When after almost six months at the University I started my first year proper, I found myself in an English tutorial group that included two Africans. One was a fat, pompous teacher-priest “continuing his studies,” the other was Mary Seswayo. When she came in, walking with her head down to the back of Room 325, we knew each other, though I did not look up as she passed the desk at which I was already seated. The native girl from across the washbasin that day. (”African” was an acquired word, preferred by non-Europeans and liberals not only because it was a more accurate designation, but rather because it was as yet clean of the degrading contexts in which the other had been dyed more deeply than with color — in the unself-conscious privacy of my thoughts I still used the old inherited word.) I felt that now and then she looked at me; felt the gentle, curious glance of her recognition touching my back.
She never spoke in class discussions, but the priest did. He used his old manner of the preacher to the layman for the new purpose of the black man to the white man: hearty, hand-rubbing, bright. We are all God’s children; let’s make the best of it. Sometimes there was the suspicion that he half-clowned his unctuous jolliness, wood-touching for the temerity of his equality, that he snatched with a conjurer’s patter and glee while his white audience was being amused, and his own people, in the know, demonstrated his superiority to them in their inability to follow his sleight of hand. So he apologized beforehand for any offense your whiteness might, with its awesome sensitivity, take from the innocuous, like litmus paper mysteriously turning red with immersion. And it seemed to him he got away with it; a trick kind of equality, in a trick kind of way, but still, an equality. “How are we this morning, how are we? — And is our Dr. East not ‘on time’?” He would swing round the door and pile his books on a desk in the front row, beaming at the class through polishing gestures with which he swept his hot face with a handkerchief as someone cleans a pair of spectacles preparatory to settling to work.
He did wear spectacles, but these were permanently misted by the heat of his hands, and he took them on and off as he sat, face poised beneath Dr. East like a seal waiting for the keeper’s fish to land in his mouth. The instant Dr. East paused to invite discussion, the preacher rose to it. (The subject of discussion, on one occasion I remember, was Thackeray’s discursive muse.) “Sir, well, I should like to say — in my humble opinion that is — I don’t know how my fellow students are feeling about it — but this bad habit of Thackeray’s, it makes it very difficult for the student. It is hard for him to know what is the story, if you know what I mean, and in examination it may be that you are asked a question about the story, and you know the book too well and put in what is not the story?” He smiled round the class with a slowly widening gesture, as a conductor acknowledges applause by taking it for his whole orchestra.
Dr. East had faded ginger hair and colorless eyes that had the cold snap of a pair of scissors, impatiently cutting off irrelevancies and idiocies with a look, before they could rise to articulation. After giving the preacher two or three commentless hearings, with the allowance of attention in the face of irritation which would be accorded to any foreigner, he refused any further concession. Yet he was not quite so hard on the African as he would have been on a European student: the viper-flicker of his sarcasm he kept in his mouth. “Just a moment, Mr. Thabo—” He would signal him down and raise his eyes at some other student who was struggling with the desire to speak.
The girl, as I have said, did not speak at all. She listened with the painful intentness of someone who is always balanced on the edge of noncomprehension, and she wrote things down when one could not imagine what had been said that was worth noting. Dr. East had a peculiar affection for those who did not offer dissent or opinion; probably he was grateful to be spared the risk of hearing more banalities. Yet at the same time he had the endearing quality of literary men — those in the exact sciences are much less hopeful — the belief that perhaps something fresh and intelligent is being muffled by timidity. Particularly in the unexplored country — jungle profusion? sweet grassland? silence of rock? — of the other race’s intellectual innocence. His compressed lips that twitched at the fly of impatience suddenly opened in his surprising smile; a friendly smile on big even false teeth that altered the whole set of his face and seemed to flatten his ears and his forehead with the look of pleasure that comes to the head of an animal when you stroke it. “Miss Seswayo, wouldn’t you perhaps like to say something about this?” He lifted his head courteously to the back of the room.
She would get up slowly, moving her notebook, putting down the pencil, resting her palms on the desk ledge. She shook her head carefully as she spoke, after a pause in which everyone was silent, “No. … No, thank you.”—Dr. East made a small noise of regret—“Yes, now what is it, Mr. Alder?”—and talk broke again upon the room.
Once or twice, when I happened to sit at the back of the room in line with her, I tried to see what it was that she wrote down so purposefully. But I only caught a glimpse of lines of copybook handwriting, a child’s at its most careful, with great round stops and hooked commas. One of these times a paper with the text of a literary-appreciation test was handed out round the room, one for every two students, and as she was my neighbor I moved to share mine with her. Sitting over the same printed sheet, I could see the brown, shiny plate of her breast, moving a little fast with her breathing beneath a necklace of white china beads that she always wore. I could see the very texture of her skin, sliding over the ridge of her collarbone as she lifted her arms. The top of her arm, in a brown coat sleeve, slowly sent its warmth through to where my arm touched against it.
It must have been fifteen years since I had been in such close contact with an African; not since that other breast, longer ago than I could remember, the breast of my native nanny, had I casually felt human warmth, life, coming to me from a black body.
The following afternoon I stopped to speak to her where she sat in a window embrasure in one of the wide corridors, reading a key to Chaucer whose edges were worn round as a stone. I made the usual banal overtures about our work and she answered in the faint, stilted English of the European-educated African woman, out of whom all the buoyancy, music and spontaneity that is in the voices of nursemaids and servants seem to have been hushed by responsibility.
An obstinacy of shyness made it very difficult to talk to her, but the reassurance of repeated casual meetings slowly thawed her silent, wide-eyed greeting as she hurried past into a smile. We met again in the cloakroom. Alone, this time, in the litter of lipstick-streaked tissues and balls of crumpled paper like cabbages, she was repacking her things on the floor — she always carried about with her a complication of coats, books, notes that she watched and counted with the poor peasant’s anxiety for his possessions. The tap frothed out over my dirty hands and I said: “You are loaded up. …”