Her own classroom was in disarray: no teacher present to take the register, and boys from the higher standards standing on desks and leaning out of the top windows, the only ones that could open to allow air in. There was a smattering of the usual thirty-five students in the class. In a back corner a group of girls had bunched their desks together into a protective laager. They sat nervously, clinging to each other for comfort. Grace joined them. She started to ask a question but was silenced by Lorraine, an older girl, as the group tried to catch snippets of information from words drifting down like scraps of paper on the wind from the boys, who provided a halting commentary on the activity outside.
“That one, over there! Unmarked police car.”
“You can see them, the Boere!”
All week members of the Student Representative Council had been planning this protest. Grace had heard details but she’d tuned them out. There was enough going on at home. Banners had been drawn and placards prepared. The protest would be peaceful, demanding what any sane human being in this society would want: Mandela released, apartheid ended, this gutter education brought up to standard.
The message had been echoing through the courtyards, the hallways, and the classrooms for weeks.
Free Mandela! Unban the ANC! Unban the PAC! Bring our leaders back home!
Today it came from a loud-hailer in the main quad. Seated at their desks the young girls heard the protest begin.
“Let’s go,” said Lorraine. “Let’s go join it.”
“No, I don’t want to get involved in this,” Claire said. “My parents warned me to stay away from politics.”
Grace followed the debate, not sure whose side she was on, nor daring to insert her own voice. Always the quiet one, always going along with everyone else, she hated herself for not having an opinion and not stating it firmly like these girls could do. What would she say, anyway? She knew apartheid was wrong, but hadn’t it been drummed into her at home to respect authority above all else? Challenge the rules and you could get hurt—at home or at school. She wanted to be decisive and quick, to know what she thought. Instead she just sat there watching Lorraine grab her stuff and leave while Claire’s face contorted with disapproval. Two others remained with them, afraid of the wrath of the policemen lining up outside.
Outside in the quad, the student rally was hitting its stride. “Amandla!”
“Awethu!”
The crowd, growing denser by the minute, grouped around the head protesters, eager to respond to the leaders’ demands. An older boy stood in the middle of a clearing of bodies, loudhailer glued to his lips.
“We demand freedom! We, the young people, are the future of this country. We want justice! Viva the ANC, Viva!”
“Viva!” the crowd responded in unison. “Viva the PAC, Viva!”
“Viva!”
“Viva Mandela, Viva!”
“Viva!”
The crowd took over chanting: “Mandela! Mandela! Mandela!”
A tall, lanky boy, made for the role of flag bearer, waved a big green and yellow banner imprinted with Mandela’s image. Grace, peeking out of the classroom door, took it in, wondering: who was this Mandela? Since the beginning of the year his name had hummed beneath the surface of her life at high school. They sang about him, chanted his name, demanded his freedom. He was locked up somewhere, wrongly, for wanting to end apartheid. This much she knew. Nobody knew what he looked like. His picture wasn’t in any history books, newspapers, or on television. She had never heard his name spoken at home, not when the going was good between her parents, and certainly not during the bad spells. The image on the flag seemed ghostly, like the only grainy picture of a long-dead relative who had been important and influential, but who you didn’t know at all. Who was this Mandela they were shouting for, really? Would he get them the vote, get rid of apartheid and Botha, and bring peace to the troubled streets? Did he beat his wife? Or would he, if he was free to do so, if she didn’t do things the way he liked?
“Mandela! Mandela!”
The chants rose up louder. The group started toyi toyi-ing to the rhythm of the freedom song, spilling out of the quad, ready to take to the streets. Banners waved furiously. Grace ached for the quiet of home, wishing she’d stayed there.
“Fok! Hier kom hulle!”
The sentries who had remained behind in her classroom jumped from the desks and ran out to warn the others of impending disaster.
“The Boere are coming!’
Grace saw Johnny in the quad. He looked her way and waved at her, mouthing, “Go!”
Another wave of boys swept down the corridor. “Out! Out! Get out!” they screamed at the petrified girls.
“Get the fuck out and run home as fast as you can! The Boere are coming!”
Claire, ever the ringleader, declared, “No, we’ll do what we want!”
The group of girls, Grace included, followed her across the classroom to where some of the boys were still perched as lookouts. Grace clambered onto a desk and strained to reach the top of the window. Row upon row of armored trucks were rounding the corner of the street next to the school’s front gate, helmeted soldiers protruding, guns ready. For one insensible moment they seemed to Grace like play cars, a convoy of army trucks like she’d seen the littlest kids next door push back and forth, back and forth; cute, harmless blocks of wood. Toy trucks for a staged fight, where the good always triumphed over evil, where everything was cleaned up and packed away afterwards and everyone went home friends. It hit Grace that the armored Casspirs were blocking off the school gate, cordoning off the way out. An unearthly ringing started in her ears, and unable to stir or look away from the approaching Casspirs, her limbs went limp.
Then, suddenly, Grace was moving fast, out of the classroom as if winged, her feet barely touching the ground. Johnny must have come running up the stairs to fetch her. He had her by the collar of her blazer and was hustling her onward, out, out. In the quad, they stopped to hear the soldiers, with loudspeakers ten times more powerful than the students’, command: “You have five minutes to disperse! Five minutes!”
From every direction, children poured into the quad. Like sheep rounded up by an unseen herd dog, bodies ran, walked, churned against each other, not knowing whether to go or stay, not knowing how to leave. Mindful of a stampede, the leaders tried to induce some order. The teachers were nowhere.
Then: shots. One, two, three. A shooting star hung briefly suspended above them before landing in their midst, unleashing its poison. A small dust cloud bloomed into full evil, and Grace knew in that instant that she was going to die. The gas ripped into her, into the delicate tissues of nose, eyes, and mouth. The top layer of her skin was being eaten away. She couldn’t breathe. Tried to cough. Gasped for air but swallowed fire. Throat melting, eyes burning out of her head, she could not see a thing. She was aware of only the burning, burning.
She started moving again, without volition, amidst the sea of bodies being swept out by a current to God knew where. In the press of bodies the students rounded a corner out of the quad and then Grace was breathing again, her lungs greedily sucking the air. She felt a hand at her back: Johnny’s, pushing her away from the main school building.
“Run, run! Go to the hole in the fence. Run home!”
Lungs still burning, Grace ran with a crowd of students across the soccer field toward the makeshift exit in the school fence, but the soldiers, guessing their escape plan, rolled in their Casspirs toward it, rifles ready. Fear became the fire in her throat, the burning of her insides, the liquid running down between her legs.
All running together, but each alone, the students’ race against the soldiers seemed futile to Grace even as she ran with the herd. There was nowhere to hide, just the soccer field with no chalked lines and browning patches. Throats on fire, they ran the length of the field, not daring to look up or back or around. Johnny had disappeared. With skin and eyes burning, tears and snot streaming down her face, Grace shot forward with the crowd.
Another dull pop echoed across the field. Another teargas canister launched at them, thudding on the earth. Faster they ran, trying to outrun the convoy rolling toward the stream of kids congealing at the hole in the fence. Turn around or continue forward? Everyone else kept moving forward, so Grace stayed within the safety of numbers.
At the hole, the group bottlenecked. Dancing to the invisible flames of teargas, some fell, while others trampled over prostrate bodies in their haste to get through the gap that allowed passage to only one person at a time. Grace felt herself being pushed up against the fence. She managed to break free. As the stream of children halted, she took a gap and decided to leap through the fence. She was about to step through the hole when her knees collapsed and her body hit the ground. The noise of the approaching armored trucks deafened her. She felt harsh rubber soles treading into her back. Then unseen hands lifted her quickly, securely, and shoved her through the fence. She turned back for a second, expecting to see him, but there was no recognizable face, just an endless blur of children crowded at the gap.
“Move!” they chided, and Grace started running again. Students scattered in all directions as a volley of shots rang out. Grace saw a house ahead of her and she ran for it. She clambered over the low front wall and lay down behind it, hoping she was hidden. More shots rent the air. These were sharper than those that had released the teargas. She crawled around the garden keeping to the wall, then scaled an intersecting fence, dropping into the neighboring yard. Through a window, a woman her mother’s age screamed, “Get out! Don’t come running through my yard! Do you see me looking for trouble?”
Grace slipped through a side gate, and for the first time since the protest began, her limbs relaxed a little. A full block away from the soldiers, separated by a double row of houses, she slowed to catch her breath. Unless they jumped out of the vehicles to start chasing on foot, she was safe. She slowed down, turned, and saw a plume of smoke rising from the school grounds. The last part of her journey home was a blur. Her legs were the consistency of rubber by the time she reached the yellow house on Saturn Street and unlocked the front door and the metal security gate. Inside, as she sank to the floor, a terrible thought screeched into consciousness. What if they’d followed her, could see her through the lace curtains? She crawled against the faded white couch and stayed there, for how long she didn’t know. Waiting. Waiting. Examining the cracks in the unpolished wooden floor. Holding them with her eyes as though her life depended on it. Guarding the tiny specks of white sand, blown underneath the door by the terrible howling wind. How neatly the grains lined up against the edge of the threadbare, fraying carpet. Taking in the dirty-orange rug speckled with brown; watching where the grains of sand had settled and nested, like tiny eggs, into its fibers. Watching one ant, then another, making its way across the living room. Feeling nothing.
This was the kind of magic Grace had learned in this house. How fixing your eyes on one thing, just one little thing—say a crack in the wall—could make everything else disappear: your parents, their shouting, the wind, the snap of fist upon flesh. The sound of Casspirs circling, the fevered cries outside, her limbs, her own body—none of these existed after Grace tuned them out. She became a mind, a pure mind, floating on the thing she’d chosen to fix on. She could project her entire being on that crack in the wall, that speck of white sand. It held her. It got her through whatever was raging on the outside.
Mary was late from work that evening. By the time her key turned in the lock Grace had gotten off the floor, but she was sitting hunched up on the couch in the darkening living room.
“Grace! Oh, thank God!”
Mary’s eyes were wild as she rushed over to her daughter and pulled her to her.
“Why haven’t you switched on the lights? All I saw as I was coming up the road was darkness!”
She let go of Grace and rushed around the room again, flicking on every switch as if to ward off evil, then sat back down next to her daughter, embracing her.
“What happened today?”
“Nothing, Mama.”
“Why won’t you tell me?”
Mary reached into her bag, not waiting for an answer, and produced from it a box of cigarettes. She lit up and inhaled. Sitting up straight, it looked as if she was bracing herself for something.
“Grace,” she said, blowing smoke at the ceiling, not looking at her, “Johnny is gone.”
Her voice was soft and low. It was the same benevolent voice she used to deny Grace something she could not have.
Grace retreated deeper into silence, although her eyes searched for her mother’s.
“They think the cops shot him at the school,” said Mary. “They think he was helping the others to get out. No one has seen him since this afternoon. The police came out and ran into the school grounds. Did you see him? Do you know anything, Grace?”
“No.”
Words were spilling out of Mary—incomprehensible, senseless words that Grace wanted to stop.
“I just came past their house. Rowena is in a state…!”
Grace fought the urge to hit her mother in the mouth in order to stop the stream of words.
“…Tim has driven everywhere, all the hospitals and police stations…”
After a waterfall of words, Mary fell quiet, staring into the distance and dragging on her cigarette, lost in her own world again. Grace wanted to scream, but the fog of cigarette smoke and silence choked her, strangling any sound. Instead, she looked at her fingernails, inspecting the arch of the white tips against the pink nail beds and the frayed bits of cuticle sticking out of her left ring finger.
Her mother sighed, smoothed down her hair, and got up to go to the kitchen. Grace heard the lid of the kettle, a sharp stream of water, and a click of a switch. She went back to examining her nails.
Mary emerged with two cups of tea. “Drink!” she ordered.
Ever the obedient daughter, Grace did as she was told until she’d drained every drop of the strong, sweet tea.