“You’re deliberately choosing to misconstrue. You know that’s just what I cannot stand about my mother’s attitude: making use of Anna as a friend and conveniently ignorant yes-woman, elevating her to the status of a confidante, and at the same time pushing her, along with her whole race, into a categorical sloth — of moral, spiritual — everything — inferiority. It’s a variation on the same old theme — you know; of course, you’re different, you’re my friend, it suits me to like you, even though you’re a Jew. Isn’t it the same, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is. And so is your attitude, neatly inverted. Your mother succeeds in the personal relationship; she fails in words, in the theory. Your theory’s sound all right, but you betray it in the heat of personal involvement; your blood lets you down. In fact, it boils when it shouldn’t. You can’t recognize that your mother’s heart-to-heart talks with Anna are the real thing, the thing we’re all piously rolling our eyes to heaven for — a contact between a white and a black simply as human beings — nothing else.”
I felt moody. “Simply, nothing — it’s simply the Trusted Black Mammy situation, that’s all. And you know how much good that sort of good will has done for race relations.”
He gave a little patient smile at the term, hearing it new on my tongue, as one hears someone use the vogue-word of a particular set, and so knows where his affinities, like antennae, are taking him. He shrugged. “None at all. About as much good as those militant liberals who love humanity but can’t stand men and women.”
I was still young enough to lose my temper and be a little ridiculous when I felt I was losing ground. “I’m going to be one of them, I suppose?”
“Don’t be a coy bluestocking,” he said aside, smiling. “—I hope not—” he commented, as if he feared it was something he might be responsible for.
Somehow one of the hard, round-backed beetles had got in. It hit the reflections of light wavering like smoke rings on the ceiling, slithered down the brittle burning surface of the globe itself, and dropped onto Joel’s head. With the calmness of the male, who distinguishes between the biters and the harmless hateful, he scooped it absently into his hand and threw it onto the floor. I put my heel down on it; like crunching a nut. We were in the unsatisfactory listless state of people who have argued about something other than the argument’s cause. I had the sudden impatient feeling that all this talk that I sought after and felt was so important at the time of talking was nothing, was of no interest to me: all that I really cared about was what happened directly to myself; there was nothing and no one in the world beyond the urgent importance of me, of a burning, selfish grasp of what would happen to me, alone. This feeling held me glowering, like a fit of sulks.
After a few minutes Joel began to tell me of a mix-up on the telephone in which he had been involved with his married sister, Colley, but though I accepted the amusing way he told the story, I ignored the change of mood, and flung out, like a challenge and an excuse for a return to disagreeableness: “Joel, why do you always side with my mother against me?” It was spoken as pettishly as it was phrased.
He looked as if he had been expecting it. Again he became heavy, wary. “Do I?”
I waved it aside. “You know what I mean. If I tell you anything about her — not disparaging, exactly, but anything to which one might expect you would agree was unreasonable on her part — you shut up like a clam. I don’t understand it.”
“Look, Helen, I don’t side with her—”
“But so often she’s wrong, quite wrong, and you’ll never give me the satisfaction of admitting it!”
“Of course I know she’s wrong; difficult, anyway. But it doesn’t matter. You can’t do anything about it, so it doesn’t matter. You can’t change them, her or your father, you can’t make them over the way you think — we think — they ought to be or the way we believe we’d like to have them.”
He saw the dissatisfaction in my eyes. “But you can’t get rid of them, either.”
I was shocked, at myself rather than his words. “—What a way to put it.”
“Making them over would be getting rid of them as they are. Well, you can’t do it. You can’t do it by going to live somewhere else, either. You can’t even do it by never seeing them again for the rest of your life. There is that in you that is them, and it’s that unkillable fiber of you that will hurt you and pull you off balance wherever you run to — unless you accept it. Accept them in you, accept them as they are, even if you yourself choose to live differently, and you’ll be all right. Funnily enough, that’s the only way to be free of them. You’ll see — really, I know.”
I protested. “But I tell you I don’t want to ‘get away’ in that sense. I don’t want to change them, really. … I just want them to be a little more understanding … to let me think my way. To have some respect for the things I want to do, the things I think are important.” I was amazed to have put these reasons to Joel, with whom I had discovered the extent of the gulf between the life of my parents and the life I wanted for myself. Joel, with whom I was hearing live music for the first time in my life; who said, Come on, I’ve got something to show you — and, between lectures, pushed me before him onto a tram to town to see exhibitions of painting and sculpture, showed me the inside of the municipal art gallery that all my life till now had been a gray stone exterior from which one might take one’s bearings, like the magistrates’ courts, or a fire station. Joel, from whose books and whose talk I was even beginning to see that the houses we lived in in Atherton and on the Mine did not make use of space and brightness and air, but, like a woman with bad features and a poor complexion who seeks to distract with curls and paint, had their defects smothered in lace curtains and their dark corners filled with stands of straggling plants which existed for these awkward angles between wall and wall, as one evil exists simply for another.
“Still in the Second League. Been in the Second League, every year for twelve years. My mother tells everybody who comes. Soon it’ll be awful; the way all the Mine people repeat to one another with awe: the Compound Manager’s wonderful old mother! That wonderful old Mrs. Ockert! And why is she wonderful? Because she’s eighty-two. …”
Joel smiled.
I said: “I suppose I make them seem …” He nodded. I looked at his hands with their sensitive-tipped fingers that always moved a little on the surface on which they rested, as the nose of a sensitive animal responds constantly to the mere fact of being alive; his broad, European peasant body, the curious, patient, implied shrug of his people: he had eyes that one could never imagine closed, like a light that is never put out.
It was as if I had blundered into the fact of his parents; I felt as if I had suddenly said, aloud, There! — and produced them, bewildered, ignorant, embarrassing, blinking like moles brought up into the unaccustomed light of Joel’s world of books and music and houses clean, sharp as beautiful paper shapes. He had said: I know. I sat staring at my own silence hardening around me; a person who suddenly remembers that the illness of which he has been talking with unsparing clinical thoroughness is the very one from which his companion must be suffering.
Chapter 13
Getting to know Mary Seswayo was like gently coaxing a little shy animal to edge forward to your hand.
There was, as Joel had inferred, something of a collector’s suppressed eagerness in the trembling bait I held out to her from time to time; and we were afraid of each other, she of the lion-mask of white mastery that she saw superimposed on my face, I of the mouse-mask of black submission with which I obscured hers. Yet there was the moment in the cloakroom; a meeting of inherited enemies in the dark in which they mistake one another for friends. And it is never forgotten: not the fact that enemy could be mistaken for friend, but the shared bewilderment of the darkness each recognized in the other’s eye. That is a moment of fusion that cannot be taken back and discussed with one’s own side, for it is a moment for which they too are the enemy. It has none of the sentiment of the armed truce, the soldiers of warring armies drinking beer together on Christmas Day and going back to killing one another on Boxing Day, but is more in the nature of an uncomfortable secret.