Nadine Gordimer - Jump and Other Stories

The only good thing was one of the other people took the sweets and biscuits for him. He wrote and said he got them. But it wasn’t a good letter. Of course not. He was cross with me; I should have found out, I should have known about the permit. He was right — I bought the train tickets, I asked where to go for the ferry, I should have known about the permit. I have passed Standard 8. There was an advice office to go to in town, the churches ran it, he wrote. But the farm is so far from town, we on the farms don’t know about these things. It was as he said; our ignorance is the way we are kept down, this ignorance must go.

We took the train back and we never went to the Island — never saw him in the three more years he was there. Not once. We couldn’t find the money for the train. His father died and I had to help his mother from my pay. For our people the worry is always money, I wrote. When will we ever have money? Then he sent such a good letter. That’s what I’m on the Island for, far away from you, I’m here so that one day our people will have the things they need, land, food, the end of ignorance. There was something else — I could just read the word ‘power’ the prison had blacked out. All his letters were not just for me; the prison officer read them before I could.

He was coming home after only five years!

That’s what it seemed to me, when I heard — the five years were suddenly disappeared — nothing! — there was no whole year still to wait. I showed my — our — little girl his photo again. That’s your daddy, he’s coming, you’re going to see him. She told the other children at school, I’ve got a daddy, just as she showed off about the kid goat she had at home.

We wanted him to come at once, and at the same time we wanted time to prepare. His mother lived with one of his uncles; now that his father was dead there was no house of his father for him to take me to as soon as we married. If there had been time, my father would have cut poles, my mother and I would have baked bricks, cut thatch, and built a house for him and me and the child.

We were not sure what day he would arrive. We only heard on my radio his name and the names of some others who were released. Then at the Indian’s store I noticed the newspaper, The Nation, written by black people, and on the front a picture of a lot of people dancing and waving — I saw at once it was at that ferry. Some men were being carried on other men’s shoulders. I couldn’t see which one was him. We were waiting. The ferry had brought him from the Island but we remembered Cape Town is a long way from us. Then he did come. On a Saturday, no school, so I was working with my mother, hoeing and weeding round the pumpkins and mealies, my hair, that I meant to keep nice, tied in an old doek. A combi came over the veld and his comrades had brought him. I wanted to run away and wash but he stood there stretching his legs, calling, hey! hey! with his comrades making a noise around him, and my mother started shrieking in the old style aie! aie! and my father was clapping and stamping towards him. He held his arms open to us, this big man in town clothes, polished shoes, and all the time while he hugged me I was holding my dirty hands, full of mud, away from him behind his back. His teeth hit me hard through his lips, he grabbed at my mother and she struggled to hold the child up to him. I thought we would all fall down! Then everyone was quiet. The child hid behind my mother. He picked her up but she turned her head away to her shoulder. He spoke to her gently but she wouldn’t speak to him. She’s nearly six years old! I told her not to be a baby. She said, That’s not him.

The comrades all laughed, we laughed, she ran off and he said, She has to have time to get used to me.

He has put on weight, yes; a lot. You couldn’t believe it. He used to be so thin his feet looked too big for him. I used to feel his bones but now — that night — when he lay on me he was so heavy, I didn’t remember it was like that. Such a long time. It’s strange to get stronger in prison; I thought he wouldn’t have enough to eat and would come out weak. Everyone said, Look at him! — he’s a man, now. He laughed and banged his fist on his chest, told them how the comrades exercised in their cells, he would run three miles a day, stepping up and down on one place on the floor of that small cell where he was kept. After we were together at night we used to whisper a long time but now I can feel he’s thinking of some things I don’t know and I can’t worry him with talk. Also I don’t know what to say. To ask him what it was like, five years shut away there; or to tell him something about school or about the child. What else has happened, here? Nothing. Just waiting. Sometimes in the daytime I do try to tell him what it was like for me, here at home on the farm, five years. He listens, he’s interested, just like he’s interested when people from the other farms come to visit and talk to him about little things that happened to them while he was away all that time on the Island. He smiles and nods, asks a couple of questions and then stands up and stretches. I see it’s to show them it’s enough, his mind is going back to something he was busy with before they came. And we farm people are very slow; we tell things slowly, he used to, too.

He hasn’t signed on for another job. But he can’t stay at home with us; we thought, after five years over there in the middle of that green and blue sea, so far, he would rest with us a little while. The combi or some car comes to fetch him and he says don’t worry, I don’t know what day I’ll be back. At first I asked, what week, next week? He tried to explain to me: in the Movement it’s not like it was in the union, where you do your work every day and after that you are busy with meetings; in the Movement you never know where you will have to go and what is going to come up next. And the same with money. In the Movement, it’s not like a job, with regular pay — I know that, he doesn’t have to tell me — it’s like it was going to the Island, you do it for all our people who suffer because we haven’t got money, we haven’t got land — look, he said, speaking of my parents’, my home, the home that has been waiting for him, with his child: look at this place where the white man owns the ground and lets you squat in mud and tin huts here only as long as you work for him— Baba and your brother planting his crops and looking after his cattle, Mama cleaning his house and you in the school without even having the chance to train properly as a teacher. The farmer owns us, he says.

I’ve been thinking we haven’t got a home because there wasn’t time to build a house before he came from the Island; but we haven’t got a home at all. Now I’ve understood that.

I’m not stupid. When the comrades come to this place in the combi to talk to him here I don’t go away with my mother after we’ve brought them tea or (if she’s made it for the weekend) beer. They like her beer, they talk about our culture and there’s one of them who makes a point of putting his arm around my mother, calling her the mama of all of them, the mama of Africa. Sometimes they please her very much by telling her how they used to sing on the Island and getting her to sing an old song we all know from our grandmothers. Then they join in with their strong voices. My father doesn’t like this noise travelling across the veld; he’s afraid that if the Boer finds out my man is a political, from the Island, and he’s holding meetings on the Boer’s land, he’ll tell my father to go, and take his family with him. But my brother says if the Boer asks anything just tell him it’s a prayer meeting. Then the singing is over; my mother knows she must go away into the house.