Authors: Beverley Naidoo
“You can get my bags out the back and carry them to my room.” Papa simply gave a slight nod. It was impossible to tell what he was thinking. His lined face remained quite impassive as father and son carried the young white man’s cases.
Before long it was apparent that Williams assumed Esi to be his personal servant. Up till now Esi had taken instructions either from his father or Mackay, who had known him since he was little. But this man’s manner was different. He didn’t seem to care at all who Esi was. It was as if he was just a thing to be used.
Much of the time Williams would sit on the veranda outside Mackay’s room, legs stretched out on a stool, a can of beer at his side, while cleaning or fiddling with Mackay’s gun.
“Hey, come clean my boots!”
“You can wash the truck now!”
“Make my bed properly,
jong
! Don’t just pull the sheets up like that!”
“Do you call these boots clean? If you were in the army I’d donder you! Do them again!”
“Go call the girl! I want her to do my washing this morning.”
At the last order, Esi had to fight to control himself. Who did this man think he was? Didn’t he know that “the girl” was Esi’s own mother, old enough to be the white man’s mother? When Esi found her, busy collecting wild spinach, his anger spilled out.
She tried to calm him. His temper would get him into trouble. He should try to be like his father.
“Papa just lets them push him around. I don’t want to be like that!”
“Ha! What else can you do my young man?”
And with that his mother began walking slowly, steadily, toward the camp to collect the dirty washing.
It was soon clear that Williams was a heavy drinker. He had brought his personal supply, Papa and Esi having unpacked half a dozen crates of beer and other drink from the Land Rover. On the first night, as Esi passed by in the dark, he had looked into the lit-up sitting room and seen Mackay’s
special cabinet, usually kept locked, wide open with a half-full bottle of whiskey on the table. Next morning there was an empty bottle in the bin.
Nor was it easy to get to sleep. The heavy silence of the bushveld night usually covered everything like a thick blanket of darkness, except for the customary night sounds—twitchings and chitterings, the odd screech or howl. But now that silence was shattered with a radio blaring out music across the camp into the bush until after midnight.
When Hendriks arrived one afternoon, Williams invited him to have some beer.
“Hell man, I’m glad to see someone! How d’you live in this godforsaken place? I must’ve been off my head to say yes to the old man!”
The two men sat drinking and smoking on the veranda. Esi stayed out of sight, but within hearing. While he appeared to be polishing the black boots, he was listening intently for any news about the armed guerrillas who had escaped. It seemed they still hadn’t been captured and the search was being concentrated further south.
Williams made out to Hendriks that he was patrolling the farm himself. It was a lie. He had only been down to the water hole a couple of
times, Mackay’s gun slung from his shoulder. Esi and Papa had gone along with him, soon gathering that all Williams really wanted was to shoot a kudu bull, for a prize pair of horns like Mackay’s. When Papa had mentioned that this wasn’t the season for culling, for once Williams hadn’t said anything. But Esi suspected that if a kudu came his way, he’d shoot.
Williams didn’t only take over Esi’s life. He began to give orders to Papa on the running of the farm. Papa kept quiet at first, fitting in the new instructions with what he normally did.
But the day after Hendriks’s visit, when Williams ordered Papa to go to the shop at Mapoteng for cigarettes, Papa replied that he had planned to do a thorough tour of the farm that day. Something in his careful observations had made him uneasy. It would take him over two hours on the old bicycle just to get to Mapoteng. Perhaps the boss would let one of the other workers go? However, Esi heard Williams insist that it should be Papa.
“Don’t you think I can manage here on my own?” he rasped.
Esi stopped sweeping the yard. He willed his
father to answer back. Instead, his father, grim faced but silent, slowly mounted the bicycle and rode off.
Esi began sweeping again. He jabbed the broom fiercely at the ground, causing the dust to scatter and fly, the anger he felt spilling out. How did Papa remain calm? Even before this man came, Papa had to play the same game with Mackay. “Boss-boy!” “Boy!” Yet if Mackay never came to the farm, Papa could still keep it running. Still, Mackay wasn’t vicious like the man his daughter wanted to marry. What would happen if they did get married? Would Williams take over the farm? But whoever owned the place, Esi didn’t want to be their policeman. Dust swirling up and around, he began to feel despair choking him.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing? Can’t you sweep properly? Hurry up with that job. I want you to come with me.”
With the gun slung at his side, and binoculars hanging around his neck, Williams set off through the bush, followed by Esi.
There were no animals at the water hole. In the heat of the day, they would take to whatever shade they could find, coming for water only when the sun was going down. Williams thrust forward on
his way to the other side of the water and began to follow a track through long dry grass and thorn trees up a low slope. With his father, Esi usually felt confident, Papa would move very quietly, always alert against possible danger. He could trust Papa’s reactions despite his being unarmed.
Now, however, Esi felt nervous. Williams was too much on edge. At a sudden movement in the nearby bush, Esi froze. Williams whirled around, swinging the gun forward. But before he could locate his target, Esi had already looked into the wide eyes of a terrified little steenbuck, flickering past him through the tall grass. The gun was almost pointing at Esi before Williams lowered it, grunting a curse. This man was mad. Esi decided to lag as far behind him as possible.
As they moved further and further from the water hole, Esi wondered whether Williams could find his way back. He was probably expecting to get his bearings from the top of the low hill since most of the land around was fairly flat.
Once at the top, Williams walked to the edge of the ridge overlooking the other side. He scanned the veld below for a few minutes with his binoculars.
“
Ja!
There he is! What a beaut!”
Esi followed the direction of the binoculars. His eyes trailed along a dry riverbed, searching the bush on its banks. Suddenly a slight movement defined the subtle curves of a gray kudu bull, its horns like converging branches. Lowering the binoculars, Williams signaled the way.
It was while they were still descending the ridge that Esi noticed what looked like a cave. There was no time to investigate. However, he also observed that the grass seemed flattened in a patch around the cave. Looking back for a second or two, he steadied himself by lightly touching the branch of a tree. As he lifted his hand off the branch, careful to avoid the thorns, a piece of brown thread caught his eye. It was wool, as though a piece from someone’s clothing had caught on the thorn. Whose was it? At that point Williams turned and whispered fiercely, “Hurry up,
jong
! I’ll donder you if you make me lose him.”
Esi’s mind was now racing as he struggled to keep pace with Williams. Poachers wouldn’t need a cave. They would come and go as quickly as possible, simply to set and collect from their traps. Their safety lay in merging back into Mapoteng. Maybe someone else had been hiding here. Esi could feel his heart pumping rapidly as he recalled
the conversation on the veranda. The MKs still hadn’t been captured. If he was Papa, he would contact Hendriks right away so the matter could be reported.
Williams turned around again.
“Come on, you….”
Before he could finish, he had tripped over an out-stretched tree root. A sharp, ear-splitting crack lashed the air, followed by a howl of pain. Williams’ body lurched forward and struck the ground, the gun hurtling away on impact. When Esi reached him, he was squirming in the rough tall grass, clutching the leg he had shot.
“God,
jong
!…The safety catch came undone!…Help me tie something around…”
Esi held back, watching as Williams struggled to tear off his shirt and tightly bandage his lower leg. The pain showed on his face.
“What’re you waiting for? Help me up,
jong
!”
Still Esi hesitated, caught by an angry desire to laugh out loud at the helplessness of this man normally so high and mighty. Shot by his own gun—or Mackay’s gun, what did it matter! When Esi did kneel down, Williams saw, perhaps for the first time, the contempt in the young man’s eyes.
“You’re strong enough to help me, damn it, aren’t you?”
But as Williams began to put his weight on Esi in levering himself up, Esi suddenly let himself go limp….
No. He was not going to help this man.
Williams bellowed and swore at Esi personally and “the whole bloody lot of you.” The curses seemed to hang above them, echoing in the hot, otherwise silent bushveld air. Esi could see a dangerous look in Williams’s eyes, as if the white man would have liked to crush him, injure him in some way too. He began to struggle to get away, but Williams was clutching him, forcing him down. With the white man’s powerful hand edging toward his throat, Esi managed to free one leg, kick Williams on his wound, and wriggle free as a fearful scream rang in his ears.
Esi was shaking as he got to his feet. He saw the gun lying on the ground and almost without thinking picked it up and began to stumble back toward the ridge. His last image was of Williams trying to force himself up, groaning and cursing, with blood seeping through the makeshift bandage.
His mind was in turmoil. He couldn’t go back to
the camp now. When it was found out what he had done, he would be arrested, surely beaten up and sentenced to years in jail. He’d heard plenty about jail in Mapoteng. In the white court all the sympathy would be for Williams. And if the man by any chance died?…Esi’s mind blanked out. He didn’t even know why he had taken the gun.
It had all happened so quickly. It seemed he had always been trapped and now he could quite easily be destroyed. Williams was like the soldiers who smashed up his aunty’s house. He thought he had a right to push Esi around, while Esi had no right to disobey. Yes, Esi hated him and his power that ensnared all their lives. He didn’t want to be like Papa, powerless, accepting the trap just so they could all keep on living—in the trap. Even maintaining the trap by catching poachers, black people like themselves, only starving. “Such is the desperation of hunger….” He could hear Papa’s own voice at the end of the leopard story. But how could you ever escape?
Esi came to the bottom of the ridge. He flopped down to rest against a boulder in a stony gulley, his head in his hands, Mackay’s gun at his side. He must stop and think. He was going in the wrong
direction, back towards the camp. Ah! He’d forgotten about the cave. What if those two MKs had been there, were there? Surely they were trying to escape the trap. They had arms. Arms against arms. At least they had a chance…. So why shouldn’t he have the gun? In Mapoteng he’d heard songs about young people going for “training” outside the country. Somehow they found their way across the border. From here it was to the east. What was it like? The high barbed-wire fence around the police station in Mapoteng? What about guards? Police and soldiers would surely be like flies on meat in the area near the border. He would have to travel by night….
Sitting alone in the gulley at the bottom of the ridge, Esi slowly realized that he had made his choice. He had made it at the moment he had let his body go limp, refusing to support Williams. There was no going back now. If only he could say good-bye to his family…hug them, especially his mother…for a last time try and explain to Papa. But it could not be. He would simply climb up to the cave…find out what was there…perhaps have a sleep…and at night, set out east, with the gun.
1995
The word “dead!” struck Rosa as she drew near the cluster of children on the other side of the fence. She looked up and saw a boy pointing his forefinger at her through the criss-cross wire fence. He pulled his finger back sharply while his cheeks and lips exploded a short pistol blast. For a second she hesitated, her heart racing. She wanted to run. But that’s what they were waiting for. Instead she forced herself to glance at all their faces. The narrow knife-gray eyes of Trigger-boy glinted with spite from under his corn-tassel fringe. But the others were more curious. Like cats hoping to play with a mouse.
Trigger-boy screwed up his mouth, preparing some new missile. Rosa pressed her lips tightly. She made herself walk steadily on, shifting her gaze into the playground behind the fence. Why shouldn’t she look inside if she chose? But with the children’s laughter now breaking behind her, she
felt hot and angry. They seemed about her own age. Eleven…some even younger. And it was to their school that Mama wanted her to go after Christmas! She and Mama had read the words of the white head teacher in the newspaper. He didn’t like the new law from the new government. Too bad, said Mama. He would have to obey it. When the new school year began in January, he must open the doors of his school. Mama wasn’t prepared to wait a day longer for her own daughter to be admitted.
The playground was alive with chasing, skipping, running, shouting. A few children sat quietly on benches in the shade of lacy jacarandas that formed a boundary of pale-green giant umbrellas between the tarmac and the playing fields. The well-kept grass stretched from the main road as far as a line of distant blue gums. They were the same tall gray trees that Rosa saw as she crossed the rough dry veld separating the township where she and Mama lived from what she had always known as the white people’s town.
It was lunch break at Oranje Primary School. Inside the grand double-storied, orange-brick building with its neat rows of sparkling windows, children had
classes both morning and afternoon. Not like in her school.
Her
school in the township had so many pupils they had to take turns to use the classrooms! When she and her classmates finished lessons at twelve, the afternoon children were just arriving. There was no playground to talk of, just a stretch of dry ground and a few straggly cactus plants in front of a long row of single-story classrooms.
Rosa eyed a group of girls around a net-ball post, one poised on her toes with upstretched arm taking aim. Normally she would have stopped or slowed down to watch. Or she would spend a little time looking out for Hennie. Usually she only had to check through the boys chasing after a ball. It was a little game that she still played, seeing if she could spot him. Of course, he never saw her. Or if he did, he never let on.
“
Dumela,
sis!”
The boy who sold newspapers to passing motorists at the corner lights called out to Rosa as she approached. His dark eyes, set deep in a pinched nut-brown face, seemed concerned. Had he seen? The road was quiet, and he was standing next to his stack of papers in a faded blue T-shirt pitted with holes.
“Dumela!”
Rosa tried to smile before turning the corner.
She broke into a jog. She could no longer be seen by Trigger-boy’s gang from here, and she wanted to get away as quickly as possible. On her left, iron railings with slim black spearheads protected the stern archway entrance to Oranje Primary School. Even the yellow roses were forbidding, standing like soldiers in straight lines.
Rosa didn’t want to be late. Hennie’s mother might deduct something from the few rands she was paying her to look after the twins.
When Mevrou van Niekerk had asked Mama some months ago if Rosa could help for a few hours every day after she finished morning school, Rosa had been upset. She never wanted to go back there! She had never forgotten Hennie’s father and the words he had said all those years ago. But Mama had pointed out they would need every cent in the New Year. President Mandela’s new law might say that all government schools would be open to every child, but Mama knew the people of Oranje.
“They’ll tell us there’s this fund and that fund. But we’ll be ready. They’re not going to keep their
Oranje Primary School just for their Hennies. It’s going to be for my Rosa too!”
Only a few months earlier, for the first time in her life, Mama had stood in the same long winding queue as Hennie’s parents and the other white townfolk, waiting to cast her vote for their new government. A “rainbow government,” Mama told Rosa. A government that would make sure her daughter could attend a school with enough classrooms, teachers, desks, books, and playing fields for everyone. The school that the white parents had kept just for their own children would have to become a “rainbow school.” Mama had laughed.
At first Rosa had felt excited. She and her friends talked about what it would be like to go to a school that had been “whites only.” But the nearer it got to the end of term and the start of the new school year, the more Rosa began to worry. Parents in the township were beginning to change their minds about sending their children to Oranje Primary after Christmas. Her best friend Thato’s parents wanted to “wait and see.” Maybe the new government would send extra teachers to their own school. Maybe there would be money to build new classrooms and buy books.
There were rumors of trouble. Someone’s father had overheard talk of a “White School Defense Committee.” Nearly every white home in Oranje had at least one gun locked in a safe. Rosa herself had seen burly red-faced men in town with pistols strapped to their belts. Often they dressed from head to foot in khaki. With their wide-brimmed khaki hats they appeared like characters from old war films. Mama had told her to keep well out of their way. Rosa hardly needed the warning. She had never seen Hennie’s father, Meneer van Niekerk, with a gun, but she had a vivid imagination.
Mama had worked for Mevrou van Niekerk for years, and Rosa had known Hennie since they were babies. At three they had played together. Mama used to take her every weekday. While Mama cooked, cleaned, washed, and ironed, Rosa and Hennie had scampered around the garden, built castles in the sandpit, made houses in the dry donga at the end of the long garden where the bushes grew wild.
By the time Rosa and Hennie were five, Mevrou van Niekerk no longer worried if Hennie was out of her sight for an hour or two. They always came
back as soon as they were hungry, and Mama would pour them both milk and give them cakes or scones, whatever she had freshly baked. Hennie was now a big brother, and Mevrou van Niekerk was largely kept busy with her twin babies.
Usually Meneer van Niekerk left home early, before Mama and Rosa had arrived, and returned after they had left. Mama never took Rosa with her on Saturdays and Sundays. When Rosa was old enough to ask why, Mama had explained that Hennie’s father “liked quiet.” Rosa told Mama that she and Hennie could be very quiet. They could play all day in the donga. Mama had said that Hennie’s father wouldn’t like that. The few times Rosa had seen him, he had never smiled. Rosa decided she would not like to see him angry. Hennie had told her about his father’s belt. How he had beaten him with it one evening after tripping over a rope the children had tied between two paw-paw trees to practice jumping.
“I didn’t tell on you,” Hennie had told her, showing her the marks on the back of his legs with some pride. “And Ma didn’t tell him!”
“What would your daddy do to me?” Rosa had asked.
Hennie had answered by sharply sucking in his breath as he pulled back his lips to show his teeth. Rosa felt her skin tingle as they began to collect dry grass to make a roof for the new house they were making.
Their playing together had come to a sudden end when one day Meneer van Niekerk came home early. The two of them were dashing under the sprinkler, shrieking and pulling funny faces for the twins, who were sitting up in their pram and gurgling, when Hennie’s father strode across the lawn. Like a thunderstorm he swept Hennie up with one arm and began to smack him on the bottom with the flat of his other hand. Hennie’s cries of laughter turned to cries of pain.
“
Wat makeer jy?
What do you think you’re doing? Running around like a savage? Half-naked with this
piccanin
?”
The words had slapped Rosa too. Mevrou van Niekerk and Mama had both come running from the house.
“Is this how you’re letting him grow? It’s time he learnt to be a proper boy—and to know he’s a
white
boy!”
Rosa saw Mama’s shoulders rise ever so slightly.
Mama had taken Rosa silently by the hand and led her away. Above Hennie’s sobs and the babies’ cries, she heard Mevrou van Niekerk.
“They were just playing, Willem. Just children’s games. Look how you’ve frightened them.”
After that, Mama had left Rosa every day with their neighbor, Mrs. Moloi. She was a kind old lady who looked after a couple of younger children as well. Rosa liked them but missed her games with Hennie. It would not be long, said Mama, before Rosa would start at the nearby school and have lots of friends of her own age to play with. But when the new year came and Mama took Rosa, in the maroon school pinafore that had been her Christmas present, they were turned away from the township school. The head teacher had explained that there were already eighty six-year-olds in a room meant for forty. He took their names and said he was sorry but they would have to wait another year. So Rosa returned to Mrs. Moloi. Mama let her wear her school uniform. She was growing quickly and it would be wasted otherwise.
Rosa had asked Mama about Hennie.
“Is Hennie waiting to go to school, Mama?”
Mama did not answer at first, but when Rosa
asked again, she replied briefly, “No. He started at Oranje Primary.”
But only three weeks after Rosa had been turned away from the overcrowded school, a spirit of joy blossomed like an unexpected rainbow for a few days over the entire township. Neighbors and friends had crowded into their tiny sitting room, while Rosa sat wedged on Mama’s lap, watching a tall silver-haired man with a warm, serious but smiling face wave at them from their small television set. All around Rosa people were crying and laughing.
Unbelievable, they said. It was a day they had almost thought would never come. Nelson Mandela, the man the white government had locked up for life, was walking free from his prison! Here was their Madiba coming to help them. They prayed for him to chase away the heavy gray clouds thrown over their lives by the white people’s government.
When Rosa had returned to the van Niekerks’ house to look after the twins, six years after Hennie’s father had chased her away, she had dreaded seeing him again. But as Mama had
predicted, now that Rosa was just a
kleinmeid
working in the house, Meneer van Niekerk hardly noticed her. With Hennie too, she sometimes felt quite invisible.
The first time he had come home from school and seen her in the kitchen, there was a brief moment when he had seemed curious. He had even nodded a greeting. But after that he always appeared to be occupied or on his way somewhere.
At the start of the Christmas holidays, Hennie’s mother asked Rosa to help all day including Saturdays. So Rosa accompanied Mama early each morning and returned home with her in the evenings, quite exhausted. Even so, she earned only a few rands more each week for all the extra hours.
“It must be nice for you to be with your mother all day and earn some pocket money!” Mevrou van Niekerk commented one time, when handing Rosa her money. “I wish I could see as much of Hennie!”
Hennie, it seemed, spent most of his time playing rugby. Mama was forever scrubbing clothes covered in red dirt.
“He’ll be our first Springbok in the family!”
Mevrou van Niekerk said proudly to some Saturday visitors. Hennie looked a little embarrassed.
“That’s if the blacks haven’t taken all the places by then,” Meneer van Niekerk spoke as if he were tasting a lemon.
Hennie glanced at his father but did not say anything.
Another time, Rosa overheard Mevrou van Niekerk speaking to Mama in the kitchen about “this silly trouble at the school.”
“It’s good for the new government to help people. But I don’t know why they must force children together in such a hurry!”
Mama’s knife continued chopping at the same steady pace. She said nothing. Rosa marveled at how she could cover up.
All through the school holidays while working with Mama at the van Niekerks, Rosa kept hoping that Thato’s parents would let her start at Oranje Primary too. But one evening as they passed the paperboy, she read the headlines: “WHITE PARENTS TO PROTEST.” Mama stopped to buy a copy.
“Do you know that President Mandela wants
every child to be in school?” Mama asked as she handed over the coins. “When will your mother send you to school?”
“My mother is dead,” the boy said gravely. “If I go to school, I won’t have money for food.”
A car hooted and he darted away to sell another paper.
One night, just after Christmas, Rosa was rinsing the dishes under the tap in the yard, when Mama called her.
“You can finish that later! Come and watch.”
Mama patted the cushion next to her on the small sofa. Rosa curled up close. On the television an interviewer was asking children what it was like to go to a school that used to be only for white children.
“At first I was scared,” said a boy with a stylish haircut. “Ree-aally scared.”
He paused, biting his lower lip. The other children laughed nervously.
“I thought no one would be my friend. But now I have lots of friends,” he added with a broad smile.
“It was like that for me too,” said a girl with a serious bronze face and thick long black hair. “You
think no one will like you and they’re probably thinking the same.”
“Indian children go to that school too, Mama,” Rosa nudged Mama.
“And
we
were wondering what
you
would be like!” giggled a freckled, pink-cheeked girl with a mass of blond curls. “You know how people pass round stories.”