Nadine Gordimer - My Son's Story

Mechanical knights — vehicles visored in steel-plating and chain-mailed in thick mesh — barred the turnoff to the township. Before them were mounted police and soldiers with automatic shotguns and R4 rifles, standing legs planted apart.

To most of the white people in the combis the yellow armoured vans, the clumsy brown armoured cars the blacks dub zoomorphically 'Hippos', the stolid figures with the power of death in their hands were ranged like the toys of war children set up. Or it was as if someone suddenly flipped the switch of a TV programme selector and a scene from some mini-series flashed on. Violence was so thin an appearance in the living-room that the shadow of someone's head, moving across the room, was enough to blot it out. Now, why, you could see the hair on a policeman's forearm. No matter if the person in the next seat stood up; when he shifted again, armoured cars, police guns were there. The steel whips of aerials swung in the sun. Alsatian dogs — once desirable and beautiful pets, now tails down in the cowed and coiled bearing of readiness to attack — were weapons leashed in the fists of police handlers.

Everyone had been briefed about how to behave: each combi had its marshal. Accept police provocation calmly, leave the talking to those appointed to do it. Some people climbed out to stretch their legs, proving they were not afraid, and were sent back to their seats. Lawyers and civil rights leaders among the groups were conferring with the comrades from within the township who had arrived to meet the convoy in an old American car lumbering low on its suspension. Others were negotiating with the police. The group broke up and re-formed, gesticulating individuals shouldered their way in upon it, left to approach others, ran back. The group moved, as they argued, from one side of the blockade to the other, pulled this way and that in the arena of their contention; a process in dumb show people encapsulated in the combis craned their necks to interpret. Look at that! That policeman shaking his fist! Can't you see? Next to that Hippo. He hit him, he's hit him! Oh my god. No no no nobody's been hurt! Just look at those brutal clots, that one could press the trigger easily as he's scratching himself. Oh don't you worry, they'd think twice before firing at us — we're white. The major or whatever-he-is — he's walking away — What's happening? No he isn't, he's just giving some instruction. They're arresting someone! Who? Can't see — oh my god, it's Dave! Dave Seaton. No that's not Dave.

Alarm and excitement died away into impatience and a new kind of boredom: was it possible to be bored while in an extraordinary situation? In one of the combis a lay nun in ankle socks offered round a plastic bottle of water, and there was the rustle of rolls of peppermints being peeled. The difference is, if we were black we'd at least be singing. Well, come on then! We were told to keep out of it. Singing! Not to sing! Well, freedom songs could be provocation. Who knows the words. Some students did, they belonged to the new generation who learned from blacks; but freedom songs need volume, and the older people from the church and civil rights movements could participate only by smiling solidarity.

A young marshal raced up and down with her walkie-talkie.

Everything about her was in movement, long hair, breasts and rubber-thong sandals bobbing, swirling in contrast with the police planted with guns at their posts. Harassed and grinning, she pulled herself up to the windows of each combi. — They say we can't enter. But Allan and Dave have shown them the statute, it's not against the law, they can't stop us! — She dropped and was off before questions could reach her. People gabbled suppositions; in the silence of others was concealed disappointment — or relief. Who could tell from their faces? In a few minutes the girl was back again, running her open-fingered hand to lift her hair high off her forehead. — They say we'll be killed. We go in at our own risk— She was fighting her own elation. She burst into laughter. People in the combi rose from their seats — but she was gone. Some climbed out of the combis and grouped in an exchange of rumours and opinions, bravado and caution. Marshals ran like sheepdogs between them, getting them back into the combis. No-one sat where they had before, everyone competed for attention, I think, I said, I told. And then the lawyers did the rounds. There was silence. — We've decided to go in. The comrades from the street committees are going to escort us — they have many more of their ranks inside and they'll be with us all the way. But anyone who feels, because of family or any other circumstances, he or she should not ignore the police warning, should feel free to leave us now. There's transport for those who wish to return to town. Please. And no stigma whatever attached to this choice. I assure you. None of us will draw any wrong conclusions. So.—

But it was not possible for anyone to find the courage to get up and leave; no fear equal to that. There was a moment like a breath held. And then all faces were turned to him: —You're coming? — And the company applauded; applauded each other, themselves. If they never were to meet again, each would have this moment of self-respect ratified between them. The Hippos, the police, soldiers, horses and dogs, guns, opened a way. The black drivers who had been chatting and smoking with the detachment of hired onlookers accustomed to dealing with the police every day, jumped into their vehicles and drove their passengers where many had never been before. Across the veld.

Hannah was in one of the combis. Of course, she had crossed the veld from many cities, towns and dorps, many times before. She sat quietly in the illusion sunglasses give that one is behind them in some kind of hide, able to think of what was most concealed, surely, among all the secret thoughts of the people around her — her anxiety whether Sonny had evaded the police by choosing some other way into the township, and — most unimaginable of all, by those whose shoulders were touching hers — what the man who would speak to them at the graves was to her. So the experience for her surely was unlike what it could be for anyone else. She had met with police interference often before, she was one of their film stars. if a policeman recognized her (she took off the sunglasses) among the collection of whites in the convoy, he would know that the ex-political prisoner who was to speak at the graves was her lover. It sometimes happened that there was this crazy bond of confirmation in their eyes when hers met those of some plain-clothes man.

The combis plunged into the township — into the valley where the township had proliferated over three generations, and into the thick-layered human presence of Sunday, when all the life that is dispersed across the veld in the industrial areas and the city during the week has crammed back. Everyone home: 'home' the streets; a habitation without barriers, the houses' breached walls spilling inmates, the tottering fences one with the components — tin, hubcaps, rotting board — of totemic rubbish mounds. Workers' dungarees were the flags hung out, drying spread cruciform with the logos of construction companies and soft-drink plants stitched across them. Drumming at yard church meetings thumped across the gibber of radio commercials and ragged singing from beer-drinks. The convoy pitched and tossed over the gullies that were the streets and also the children's sandpits, the fecal streams, the fodder-ground of pigs, chickens and dogs. If the way was not demarcated by cambering and sidewalk gutters as the whites were accustomed to, it was defined by people who ran towards the combis and gathered ahead on either side of the route. An avenue of black faces looked into the windows, pressing close, so that the combis had to slow to these people's walking pace in order not to crush them under the wheels. No picnic party; the whites found themselves at once surrounded by, gazed at, gazing into the faces of these blacks who had stoned white drivers on the main road, who had taken control of this place out of the hands of white authority, who refused to pay for the right to exist in the decaying ruins of the war of attrition against their presence too close across the veld; these people who killed police collaborators, in their impotence to stop the police killing their children. One thing to read about them in the papers, to empathize with them, across the veld; Hannah felt the fear in her companions like a rise in temperature inside the vehicle. She slid open the window beside her. Instead of stones, black hands reached in, met and touched first hers and then those of all inside who reached out to them. The windows were opened. Passengers jostled one another for the blessing of the hands, the healing touch. Some never saw the faces of those whose fingers they held for a moment before the combi's progress broke the grasp. In the crush outside faces gleaming in welcome bobbed up. There were the cries, Amandla! Viva! and joy when these were taken up by the whites, and there were the deep dreamy intonations of the old-time greetings, 'nkos' from people too ancient to grasp that this, granted to whites, now represents shameful servility. In the smiling haze of weekend-drunks the procession of white people was part of the illusions that softened the realities of the week's labour, and made the improbable appear possible. The crowd began to sing, of course, and toyi-toyi, the half-dance, half-procession alongside the convoy bringing, among the raised fists of most in the combis, a kind of embarrassed papal or royal weighing-of-air-in-the-hand as a gracious response from others.