Go Carefully, My Friend: A Novel of South Africa

1

The New York Times

Boston Edition

Tuesday, March 16, 1963

News Summary

United Nations Monday March 15

Debate on sanctions against South Africa continues with a vote expected soon. Judith Brown held the attention of delegates with testimony of her arrest and detention in solitary confinement. Under the Suppression of Communism Act, political prisoners are denied access to family, legal council or a trial for ninety days.

David scans the paper drinking his coffee. Judith is testifying at the United Nations in the debate on sanctions against South Africa.

For a moment their eyes meet. He’s waiting. Gillian cuts banana into Jamie’s cereal, watches him slowly spoon each mouthful.

Can I see the article? All she says.

An impatient hoot signals it’s time for Jamie to go. Laces tied, jacket buttoned, a quick kiss and a hug for David, and he’s out the front door, down the driveway and into the waiting station wagon.

David places the newspaper on the table, carefully folded so the article lies exposed. He rests his hands for a moment on her shoulders, I’m late.

He kisses her cheek, the clean soap smell of his damp hair still there as he leaves. Such a small paragraph to bear such weight, the name stares back at her.

She hadn’t thought about Judith in a long time, the memory of those last desperate days in London pushed to some forgotten corner of her brain.

The article forces her up the stairs to the attic where her old black steamer trunk stands in a corner under the eaves. Obsolete, abandoned, her hope chest, filing cabinet, filled with things carried across oceans but never unpacked. She lifts the lid, unwraps crisp sheets of tissue from the leather photograph album that shares the top drawer with strings of African beads, a silk shawl, and the gift of an embroidered tablecloth some relative gave her.

Her back against the metal trunk, the steady tick of the clock on the landing, the only sound in the quiet house, Gillian turns pages, searches for the group class photo, the beginning of their friendship.

She finds herself in the front row sitting with the smallest girls, the careful pleats of her green serge tunic tailored flat to her childish body over the white shirt, the black and white striped tie of the school uniform. The eager-to-please smile, back straight, legs crossed at the ankles, hair pulled into tight blond braids secured with black bows.

Judith stands at the end of the middle row, a tall figure at the edge of the group. Her wild black frizzy hair, bony arms and legs, her uniform tied carelessly at the waist, bunched over her narrow chest, slim hips, her sullen expression, disturbs the symmetry of the class photo, draws attention to her darker skin.

Her family came from Portugal, Sephardic Jews, classed as white, although they looked colored, who took advantage of an initiative by the South African government that relaxed immigration laws to lessen dependence on African labor.

The Browns lived in a row of semidetached houses, on a dead-end street close to the line of small shops that divided Kensington from the poorer neighborhood of Troyeville.

In high school the new girls joined a line outside the gym teacher’s office. Dressed in a brown gym tunic, hair bobbed like a boy, voice pitched low and loud, she barked instructions, directed them in groups of eight, to one of the five houses named after local birds. The school was modeled after the British system, where students competed against each other in academics and sports for the coveted silver cup awarded at the end of the school year.

Gillian and Judith were both assigned to the house of the Sakabula bird. The image on their house flag was the male bird in mating season, transformed from a dull brown sparrow to the dramatic black bird with a broad band of orange at the bend of its wings and a long black tail of feathers that made it difficult to fly. His tail forced him to lope along the fringe of long grasses where the female built the nest while they waited for the chicks to hatch.

The girls in other houses taunted the Sakabula house, made fun of the black bird that couldn’t fly.

Saka, Saka, Bula, Bula, Bula

Big black bob tail

Flip flap flop tail

Sa. Sa. Sakabuuuula

Gillian dreamed of becoming head prefect, competed in everything, played center forward for the house hockey team, spurred on by the heady drumming of the girls’ shoes against the wooden boards of the stands as they urged their team on.

Judith took no part in any of it.

Gillian watched the open hostility of the other girls who treated Judith as if she didn’t belong in their school, dismissed her with, She’s such a slob, such a pain, peeved that someone who looked colored could be the brightest girl in the class. The prefects punished her for breaking rules, for the hair she refused to cut or tie back, for never wearing her hat off school grounds, for the crumpled dirty look of her uniform. Her head buried in a book whenever they gathered in groups in the hallways or outside the building, she ignored them all, behaved as if she didn’t notice the antagonism.

Their friendship began much later, in a Social Studies class, the day Miss Campbell explained a change in government policy. Jo’burg is a declared white area. Blacks are here to work. If they don’t have a job and a work permit, they’ll be sent to the reserves under the new Bantu Areas Act.

Do they have the right to separate families? Gillian had read an article in the Rand Daily Mail criticizing the new regulations.

Slouched at her desk, eyes on the floor, Judith interrupted before Miss Campbell could answer. And what have they got out there? Sending them to the reserves to starve, that’s what the government’s doing.

The others weren’t even listening, restlessly bored by the discussion.

They’re only kaffirs, what do they know? Let our government do what it has to do. There are too many of them here, anyway. Her authority undermined in some subtle way, Miss Campbell turned on her heels to erase the blackboard, discussion closed.

The subtle sound of crumpled paper broke the silence as Judith tore her returned corrected paper into small strips. She methodically chewed the pieces to pulp, rolled them into spitballs, and flicked them with thumb and forefinger to land on the floor below the teacher’s desk. Chewed, rolled and flicked. Chewed, rolled and flicked. All eyes on the small white arcs of paper that fell below the broad back, waited for Miss Campbell to turn. But the sharp ring of the recess bell shattered the moment. Judith smiled at Gillian, the two of them side by side against the noisy release that signaled the end of class.

Interested in teaching some mine workers to read and write? Judith asked.

Gillian hesitated, aware of Miss Campbell’s puzzled expression as she stared at the small white balls below the blackboard. Gillian wondered how many of the others, putting away their books, heard Judith’s invitation.

It’s a program some university students run. We meet on Saturdays in a schoolhouse next to the Anglican Church in Jeppe, near the mine dumps where the miners work. Judith’s eyes challenged her as she waited for Gillian’s response.

All Gillian knew about African mine workers was peering through the car window, waiting at a traffic light, as the new recruits poured out the train station, herded like a bewildered pack of animals to the parking lot where buses waited to drive them to the mines. Watching the mass of black bodies, some with belongings wrapped in a blanket, some carrying a cardboard box, others with nothing but the clothes they wore, Gillian saw the fear in the faces of people on the street, who crossed to the other side or stood in doorways of shops till they passed. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like, going to the mines.

It was a test, taking sides. The moment stretched between them.

I’d like that, she said. The words came easily.

That Saturday Gillian lied, told her mother she was going to a play rehearsal at school, instead met Judith and her brother, Leonard, and drove with them out of the city to the mines. Leonard concentrated hard as he navigated the unlit, rubble-strewn backstreets that led from the white area to the district near the mines. He stopped at the parking lot of the Anglican Church where a young black man in a navy blue blazer, white shirt and tie, greeted them. The men are waiting, eager to learn, he said, and led the way to a small brick building, to the room where her students waited.

In their gumboots and frayed pants, covered in the fine gritty sand from the mines, they sat squeezed into children’s desks, their legs extended out into the aisle. The sand nestled in the creased dry skin of their fingers, settled in their hair, in the outer corners of their eyes and mouths. Gillian handed out pale, blue lined, exercise books and small yellow pencils, inhaling the pungent staleness of their sweat, wondering if they could smell the fear of a fifteen-year-old white girl alone in a room with seven black men.

On the blackboard, she wrote the first letter of each of their names as Leonard had instructed her to do, Thomas, Selaan, Nat, Sixpence, Matthew, William and Makoma, the first step to erase the X on their signed contracts. Their broad workers’ hands gripped the half pencils awkwardly in their effort to shape their sign, heads bent low, shoulders hunched. After a day working in the mine, they came to the small room in the schoolhouse at the back of the Anglican Church, to learn to write their names.

Gillian wanted to fold her hands over theirs, steady their grip, lessen the pressure on the small pencils, but instead, she stood very still and listened to the sound of Judith’s voice coming from the room next door, a muffled message that penetrated the wall between them. There was excitement in the knowledge that they were doing this together, defying the rules that forbade white girls from mixing with black men.

In the basement of the church building, they sat around a table drinking coffee. Judith, in her jeans and boy’s shirt, was easily part of the older university crowd. Gillian, in white ankle socks and an English Liberty print dress, raged silently against her mother who forced her to wear dresses made by the Afrikaans dressmaker, Mevrou De Klerk. For years she’d gone with her mother to the small house where the curtains were always drawn against the sunlight that faded the rugs and chair covers. To the dressmaker who leaned on heavy arms and lifted her body awkwardly from the bent position over her sewing machine.

"Hoe gaan dit, Mrs. Goodman? And look at you, Gillian. Ag man, how you grow."

The unwashed smell of her when she kneeled to take measurements or mark the hem of Gillian’s skirts, while Gillian’s mother studied patterns arranged in boxes on the floor to choose the dresses Mevrou De Klerk would sew.

After that first meeting, Gillian refused to wear the offending dresses, borrowed her brother’s jeans until she bought her own. All week they planned for their classes with the miners, stole supplies from the art room and books from the library. Some days it was only the three faithful, Thomas, Matthew, and Nat, who came to class. Thomas was older than the other two, he took his exercise book back to his bunk in the miners’ barracks to practice, line after line of the letters, until he’d mastered his name. Gillian had him write his name on the blackboard; spelling the letters out slowly, he turned with a proud grin to face the class. They laughed and clapped, insisted he write his name again.

Matthew was always late. He seemed too tired to follow even the simplest instructions until she smelled his breath and knew he’d been drinking, smuggled skokiaan brew from the township near the mines. Nat, the youngest of the group, came from Basutoland. He’d been recruited to earn money for his family when the last of his father’s cattle died from drought.

The concentrated silence of the men never lasted long. One by one they shifted their bodies away from the desks, shook their heads with sounds like "Waza! and Humba!" phrases that ended in shared laughter as they watched Gillian watching them.

She questioned them about what it was like to work in the mines. They described the intense heat, mimed how they crouched in the low-ceilinged stope, where the heavy jackhammers didn’t go through the rock downward by force of gravity but had to be held horizontally and driven into the wall in front or above them. Nat spoke of the dust they inhaled each day that left them coughing and spitting up blood. He described what it was like lying in his bunk in the dormitory at night, listening to the sounds of sick men, how he wondered if he’d ever see his mother again.

Once they stayed to watch the miners perform their tribal dances in the soccer field next to the school. They sat on the top of the soccer spectator stand, looked down on the dancers divided into their tribes. The Zulus proud and tall, their muscular bodies with necklaces and armbands of bright beads, glistened in the hot sun as they leapt and stamped their feet. Their battle cries, their assegais and animal skin-covered shields proclaimed their strength. The Sotho, in colorful blankets draped over one shoulder and under the armpit of the other, brandished knobkerries carved into weapons with metal spikes, while gyrating bone anklets rattled a rhythmic accompaniment to their chants. A lead dancer started a song, a phrase picked up and repeated in the rhythm of the dance.

Gillian couldn’t understand the words but felt their longing, as, far from home and family, their voices joined together in despair.

Perched on the bench where they sat, like a swimmer ready to plunge headfirst into the water at the beginning of a race, Judith leaned forward, hands on her knees, eyes riveted on the dancers below. She didn’t move, never relaxed, just sat there, poised as if ready to leap, join them.

Not long after the performance of the dancers at the mines, they arrived at the little schoolhouse to find the building locked, the miners standing outside, a sign pinned to the door. Evening Classes Discontinued Until Further Notice.

Who did this? Judith turned to confront the others grouped behind her.

Shrugs and silence her only answer. All we want is the building. We’re not asking them to do anything. It’s not theirs to close.

Hell man, Judith, we can only do it because the church sponsored the program. Leonard answered.

I’m not ready to give in. Judith turned to lead a march to the church behind the school but none of the others moved. Come on Gillian.

A single