Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

— They’ll be a mixed crowd of females. God knows. All kinds, I hope. But concerned. We’ve more or less restricted it to representatives of various organizations, with a few outstanding individuals, old Daphne Mkhonza, yes — we don’t just want a lot of do-gooders and church women, we must drop white urban values and rope in some of the toughies with guts, the flamboyant ones. I wish the shebeen queens would come; and white prostitutes — why not? I don’t delude myself we’ll reach the radical black girls in the student movements, though I’ve got a hopeful contact or two for Turfloop and the Western Cape. Never mind. Even if we can close up a bit — close the hiatus between the politically-aware young women, those smashing black girls with the holoha hairdos — don’t you love the way they look? That sort of ‘Topsy, and fuck-you’—and the ordinary black woman. Get her to regard herself as someone who can do something again, you’re too young to remember, but the women’s movement in the ANC was a force — and at the same time get these white suburban good souls (basically, they’re really concerned) to tackle human rights as women… together… I think it’s possible to tap new resources, maybe — Eunice Harwood’s terrifyingly professional, isn’t she? — Flora had me to herself for a quick briefing away from the others; we buttered scones.

I kept out of the way while people were arriving; William and I sat with the cold coffee cups from lunch, in the little paved courtyard Flora has made off the diningroom, hearing car doors bang and the eager pitch of welcome, the breathy laughter and African organ-note murmur of polite responses, and the enumerative intoning by which introductions could be recognized without names being audible to us. Both too comfortable — too marginal — to get up, he to demonstrate, I to see for myself, we discussed pointing from our chairs how he decided which shoots to train where on the plants he has espaliered against the walls. — Don’t you think pomegranates hanging down, that red against the white-wash… I want to have a go with a pomegranate. You’ve seen those miles of peach and pear espaliered on frames along the roads of the Po valley — considerate William at once shifted the tactless reference to the ease with which he could go about the world, making over the question into a small marital joke — Don’t see why it’s any more unnatural for a pomegranate to be trained to grow in a regular pattern, do you? Flora keeps accusing me, but then so’s it ‘unnatural’ to prune any tree. — The arrivals seemed all to be behind doors, now; each catching the other’s eye, we giggled quietly. — Quite a mob. — William assumes in me an affectionate tolerance like his own, for Flora’s activities, which he himself is supposed to have circumscribed. When I put down my section of the Guardian Weekly we were sharing and went indoors he looked across from the sheets he held but said nothing. The moment in which he might have questioned where I was going was really made by me; I caught myself, an instant almost of shame, in the misreading his concern would be victim of. But I had always made free of their home; I might just as well be going upstairs for a doze on the bed in ‘my’ room or to the downstairs lavatory with the Amnesty International poster for contemplation on the back of the door.

I skirted Flora’s assembly and sat down at the back. The meeting had just begun. After the cube of courtyard sun, dark breathing splotches furred with light transformed the big livingroom. Everyone — I began to see them properly — bunched together in the middle and back seats, the black women out of old habit of finding themselves allotted secondary status and the white ones out of anxiety not to assume first place. Flora’s gay and jostling objections started a screech of chairs, general forward-shuffle and talk; I was all right where I was — her quick attention took me in, a bird alert from the height of a telephone pole. After the addresses of the white woman lawyer and a black social welfare officer, a pretty, syrup-eyed Indian with a soft roll of midriff flesh showing in her seductive version of the dress of Eastern female subjection, spoke about uplift and sisterhood. Flora kept calling upon people — masterly at pronouncing African names — to speak from the floor. Some were trapped hares in headlights but there were others who sat forward on the hired chairs straining to attract attention. A white-haired dame with the queenly coy patience of an old charity chairwoman kept holding up a gilt ballpoint. Along my half-empty row a black woman urged between the whispers of two friends could not be got to speak.

In respectful silences for the weakness of our sex, the flesh that can come upon any of us as women, black matrons were handed slowly, backside and belly, along past knees to the table where Flora had a microphone rigged up. Others spoke from where they sat or stood, suddenly set apart by the gift of tongues, while the faces wheeled to see. The old white woman’s crusade turned out to be road safety, a campaign in which ‘our Bantu women must pull together with us’—she trembled on in the sweet, chuckly voice of a deaf upper-class Englishwoman while Flora tried to bring the discourse to an end with flourishing nods. A redhead whose expression was blurred by freckles floral as her dress asked passionately that the meeting launch a Courtesy Year to promote understanding between the races. She had her slogan ready, SMILE AND SAY THANKS. There was a soft splutter of tittering crossed by a groan of approval like some half-hearted response in church, but a young white woman jumped up with fists at her hips — Thank you for what? Maybe the lady has plenty to thank for. But was the object of action for women to make black women ‘thankful’ for the hovels they lived in, the menial jobs their men did, the inferior education their children got? Thankful for the humiliation dealt out to them by white women living privileged, protected lives, who had the vote and made the laws — And so on and so on. I saw her falter, lose concentration as three black girls in jeans who had only just come in got up and walked out as if they had come to the wrong place. A white woman had thrust up an arm for permission to speak — We don’t need to bring politics into the fellowship of women. — Applause from the group with whom she sat. Black matrons ignored both the white girl and black girls, busily briefing each other in the susurrations and gutturals, clicks and quiet exclamations of their own languages. They responded only to the sort of housewives’ league white ladies who stuck to health services and ‘commodity price rises in the family budget’ as practical problems that were women’s lot, like menstruation, and did not relate them to any other circumstances. The black ladies’ fear of drawing attention as ‘agitators’ and the white ladies’ determination to have ‘nothing to do’ with the politics that determined the problems they were talking about, made a warmth that would last until the teacups cooled. Dressed in their best, one after another, black women in wigs and two-piece dresses pleaded, were complaining, opportuning for the crèches, orphans, blind, crippled or aged of their ‘place’. They asked for ‘old’ cots, ‘old’ school primers, ‘old’ toys and furniture, ‘old’ braille typewriters, ‘old’ building material. They had come through the front door but the logic was still of the back door. They didn’t believe they’d get anything but what was cast-off; they didn’t, any of them, believe there was anything else to be had from white women, it was all they were good for.

And all the time those blacks like the elderly one near me, in her doek with Thursday church badges pinned to it, a piece cut out of her left shoe to ease a bunion, a cardigan smelling of coal-smoke and a shopping bag stuffed with newspaper parcels, listened to no one; were there; offered only their existence, as acknowledgment of speakers, listeners and the meaning of the gathering. It was enough. They didn’t know why they were there, but as cross-purpose and unimaginable digressions grew louder with each half-audible, rambling or dignified or unconsciously funny discourse, clearer with each voluble inarticulacy, each clumsy, pathetic or pompous formulation of need in a life none of us white women (careful not to smile at broken English) live or would know how to live, no matter how much Flora protests the common possession of vaginas, wombs and breasts, the bearing of children and awful compulsive love of them — the silent old blacks still dressed like respectable servants on a day off, although they were sitting in Flora’s room, these were everything Flora’s meeting was not succeeding to be about. The cosmetic perfumes of the middle-class white and black ladies and the coal-smoke and vaginal odours of old poor black women — I shifted on the hard chair, a deep breath in Flora’s livingroom took this draught inside me.