Nadine Gordimer - None to Accompany Me

Zeph Rapulana dines on board the Drommedaris now.

He has moved more or less permanently from Odensville, where he built a home for his family in the temporary settlement area secured, and, leaving the backyard cottage, has taken a house in a modestly affluent suburb vacated by a white couple who have left in the latest count of emigration to America or Australia. What has been abolished along with the laws of segregation is the law and custom, more deeply entrenched than any law, that only white people could live in these pleasant areas. Anyone who can afford to pay the rent or buy property may do so now. Many whites who want to see racial prejudice abolished and have applauded its passing nevertheless comment high-mindedly whenever a black man or woman is successful enough in their — the whites’—world of professions, finance and business to move into one of the formerly white compounds. There are so many blacks living in degrading poverty, how can a black man live it up with a tree-filled garden, lock-up garage for his car, and neighbourhood security watch? For one to want justice for black people, they must all qualify by being poor. He ought to be living a dozen to a shack without light amid shit running from broken drains. He ought to be standing before a farmer’s door shut in his face, saying without menace, non-violently, we won’t harm you. Not you or your wife and children. Never. Whatever you do to us. Never. And we’ll never penetrate your boardrooms, we’ll never enter and take the place behind the desk in the chairman’s office, don the robes of the judge, fit the uniform of the commander-in-chief.

When Vera comes to have coffee with him they sit and compare notes. Vera is sharp-tongued about the patrons of the Drommedaris, teases him a little, in his position as an infiltrator of a new kind. He’s calm as the old kind. — Of course, underneath that smoked salmon stuff and the wine they keep pouring I understand they’re having problems in taking a black man seriously. Of course I understand that. — He is neither sarcastic nor facetious.

Vera smiled. — ‘I know the white man’.— And they laughed.

— Well, I’ve been learning about him a long time.—

— But you get on with them — not just amiability; I mean you get them to take you: seriously. Have your say in decisions.—

— Slowly, slowly — yes. — He is a director on the boards of several finance companies, a development foundation, two banks. — I think I’m not decorative enough to be put in the window.—

— Oh I don’t think so! My bet is they certainly counted on you being decorative enough, with your credentials from the housing commission, they thought that looks good, you don’t need to say anything round the boardroom table, you’ll lend them enough credibility for progress just by being there, and then they find they haven’t got a dummy, they’ve got you . I could have warned them.—

— I’m just a schoolmaster who’s trying to educate them to diversify their excess profits into enterprises that will benefit our people whose labour made those profits. That’s all. Cheap bonds for housing, technical training instead of casinos, backing for blacks to get into setting up our own financial institutions — and the right kind of co-operation to make sure we don’t fail while we’re gaining experience. It’s like everything else with us blacks, Vera; fail, and it’s proof you can’t succeed because black can’t succeed. It’s a trap; give us funds and no access to expertise along with them. ‘See what happened? They can’t do it’.—

— Probably we’re going to nationalize banks — and then?—

He bent towards her with a gentle smile. — I think your politics are a bit different from mine, Vera.—

She was sitting back in her chair with the coffee cup on the arm, legs stretched and crossed at the ankle. With him there was no haste in communication; in every encounter between human beings there is a pace set that belongs to them, and that will be taken up in its own rhythm whenever they are together. — Private enterprise … I think you’re getting me to see it your way, sometimes.—

— The banks we’ve created will have belonged to our people already. Only the private aspect will change — there’ll be government men on the boards, some of the directors will go.—

He? He’ll move on, as he did from the way he found to emerge from the Odensville affair, doing what was to be done when it had to be done.

— I wonder what you really think of them. When you’re with them.—

— People. Human beings, men like any other.—

— Oh come on. That’s the ‘politically correct’ reply. And women? The few women I’ve met in that circle are not what I’d call like any other.—

— Can’t think of any women … yes, there’s one.—

— Poor thing.—

— Well, yes, I suppose so. But I have to admit I didn’t notice it, how she was treated. Among us black men, too, it’s been usual. I suppose I’ve been conditioned from boyhood. Although I like to think I’ve resisted all that!—

— You’re the least conditioned person I’ve met. I was quite wrong about you when I first saw you, hat in hand. I mistook dignity for servility. I can tell you that now.—

He avoided personal references by withdrawing to himself. He filled his cup. — And you? — She put her palm over hers. — I mean would you say you are conditioned?—

She knew he was saying he didn’t believe it was so, while he didn’t think they needed to be personal in this way; such a level already existed differently between them.

— I find at the moment I need to be, more than I am. I have my son’s young son living with us.—

Correcting the awkward definition: —Your grandson.—

— Grandson. I’m unsure — of our position — you know? I don’t know what he expects, the right thing.—

This was how he listened in boardrooms, waiting to unravel speakers’ motives, giving them time.

— What I should be to him.—

— You’re Vera. — His, the last word, no qualifications.

She laughed and pulled a face.

— What about the other children?—

They had been thinking aloud over the news that pupils at black schools were out in the streets again, this time in refusal to pay examination fees. He took up in doubt: —I wonder why we call them children. Eighteen, nineteen, sometimes more than twenty years old, and that’s part of what’s gone so terribly wrong in our times. If the parents weren’t too poor to keep them in school when they’re small, if there had been enough schools to take them all in at the right age, as white children start their schooling, if they hadn’t been chased here and there, everywhere, all over the country in removals — if they’d really had the chance to be children like other children — they wouldn’t be young men and women treated like children now. They wouldn’t be doing the things that scare people so much, the things that young men and women do when they’re angry. This country got it all wrong.—

— And we have to believe we’re going to get it right.—

— A piece here, a piece there. It’s all broken up. You do what you can, I do what I can. That’s it.—

Vera was looking at the palm of her right hand as if (to him) seeking to divine something there; but she was turning to the distraction of some blemish while dealing with uncertainty; she picked at the tiny grains of a couple of warts that came and went, from time to time, in that palm. — So it’s some sort of historical process in reverse we’re in. The future becomes undoing the past.—

— You still believe history will do it through us. I believe we act through God’s will.—