Nadine Gordimer - My Son's Story

At the graveyard Hannah saw him. Sonny, the detainee in his cell, the political personality, the gentle lover — all these personae were present to her in the sight of him. He stood with his friend Father Mayekiso and some young white people from the End Conscription Campaign. As she watched his curly black hair rise away from his head in the dusty wind, moving over forgotten graves with the party from the combis she stumbled on a broken plastic dome of paper flowers and was quickly caught and put on her feet by a black man in torn and dirty clothes: sorry, sorry. They were all around, those who had followed the convoy, and those who were streaming down from all parts of the township to the graveyard. Smoke from the night's cooking fires hung its acrid incense over them. The old graves and leaning crosses were disappearing under the feet of the living. They stopped at nine fresh mounds. Hannah wanted to say — but only to him, over there with Father Mayekiso— these aren't graves yet, not yet, it's too soon, they are beds, the shape of sleeping bodies with a soft cover of this red, woolly earth drawn over the heads. She knew that the young men down there were between fifteen and twenty-six years old; she did not know what to do with her emotion. She pulled some irises from the bunch she had bought and gave them out to people around her.

The blacks were accustomed to closeness. In queues for transport, for work permits, for housing allocation, for all the stamped paper that authorized their lives; loaded into overcrowded trains and buses to take them back and forth across the veld, fitting a family into one room, they cannot keep the outline of space — another, invisible skin — whites project around themselves, distanced from each other in everything but sexual and parental intimacy. But now in the graveyard the people from the combis were dispersed from one another and the spatial aura they instinctively kept, and pressed into a single, vast, stirring being with the people of the township. The nun was close against the breast of a man. A black child with his little naked penis waggling under a shirt clung to the leg of a professor. A woman's French perfume and the sweat of a drunk merged as if one breath came from them. And yet it was not alarming for the whites; in fact, an old fear of closeness, of the odours and heat of other flesh, was gone. One ultimate body of bodies was inhaling and exhaling in the single diastole and systole, and above was the freedom of the great open afternoon sky.

At a gesture from someone, whites turned heads; on the rise on the side of the graveyard opposed to that of the township the whole force of police and soldiers had reassembled. The yellow vans and brown Hippos made an horizon, the mounted men before them, and, in front, the line on foot. But these were no longer standing stolidly as they did at the road-block. They were half-crouched, their rifles and shotguns pointing down straight at this body, the body of the gathering. Blacks didn't bother to look. The police, mingled with army conscripts from whom they were indistinguishable most of the time, because they often wore the same camouflage outfit, had been camped on the township soccer fields for weeks. There was no getting away from them. They were life; and death. They had shot the nine young men lying in the graves where the earth had not yet settled.

The priest led prayers in Twsana and Pedi, and hymns, banners of sound, were borne away into the sky, over to the battle-lines on the hill. One of the young white men who had refused conscription to join those up there, and were ready to go to prison for this decision, told the gathering why the white people had come to the people of the township. We're here to show you that whites don't have to come to kill. We come to share your anger and sorrow at the killing of these, our brothers. We come to tell you that we'll take no part in the army or the police who do these things to you. The interpreter's translation into one of their own languages set off freedom songs among the people but the street committee comrades skilfully led a transition to hymns; the armed onlookers on the hill must not be provided with any pretext that this was a subversive gathering.

Hannah knew Sonny's speech. That is, she knew his thinking, his way of expressing a political line in a manner, as far as feasible, his own way, part of which had been developed in his long dialogue with her, another part of which came from some source in him as the sea is in human blood from the time when humans were creatures of some other element. She did not know him there in his old element, nor could he make himself known to her. He was perhaps even ashamed of this base as too uninformed and simple; could not know that she observed it in him as a quality that drew her to him more than anything they shared. She kept for herself something she would never speak, not to anyone, certainly not to him — his mystery: He's a good man.

Sonny was wearing the hand-dyed aubergine shirt she had given him and the rich colour accentuated his darkness — no-one could say Sonny wasn't black enough to be a spokesman of the people, either in terms of his skin or his actions! When he spoke now of detentions and imprisonment, he had been there; when he spoke now of the deaths of the nine young men by police brutality, he himself had risked such a death in his own life. His existence gave her the surety: that was what authority meant, it was not the authority of the weapons on the hill. If he used the vocabulary of politics because certain words and phrases were codes everybody understood — no interpreter necessary, even in the English in which they were formulated they expanded in each individual's hearing to carry the meaning of his own frustrations, demands and desire — Sonny did not adopt the usual mannerisms the vocabulary produces. He did not have a calculated way of standing or using his hands, when the eyes of a crowd were on him. When he posed some rhetorical question, his eyes, all pupil in their intensity, would come, as if in ordinary conversation, to some individual for the response that would influence his own reflections. When he paused before explaining a point, he was unembarrassed by the moment he created, confident there would be acceptance of it, and he would use a gesture, more of an aid to clarity of thought, used in private discussion — maybe turning up his palm and looking down to trace in it a circular movement with the thumb of the other hand. He also had the gift of spontaneity, drawing into his own discourse his response to previous speakers, so that what he said never seemed prepared in advance, but to have come to him from his colleagues and the vitality of the crowd before him. Watching Sonny, listening to Sonny, she felt at last she could define sincerity, also — it was never speaking from an idea of oneself. And frankness: frankness, something dangerous and beautiful. The subterfuges of an illicit love made the frankness of its emotions possible; the subterfuges of resistance made frankness in a lying society possible. Sonny once said, what the oppressors call subversion is the exposure of the rot in the State.

What is the meaning of the death of nine comrades we honour today? Nine young people who were hardly yet grown to be men but who were men in their resistance to the people who have surrounded and terrorized you in your homes. These young comrades and thousands of others who have been killed by apartheid's agents, the police, the army, the witdoeke, have given to the struggle their share of the future the struggle is going to win for us. They will never share with all our people in the country's wealth, instead of working to provide thirteen percent of the population with the highest standard of living in the world, while the majority of the people cannot feed their children. They will never know what it is to get out of ghettos like this one and live where there is electricity and clean running water in decent houses. They will never know the time when our sick will no longer lie on the floor in apartheid hospitals while there are wards full of empty beds in hospitals for whites; when our old fathers and mothers will no longer have to starve on pensions a fraction of those whites get. They will never know the single and open education for all, never mind colour or race, our democratic education will establish, and they will not know that the migratory labour system, which now divides husbands and wives, parents and children, and has created the prostitutes, the homeless children of the streets, and the spread of the terrible disease called AIDS, will be a horror of the past. They will never walk on our land, our land restored to the people, instead of being sent away after the day's work to urban rubbish heaps like this and to rural resettlement slums in areas of our country given tribal names and called foreign states'. They will never live in the unitary, non-racial, democratic country our struggle is going to create. They have died without freedom; but they have died for freedom. Our freedom. We have heard from a young comrade who is not up there on the hill pointing a gun at us, although he is white. The presence of our white comrades from the city here today is surely proof that the nine died also for their freedom. They died for the freedom of all the people of this country who want to see oppression destroyed and are ready to join the people's struggle to achieve this. That is the meaning of the death of the nine, for us.