Nadine Gordimer - July's People

Beyond the clearing — the settlement of huts, livestock kraals, and the stumped and burned-off patches which were the lands — the buttock-fold in the trees indicated the river and that was the end of measured distance. Like clouds, the savannah bush formed and re-formed under the changes of light, moved or gave the impression of being moved past by the travelling eye; silent and ashy green as mould spread and always spreading, rolling out under the sky before her. There were hundreds of tracks used since ancient migrations (never ended; her family’s was the latest), not seen. There were people, wavering circles of habitation marked by euphorbia and brush hedges, like this one, fungoid fairy rings on grass — not seen. There were cattle cracking through the undergrowth, and the stillness of wild animals — all not to be seen. Space; so confining in its immensity her children did not know it was there. Royce headed a delegation: —Can’t we go to a film today? Or tomorrow? — (The postponement an inkling, the confusion of time with that other dimension, proper to this place.) Even though Gina and Victor were old enough to know cinemas had been left behind, they did not stop him asking, and sulked and quarrelled afterwards on the car-seat beds in the hut, scratching flea-bites. Maureen could not walk out into the boundlessness. Not so far as to take the dog around the block or to the box to post a letter. She could go to the river but no farther, and not often. When she did go she did so believing it better not to go at all than risk being seen, now.

July came to fetch her family’s clothes for the women to wash down there.

— I can do it myself. — They had so few, they wore so little; the children had abandoned shoes, there was no question of a fresh pair of shorts and socks every day.

But he stood in the manner of one who will not go away without what he has come for. — Then I must carry water for you, make it hot, everything.—

She saw she could not expect to be indulged, here, in any ideas he knew nothing about.

— Will your wife do it? I must pay.—

It was women’s business, in his home. His short laugh tugged tight with his fingers at the ends of the loose bundle she had made. — I don’t know who or who. But you can pay.—

— And soap? — She was cherishing a big cake of toilet soap, carefully drying it after each use and keeping it on top of the hut wall, out of reach of the children.

— I bring soap.—

Soap he had remembered to take from her store-cupboard? His clean clothes smelled of Lifebuoy she bought for them — the servants. He didn’t say; perhaps merely not to boast his foresight. She was going to ask — and quite saw she could not.

— I’ll pay for it. — Bundles of notes were bits of paper, in this place; did not represent, to her, the refrigerator full of frozen meat and ice-cubes, the newspapers, water-borne sewage, bedside lamps money could not provide here. But its meaning was not dissociated, for July’s villagers. She saw how when she or Bam, who were completely dependent on these people, had nothing but bits of paper to give them, not even clothes — so prized by the poor — to spare, they secreted the paper money in tied rags and strange crumpled pouches about their persons. They were able to make the connection between the abstract and the concrete. July — and others like him, all the able men went away to work — had been sending these bits of paper for so long and had been bringing, over fifteen years (that meant seven home-leaves), many things that bits of paper could be transformed into, from the bicycle Bam had got for him at a discount to the supermarket pink glass teacups.

July’s wife’s hut, his own hut, the huts of three or four other families within the family, their goat-kraal, the chicken-coops made of twiggy dead branches staved into the earth in a rough criss-cross of hoops, the pig-pen enclosed by the fusion of organic and inorganic barriers — thorny aloes, battered hub-caps salvaged from wrecked cars, plates of crumbling tin, mud bricks; the hut where the farming implements were kept — these were the objectives and daily landmarks available. She moved between them neither working as others did nor able to do nothing as others did. She did have one book — a thick paperback snatched up in passing, until that moment something bought years ago and never read, perhaps it was meant for this kind of situation: Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi , in translation as The Betrothed. She did not want to begin it because what would happen when she had read it? There was no other. Then she overcame the taboo (if she did not read, they would find a solution soon; if she did read the book, they would still be here when it was finished). She dragged the lame stool July had supplied ‘for the children’ out where she had a view of the bush and began. But the transport of a novel, the false awareness of being within another time, place and life that was the pleasure of reading, for her, was not possible. She was in another time, place, consciousness; it pressed in upon her and filled her as someone’s breath fills a balloon’s shape. She was already not what she was. No fiction could compete with what she was finding she did not know, could not have imagined or discovered through imagination.

They had nothing.

In their houses, there was nothing. At first. You had to stay in the dark of the hut a long while to make out what was on the walls. In the wife’s hut a wavy pattern of broad white and ochre bands. In others — she did not know whether or not she was welcome where they dipped in and out all day from dark to light like swallows — she caught a glimpse of a single painted circle, an eye or target, as she saw it. In one dwelling where she was invited to enter there was the tail of an animal and a rodent skull, dried gut, dangling from the thatch. Commonly there were very small mirrors snapping at the stray beams of light like hungry fish rising. They reflected nothing. An impression — sensation — of seeing something intricately banal, manufactured, replicated, made her turn as if someone had spoken to her from back there. It was in the hut where the yokes and traces for the plough-oxen were. She went inside again and discovered insignia, like war medals, nailed just to the left of the dark doorway. The enamel emblem’s red cross was foxed and pitted with damp, bonded with dirt to the mud and dung plaster that was slowly incorporating it. The engraved lettering on the brass arm-plaque had filled with rust. The one was a medallion of the kind presented to black miners who pass a First Aid exam on how to treat injuries likely to occur underground, the other was a black miner’s badge of rank, the highest open to him. Someone from the mines; someone had gone to the gold mines and come home with these trophies. Or they had been sent home; and where was the owner? No one lived in this hut. But someone had; had had possessions, his treasures displayed. Had gone away, or died — was forgotten or was commemorated by the evidence of these objects left, or placed, in the hut. Mine workers had been coming from out of these places for a long, long time, almost as long as the mines had existed. She read the brass arm-plaque: BOSS BOY.

The shift boss’s gang earn recognition and advancement. He is proud of his BOSS BOY; some among the succession of incumbents have been recruited again and again from the kraals, the huts, repeating the migrant worker’s nine-or eighteen-month contract for the whole period of My Jim’s own working life; on Western Areas, while his girls are growing up ambitious to be ballet dancers.

A white schoolgirl is coming across the intersection where the shops are, chewing gum and moving to the tune of summer-afternoon humming. In step beside her is a woman of the age blacks retain between youth and the time when their sturdy and comfortable breasts and backsides become leaden weight, their good thick legs slow to a stop — old age. The black woman chews gum, too; her woollen cap is over one ear and she carries on her head a school case amateurishly stencilled in blue, MAUREEN HETHERINGTON. When the black woman makes to move against the traffic light suddenly gone red, the white girl grabs her hand to stop her, and they continue to hold hands, loosely and easily, while waiting for the light to change. Then they caper across together. Lydia scarcely needs to put up the other hand to steady the heavy case; she does so as one jaunties the set of a hat.