Nadine Gordimer - My Son's Story

The relatives are warily impressed by this house we live in illegally in a street among white people. Cousin Vyvian (our people often give their children fancy names, a distinction those who count for nothing among whites may nevertheless claim) who was brought up in the same house with my father, harangues the men on his fill of beer, using an imagined movie gangster manner although he is a shelf-packer in a supermarket. — Listen, my baby, let me tell you — Sonny's going to do a good thing for us, ek sé… A good thing. — He gazes jerkily round the colonial-pillared archway in the entrance to our sitting-room, but the imperial pretensions of some white owner who lived here, long before the neighbourhood went down enough for us to risk moving in, don't represent the aims he's stumbling to draw from a fuddle of frustrations. — No shit, my baby. I'm not going to take it for ever, ay. Me neither. Hotnot do this do that. Things is going to be very different. They not going to sit on their arses while I break mine for a hundred and fifty bucks a week. Ye-suss! No ways, my baby, and I'm telling you… a good thing. Let them go where they like, we coming right on and push them out. Ay, Sonny, no shit, ay? A good thing for us.—

Forget it man Vyv Ag, come on, such a big mouth Lay off old Vyv he's all right

But my father steadies the arm of the ignorant and bewildered man he shared a bed with (he's told us many times) as a child, and thanks him; it's not a sober man holding up a drunk one, it's an exchange of support. I don't understand.

I snap back the rings on the beer cans bought for the occasion, I hand round the tea and cakes for her. When they ask me what I'm doing I say I'm going to study at the university. Among whites: of course. It's what they expect of Sonny's boy. Sonny was always the clever one, the one who would go far. And my mother shows the women her kitchen; they're full of admiring envy, they can see how lucky she is, always was, so refined, a real lady, and deserving, chosen by Sonny, marked out to go far with him.

They've all left, the performance is over. He came out of the cinema into bright daylight; and me.

Imagine the prestige he gets out of it among his comrades— his daughter, skipped the country to join the Freedom Fighters. Dedicated in the tradition of her father, who 'recently narrowly escaped death', so the papers said, when the police charged a cleansing-of-the-graves gathering where he was speaking. 'Sonny' the popular figure in resistance politics, whereabouts often unknown since sometimes he's obliged to go underground. During the boycott campaign against yet another of the elections where we can vote to put people of our colour onto councils whose decisions can be reversed by whites, he didn't sleep at home at night because that's the place and time the police would come for him; suits him fine — oh but then I suppose the police know as well as I do where to find that big bed right there in the room as you enter. So he wouldn't have been able to use his perfect alibi to spend nights with her. I suppose she wouldn't let him, anyway. She's what the comrades would call 'a good girl', and they don't mean she's not easy with men. They mean she can be relied upon to know the priorities. My mother's not in the struggle so my mother is no priority. When he looks at me as he sometimes does I'm supposed to remember that.

If his woman were not a good girl it would be all right for me to loathe her.

I got my parents to pay me to go away for a week as the celebration of my success in matric. I went down to Durban on the motorbike and picked up a girl on the beach the first day. It was easy. Some of the beaches are open to all of us now. So I've lived with a woman for six days, fucked her and slept in the same bed with her, and don't want ever to see her again.

Sonny realized only too well he had the advantage. Aila being Aila, she couldn't be expected to take the sacrifice of her daughter (that was how she would see it) as he did. Aila did not have access to his kind of acceptance of Baby's choice to begin her life, the resource discovered in himself from which his responses came, now: his political commitment. He could quite see it: for Aila, all was loss. There was no gain. Although her eyes had changed — he noticed her dark-grained lids were slightly lowered, she no longer looked out with the ready gaze of the young Aila — she still saw 'not living for yourself' in terms of a schoolteacher's extra-curricular activities of social uplift in a little community across the veld somewhere. He had left her behind, there.

Poor Aila.

But nobody loved Baby more than he did, nobody! The boy was 'her' child; Baby was 'his'; these things were never admitted in the virtuous convention of an obscure little schoolteacher's family in a dorp ghetto. But it always had been so; even then, he knew he was not the socially impotent male whose only positive contribution to his outcast people is to beget another male to carry on a family name. What had Aila done to assuage his anguish at Baby's attempt to end her life before it had begun? Nothing. Silence. Silence upon the other silence. Comfort and understanding he had had to find elsewhere. 'I could do nothing for him. We were finished.' Hannah's flash of perception suddenly passed from the ominous focus it had had for him at the time and picked out of his darkness, Aila. Lit upon her. Aila could do nothing for him. He could do nothing for Aila. Thank god she had the boy. Such a disappointment in other ways, at least there was this to be said for him.

First there had been Sonny's discovery that the individual decision to lead a protest party of children is only an amateur's beginning, a half-conscious sign of readiness to learn disciplined political action. Then, in the process (and he retained a pedagogue's faith in the learning process as a never-ending one) there came the inspiring satisfaction of action arising from the decisions of like minds. Then the bonding of prison, a brotherhood those in the safe world can only mimic with their play-play ordeals of ordination or initiation, taking the habit and vows of chastity or getting vomit-drunk. In solitary confinement there is no choice but chastity and abstention. No sacrifice or celebration. The secret signs between initiates are messages tapped with a knuckle to be received by an ear pressed to the other side of a wall. The blood brotherhood is exchanged when hymns are taken up from cell to cell to accompany an unknown to the hangman. Sonny had heard this dread choir. He had told Hannah about those dark mornings, while he and she were waking to the song of birds. Confessed everything about them. — How is it for a man when those hymns don't mean anything to him? What would happen to me, if I were going off to die like that, with no prayers and no god. I lay there while it got light.—

— I'm told they sing freedom songs.—

— Then the warders come and kick the cell doors and swear. I'm not talking about fear. Normally, people like us never think what it must be like because as far as we're concerned criminals, murderers, hang. We don't. But here, where politicals are hanged, when you're inside and you hear the singing, you think of things that didn't ever have to enter your mind before.—

The learning process continues.

Although a liberation movement strives to act rather than react, because its existence is a phenomenon of opposition to power it is constantly forced to respond to what those in power do, to move in the foreshadow of what the power is planning to do, and to predict what it might or might not be led to do by any pre-emptive action. 'Taking into account changing circumstances' is a tenet like that of a farmer taking into account the weather, and it covers as many factors as there are signs in the heavens, variables in the four winds. Sonny's late development of political sense, grown slowly out of a priggish and subservient morality, ensured that his judgment never lost touch with principle, while his unhesitating return to the struggle after detain-ment and imprisonment ensured that he was capable of bold pragmatism. With these credentials added to his intelligence and gifts as a speaker, he had emerged from among others to the company of decision-makers. There, the combination in his personality was reflected in his position: considered as one of the radicals, he was yet reassuring to the cautious; he could be used to press decisions in a form acceptable to them. There was an exhilarating war-time will to consensus on the strategy and tactics of attacking the government and its supports, military and economic, throughout the world, as well as in the country itself. Comrades who were arrested were immediately replaced by others ready to do their work; the interchangeability of leadership again and again defeated bans and imprisonments. Under the endless disruption of a hounding State — files seized, offices burned down, comrades become political nomads sleeping when and where they could — the huge problems of mass organization continued to be debated and tackled. How to emphasize a constituency among hoes and factory overalls without losing the chance to draw in the people the government were co-opting with the penny sweetmeats of middle class instead of rights? How to get rid of corrupt, government-protected councillors without the people taking the decision into the hands of their own anger and killing them? How to keep proper contact with the youth and street committees who wear the T-shirts and carry the colours but go beyond the approved methods of struggle and give the State the opportunity to charge leadership with incitement to murder? What issues — population removals, strikes, stay-at-homes, boycotts — would be most effective, pursued where, at what period?