Bloodlines (8 page)

Johannesburg, 1945

I was in my pajamas, sitting curled in a chair in the kitchen with Roslyn, the black woman who had worked for us since before I was born. It was late, way after my bedtime, and my school friend, Alex, who was spending the night, was already sleeping.

Roslyn was a plump woman in her mid-thirties, with full cheeks and smooth skin. Most of the time she wore a serious, worried expression, but when she smiled her whole face opened up, and her cheeks dimpled. She wasn’t smiling now—in fact, she was studiously ignoring me. She stood over the ironing board in her starched light blue and white uniform, iron in hand, smoothing sheets and pillowcases, ironing my father’s shirts, putting creases in my trouser legs, refusing to look up at me.

“Go to bed, Leonard,” she said wearily. “There is nothing you can do to change my mind. I’m going to tell your father when he comes home.”

“You don’t have to be to be so mean,” I said.

“Me, mean? What about you? You supposed to be in bed half past eight. Instead you been playing around, making messes with your friend, being rude to me. You don’t care about me—but I have to take care, cleaning up your mess, running about after a big boy like you, when I have ironing to do for your mother. She’s not going to be pleased that it’s not done, and I’m tired. No. It’s enough with you. I’m going to tell your father when he comes home. Maybe he beats you with his belt; it will be a good lesson for you. Maybe next time they go out, you behave better than tonight.”

In my mind, there was no next time. I had been badly behaved all week. My father had made clear that if we misbehaved, it was the last time Alex would sleep over, and that in addition I would be punished. What form the punishment would take I didn’t know—although my father was not overly strict, he knew that I was easily shamed, and that withholding his approval was generally punishment enough.

But there was something in me that wouldn’t allow me to do what Roslyn said at that moment, some kind of pubescent rebellion I couldn’t stop. I wanted to get what I wanted, and was suddenly for the first time reckless enough to speak about what was ordinarily taboo in our little world—something that made me voice words forbidden by the social contract that bound us.

“It’s not my fault, Rosy, that things are the way they are. I didn’t make them this way. I didn’t choose to be born white, you know, any more than you chose to be born black. And I didn’t make the laws that force you to live in a different place, and make it so that you have to work in my parents’ house.”

She looked at me strangely.

“What you talking about, Leonard?” she said, and went back to her ironing.

I was in unknown territory, beyond what was acceptable, and my heart was beating wildly. There were few things that could not be said to an African servant—yet Roslyn was family, and I knew even as I spoke that I was overstepping the bounds of propriety set by my parents.

“I’m talking about the way things are, between white people and black.”

She looked up at me again, briefly, out of the side of her face, and I could see the tiny red veins in the whites of her eyes.

“Go to bed, Leonard,” she said wearily, waving me away with the back of her hand. “I’m tired of you tonight, and I have work to do. Your mother and father will be home soon—don’t let them find you still awake. Go.”

Roslyn stood bowed over her ironing board, repeatedly running the iron back and forth over my father’s white shirt, stopping every few runs to dip her hand in a bowl of water and flick moisture on the fabric. Eventually she looked up at me, briefly, reproachfully.

“What?” I said. “You’re forced to live in a poor township, far away from here, and to work in our house and live in a little room in the backyard. You have to watch us living together as a family, but you can only see your children one day a week. And they don’t have all the things that we have. If I were you I would be angry, too—but that doesn’t mean you have to take your anger out on me by telling my father I’ve misbehaved.”

When I started talking, I didn’t quite know what I wanted to say, or what impact it would have, or even whether I would be doing my cause any good. It was quite possible that Roslyn would be infuriated by these words from a child, and that she would be undeterred from her intent to tell on me when my parents came home. What I didn’t expect was that she would say nothing; that she would refuse to look at me; that huge, clear drops would fill her eyes and roll down her cheeks to form a dark puddle on my father’s starched shirt, and that she would do nothing to stop them.

Even at twelve I recognized her helplessness; saw in her tears a loss too deep for words to express. And I felt a sense of power at the reaction I had been able to elicit from her. I had plumbed the depths of her life; forced a tacit admission that her time was spent in involuntary servitude. I had spoken the unspeakable, revealed the fiction created by both master and servant so that we could survive each day—the servant unashamed by what she allowed herself to suffer without rising up in fury against her masters to reclaim personhood and birthright; and the master, unashamed by what he was willing to impose upon a people regardless of the cost to his own humanity.

“I’m sorry, Rosy,” I said. “Please, don’t cry. I didn’t mean to make you sad.”

“Yes, you did,” she said, “and now look.”

She put her iron down on the stand and picked up my father’s shirt, a brown angular burn visible on one shoulder. I knew that Roslyn was proud of her ironing, and that she never burned anything. She dropped the shirt into a basket at her side, and for a moment rested both hands on the ironing board, her head lowered and her weight hanging from her shoulders.

“I’m sorry about the shirt, Rosy. It got burned because of me. Please, don’t worry. I’ll explain to my mother that I was annoying you,” I said bravely, “and that you got distracted.”

But Roslyn ignored me.

“You can have what you want, Leonard,” she said softly. “I will not tell your father about tonight. Not a word about your bad behavior. And nothing of this conversation.”

She refused to look at me, but I could see that her eyes were swollen, her cheeks still wet.

“Now go to bed.”

I rose from my chair and walked towards her, intending to give her a hug before I went back to my room. But she closed her eyes and looked down, the tears still falling from her cheeks like morning dew from a plant, uprooted and shaken. I turned and made my way through the kitchen, up the darkened corridor to my room, and climbed into bed. I didn’t know then what rape was, but I knew that I had violated her—exposed her against her will, robbed her of something essential to her sense of well-being. In the process, I had soiled myself.

Roslyn didn’t tell my father about my bad behavior that night, nor did she mention our conversation. But neither could she face me. Despite my efforts to engage her, to apologize, she turned away from me, and when I became insistent, she locked herself in her room. I stood outside her door, entreating her to talk to me, and received only silence in response.

After that night, she wouldn’t speak to me or look into my face. Shortly thereafter, she asked my mother for a reference, saying that she no longer wished to work for a family with children. She gave no reason, and my parents respected her decision. They asked me whether anything had occurred between us, or if I had in some way offended her, but I was too confused and humiliated by what I had done to tell them the truth. They could never have imagined what actually happened, and I never told them; never shared it, until now, with anyone else.

I knew she had three children who lived in a township with her mother or her aunt, and on her day off each week she traveled six hours one way by bus to spend a night with them. I never learned which township it was; never asked her children’s names or their ages; never saw their pictures. Thoughts of my childhood are incomplete without her; I carry her face with me every day of my life. Her voice, her accented English, her dimpled cheeks and her laughter, the flowery smell of her hair oil, are a part of me. I didn’t know her by any name other than Roslyn. And I never saw her again.

Johannesburg, 1953

After that first kiss, Michaela and I spent many hours together at the office and in coffee houses, and at the homes of like-minded friends. Your mother was always willing to take risks—she wanted to make bold statements, take action. We discussed our plans and the best ways to achieve them, and if I hadn’t been there to inject moderation and caution, she would have been the one to lead the charge, to be in the vanguard, and to be the first one shot. I was much less politically motivated than she was, but I was also politically astute in a way that she would never be.

“You’re not going to get them to change their plans for Sophiatown,” I told her and a group of fellow students one night around the table in a local café. “Not by writing editorials or by demonstrating. It’s a done deal. You think you can change their minds, but you can’t.”

I tried to explain why it was too late to stop the relocation. The government wanted to satisfy an adjacent community of poor whites who resented the proximity of the black community. They were already planning to bulldoze the area and build a white suburb over the ruins—which they ultimately did, naming it Triomf—Triumph—in unvarnished arrogance. The plan was to move residents out of the freehold of Sophiatown, where they were allowed to own land, and into a township where they would be denied property rights—where it was easier to monitor their movements. The strategy of the Nationalist Party was brilliant: take advantage of the strength of tribal bonds to fragment and weaken the opposition, and make it impossible to mount any united resistance to apartheid.

When I was through explaining how I thought it worked, Michaela leaned back in her chair, folded her arms, and looked at me quizzically.

“You’ve never been to Sophiatown,” she said, “so you’re talking theory—you’ve never seen the reality of what they want to destroy. You’ve never seen the communities that will be bulldozed.” Her large, dark eyes filled as she spoke, and she wiped the overflow from her cheeks delicately with the backs of her fingers. “You’ve never looked into the faces of people who’ve lived there for fifty years, who own their homes, and who are about to be forced off their property as if they had no say in the matter, no feelings, no legal standing. Or the children whose neighborhoods are going to disappear; friends who’ll end up living apart from each other because they belong to different tribal groups, or have a slightly different skin color.”

“I haven’t seen those things,” I responded quietly. “But seeing them isn’t going to change the reality of what’s about to happen.”

She slowly shook her head, and smiled at me knowingly. “You may not be able to change the outcome by visiting the place,” she said, “but standing shoulder to shoulder with people, seeing their faces, will change your reality. You may still talk about issues and possibilities, but once you’ve been there, your issues will have faces. And faces make a difference.”

“Okay,” I said. “Write about those people. Put their voices in your stories.”

“I’ll do better than that,” she said as she stood up and began to gather the papers on the table to take home with her. “This week we’re going to the Odin Theatre. I’m going to show you the face of this country—the face they intend to beat into submission.”

“Okay,” I said. “Where’s the Odin Theatre?”

“You really don’t know, do you?” she said with a grin. “It’s at the center of Sophiatown.”

That first visit to Sophiatown changed the course of my life—not only because I saw so many black faces and black lives, but because for the first time, I saw who your mother really was. Most of all, it was the moment in my life when I first understood what it meant to be South African; when I recognized the richness of the identity that was being denied all of us. There was no going back from that moment.

Blacks made up eighty percent of the population, but they were invisible to us. We might speak a few words in one of the Bantu languages—Xhosa or Zulu or Shangaan—but we knew nothing of their customs or their mythology; nothing of their families or where and how they lived. Sometimes we didn’t know their family names, or even the names of their children.