like a feast, so great was our hunger for company, so many were our questions. Particularly the two children questioned and demanded, for the life of such a man, walking quietly by himself through the bush, sometimes, twenty miles or more a day, sleeping by himself under the stars, or the moon, or whatever weather the seasons sent him, prospecting when he wished, stopping to rest when he needed – such a life, it goes without saying, set us restlessly dreaming of lives different from those we were set towards by school and by parents.

We did learn that he had been on the road for ‘some time, yes, some time now, yes’. That he was sixty. That he had been born in England, in the South, near Canterbury. That he had been adventuring up and down and around Southern Africa all his life – but adventure was not the word he used, it was the word we children repeated until we saw that it made him uncomfortable. He had mined: had indeed owned his own mine. Had farmed, but had not done well. Had done all kinds of work, but ‘I like to be my own master.’ He had owned a store, but ‘I get restless, and I must be on the move.’

Now there was nothing in this we hadn’t heard before -every time, indeed, that such a wanderer came to our door. There was nothing out of the ordinary in his extraordinariness, except, perhaps, as we remembered later, sucking all the stimulation we could out of the visit, discussing it for days, he did not have a prospector’s pan, nor had he asked my father for permission to prospect on this farm. We could not remember a prospector who had failed to become excited by the farm, for it was full of chipped rocks and reefs, trenches and shafts, which some people said went back to the Phoenicians. You couldn’t walk a hundred yards without seeing signs ancient and modern of the search for gold. The district was called ‘Banket’ because it had running through it reefs of the same formation as reefs on the Rand called Banket. The name alone was like a signpost.

But Johnny said he liked to be on his way by the time the sun was up. I saw him leave, down the track that was sun-flushed, the trees all rosy on one side. He shambled away out of sight, a tall, much too thin, rather stooping man in washed-out khaki and soft hide shoes.

Some months later, another man, out of work and occupying himself with prospecting, was asked if he had ever met up with Johnny Blakeworthy, and he said yes, he had indeed! He went on with indignation to say that ‘he had gone native’ in the Valley. The indignation was false, and we assumed that this man too might have ‘gone native’, or that he wished he had, or could. But Johnny’s lack of a prospecting pan, his maize meal, his look at the supper table of being out of place and unfamiliar – all was explained. ‘Going native’ implied that a man would have a ‘bush wife’, but it seemed Johnny did not.

‘He said he’s had enough of the womenfolk, he’s gone to get out of their way,’ said this visitor.

I did not describe, in its place, the thing about Johnny’s visit that struck us most, because at the time it did not strike us as more than agreeably quaint. It was only much later that the letter he wrote us matched up with others, and made a pattern.

Three days after Johnny’s visit to us, a letter arrived from him. I remember my father expected to find that it would ask after all, for permission to prospect. But any sort of letter was odd. Letter-writing equipment did not form part of a tramp’s gear. The letter was on blue Croxley writing paper, and in a blue Croxley envelope, and the writing was as neat as a child’s. It was a ‘bread and butter’ letter. He said that he had very much enjoyed our kind hospitality, and the fine cooking of the lady of the house. He was grateful for the opportunity of making our acquaintance. ‘With my best wishes, yours very truly, Johnny Blakeworthy.’

Once he had been a well-brought-up little boy from a small English country town. ‘You must always write and say thank you after enjoying hospitality, Johnny.’

We talked about the letter for a long time. He must have dropped in at the nearest store after leaving our farm. It was twenty miles away. He probably bought a single sheet of paper and a lone envelope. This meant that he had got them from the African part of the store, where such small retailing went on – at vast profit, of course, to the storekeeper. He must have bought one stamp, and walked across to the post office to hand the letter over the counter. Then, due having been paid to his upbringing, he moved back to the African tribe where he lived beyond post offices, letter writing, and other impedimenta that went with being a white man.

The next glimpse I had of the man, I still have no idea where to fit into the pattern I was at last able to make.

It was years later. I was a young woman at a morning tea party. This one, like all the others of its kind, was an excuse for gossip, and most of that was – of course, since we were young married women – about men and marriage. A girl, married not more than a year, much in love, and unwilling to sacrifice her husband to the collective, talked instead about her aunt from the Orange Free State. ‘She was married for years to a real bad one, and then up he got and walked out. All she heard from him was a nice letter, you know, like a letter after a party or something. It said Thank you very much for the nice time. Can you beat that? And later still she found she had never been married to him because all the time he was married to someone else.’

‘Was she happy?’ one of us asked, and the girl said, ‘She was nuts all right, she said it was the best time of her life.’

‘Then what was she complaining about?’

‘What got her was, having to say Spinster, when she was as good as married all those years. And that letter got her goat, I feel I must write and thank you for … something like that.’

‘What was his name?’ I asked, suddenly understanding what was itching at the back of my mind.

‘I don’t remember. Johnny something or other.’

That was all that came out of that most typical of South African scenes, the morning tea party on the deep shady veranda, the trays covered with every kind of cake and biscuit, the gossiping young women, watching their offspring at play under the trees, filling in a morning of their lazy lives before going back to their respective homes where they would find their meals cooked for them, the table laid, and their husbands waiting. That tea party was thirty years ago, and still that town has not grown so wide that the men can’t drive home to take their midday meals with their families. I am talking of white families, of course.

The next bit of the puzzle came in the shape of a story which I read in a local paper, of the kind that gets itself printed in the spare hours of presses responsible for much more renowned newspapers. This one was called the Valley Advertiser, and its circulation might have been ten thousand. The story was headed: Our Prize-winning story, The Fragrant Black Aloe. By our new Discovery, Alan McGinnery. ‘When I have nothing better to do, I like to stroll down the Main Street, to see the day’s news being created, to catch fragments of talk, and to make up stories about what I hear. Most people enjoy coincidences, it gives them something to talk about. But when there are too many, it makes an unpleasant feeling that the long arm of coincidence is pointing to a region where a rational person is likely to feel uncomfortable. This morning was like that. It began in a flower shop. There a woman with a shopping list was saying to the salesman: “Do you sell black aloes?” It sounded like something to eat.