Durban, December 1977
The veranda of a Cape-Dutch house on the North Coast of Natal. It is late afternoon. The remains of a shattered Zulu pot are on the steps and the ground. A black gardener, Hilton, enters carrying a bag filled with women’s clothes.
GIL (Entering): Hilton! Her stuff! They’re waiting for her stuff!
(The sounds of a car pulling away. Gil, surprised, looks after it.)
They left.
HILTON: The Durban police don’t wait. They’re very busy.
GIL: But how’s she gonna . . . ? (Gil holds out the bag toward Hilton) Can you get this down to her?
HILTON (Gruff): They have clothes for her in jail.
GIL: Jesus, Hilton! What happened? Did she just go berserk all of a sudden?
HILTON: I didn’t see. I heard her screaming, and I came when you did.
GIL: But why was she screaming?
(Patrice enters and sees the broken pot.)
PATRICE: Oh, great. She got this one too.
(Beat.)
GIL: They just drove off. I couldn’t even give them her stuff.
(He gently kicks the bag of clothes. A moment.)
PATRICE (Takes this in): Hilton, what I need for you to do right now is make us some tea. Would you mind taking over the kitchen? Just for right now, would you mind?
HILTON: (Very obsequiously): Of course . . . Do you want fancy tea or teabag tea?
PATRICE (Impatiently): Just tea.
(Hilton exits.)
GIL (Fretting): Should I call someone from the consulate, Mom?
PATRICE: Christ, no. That’s all your father would need.
(Beat. Annoyed) Please don’t hover like some mendicant. Everything is okay. It’s really fine. Let’s just get this all picked up. (Taking in the broken pottery) Maybe your father can piece this together when he gets back. His next big cultural project!
GIL: I just wish the whole business were a bit clearer.
PATRICE: Are you still shaken up?
GIL: I don’t understand what set her off.
PATRICE: The thing is, she and I had a little run in. I may have forgotten the rules for a second. I may have forgotten that she is the maid and I am the mistress. Role confusion.
GIL: But she was throwing things!
PATRICE: Sometimes people do that. You know what people can do. They throw things. That’s what people do. They hit. They yell. They behave. It’s all Lord of the Flies. May I have a cigarette?
GIL: I don’t smoke anymore.
(Patrice reaches in Gil’s jacket pocket and takes his cigarettes and lighter.)
PATRICE: Stop lying. It’s embarrassing.
GIL: It’s that Zulu rage, isn’t it, Mom? It’s that impenetrable African anger that you can’t see through. You look at them and haven’t got a clue as to what’s going on.
PATRICE (Studying him): Do you think that is a particularly worthy line to pursue, Gil.
GIL: Um.
PATRICE: Let’s not make this into some sort of racial test case here.
GIL: I’m not making—
PATRICE (Cutting him off): No, no, no. You are making a critical mistake, sweetie, you are falling right into the traps. That Boer policeman. What he just said before he left: “That’s the real African, they’re not like your Sidney Poitier kind of native . . .”
GIL: I just said there is this thing called Zulu rage, that doesn’t make me an Afrikaner!
PATRICE: Well? What’s the difference between your two points of view then? It seems to me—
GIL (Highly agitated and confused): But I saw how violent she was.
PATRICE: Yes. True. But listen. Look. I’m not going to do “the Kafir went mad.” I will not lower, we will not lower ourselves. What this was, was merely a problem of two personalities clashing, Gil.
GIL: Okay. Big clashing personalities.
PATRICE: I mean, really clashing. Because, let’s face it, she and I were not over the moon about each other. From the beginning. You had two people coming up against one another. Was it cultural? I’ll give you that. Because I wouldn’t play mistress to her put-upon servant, and I wouldn’t play at being some goddamn lumpy-ankled white Anglican housewife managing her every move, she resented me and she hated not being treated like shit.
GIL: But I don’t know that she was geared up for a full-fledged insurrection, Mother.
PATRICE: Could we have a drink? And some music? A little something. Because I am still a little . . . (She laughs) In shock.
GIL: Why have we been through so many?
PATRICE: What?
GIL: So many servants?
PATRICE: Well, I guess it has been a sort of festival of maids. I have to say, it’s because I throw them. I’m not what they’re used to.
GIL: Do you remember any of their names? I mean, I can barely keep track. It blurs.
PATRICE: Does this in any way, this whole thing, have to do with your brother? It’s all so synchronistic with his visit.
PATRICE: Well. It’s just, sorry to use this expression, but is he “putting ideas in your head?”
GIL (Offended): Please!
PATRICE: Really. Here he comes, the last bastion of the heroes of the left, you know, filled with his inflammatory ideas picked up at Columbia Journalism School, and one can just hear him delivering speeches to Edna—or maybe to you—about “When are these people going to take control of their lives?”
GIL: Are you saying he shouldn’t talk to people?
PATRICE: Oh please don’t paint me as some sort of one-woman police state.
GIL: I’m sorry.
PATRICE (Very edgy): May I have my drink please? I’m done in.
(Gil goes back into the house. Patrice puts out her cigarette in the remains of the Zulu pot.)
Maybe if your brother had been here, I mean, they like him. What kind of vacation is it, to not spend even an hour, to not take a shower. He’s been here for two days and we’ve had one meal together and he just split . . .
(Some cool Jobim samba wafts out to the veranda. Gil comes back out with a glass of whiskey for Patrice and water for himself.)
GIL (Acutely aware of Patrice’s fragile state): Are you all right?
PATRICE (Softening): I’m so sorry, Gil. To have you part of this. To have you growing up here. We had the idea: “Oh, let’s see the world . . .” This was not at all what one had in mind.
GIL (Soothing): Dad will be home tomorrow. Dad . . . (He doesn’t know what Dad will do. He stops)
PATRICE: It really worries me to hear you put some sort of racial slant on these things.
GIL: I’m sorry, I’m . . . just talking. It’s just talk.
(Beat) Do you ever listen to Lux Radio Theatre?
PATRICE: God. I’m not that old, Gil.
GIL: Well, it’s on here, I lie in bed listening at night. It’s probably new for them, and—it’s, all these awful old English actors pouring drinks all over the place whenever anything slightly sticky happens . . . they’re just pouring the whiskey and being civil. Sound effects of ice and stuff in glasses. And screams.
PATRICE (Looking at the shattered pottery): I will grant you one irony. It was not like she was destroying some cheapo Tijuana terra-cotta crap. This was a pot that though very, very unattractive, was nevertheless arguably one of a kind. Which counts for something. And it’s her culture she was smashing, tossing around. And they will have been the ones doing the smashing.
GIL: Maybe that’s what I was trying to say, that there’s an irony.
PATRICE: And come the revolution, you know, and they look around and there’s nothing left, I hope they aren’t surprised when the only Zulu pot left in the world is in some awful museum. In hell.
(Pause. Gil looks around.)
GIL: I think all the neighbors heard.
PATRICE: Oh yeah, they’re all peering out, behind those fucking lace curtains going, “See what that bloody American family has gone and done now? They’re practically like Jews, they’re so loud.”
GIL (Laughing): Mother.
PATRICE (Improvising now that she’s getting laughs, she mimes a phone call, this time with a South African/Anglicized voice): “Hullo, Mrs. Burgess? This is Mrs. Snitterton from down the road. Just want to say jolly good job, ringing the police. Would you mind sending them by to give my cook a couple of whacks. She made a balls of the beef Wellington and she’s being cheeky . . .”
GIL (Laughing): All right, I know.
(Beat. He notices blood on the arm of her dress) There’s blood on your sleeve.
PATRICE: It’s Edna’s. From when the policeman hit her.
GIL (Anguished): Maybe we didn’t have to call the police. Maybe that was a bit much.
PATRICE: What else could you do? You did the right thing.
(Pause.)
GIL: Did you see? Did you see how he got the black cop—the black one, mind you—to punch her.
PATRICE (Tilting her head, listening to the music): Listen. You know the great thing about this music? It is infallible. It can not help but to cheer you up. It never fails.
(Hilton enters with a tray, unnoticed, as Patrice begins to dance. She pulls Gil up to join her. Lights fade on the tableau of Patrice and Gil dancing, watched by a silent Hilton.)