“Which one?”
“The Richardson.”
“Thank you very much.” I was just thinking, Now is the number 52-8529 or 92, when the telephone jangled under my hand. Instantly, I was sure it was Paul. Urgently I said: “Hullo—”
Laurie’s mild, slow voice, the voice of a fat man, answered. “Helen — hullo …” We exchanged pleasantries, commented on the uneventful way the day had passed off. “Is your man there? I want a word in his ear.”
“I was just about to phone him. He’s at the Richardson Center.”
“Oh, blast him. I want to speak to him right away.”
“Well, why don’t you phone him there?” I said. “I was going to.
“No, I can’t,” Laurie said, “I can’t explain. … But I can’t tell him what I want to tell, over the phone. I was going to come over to your flat, if he’d been home.” He laughed. “Don’t think I’m crazy.”
For some reason, I felt vaguely embarrassed. “Well, I don’t know what to suggest. I don’t know when he’ll be back. And if I can’t get him before he leaves the Richardson, he’ll go straight to Isa’s. We’re supposed to be eating there. — You could drop in there later, and see.”
“No,” he laughed again, a little irritated at having to keep up a mystery. “It’ll be too late. Might be, even now, as he’s already in the township. — Well I’ll have to take a chance on saying what I have to say in some sort of guarded way over the phone. Give me the number, will you? And you don’t mind waiting five minutes so that I can ring him first? I’ll tell him to ring you, if you like.”
“Yes, do that. The number’s 52-8529.” I was suddenly sure of this. We both rang off. I was tingling with a vaguely alarmed curiosity. But although he had made it clear that it was not from me, but from the telephone, that he was withholding an explanation of the message he wanted to give Paul, I, too, was irritated by the mystery. — He’s getting like Edna and all the rest, creating for himself the importance of dark secrets. Paul won’t thank him for it anyway; he’ll laugh.
The telephone rang again almost immediately. “Look—” said Laurie, “there’s no reply from the place.” “Of course. The switchboard must be closed. Operator keeps ordinary office hours, there,” I remembered. Laurie said: “D’you think he might still be there?”
“Very likely.”
“Or he might be on his way home?”
I laughed. “Sound deduction!” But Laurie ignored it. “I think I’ll take a chance and go out there,” he said. “That’s if I ever find the place.”
“Oh, it’s easy, you can’t miss it. When you turn off the main road you keep turning to the left, three times, and then once right past the Apostolic Faith church, it’s a funny little place with a silver-painted roof.” I stopped myself suddenly. “Laurie, take me with you. Please. Come and pick me up? I’ve been in all day and I’ve nothing to do till Paul comes. I wasn’t going to Isa’s anyway, that’s what I want to talk to him about.”
“Well, at least you know where this place is,” he said. “—All right. If you really want to. But be ready. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
Laurie’s car was a long narrow English model, very beautifully cared-for. His fat body sat in it as incongruously as a sack of potatoes dumped in a boudoir. “Just give it a gentle tug,” he said as I pulled the door in behind me; the door closed with an oiled click. I felt suddenly the pleasant relief of being out, anywhere at all, in the air and the moving streets, after the confines of the flat. “It’s about Fanyana, of course,” he apologetically confided at once, as if he was sure he was only confirming what I must have guessed. “I heard today on good authority that they’re watching him. They have to be able to lay their hands on a few ‘inciters to public violence’ when they need ’em, to prove what an efficient police force they are. And Fanyana’s one. He’s only got to wiggle his little finger.” Laurie demonstrated, moving free of the steering wheel a white, dry-skinned hand blotted with the brownish marks of some liver ailment. “If Paul’s got any sense, he must keep away from him. It’d be a much more serious thing for Paul if he were arrested as the inciter of an inciter—” He laughed, moving his shoulders which overflowed the curved back of the seat. “You know how they are — they make up their minds you’re an inciter, so you’re an inciter — What can you do? You could have been teaching Fanyana how to embroider. … You’re an inciter. So. Go and argue with them.”
“Oh, but it’s all right,” I said, “nothing’s happened. There haven’t been any incidents to be blamed on anyone.”
“No, but I think Paul shouldn’t be seen even talking to Fanyana today.”
I shrugged. “He’s probably doing that now.” I couldn’t help feeling that Laurie was getting excited over something that would be no news to Paul; he knew that the police were interested in Fanyana, and had been for some time.
“By the way, d’you think they’ll let us in?” Laurie asked.
“At the location? Oh, yes. They know me, I’ll fix it.” For a moment I had not realized what he meant; the strike had already taken on the character of an alarum that had never gone off, and the ban on the entry of Europeans to native townships which would certainly be included in police security methods seemed as nominal as had been the posters illustrating air-raid precautions in our country which had never known a raid. Yet the reminder gave a slight fillip to our little expedition. The fact that I felt Paul would consider Laurie’s urgency a piece of dramatics added to this something of the pleasurable illusion of adventure with which children invest some unnecessary action by pretending to believe it vitally important. We were quite gay, and passing the Criterion Bar, Laurie said: “When we’ve collected Paul we’ll come back and have a drink somewhere.”
As we shed the city, dusk was falling.
“At dusk, reports of bloodshed and violence followed in rapid succession. At Orlando, Sophiatown, Alexandra, Moroka, Jabavu, White City, Mariastad. … It was the start of a night of terror after twenty-four hours’ tension.”
This was how it was described in the papers next day. While we were driving through the dusk that thickened like pollen about the street lights, the trains were going home, some in the direction we took, some toward other townships, carrying workers who had defied the strike and who were being escorted from work by the police to assure their safety. The stones that were to be thrown and were to draw back bullets were lying ready to hand in the unmade streets and the vacant lots filled with rubbish. The men were already restless in the streets, the voices of the women shrill before the dark houses. That was what we understood when we read about it.
That night, rioters stoned a police squad at Alexandra. The police fired into the mob. A bus queue shelter was demolished, coffee stalls overturned, shops looted and gutted, and a cinema burned to the ground. A crowd attacked the bus depot, and another police squad, hurrying to the scene, met with a road block and was stoned. The police got out of their cars and fired. At Orlando trains were stoned. On the Reef, at Brakpan, a thousand demonstrated outside the location, screaming and shouting, and were dispersed by a baton charge of a hundred police. At Atherton location, a large crowd defied the ban on public meetings, refused to disperse, and were charged by the police with fixed bayonets. Then the police fired, and three people were killed on the spot. Everywhere in the townships there were “disturbances” of one sort or another; stones were thrown. Stones were thrown, and one way or another, drew blood. Later that week, one of the Native Representatives (there were three and they were all Europeans) moved the adjournment of the Parliamentary debate then in session, so that the May Day riots could be discussed in the House. The leader of the Opposition, General Smuts, did not support the motion. Letters were published condemning the brutality of the police, praising them for courage, accusing them of incitement; hailing the dead rioters as martyrs, expressing satisfaction at the dispatch of dangerous hooligans, urging black and white to make “this tragic and bitter clash” a basis for the return to Christian tolerance. There was a report of how, over the week end, when the ban on public gatherings in African townships was already in force, a wedding party had been broken up by the police; a group of mourners, sitting in the small yard of a bereaved house after a funeral, as is the custom with Africans, were intruded upon by the police and ordered to go home. An elderly African who had been one of the group said: “They treat us like wild animals. Perhaps after all we can get nothing by peaceable means.” Still later, a commission of inquiry set up to investigate the cause of the riots, said that the anti-police attitude of the Africans was due to liquor and pass raids on their homes in the early hours of the morning, and the treatment of native prisoners by young policemen. This attitude, the commission stated, was not racial — black and white policemen were equally hated, resulting in “a complete disregard of authority of any kind.”