He had to explain to his girl that her introduction to his parents might not be without certain problems. She looked at him as if he’d had a sudden lapse of memory. She’d been taken to their home several times, first fruit juice and beer on the verandah, where the mother talked to her about what it was like to work in a bank and the father talked to his son about soccer, then to lunch on a public holiday, and once to share the evening meal. — But that was before they knew — about you, I mean. I’d never thought it necessary to tell them about my girlfriends’ families and so on. What interest to them. Nothing to do with their lives. Now when I say we’re getting married, I’m marrying this girl, I’ll have to tell them about you.—
— Of course. — But she had not thought of this before: love is in the present, it’s her hand slipping beneath his shirt to his chest, it’s reading together descriptions of the places in the world maybe they’ll save up to see. She did not say: they know I’m white. As if he heard the thought — I know … But that you grew up there, school and home, people who are like — your parents, to you. — He came over in her silence and kissed her; he had no part in the problem his parents might represent.
He came back with the news, angry, the skin over his cheekbones taut and flushed. — They’re terrible. I don’t even want to tell you about it. I’m degrading never mind myself, them, my sister, her kids. The country. Beautiful South Africa 1975. It doesn’t matter to them that you’re white. You were brought up among Coloureds, the family — which I’ve explained over and over again you haven’t really got although you love them — is Coloured. You’d think colour is something you can catch just by being among people. Infection, it’s a disease. — His car was piled with a thrown-in muddle of clothes, shoes, books, soccer helmet, music cassettes. He left home and moved in with a friend. In servants’ quarters converted to a cottage rented in someone’s garden he had a room to himself where she could comfort him with love-making; she knew something of what it was like to leave behind you those who had been your parents.
They had each other, in love. They would get married. Sooner, now, an act of confirmation, even of defiance, as well as love. But if he was angry before, he was stricken, transformed by disbelief when he came back from the marriage licence office to tell her that the licence was not, could not be issued. There would have to be a birth certificate to prove she was white; he could give his date and place of birth, the names of his parents. She had no birth certificate and no place except a church toilet, and her adoptive parents had registered her in their name and residence as Coloureds in a duly designated township. Denise Appolis was a Coloured female. The Mixed Marriages Act forbade marriage between them. Even their love-making was clandestine contravention of the law.
The television technician had never needed a lawyer, he was an ordinary law-abiding young man who wanted to marry in the usual progression of life, and, white and sure of his own, he had never taken any part in organisations concerned with human rights but remembered reading in newspapers of a legal aid resource that offered help in such matters. There he was received by a rumpled, well-rounded woman lawyer who ran her hands up through her hair as if they were going over a story she’d heard in various versions many times. — I know, I know it’s an awful prospect, but your ‘intended’ will have to go before the Population Registrar. We’ll make an application for her to be reclassified. White. Don’t think I’m doubting you in any way, but I must meet her, first.—
— You’ll see for yourself. Whoever they are can’t have any doubts.—
— The parentage questions — habitation, childhood — complicates things, even if the physical appearance seems to fit by their invented genetic standards …—
When there is trouble you take your shock home to those to whom you went with the hurt of grazed knees.
She took him with her to Mama and Daddy, Abraham and Elsie, there she was able to give way to tears and they wept with her, hugged the young white man who hadn’t given her up but become confined, as they had been all their lives, in one of those cages of the law that made people species of exotic animals: he must understand — yes — he’s in the whites’ cage. And she, their girl? If the lawyer knows the procedure, everyone in the township knows how you must present yourself before it. Everywhere, close, there are families to whom nature — God’s will — has produced one of a brood who could play for white, Abraham and Elsie could call in all manner of advice from friends, relatives, expert in their ways; lore unknown to any lawyer. Without papers, registered Coloured, the girl must present herself, to that bastard looking her over, as if the girl really is a play-white who must disguise herself. He’ll only be convinced, by his model of a real white girl, if she gets herself up in the right way that they know, from experience, will succeed. She looks too — what’s it — lady-like. He’ll find it fishy. He’s not used to that. He’s used to letting pass — all right, got to make a few who do, just to show the law is good — the special kind of looks, it’s like they’re on a rubber stamp ready to his hand, he recognises as properly faked. How she must dress and make up — that’s important. Really white, you must look; she and her boyfriend go swimming a lot, she’s rosily-dark sunburned.
Who knew better than the aunties, cousins, neighbours how to deal with the law’s servants, those white ‘civil servants’ that decided your life for you. On the day she and her future husband met the lawyer at the office of the Population Registrar she was heavily plastered with chalky makeup, as if she truly had mixed blood to conceal, her hair, which lately she had followed the craze of the girls at the bank to have cooked into a rippling Afro, was tortured even straighter, her blondness bleached even blonder, than these were naturally.
The lawyer from Legal Aid was appalled. She left the future husband standing in a corridor and rushed the girl to the women’s toilet where, totally concentrated, exasperatedly wordless, she scrubbed the face with paper tissues from her briefcase and drew palms-full of liquid soap from a dispenser to finish the job. The clean shining face of a tanned white girl, pink around the nostrils, emerged and it was in this naked aspect that the foundling applicant entered the official’s office accompanied by the woman lawyer. The future husband left behind the door: he could make out the voice but not the words of the lawyer explicating her client’s claim. His lips moved on the words he would have used. And he would also have said what surely couldn’t be denied by any Registrar, I love her, isn’t there a right to love.
His girl and the lawyer were on the other side of the door a long time. He did not allow himself to look at his watch as if the hour might be an omen; good or bad. He could scarcely catch his girl’s low voice and an indifferent-sounding growl of the official’s questions was infrequent, impossible to follow.
They came out and the door closed on a moment when he saw the official with his chin pressed into a swag of flesh as he bent over papers on a desk. She was looking straight in front of her, not at him. The woman lawyer was slowly wagging her head, lips tight. Absence of documentation, the applicant’s answers to where her parents lived, who they were, what school she was admitted to, recognised as a Coloured among Coloureds all her childhood — these criteria have decided that her classification cannot be changed to white. Application refused. Sorry. That was what the half-audible growl had been decreeing.