The morning township train cruised into Park Station, Johannesburg, and came to a halt in the dark vaults of the subterranean platforms. Already the young of limb, and the lithe and lissom, had leapt off and dashed for the gate that would let them out. But the rest of us had to wade ponderously, in our hundreds, along the thickening platforms that gathered the populations disgorged by Naledi, Emdeni, Dube, Orlando, Pimville, Nancefield, Kliptown, Springs, Benoni, Germiston. Great maws that spewed their workership over Johannesburg.
I was in the press that trudged in the crowd on the platform. Slowly, good-humouredly we were forced, like the substance of a toothpaste tube, through the little corridor and up the escalator that hoisted us through the outlet into the little space of breath and the teeth of pass-demanding South African Police.
But it was with a lilt in my step that I crossed the parquet foyer floor and slipped through the police net, because I knew which cop to pass by: the one who drank with me at Sis Julia's shebeen of an afternoon off. It was with a lilt, because it was spring as I walked out of Park Station into a pointillist morning with the sun slanting from somewhere over George Goch, and in spring the young ladies wear colourful frocks, glaring against the sunlight and flaring in the mischievous breezes. I joyed as I passed into Hoek Street, seeing the white girls coming up King George Street, the sunlight striking through their dresses, articulating the silhouettes beneath to show me leg and form; things blackmen are supposed to know nothing of, and which the law assininely decrees may not even be imagined.
Funny thing this, the law in all its horrificiency prohibits me, and yet in the streets of Johannesburg I feast for free every morning. And, God, if I try hard enough, I may know for real in Hillbrow every night.
There is a law that says (I'm afraid quite a bit of this will seem like there is a law that says), well, it says I cannot make love to a white woman. It is law. But stronger still there is a custom—a tradition, it is called here—that shudders at the sheerest notion that any whiteman could contemplate, or any blackman dare, a love affair across the colour line. They do: whitemen do meet and fall in love with black women; blackmen do explore ‘ivory towers’. But all this is severely ‘agin the law’.
There are also African nationalists who profess horror at the thought that any self-respecting blackman could desire any white woman. They say that no African could ever so debase himself as to love a white woman. This is highly cultivated and pious lying in the teeth of daily slavering in town and in cinema. African girls, who are torturing themselves all the time to gain a whiter complexion, straighter hair and corset-contained posteriors, surely know what their men secretly admire.
As for myself, I do not necessarily want to bed a white woman; I merely insist on my right to want her.
Once, I took a white girl to Sophiatown. She was a girl who liked to go with me and did not have the rumoured South African inhibitions. She did not even want the anthropological knowledge of ‘how the other South Africans live’. She just wanted to be with me.
She had a car, an ancient Morris. On the way to Sophiatown of those days, you drove along Bree Street, past the Fordsburg Police Station in the Indian area, past Braamfontein railway station, under the bridge away past the cemetery, past Bridgeman Memorial Hospital (known, strangely, for bringing illegitimate Non-European children into the world), up Hurst Hill, past Talitha Home (a place of detention for delinquent Non-European girls), past aggressive Westdene (sore at the proximity of so many Non-white townships around her), and into Sophiatown.
So that night a blackman and a white woman went to Sophiatown. I first took Janet to my auntie's place in Victoria Road, just opposite the bus terminus. It was a sight to glad a cynic's heart to see my aunt shiver before Janet.
‘Mama’—in my world all women equivalents of my mother are mother to me—‘Mama, this is my girl. Where is Tata?’ This question, not because my uncle might or might not approve, but because I knew he was terribly fond of brandy, and I was just about to organize a little party; he would not forgive me for leaving him out. But he was not there. He had gone to some meeting of amagosa—church-stewards, of whom he was the chief.
‘Mama, how about a doek for Janet.’
The doek! God save our gracious doek. A doek is a colourful piece of cloth that the African woman wears as headgear. It is tied stylistically into various shapes from Accra to Cape Town. I do not know the history of this innocuous piece of cloth. In Afrikaans, the language of those of our white masters who are of Dutch and Huguenot descent, doek meant, variously, a tablecloth, a dirty rag, or a symbol of the slave. Perhaps it was later used by African women in contact with European ideas of beauty who realized that ‘they had no hair’ and subconsciously hid their heads under the doek. Whatever else, the doek had come to designate the African woman. So that evening when I said, ‘Mama, how about a doek for Janet’, I was proposing to transform her, despite her colour and her deep blue eyes, into an African girl for the while.
Ma dug into her chest and produced a multi-coloured chiffon doek. We stood before the wardrobe mirror while my sisters helped to tie Janet's doek in the current township style. To my sisters that night I was obviously a hell of a guy.
Then I took Janet to a shebeen in Gibson Street. I was well-known in that particular shebeen, could get my liquor ‘on tick’ and could get VIP treatment even without the asset of Janet. With Janet, I was a sensation. Shebeens are noisy drinking places and as we approached that shebeen we could hear the blast of loud-mouthed conversation. But when we entered a haunted hush fell upon the house. The shebeen queen rushed two men off their chairs to make places for us, and: ‘What would you have, Mr Themba?’
There are certain names that do not go with Mister, I don't have a clue why. But, for sure, you cannot imagine a Mr Charlie Chaplin or a Mr William Shakespeare or a Mr Jesus Christ. My name—Can Themba—operates in that sort of class. So you can see the kind of sensation we caused, when the shebeen queen addressed me as Mr Themba.
I said, casually as you like, ‘A half-a-jack for start, and I suppose you'd like a beer, too, my dear?’
The other patrons of the shebeen were coming up for air, one by one, and I could see that they were wondering about Janet. Some thought that she was Coloured, a South African Mulatto. One said she was white, appending, ‘These journalist boys get the best girls.’ But it was clear that the doek flummoxed them. Even iron-Coloureds, whose stubborn physical appearances veer strongly to the Negroid parent, are proud enough of whatever hair they have to expose it. But this girl wore a doek!
Then Janet spoke to me in that tinkling English voice of hers, and I spoke to her, easily, without inhibition, without madamizing her. One chap, who could contain himself no longer, rose to shake my hand. He said, in the argot of the townships, ‘Brer Can, you've beaten caustic soda. Look, man, get me fish-meat like this, and s'true's God, I'll buy you a vung (a car)!’ That sort of thawed the house and everybody broke into raucous laughter.
Later, I collected a bottle of brandy and some ginger ale, and took Janet to my room in Gold Street. There were a few friends and their girls: Kaffertjie (Little Kaffir—he was quite defiantly proud of this name) and Hilda, Jazzboy and Pule, Jimmy, Rockefeller and a Coloured girl we called Madame Defarge because, day or night, she always had clicking knitting needles with her. We drank, joked, conversed, sang and horse-played. It was a night of the Sophiatown of my time, before the government destroyed it.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
Sometimes I think, for his sense of contrast and his sharp awareness of the pungent flavours of life, only Charles Dickens—or, perhaps, Victor Hugo—could have understood Sophiatown. The government has razed Sophiatown to the ground, rebuilt it, and resettled it with whites. And with appropriate cheek, they have called it Triomf.
That night I went to bed with Janet, chocolate upon cream. I do not know what happened to me in my sleep; the Africans say amadhlozi talked to me—the spirits of my forefathers that are supposed to guide my reckless way through this cruel life intervened for once. In the mid of the night, I got up, shook Janet and told her we got to go.
‘Ah, Can, you're disturbing me, I want to sleep.’
‘Come-ahn, get up!’
‘Please, Can, I want to sleep.’
I pulled off the blankets and marvelled awhile at the golden hair that billowed over her shoulders. Then she rose and dressed drowsily.
We got into her ancient Morris and drove to town. I think it was the remembrance of a half-bottle of brandy in her room in Hillbrow that woke me and made me rouse her, more than the timely intervention of the amadhlozi. We saw a big, green Kwela- Kwela wire-netted lorry-van full of be-batonned white cops driving up Gold Street, but we thought little of it, for the cops, like fleas in our blankets, are always with us. So we spluttered up Hurst Hill into town.
Later, I heard what had happened.
I used to have a young Xhosa girl called Baby. She was not really my class, but in those days for what we called love we Sophiatonians took the high, the middle and the low.
Baby was pathologically fond of parties, the type of parties to which tsotsis go. They organize themselves into a club of about half-a-dozen members. On pay-day they each contribute, say £5, and give it to the member whose turn it is. He then throws a party to entertain all the members and their girl-friends. Almost invariably guys trespass on other guys' girls and fights break out. Baby liked this kind of party, but it soon became clear to me that I was risking the swift knife in the dark so long as I associated with her. So I talked it over with her, told her that we should call it a day and that I did not want to clash with her tsotsi boyfriends. She readily accepted, saying, ‘That-so it is, after all you're a teacher type and you don't suit me.’
So far as I was concerned that had been that.
But that star-crossed night, Baby heard that I was involved with a white girl. She went berserk. I gathered that she went running down Gold Street tearing out her hair and shrieking. At the corner of Gold Street and Victoria Road, she met a group of tsotsis playing street football under the street lamp with a tennis ball. They asked her, ‘Baby, whassamatter?’ She screamed, ‘It's Can, he's with a white woman,’ and they replied, ‘Report him!’
Africans are not on the side of the cops if they can help it. You do not go to a policeman for help or protection or the which way to go. You eschew them. To report a felon to them, good heavens! it is just not done. So for a tsotsi to say about anyone, ‘Report him!’ means the matter is serious.
Baby went to Newlands Police Station and shouted, ‘Baas, they're there. They're in bed, my boyfriend and a white woman.’ The sergeant behind the counter told her to take it easy, to wait until the criminals were so well-asleep that they might be caught flagrante delicto. But Baby was dancing with impatience at ‘the law's delay’.
Still, that sergeant wanted to make a proper job of it. He organized a lorry-full of white cops, white cops only, with batons and the right sadistic mental orientation. Or, perhaps, too many such excursions had misadventured before where black cops were suspected of having tipped off their brethren.
When we went down Gold Street, it was them we saw in the green lorry-van bent on a date with a kaffir who had the infernal impertinence to reach over the fence at forbidden fruit.
I understand they kicked open the door of my room and stormed in, only to find that the birds had flown. One white cop is reported to have said, wistfully, ‘Look, man, there are two dents in the pillow and I can still smell her perfume.’ Another actually found a long thread of golden hair.
I met Baby a few days later and asked her resignedly, ‘But you said we're no more in love, why the big jealous act?’
She replied, ‘Even if we've split, you can't shame me for a white bitch.’
I countered, ‘But if you still loved me enough to feel jealous, didn't you consider that you were sending me to six months in jail! Baby, it could be seven years, you know.’
‘I don't care,’ she said. ‘But not with a white bitch, Can. And who says that I still love you? It's just that you can't humiliate me with a white bitch.’
I threw up my hands in despair and thought that one of these days I really must slaughter a spotlessly white goat as a sacrifice to the spirits of my forefathers. I have been neglecting my superstitions too dangerously long.
Funny, one of the things seldom said for superstitious belief is that it is a tremendous psychological peg to hang on to. God knows, the vehement attacks made upon the unreason and stark cruelty of superstition and witchcraft practices are warranted. Abler minds than mine have argued this. But I do want to say that those of us who have been detribalized and caught in the characterless world of belonging nowhere, have a bitter sense of loss. The culture that we have shed may not be particularly valuable in a content sense, but it was something that the psyche could attach itself to, and its absence is painfully felt in this whiteman's world where everything significant is forbidden, or ‘Not for thee!’ Not only the refusal to let us enter so many fields of human experience, but the sheer negation that our spirits should ever assume to themselves identity. Crushing.
It is a crepuscular, shadow-life in which we wander as spectres seeking meaning for ourselves. And even the local, little legalities we invent are frowned upon. The whole atmosphere is charged with the whiteman's general disapproval, and where he does not have a law for it, he certainly has a grimace that cows you. This is the burden of the whiteman's crime against my personality that negatives all the brilliance of intellect and the genuine funds of goodwill so many individuals have. The whole bloody ethos still asphyxiates me. Ingratitude? Exaggeration? Childish, pampered desire for indulgence? Yes-yes, perhaps. But leave us some area in time and experience where we may be true to ourselves. It is so exhausting to have to be in reaction all the time. My race believes in the quick shaft of anger, or of love, or hate, or laughter: the perpetual emotional commitment is foreign to us. Life has contrived so much, such a variegated woof in its texture, that we feel we can tarry only a poignant moment with a little flare of emotion, if we are ever to savour the whole. Thus they call us fickle and disloyal. They have not yet called us hypocritical.
These things I claim for my race, I claim for all men. A little respite, brother, just a little respite from the huge responsibility of being a nice kaffir.
After that adventure in Sophiatown with Janet, I got a lot of sympathy and a lot of advice. I met the boys who had said to Baby, ‘Report him!’ I was sore because they had singled me out like that and made me the pariah that could be thrown to the wolves. They put their case:
‘You see, Brer Can, there's a man here on this corner who plays records of classical music, drinks funny wines and brings whitemen out here for our black girls. Frankly, we don't like it, because these white boys come out here for our girls, but when we meet them in town they treat us like turds. We don't like the way you guys play it with the whites. We're on Baby's side, Brer Can.’
‘Look, boys,’ I explained, ‘You don't understand, you don't understand me. I agree with you that these whites take advantage of our girls and we don't like the way our girls act as if they are special. But all you've done about it is just to sit and sizzle here at them. No-one among you has tried to take revenge. Only I have gone to get a white girl and avenged with her what the whites do to our sisters. I'm not like the guys who procure black girls for their white friends. I seek revenge. I get the white girls—well, it's tough and risky, but you guys, instead of sitting here crying your hearts out, you should get yourselves white girls, too, and hit back.’
I got them, I knew.
One guy said, ‘By right, Brer Can's telling the truth.’
Another asked, ‘Tell me, Brer Can, how does a white woman taste?’
That was going too far. I had too great a respect for Janet, the woman, to discuss that with anybody whether he was white or black.
I said, ‘You go find out for yourself.’
The piece of advice I got from the mother of a friend of mine who stayed in the same street, Gold Street, was touching.
She said to me: ‘Son, I've heard about your trouble with the white girl. It's you that was foolish. People know that your white girl is around because they recognize the car. If they see it parked flush in front of your house, they say, “Can has got silver-fish”. What you should do is to drive the car into my yard here, right to the back of the house so that nobody could see it from the street, and then they wouldn't suspect that you have the white girl in your room down there.’
It seemed to me to be excellent, practical advice.
So the next time I got home with Janet, we drove the car into the yard of my friend's mother, right back behind the house, and walked down in the dead of night to my room.
In the middle of the night, my friend came clattering on the window of my room and shouted, ‘Can, get up, the cops!’ We got up, got dressed in breathless time, rushed to the car at his mother's place and zoomed out of Sophiatown on a little-used route past St Joseph's Mission through Auckland Park into Hillbrow, where in the heart of the whiteman's flatland we could complete breaking the whiteman's law as, apparently, we could not do in Sophiatown.
Later, I heard the sordid details of what had happened that night. My friend came home late, and overheard his mother and sisters discussing the Morris we had left in their yard. The mother felt that it was not right that I should be messing around with a white woman when she had unmarried daughters of her own and my eligibility rated high. So she sent one of her daughters to go and tell Baby that I was with the white woman again and that I had left the car in their yard. My friend felt that he did not have the time to argue with his family, that his job was to warn us as quickly as he could to get the hell out of there.
As it turned out, I need not have bothered. The darling Afrikaaner at the desk told Baby, ‘Look here, woman, every time you have a quarrel with your boyfriend, you rush to us with a cock and bull story. Clear out!’