Nadine Gordimer - July's People

She blinked slowly two or three times. — I think July was talking about himself.—

— Himself? How? — Now she was actually saying something, not provoking him to give himself away in some manner he didn’t understand; he didn’t want either to slip the frail noose or tighten it on himself by the wrong reaction.

— He always did what whites told him. The pass office. The police. Us. How will he not do what blacks tell him, even if he has to kill his cows to feed the freedom fighters.—

— But it will come better from them. — (Some of the old phrases were real.) — For his own people. Even if they do need the help of the Cubans and Russians to bring it about.—

— So July won’t fight any Holy Wars for that old man. He didn’t murder us in our beds and he won’t be a warrior for his tribe, either.—

— Oh murder us in our beds! — Moving after her along this track and that, losing her. — You don’t think (he stopped) you’re not thinking he was a sell-out to bring us here — are you? Not that?—

— What do the blacks think? What will the freedom fighters think? Did he join the people from Soweto? He took his whites and ran. You make me laugh. You talk as if we weren’t hiding, we weren’t scared to go farther than the river?—

— Of course we’re hiding. From (his neck stiffened, his head shuddered frustration rather than shook denial) — from … temporary rage and senseless death. He’s hiding us.—

— He’s been mixed up with us for fifteen years. No one will ever be able to disentangle that, so long as he’s alive; is that it? A fine answer to give the blacks who are getting killed to set him free.—

— Good god! He runs the risk of getting killed himself, for having us here! Although I don’t think he realizes, luckily …—

— Then we’d better go.—

She was looking at him as he had never seen her before, with dead eyes, triumphantly, as if he had killed her himself, expecting nothing of him. — So we’d better go, then. You can’t be a mercenary. He didn’t join his own people in town.—

The two of them were regarding — he himself was conscious of — a heavy blond man, his reddened skull wrinkled with anguish above angry eyes. — Where? Where?—

At the same instant both heard (again, strangely, the couple in the master bedroom about to be burst in upon while making love on Sunday morning) the approaching voices of their children.

But she would not let him avoid the logical conclusion of his question. She was telling him as Royce raced up, prancing, tripping and shadow-boxing one of his own heroic fantasies of adult life: —How. And how?—

The white woman did not understand they were going to cut grass, not gather leaves for boiling. She followed, and pointed at the old woman’s sickle, silver-black, slick as a snake’s tongue, with cowhide thongs woven round the hand-piece. It had been taken down from the dark of the special hut where the wooden yoke and chains for the plough-oxen were kept. Martha had her one-year-old hump of baby on her back and on her head an enamel basin with a small machete, cold pap tied in a cloth, and an old orange-squash bottle filled with a pale mixture of water, powdered milk and tea. She shaped for the white woman the few Afrikaans words she could find; these included a slang catch-all brought back from the mines and cities by men of the village who were the gang labourers of poorly-educated white foremen: Dingus , thing, whatsis-name. — Vir die huis. Daardie dingus. — Her hands were free, her head steady under its heavy crown, she lifted elbows and sketched the pitch of a roof. The old woman half-closed her faded eyes and growled low and friendly affirmation. While her daughter-in-law tried to satisfy the questions of this white woman who had had to be taught the difference between a plant that even a cow knew better than to chew, and the leaves that would make her children strong, the old woman had the chance to look at her closely in the satisfying, analytical way she didn’t often get without the woman disguising herself by trying, with her smiles and gestures, to convey respect etc. as she thought this was done by black people. July had told his mother again and again, the white woman was different at home. He meant that place that had a white china room to do your business in, even he had one in the yard. She had never worked for whites — only in weeding parties on their farms, and there in the lands they didn’t tell her where to go and do it. She wouldn’t be told that by whites!

The grass was the correct height, the weather neither too damp nor too hot and dry — exactly right for cutting thatching grass, and she, who knew the best sources for all the materials she used for her brooms and her roofs, was on her way to a stretch up-river she had been watching for weeks. Since before her son brought his white people. She grinned with top lip pursed rubbery down over her empty gums and pointed a first finger as if to prod the white woman in the chest: You, yes you.

But the white woman didn’t understand she meant the grass was to thatch the house the white woman had taken from her. Martha reproached her mother-in-law in their language; yet it was true; and she could say what she liked, anyway, the woman understood nothing. The poor thing, the nhwanyana (July’s mother used the term, my lady , that had come down to her attached to any white female face, from the conquests of the past), the white woman was grinning back to show she had taken up the joke, whatever she imagined it was … They have money, let them go to their relatives, to other white people, if they’re in trouble: the old woman talked as the little party went through the bush. If her daughter-in-law didn’t or wouldn’t listen, the words became simply a refrain.

— Now they have been there. He’s greeted them.—

Several days after he had taken the white people to visit the chief, July’s wife spoke to July of what she was thinking. She was not used to having him present to communicate with directly; there was always the long wait for his answering letter, a time during which she said to herself in different ways what it was she had wanted and tried to tell him in her letters. Once she sent a telegram. There had been trouble with her younger brother; fighting, and a hut burned. But the man who knew how to go to the white farm store that was also a post office said never mind, he knew what you said in telegrams, and wrote MOTHER VERY SICK COME HOME.

Now her man was in her hut, she was giving him his food, he was there to look at her when she said something. — The chief can give them a place in his village, then.—

When July didn’t answer at once she couldn’t wait. — Perhaps he’s going to.—

Trying to hem him in with her reasoning; she thought she was chasing a chicken? — Why should the chief do that? Who told you that?—

— Nobody told me. — After a moment: —You took them there.—

— So you yourself are the one who thinks the chief will give them a house.—

— Did you ask him?—

He scooped and balled the pap vigorously between his fingers and ate a mouthful; lifted a graceful smeared hand to show he would have something to say in a moment, in a moment.

She could wait; perhaps he was trying to think of an answer to all the questions she might have for him, who had learned so much she did not know.

— You are the one who is asking him. Aren’t you? Not me. I saw, you’ve put the bundles of thatching grass outside their house — all right, mhani ’s house, I know. But why did you do that? — He added what both knew was not the reason for his objection. — Their children are playing with it. It will all be broken and spoiled. You’ll waste your work.—