Nadine Gordimer - A Sport of Nature

He comes over sniffing gutturally and making awkward genteel gestures to wipe the sweat off the back of his neck. His mouth is pegged down in bashful happiness.

— Where’d you learn?—

He laughs and hunches. — No, well, I just picked it up. First from listening, you know, watching. Then having a go myself. I’d always played guitar and that.—

But where? Someone must have taught you the music — it’s not written down, is it? It’s traditional African stuff.—

He moves his hands about, begins to speak and stops; he is embarrassed by and will only embarrass by what he has to tell. — We had a fish and chips shop. My mother, after my pa passed away. One of the boys that worked in the kitchen, he used to play these things. I got my guitar when I was about fourteen, and we both used to play it. He first taught me guitar.—

— He sings in their languages, too. Come on Gert, one of their songs. Come on. Please.—

It is always difficult for anyone to refuse Hillela; even people who don’t have, like Pauline and Olga and the family, a duty towards her. She butts the boy with her guitar. He takes it with lowered head but when he begins to sing, in the black man’s voice and cadence, in the black man’s language — as white people hear work-gangs sing in the street, only their song making them present among the whites driving by — his inarticulacy, his fumbling self is broken away. That he is singing against the sobbing beat of a pop singer does not matter; a song that is not his own sings through him.

Hillela asks him to tell what he’s singing about; producing him for Sasha; she knows the sort of thing Sasha likes to know.

At once there is difficulty, again, finding words. — Not really a song. Not really. It’s like, you know, it’s a native boy who’s come here to town to work. He’s singing, saying, we come to Jo’burg because we hoping we get something nice, but now we don’t get it. That’s all it’s about.—

When the joint comes round Sasha feels her — Hillela — look to him before she takes a draw. But she needn’t have worried, the weed has been smoked traditionally, long before white kids discovered it, by the local people in the country where he goes to school; he hasn’t ever brought any home only because he doesn’t want to be the one to be blamed for corrupting the two girls. And Hillela doesn’t drink; he sees that.

Hillela was all right that night;—a member of the family, after all, was keeping an eye on her. Sasha had his mother’s car to take her home in. First they delivered a lot of other people to various parts of town. It was late. Pauline was away at the All In African Conference in Maritzburg. Joe and Carole were so deep in the hibernation of the small hours that the house seemed empty; without Pauline all the watchtowers of the spirit were unattended, its drawbridges down. Anything could be let in, nothing would be recorded. Hillela fell asleep in Sasha’s bed, this bed which his cousin and sister used to raid, beating him with pillows. There had been a coup; he had usurped and was on guard in place of his mother. He kept himself awake and measured the passing of darkness by the soft sensation of the girl’s breath spreading on his neck and then drawing back like breath clouding and disappearing on a window pane. When he gauged he must, he separated her warmth from his own, so that once again she became herself, he became himself.

Carole did not know that her cousin was home from a party, had come into their bedroom and slid into her own bed.

Sasha switched on the witness of his lamp and searched his sheets for frail dark question-mark hairs that Bettie, who insisted on making his bed as a holiday treat for him, would recognize as not his brassy-blond sheddings. He did not want to be reminded — to have to remember in the morning.

Hillela could have been like anybody else. She had the opportunity. The same opportunity as Carole and Sasha. Or Olga’s spoilt children — if that had been what she preferred. She was a white child, with choices; that was the irony of it. Young blacks had no choice, only necessity and plenty of ignorance about how to deal with that, in addition. Alpheus was so ambitious, so eager to better himself, become a lawyer, and now he had to saddle himself with a girl and baby on the way. — The trouble is we’re much too timid in these matters. Scared of appearing to boss them around — but, in the end, it’s not a kindness or a respect. When I saw the girl was living there, I should have told Alpheus straight out that he must take her to a birth control clinic. I should’ve taken her myself.—

Joe always listened to Pauline patiently. — Oh come on.—

— Well, damn it all, I’m paying for his courses, maybe I should use that to stop him making things impossible for himself. Nineteen years old. A baby, and next year another baby, how will he support them on a clerk’s salary? We undertook to subsidise his studies, not a family.—

— Oh ma, it’ll be lovely to have a little baby— Carole had pleaded happily, like that, for a puppy or a kitten.

— Oh lovely . A squalling infant while he’s supposed to be studying for exams. I fixed up the garage so’s he wouldn’t have to live in a crowded location room, so’s he’d have the kind of working conditions you kids have.—

— Bettie says, God has sent a child, what can you do. — Hillela quoted, and she and Carole laughed.

— She knows damn well. I had her fitted with a loop years ago. Alpheus’s poor mother, doing four washes a week—

— And breaking the washing machine once a month. — Joe settled back into his soft chin philosophically.

— Rebecca’s beaming all over, ma, she says her son is going to have a clever son like himself.—

— Poor old Rebecca! Where’s he going to find to live? — Pauline’s defiant eyes, questioning — them all: the room, the walls, and beyond. Philosophers like her husband had no answers, they knew only how to accept problems. Carole was a good enough little girl without the originality to swerve aside and seek answers to her mother’s questioning, which she followed as naturalists say a duckling follows the first pair of feet it sees when it hatches. And Hillela — when did that intelligent girl (more intelligent than her own daughter, Pauline confessed confidentially to Joe; an intelligence more like Pauline’s own than that Carole had inherited) when did the girl receive questions, or the possibility of answers, as addressed to her? — A whole family pushed into a garage in the yard. We can’t have them here living under conditions as bad as those in a location. That wasn’t the intention. Alpheus knows it. Rebecca knows it.—

If Sasha had been there he might have answered Pauline.

When Sasha was home Joe had to think of conversation that would start up their father-and-son relationship again; the battery went flat in the long partings, he himself away where the clamorous struggle between power and powerlessness was reduced to a sleepy hum and rustle of courtrooms through whose high windows light slanted as in a church, the boy away at that school for the future which had to be hidden in a little green African kingdom belonging to the 19th century. Joe had come out of his working cubbyhole on a Sunday morning. They were stretched on the grass drinking beer together. Joe mentioned young Alpheus had moved a girl into the garage and got her pregnant — Pauline felt she ought to have done something about it.

Sasha rolled right over before he spoke. — Emasculate him?—

A response lifted clean out of some five-finger-exercise liberation theology picked up from black boys at the school. It was easy for a youngster like Joe’s to see things that priggishly hysterical way. Joe patiently ignored, patiently explained. — He’s had a poor schooling and it’s a hell of a struggle for him to keep up with the courses he’s doing. She’s absolutely right, the last thing he needs is a wife and kid as well. If he were a white boy, we’d all be calling it hopelessly irresponsible, and that’s what it is. Towards his mother, to us, as well as himself. But what can one do.—