‘ … sooner or later every action brings its retribution, in this existence or in one to come.’
Can you believe such a thing. Dump a baby in a toilet. Well it was the church toilet, whoever did it that Sunday knew when we brethren came to morning service we’d hear the crying. No-one could get hold of Welfare on a Sunday and the police — we know our police boys, they’re our own sons or other relatives in our township, what’d they know about looking after a baby couldn’t have been more than two weeks old! So Abraham and I took it home, just for the day, we don’t have kids of our own and other brethren have the house full with them.
A girl. Pretty little thing. Had no hair yet just a bit of fine fluff, so what’s the easiest thing you can tell whether a baby is one of us, tight, curly, wasn’t there. Except for hair, most of our babies could be whites when they’re born, they’re very light-coloured, the white in us only gets taken over by the black as they get older. The noses usually aren’t flatter than all babies have, and if the eyes are green — our grandfathers, great-grandfathers all the way back were Malay, Indian, Bushmen, real blacks, whites, you name it, and somehow from the mixture many of us have green eyes, like whites. By the time the Welfare made up their minds about which orphanage to get her into we’d … well, no kids of our own, we’d got fond of her, our life was different not just the two of us like before, Abraham had a good steady job with his Jewish boss at the shoe factory, I didn’t really need to go out to work. So we kept her. We named her a lovely name, Denise, and gave her our name. She was christened in our Seventh Day Adventist church by our minister. It was only about the time she began to be steady on her feet and begin to walk that there was no doubt about it; she was a white kid. The reason why her hair was so fine and slow to cover was that she was going to be very blond. The green eyes didn’t help; this kid was white. You do get throwbacks among us that can pass for white, but she was the real thing. Everybody saw it, all the neighbours and Abraham’s and my aunties, uncles, cousins — and looked from the kid to us, saying nothing but thinking, we knew, what were we going to do, later? For school. The children played with her as if she was the same as them; children learn the names for difference, from us, what did apartheid mean to them: just another grown-ups’ word. The local nursery school, run by our church with charity grants, was no problem. All shades of our skins passed, there, some were blacker than it was meant for, slipped in by parents from the nearby black township through family or church connections with our people; if one tot was whiter than she should be, who was going to ask questions.
But when the time came for real school, Government school, we had to make up our minds, Abraham and I. To be white in apartheid days was to be — everything. Everything! From, you know, sitting on a bench waiting for a bus, to getting a job in a bank, renting a flat, owning a house, qualifying in a trade, getting a good education — all these came to you, just like that, if you were white, all these were closed to you if you were some other colour. We had to decide whether our little girl — because who else’s was she, she called us Mama and Daddy — should grow up to be one of us, our own people, here in the places and jobs, the lives the whites decide for us, or whether we owed it to her to try for white. And that’s not the right way to put it, either, because that means you’re not white but may be able to pass, and our girl was white. Easy to be accepted by our kind because what are we? Such a stew-pot most of us don’t even know, from way back, what’s made us whatever we are, our family names are only clues, Dutch, English, German, Jewish, Malay-Muslim, some of this is even hidden behind family names taken which are just names of months — September, February, that’s two families in this street where Abraham and I took in what is called a foundling who had no name at all.
We decided to try to put her in a white school. That meant Government school was out. Government schools were separated: blacks at black schools, us coloureds at coloured schools, whites at white schools. Our child, living in our place, would have to go to the local school for our kind. But there were private schools we heard about. A convent school. We were Seventh Day Adventists, no whites or blacks in our local church, but people said the nuns had some arrangement, they took in a few black or coloured children if the parents could pay. But the convent refused her, the vacancies for exceptions were full, and then when we tried a private Anglican school, although the headmistress who interviewed us with our child looked at her curiously and kind of sadly, she wasn’t given a place there, either. The headmistress said that, even with us paying, the school couldn’t afford to take our child because for coloured or black children the Government supplied no subsidy as it did for other private pupils.
Denise Appolis attended primary and high schools in a coloured township outside the city and suburbs, like the townships and schools designated for blacks and for Indians, and matriculated as head prefect with three distinctions, in English, Afrikaans (the language spoken in her home) and history. Abraham and Elsie Appolis were unsurprised and proud of her. There had grown up in them, as she grew up, the unspoken shared sense that because she was not their biological creation, she had not been made in their bed, she was somehow chosen. Not alone in the sense that they had taken her for a day and kept her; chosen for a different life, other than theirs. A life of fulfilment they thought of as happiness. Had they, then, not been happy? Yes, in their way, the way open to them. Happiness as being white: no boundaries! God’s will.
Now it was possible for her to be what she was: white. The private business schools in the city were given as her home address that of Abraham’s white Jewish boss (appropriated, with or without consent?) when Abraham and Elsie sent her for application unaccompanied by their presence and obvious place in the official race classification. She carried a letter of parental authority written carefully in English (corrected by the girl who had gained Distinction in that subject), and proof of the parents’ ability to pay fees, in details of their savings bank account. There she was, a white seventeen-year-old among other young white men and women. She evidently made no friends but concentrated on her computer and general secretarial courses and every day came home by way of one of the roving minibuses in the city, back to the township, her friends there. Just as well she was the quiet one who kept to herself at the business college, she didn’t bring any fellow student home; Abraham and Elsie never brought up the subject, neither did she offer any explanation.
It seemed she understood what their love was doing for her. You couldn’t grow up in that township without becoming aware that it was best to be white, if by some good fortune you had the chance to take. God’s will. When her courses were — successfully — completed she and the parents studied together the situations vacant advertised in the morning and evening papers; for the first time in his life Abraham brought home both (TV was the source of news for what was happening in the world, for him) from his boss’s office, with the permission and kindly interest of his Jewish employer. After all, they were family men of around the same age; there was the joking — You’re not going down those pages because you’re walking out on me? — No, no … it’s my daughter, just come through business college.—