Carole did not know that her cousin was home from a party, had come into their bedroom and slid into her own bed.
Sasha switched on the witness of his lamp and searched his sheets for frail dark question-mark hairs that Bettie, who insisted on making his bed as a holiday treat for him, would recognize as not his brassy-blond sheddings. He did not want to be reminded — to have to remember in the morning.
Opportunities
Hillela could have been like anybody else. She had the opportunity. The same opportunity as Carole and Sasha. Or Olga’s spoilt children — if that had been what she preferred. She was a white child, with choices; that was the irony of it. Young blacks had no choice, only necessity and plenty of ignorance about how to deal with that, in addition. Alpheus was so ambitious, so eager to better himself, become a lawyer, and now he had to saddle himself with a girl and baby on the way. — The trouble is we’re much too timid in these matters. Scared of appearing to boss them around — but, in the end, it’s not a kindness or a respect. When I saw the girl was living there, I should have told Alpheus straight out that he must take her to a birth control clinic. I should’ve taken her myself.—
Joe always listened to Pauline patiently. — Oh come on.—
— Well, damn it all, I’m paying for his courses, maybe I should use that to stop him making things impossible for himself. Nineteen years old. A baby, and next year another baby, how will he support them on a clerk’s salary? We undertook to subsidise his studies, not a family.—
— Oh ma, it’ll be lovely to have a little baby— Carole had pleaded happily, like that, for a puppy or a kitten.
— Oh lovely. A squalling infant while he’s supposed to be studying for exams. I fixed up the garage so’s he wouldn’t have to live in a crowded location room, so’s he’d have the kind of working conditions you kids have.—
— Bettie says, God has sent a child, what can you do. — Hillela quoted, and she and Carole laughed.
— She knows damn well. I had her fitted with a loop years ago. Alpheus’s poor mother, doing four washes a week—
— And breaking the washing machine once a month. — Joe settled back into his soft chin philosophically.
— Rebecca’s beaming all over, ma, she says her son is going to have a clever son like himself.—
— Poor old Rebecca! Where’s he going to find to live? — Pauline’s defiant eyes, questioning — them alclass="underline" the room, the walls, and beyond. Philosophers like her husband had no answers, they knew only how to accept problems. Carole was a good enough little girl without the originality to swerve aside and seek answers to her mother’s questioning, which she followed as naturalists say a duckling follows the first pair of feet it sees when it hatches. And Hillela — when did that intelligent girl (more intelligent than her own daughter, Pauline confessed confidentially to Joe; an intelligence more like Pauline’s own than that Carole had inherited) when did the girl receive questions, or the possibility of answers, as addressed to her? — A whole family pushed into a garage in the yard. We can’t have them here living under conditions as bad as those in a location. That wasn’t the intention. Alpheus knows it. Rebecca knows it.—
If Sasha had been there he might have answered Pauline.
When Sasha was home Joe had to think of conversation that would start up their father-and-son relationship again; the battery went flat in the long partings, he himself away where the clamorous struggle between power and powerlessness was reduced to a sleepy hum and rustle of courtrooms through whose high windows light slanted as in a church, the boy away at that school for the future which had to be hidden in a little green African kingdom belonging to the 19th century. Joe had come out of his working cubbyhole on a Sunday morning. They were stretched on the grass drinking beer together. Joe mentioned young Alpheus had moved a girl into the garage and got her pregnant — Pauline felt she ought to have done something about it.
Sasha rolled right over before he spoke. — Emasculate him?—
A response lifted clean out of some five-finger-exercise liberation theology picked up from black boys at the school. It was easy for a youngster like Joe’s to see things that priggishly hysterical way. Joe patiently ignored, patiently explained. — He’s had a poor schooling and it’s a hell of a struggle for him to keep up with the courses he’s doing. She’s absolutely right, the last thing he needs is a wife and kid as well. If he were a white boy, we’d all be calling it hopelessly irresponsible, and that’s what it is. Towards his mother, to us, as well as himself. But what can one do.—
This question was not a question, was the summation of more than the small nuisance of Alpheus. Adults, who always knew what the children should do, at this time were withdrawn, in the presence of the children, into a state of waiting to be told or given a sign. For themselves. In various countries and eras children understand marriage as what it is for their parents in that place and period. Living with Pauline and Joe, the children saw that the meaning of marriage was that Pauline and Joe expected this sign from one another. The volume of the cheerful, restless house was turned down (as Pauline would sometimes stride into the girls’ room, pulling a mock-agonized face, and turn down the volume of their record-player). The rooms strewn with evidence of everyone’s activities were under dustsheets of adult preoccupation. The newspapers Pauline and Joe read and had always let pile up beside sofa and chairs, where they served in place of Olga’s coffee tables, gave information but no guidance. Carole lifted her head like a young buck alert to something — what, it does not yet know — the mature animals have noticed, and Hillela went on with her translation of Tartarin de Tarascon while Pauline read out aloud to Joe: —‘I don’t want to be equal with Europeans. I want them to call us baas. I wish I can live till we rule, I will do the same to them: I will send the police to demand passes from whites. Their wives are going to wash the clothes for our wives. We don’t want to mix with whites, we left the African National Congress because we saw Europeans among us. We are fighting for the full rights of Africans. We do not fight to dance and sit with Europeans.’—
— The government bans a non-racial movement like the ANC, it gets black racists as primitive as its white ones. It bans again; and an even worse reaction will come. Are you surprised?—
When Pauline left the drawbridge down and the watchtowers unguarded she had been at a conference where blacks sat with whites. Only as an observer — she had got in with the help of black friends — the Chief had been a guest in her house. The civil rights organization to which she belonged was one of those that had decided not to take part; they said the All-In African Conference was a front, dominated by communists who had indoctrinated and infiltrated the African National Congress and its allies.
There were chants and freedom songs one didn’t need to know the language to respond to with an almost physical expansion of being; after having been shut away, so white, so long. For herself, she came back home with ‘Nelson Mandela’s words in my ears, something you can’t stop hearing’. Carole and Hillela saw her unblinking hunter’s eyes stilled and magnified with real tears when she played the tape she had run while the man spoke for the first time in nine years (he had just been released from bans) to the assembly of all colours, to the government, and to the whole country. He knew what he could do. He called for a national convention. — Explain to the girls what that is, Joe. — And Joe explained that a national convention would be that meeting to culminate all meetings, one where white leaders from up there in the House of Parliament in Cape Town (on holiday one year, Olga had pointed out to Hillela and her sons the beautiful white building among oak trees) and black leaders emerged from prison, Underground and exile would decide in a proper and constitutional manner upon the dismantling of apartheid. Sasha, Carole and Hillela had been taken to see a court in session, once. While Joe explained, they would be visualizing something rather like that, the solemnity at mahogany tables, the carafes of water, the security men standing round the walls to keep intruders from shouting we do not fight to dance and sit with Europeans.