The only difference was that this time, unlike the real time that it happened, we were not safe from disgust. We got into the car full of shame and I kept my face turned away from Joel, although I seemed to see his face all the same, as you do in a dream. And perhaps it was here that it all really became a dream, and I was asleep.
Chapter 25
I often ask myself now whether I was ever really happy at this time; and I find I must believe that I was. My measure of happiness so far — it changes all through life, like one’s idea of what age is getting old — is the intensity of my identification with living; those periods when I have known myself to be crawling through summer and winter like a slug falling listlessly from leaf to leaf have been the seasons of misery. And by this standard I was happy, though perhaps it was the kind of happiness that you can stand only once, and when you are very young.
The revelation of being well loved in the body is an astounding experience. It carried me along, buffeting through everything else that weighed in on me or harassed me, even the practical worries attendant upon itself. And there is no experience that gives one a closer feeling of being in life; in fact it is like an explanation without words that turns an abstraction into possessed reality.
Then, too, not only was Paul the source of this joy, he was also at grips with the huge central problem of our country in our time, something that had oppressed me not only in my intellect since I had grown old enough to have a concept of man’s freedom, but in my blood. What he could do was pitifully little and pitifully inadequate, but I was at that stage in idealism when the gesture was satisfying in itself. I believed then that the only way for a man to fulfill himself in South Africa was to pit himself against the oppression of the Africans. It did not matter in what way he did it; the thing was so sinister that there was hardly a job or profession where it was not implicit and the question did not come up, if not in so many words, a dozen times a day: Are you for them? Or will you add your weight against them, along with all the others? — And I believe this still, although I understand now the consequences of such a way of life, as I certainly did not do then; something that makes all the difference between one’s right to hold such a belief, and one’s unfitness to do so.
It seemed to me utterly satisfying that Paul should have chosen this job of his — hopelessly limited as it was by the whole framework in which it functioned — rather than some profession whose prizes and successes were really only relevant to the world of Europe where a man did not start off with the immediate advantage of a white skin. The fact that he was so small and the thing he put himself against so enormous and tangled gave me a peculiar pride in my love for him. — It gave our relationship something of the quality that heightens the excitement of love during a war; I do not mean the quickened urge to mate in the threat of death, which you may feel whether or no you believe in the war, but the more complicated sense of the passionate integrity for what you both believe, in which your lover exists in the midst of the heedless crashing hostility that comes from both sides, sometimes his own as well as the enemy’s.
Of course, I could never express to Paul this concept of himself. He would have laughed it out of existence and have been exasperated with and even ashamed of me; he would not have said so, but I should have felt he was thinking again: the Mine, the Mine, showing itself in the excessive reaction from a life without a single real idea, to the extremes of romantic idealism. And I should have been conscious again of the dowdy unsuitability of the way I wore some of my convictions; like a woman accepted in fashionable circles who sometimes gives away her forgotten provincialism in her choice of hats.
But often, when I looked at Paul without his knowledge, a queer swelling excitement came up in the back of my throat, I wanted to grip tightly the arms of the chair I sat in: I had it all; there …
Most of the time Paul came home very late and very tired. Out of the official work of the Department had grown a whole extension of activity that almost doubled it; the impatience of people like Paul with the inadequacy, sometimes the total unsuitability, of what the Department offered the African townships made them try to supply something of what was missing, out of themselves. It was impossible, for anyone who saw the Africans as men and women with the same wants and hopes as anyone else, to be satisfied to hand out food or clothes or money to those who lacked the basic necessities, and ignore all those other nagging and endless and less easily satisfied needs that showed everywhere, in every street and every face. Nothing to do, nowhere to go, no hope of change. The young boys kicking a stone along the gutter because they have no ball and know no game. The schoolteachers and young clerks borrowing books from the little library (a charity handout of the discarded books of white people) and reading in the paper of the plays they can never see, the concerts they can never hear.
Paul and a few other people in the Department helped with the organization of discussion groups, supplied a portable player and the loan of records for a music society; found journalists and lawyers and actors to go out to the bare solemn rooms at the Community Center to lecture. They commandeered bats and rackets from the cupboards of their friends to give some purpose to the one or two open pieces of ground that the Department listed on its reports under “Sports Facilities.” And they became expert at filling in applications for Departmental funds in such a way as to avoid their narrow stringency and stretch their validity to cover expenditure that was officially “beyond the Department’s scope.” “But I’ll wangle it somehow,” I have often heard Paul say, telling me of some scheme for which money or facilities were not available. He would narrow his eyes and lift his chin while he thought what lie, what approach, would be best. And though he laughed at his own craftiness that had developed so efficiently out of necessity, there was in his eyes at these times he afterward mocked a concentration of determination, blank, grim, that he did not see.
One Friday night early in January we were coming home from a Brains Trust which had been held in one of the native townships. Gathered in the hall there had been the usual small group of subdued, expectant people; the air of awkwardness about them coming from the lack of group consciousness, the unfamiliarity of identifying himself with anyone that marks the intellectual who lives in a backward society and is accustomed to being the lone, the self-excluded. The joy of finding themselves among their own kind could not come to them as spontaneously as it did to the dancers of jive who filled the hall on other nights. When I came in, I felt a pang of anxiousness for the meagerness, the curious tameness of the whole show — something that, I knew by now, inexplicably vitiates efforts of this nature just as it does those occasions of genteel patronage when white people distribute prizes and shake their heads over the charm of black babies, or the skill of black handiwork. Paul dashed across the stage (six chairs were set out behind a long table, there was a carafe and a glass at one end) and I thought in a burst of irritation, Christ, why do they have to treat him as if he were a city councilor deigning to be present — why can’t they give him the due of thinking him a man, like themselves.