Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

The girl had already turned away, superior to praise from an aunt who was impressed by whites. She joined a friend, the two braced against the wall from the base of shoes with platforms twice the thickness of the feet they supported, their heads geometrically patterned rather than coiffured with the hair parted in small squares, each drawn tightly to its centre in a tobacco-twist strand pulled to connect it to the next. A baby boy with a bare bottom skeetered into the room from the direction of the smell of food cooking and was pursued by a heavy old woman who held him laughing and kicking while, smiling on an empty mouth, she talked to the two girls. Fats’ Margaret was still telling me about her niece, in the English vocabulary of black newspapers — A well-known model and top actress — she faltered in embarrassment over the naked baby, seeing him with eyes other than her own, and scooped him up, also laughing, her pretty, sexually-contented face under her wig and her clumsy voluptuous body, beside the old woman for a moment, a conjuration of what the old woman once was, and the old woman so clearly what the young would be. Do you know who this is … The grandmother dealt with me in the style of her own time. Her English was the kind white people mimic. She was holding my wrist — The Lord will reward your fath-a. Yes, he has his reward with Gord. Yes, listen to me, I’m promising. The African people we thanks the Lord for what your fath-a was doing for us, we know he was our fath-a. — Margaret was not embarrassed on her account. Her head tracked, smiling agreement, from the old woman to me. I might have been moved. The afternoon of the anniversary of Lionel’s death: but I was aware of those two girls, the one chewing gum with the concentration of an incantation, the other (who had been introduced) a head set like a seal’s in a single line with the neck, entirely self-regarding. No, I felt instead only an affinity with them, with their distance, although they were distanced from me, too.

Fats’ place, Marisa said. I said. Orde Greer said. Blacks don’t talk about ‘my house’ or ‘home’ and whites have adopted the term from them. A ‘place’; somewhere to belong, but also something that establishes one’s lot and sets aside much to which one doesn’t belong. So long since I had been with blacks in their own homes that I saw it, Soweto, Orlando, this township house — a year after Lionel was dead — as something apart, apart from my daily life; something from the past. When I was a child I went in and out the black townships with my mother so often and naturally that I embarrassed Auntie Velma and Uncle Coen, chattering of this when Tony and I lived with them. How many months since I had crossed the divide that opens every time a black leaves a white and goes to his ‘place’; the physical divide of clean streets become rutted roads and city centres become veld dumped with twisted metal and a perpetual autumn of blowing paper — the vast vacant lot where Orde Greer turned off from the main road that leads from white city to white city; and the other divide, hundreds of years of possession and decision, which lay even between that house where Orde Greer was never invited, that house where the revolution was planned, and the ‘place’ of those millions who have been dispossessed and for whom others have made all the decisions. From the car I saw it again as I had once ceased to see the too familiar. These restless broken streets where definitions fail — the houses the outhouses of white suburbs, two-windows-one-door, multiplied in institutional rows; the hovels with tin lean-tos sheltering huge old American cars blowzy with gadgets; the fancy suburban burglar bars on mean windows of tiny cabins; the roaming children, wolverine dogs, hobbled donkeys, fat naked babies, vagabond chickens and drunks weaving, old men staring, authoritative women shouting, boys in rags, tarts in finery, the smell of offal cooking, the neat patches of mealies between shebeen yards stinking of beer and urine, the litter of twice-discarded possessions, first thrown out by the white man and then picked over by the black — is this conglomerate urban or rural? No electricity in the houses, a telephone an almost impossible luxury: is this a suburb or a strange kind of junk yard? The enormous backyard of the whole white city, where categories and functions lose their ordination and logic, the ox and the diesel engine, the pig rootling for human ordure and the slaughterer, are milled about together. Are the tarts really tarts, or just factory workers or servants from town performing the miracle of emerging dolled-up and scented, a parody of any white madam, from these shelters where there is no bathroom? Are the ragged boys their brothers? Their children, conceived with lovers in a corner of a room where brothers and sisters sleep? Which are the gangsters, which the glue-sniffers among the young men on street-corners? Who are the elderly men in pressed trousers and ties who sit drinking beer and arguing on a row of formica chairs on the strip of dirt between a house and the street?

I used to know, or think I knew. Baasie looked like one of these children because they were black, like him. He came from streets like these and he has disappeared into them. He is a man, somewhere like this.

The little house into which we were crowded, family, relatives, friends and furniture — familiarity placed it for me without thinking, the bigger type of standard two-roomed township house, three rooms and a kitchen, for which people have to be able to afford (Fats I remembered was a boxing promoter) a bribe to an official. The diningroom ‘suite’, the plastic pouffes, hi-fi equipment, flowered carpet, bar counter, and stools covered in teddybear fur were the units of taste established by any furniture superama in the white city. The crowding of one tiny habitation with a job-lot whose desirability is based on a consumer-class idea of luxury without the possibility of middle-class space and privacy; the lavish whisky on the table and the pot-holed, unmade street outside the window; the sense all around of the drab imposed orderliness of a military camp that is not challenged by the home-improvement peach trees and licks of pastel paint but only by the swarming persistence of children and drunks dirtying it, tsotsis, urchins and gangsters terrorizing it — this commonplace of any black township became to me what it is: a ‘place’; a position whose contradictions those who impose them don’t see, and from which will come a resolution they haven’t provided for. The propositions of the faithful that seem so vital to biographical research — I understood them in a way theory doesn’t explain, in a way I was deaf to earlier in the afternoon when I was being questioned by my father’s biographer. The debate that divided my parents and their associates in a passion whose reality you regard as abstraction far removed from reality; it was based on the fact that they did see. They had always seen. And they believe — Dick and Ivy — they know the resolution and how it will be. Clare still believes; if Lionel lived, if he were to have come out of prison to answer—

But I can’t bring Lionel into being for myself, I can’t hear responses I ought, on the evidence of biographical data, to be able to predict. After a year, there are new.components, now that I have taken apart the whole. I’ll never be able to ask my mother, reading her book in the car and hearing my footsteps on the prison gravel, my father opening his arms to Baasie and me in the water, the things I defy them to answer me.

Around me was talk about the selection of black athletes to go abroad with white teams. The argument among the men jumped like a fire-cracker. It landed at my feet; Fats, losing his domination of raised voices, demanded response — My boy has a chance to meet the big boys in West Germany and America — why must I say no?—