It was not easy for her to speak lightly. “Sometimes I cannot seem to get it all in. It seems to get bigger and heavier as the day goes on.”
To anyone else I could have said: “But why on earth do you carry all that stuff about, anyway — but with her I could not. “You know, you frighten me with the notes you take; every time my mind’s wandering at a lecture, I see you writing away and I get an awful feeling that I’ve just missed hearing something very important.”
She smiled, and this time it was the sudden, quick, surrendering smile of the piccanin caddies at the golf course. It seemed ridiculous that here was I, talking to a little native girl about lecture notes at a University.
“Well, it is a lot …,” she admitted with the shy acceptance of a commendation, “especially with Dr. East. Everyone in the class always has so much to argue about. — The expense of all the paper is something, too.”
She takes down everything that anyone says. She struggles to get down the commonplace inaccuracies, the embarrassed critical shots in the dark, the puerile fumblings toward an opinion. — I was so appalled that I looked at her with the polite daze of someone who has not quite heard, really listened. …
“Do you — do you live here, I mean in Johannesburg itself?” It was not a question I had meant to ask, but I snatched it up as the first thing to hand.
She answered dutifully. “I have a room with a family in Sophiatown. I was at the hostel and then at Alexandra, but I moved.”
“Oh, I live at home — that is, in Atherton, on the Mine.” Questioning her about where she lived suddenly seemed too much like a mistress expecting to be decently answered by a servant, and I looked for some way to put it right.
“It’s a long way,” she said.
“An hour by train every morning.” I always said it with some sort of distasteful pride in the hardness of it.
But to her, living in a native township where people got up at five o’clock to queue for busses in order to get to work by eight, it was nothing to commiserate about. She nodded politely.
“I have to go.” She smiled, with her bundles on her arm, as if she did not want to. She stood like a neat schoolgirl, feet together.
I said: “Bye now. …”—But no airiness could take from that quiet, serious little figure the consciousness of privilege that sent it, alone, down the corridors and down the flanking steps and through the gardens out into the street; into Johannesburg, to be swept aside with errand boys and cooks and street cleaners, still alone.
A susurration of voices — now and then a phrase would land, shrill on our table: “tastes like soap!” … “his FINAL YEAR, I said”—the warmed-over humidity of canteen foods, and the grinding, bursting effort of a box apoplectic with colored lights to release the snarling of a swing band — stood between Joel and his friend, and me.
“Big attraction of this tearoom, now.” The light-haired young man indicated the juke box.
“Big attraction of the other one is no juke box,” said Joel. “Let’s go.”
There nothing moved but a lethargic tearoom fly, feeling over the sugar bowl. “What happened to you?” said Joel in the hush, referring to my lateness.
“Joel, I was talking to that girl, the African girl. I discovered she takes down everything that is said. She sits at tuts taking down miles of notes. All the rubbish that everyone talks.” I sat back in my chair, looking at him.
He pursed his lips. “Just a minute—” He went up to the counter and came back with our lunch balanced; the steady, heavy approach of his legs, a thoughtful, nervous walk that I watched for assurance.
“Did you tell her, though?”
“Well, no — it was so difficult to know where to begin. If I knew her a bit better … I don’t know how not to be officious about it.”
“Showing the poor savage the ropes.”
“Yes, that’s just it.”
Joel took a long drink of cold water that made him gasp. He looked as if he had just come up from a swim under water, and somewhere, parenthetically, there was a smile in me that did not reach my face. “Still, it’s a damned shame, someone should tell her. The confusion behind it—”
“You mean it’s not the waste of effort so much, it’s that it means she doesn’t know what to take and what to leave?”
“That’s the whole thing. That’s the whole unwieldy thing.” He looked from one hand to the other as if he saw it, did not know what to do with it, lying amorphous on the table, in the air, between us. “We see only one little corner of it — this native girl needs to be told that one abstracts from lectures, discussions, what-have-you, only what is useful, relevant, illuminating. So then you find that you’ve solved nothing for her; you’ve simply twitched up and caught hold of one corner of a dilemma that shifts continually beneath everything she does here. It’s the most difficult thing in the world for her to discern simply because she has no comparative values. It’s the African’s problem all the way up through all struggles with a white man’s world. On a higher level, it’s the problem of Colley’s servant girl, who gives the cat milk out of a saucer from the best tea set, or the old kitchen one, quite impartially. She doesn’t know it is a best tea set; she simply never has known such a sufficiency of utensils that there could be gradations of use—”
“What’s this? The evils of property?” Rupert Sack, whom we had lost between one tearoom and the other, rejoined us. He had dark, theatrical eyebrows that confirmed the suspicion that the bleached streaks of his hair were dyed: perhaps his one gesture of allegiance, if a rather misplaced one, to the art of architecture, since he was sure to leave before completing his course, in favor of his father’s business, pleasantly knowledgeable about cantilevers and clear-story lighting for the rest of his life. He was intelligent but his mind wandered. He sat looking elaborately at me, one eyebrow raised in his own convention of idiotic admiration.
“And she’s never known a sufficiency of ideas?”
“From where?” Joel answered me with a question. “The life of an African — especially of her generation, pressed into a sort of ghetto vacuum between the tribal life that is forgotten and the white man’s life that is guessed at — it’s the practical narrow life of poverty. All the kinds of poverty there are: money, privacy, ideas. Even suppose she didn’t grow up in a two-room shack in a fenced location where her father couldn’t go out without a pass from his baas — she probably went to a mission school, at best. In some ways, at worst. Because in a location, in a room in somebody’s back yard, she might get some sort of idea of white people’s context. But in a mission, shut away in some peaceful white-walled place in the hills, God, her idea of the white world would be the Standard Six reader and Galilee nearly two thousand years ago.”
“Hell, that’s true, you know, Joel—” Rupert was suddenly attracted into the conversation. “It’s funny, I was talking about the same thing last night — at my sister’s place. With that chap Goddard, a pathologist I think he is; he’d been taking some medicals for some oral examinations—”
“A viva.”
“Yes — He was saying that it’s bloody difficult with these natives. Bloody difficult for them. No matter how clever they are, there’s just that lack of common background knowledge — you know, there’s nothing to back up what they’ve learned out of books. So some white fellow who messes around half the time playing poker has a better chance of bluffing his way through than the poor devil of a native who’s worked — well — like a black. …” He laughed at the lameness of his own joke.