Nadine Gordimer - My Son's Story

I spoke to him for the first time. — Biology. On Tuesday. — And so there was complicity between us, he drew me into it, as if he were not my father (a father would never do such a thing). And yet because he was my father how could I resist, how could I dare refuse him?

It might even have been that the principal protected the schoolteacher for some time. Conscience — the principal's own, that he didn't follow — or loyalty to his own kind against the power of the town's and the government's authority might have moved him; in the community there was no-one so determined to stay out of trouble that he would not secretly admire one who was not afraid to get into trouble. The schoolteacher did not lose his post during the period when the children were disrupting the school just as if they were really black.

But he had ventured outside the harmless activities of good works for which funds could be begged from the Rotarians and the Lions, and approved by them at their weekly lunches in the town's appointed hotel. People in communities like his own, in other areas of the Transvaal, got to hear of him — probably it was the newspaper photograph that started it. Proclamations in the Government Gazette were being enacted in these areas — literally, as the script of a play is enacted by the voices and movements of players, by government trucks carting away people and their possessions and by bulldozers pushing over what had been their homes. Shopkeepers who were not really black but not white, either, were being moved out of the shops they had occupied for generations in the white towns. There were people like him in these communities, people who felt responsibility beyond their families, and they were eager to recruit anyone who showed a sign: he had marched across the veld; he was marked. Although no family was losing its home as yet in his community it was obvious he was the kind of man who would realize that all communities of his kind were in fact one and if that one were threatened by a white town this month or year, this one could be the next. He was approached to form a local committee, he was elected to a regional executive, he studied government white papers in the tin-trunk archives of township proclamations, and title deeds old people had kept; he stood on the creaking boards of a church hall and made his first speech.

He had stayed the children's hands when they picked up stones. But words, too, are stones. Now he had taken up the sling, another David among many singling themselves out to be marked — again, by the eyes of Goliath.

Unexpectedly, he proved to be one of the best speakers in the movement and at weekends was needed to address gatherings around the province. His name appeared on posters in dorps where they were scrawled over obscenely or torn down by local whites. 'Sonny', in quotes, was printed between his first and surnames, in the lists of speakers, the childish appellation became a natural political advantage, stressing approachability and closeness to the people he would address. And when there were combined meetings with real blacks, his own dark skin, in contrast with the lighter colouring of most of his kind, surely-helped reduce superficial differences between those who were entirely black and those who had something of the white man in their veins. Colleagues, more politically sophisticated than he, saw the usefulness of these attributes. He himself was innocent of the fact that they could be used in any way; was only gratified that his years of reading — that individualistic, withdrawn preoccupation, as he was beginning to think of it — were being put directly to the use of the community in providing him with a vocabulary adequate to what needed to be said. Words came flying to his tongue from the roosts of his private pleasures. When he was told he was good he laughed and said embar-rassedly that he was a teacher, a public speaker in the classroom every day of his working life.

The principal came to the teacher's house on a Saturday afternoon. Aila opened the door and in her face (the principal always had thought her beautiful, but in the way of one of those national costume dolls brought back from foreign countries, too typical) he saw such instant comprehension and dread that, having never ever dropped in, before, what he came out with was something ridiculous: I was just passing… She led him in, in silence. She went to fetch her husband from the back yard where for privacy, under the shelter of the grapevine he'd grown, he was in a meeting with his new associates. They saw her face. They rose quickly to their feet.

— No, not the police. The principal.—

The associates sat down again; one gave a gesture of relief, excusing the teacher for the interruption, as he himself might have given a pupil permission to leave the classroom.

The education department responsible for people of their kind had informed the principal that this teacher was to be dismissed.

The teacher smiled as one does at something expected, feared, and already dealt with at four in the mornings, lying quite still so as not to disturb the sleeper sharing the bed.

— Man, what can I do. I tried to stop it. — The principal's lower jaw jutted and pushed his lips and moustache up towards his nose; that comic grimace so familiar to his staff whenever he had something unpleasant to say and the muscles of his face sought to disguise his nervousness by assuming a fearsome aspect, the way a defenceless animal changes colour, or bristles.

— It's all right.—

— Sonny, I held them off. I told them, you're one of my best. I told how popular you are with the kids. What you've done for the school.—

But he had said the wrong thing again. It was exactly what the teacher had done for the school that had opened the dossier which had led to this: dismissal. In distress the principal unburdened himself of the worst. — You know… don't you…man, it's bad. The Department won't allow any other school to give you a post.—

Aila came in with a tray of tea.

She did not look up at either of the men and left without breaking the silence, for them.

Benoni — son of sorrow.

My father, who didn't have a university degree (unlike that woman he admires so much) used to have the facility for picking up incidental knowledge that only intelligent people whose formal education is limited, possess. He drew fragments of information to himself as I drew my mother's pins to the horseshoe magnet. One time he told me what the name of the town meant. I don't know where he learnt it. He said it was Hebrew.

I was born in that town, his son. I think now that this sorrow began when we left it. As long ago as that. Even before. When he had to stop being a teacher and his profession and his community work were no longer each an extension of the other, something that made him whole. Our family, whole.

They found a job for him in an Indian wholesaler's — the people of the committee against removals which was now his community work, taking him all over the place, speaking on platforms and attending meetings outside the community of our streets, our area. He no longer had a profession; his profession had become the meetings, the speeches, the campaigns, the delegations to the authorities. The job — book-keeping or something of that kind he quickly taught himself — was not like teaching; it was a necessity that fed us and that was got through between taking the train to the city every morning and returning every evening. It had no place in our life. He did not bring it home, it was not present with us in the house as his being a teacher always had been. I was eleven years old; he went away every day and came back; I never saw that warehouse at the other end of the train journey. Men's and boys' clothing, he said: I had asked what was in it. Imagine him in cave after cave of shoes without feet, stacks and dangling strings of grey and brown felt hats, without heads or faces, he who had been surrounded by live children. He used to read to us at night, Baby and me, whenever there were no meetings. Baby didn't listen, she would go into the kitchen with her little radio. He had taught me to read when I was less than five years old but I still loved best to be read to by him. Sometimes I made him read to me from the book he himself was in the middle of, even though I didn't fully understand it. I learnt new words — he would interrupt himself and explain them, if I stopped him. When grownups asked the usual silly question put to children, Baby answered (depending on whether she was out to impress the visitor or be saucy) she would be 'a doctor', 'a beauty queen', and I said nothing. But he — my father — would say, 'My son's going to be a writer'. The only time I had spoken for myself everyone laughed. I had been taken to the circus at Christmas and what I wanted to be when I grew up was a clown. Baby called out— bright little madam, everyone dubbed her—'Because your feet's so big already!' My mother didn't want to see my feelings hurt and tried to change the derision to a rational objection. But clowns are sad, Will, she said.