The Housemaid's Daughter (20 page)

‘Ada?’ Lindiwe stood before me, shoulders bent under a heavy load, the muscles standing out on her arms and neck like thick cords.

‘It will only be for a short while,’ I said urgently, struggling to my feet. Dawn cried into the blanket on my back, then fell silent. ‘I will pay you. And I will teach you everything I know for free.’

‘Oh, Ada.’ She slung down her load and sat down. I levered myself down beside her. This time she didn’t avoid my eyes and I could see that hers were no longer uncertain, merely weary. ‘How could I turn you away?’ She motioned inside the hut. ‘But it’s so small.’

‘Thank you,’ I gasped and took her hand. ‘God bless you! I will try not to be a burden.’

The tears that had stayed away since the early morning suddenly came back. And then Lindiwe leant against me and wept too, saying that she had hated herself all day for the manner in which she had greeted Dawn that morning.

‘I don’t know if I can do this,’ I said, tears and relief mixed together. ‘I have sinned against someone I love and I have made God the Father angry.’

‘Hush,’ murmured Lindiwe, stroking my arm. ‘That is past. God will forgive if you serve Him through the child.’ She paused and her forehead creased and I could tell she was searching for the right words like she used to during our lessons. ‘God is not like the white man. He does not hate Dawn because of what you did.’

I thought about this for a while as darkness gathered about us and my body began to stiffen, and the sky deepened to an inky blue. It was what I hoped too. While I myself was perhaps forever flawed, I could still serve Him through Dawn. And whatever happened, God would not punish the child. But what of Madam? Even if I found a measure of forgiveness through Dawn, I could never receive it from Madam.

Candles began to flicker from nearby huts. A woman was singing to her child,
Thula thu’,
like Mama used to sing to me, like I would one day sing to Dawn. Back towards Bree Street, Cradock’s electric lights beckoned through the bluegums and the pepper trees in front gardens. Madam would be sitting down in the lounge opposite Master. The light would be shining on the brooch she wore at her throat, perhaps the green one, perhaps – still – Master Phil’s military badge.

‘She’s beautiful,’ said Lindiwe, holding down a fold of the blanket and examining Dawn’s sleeping face closely. ‘One day you will be proud.’

* * *

Before Dawn was born, I was in the midst of a negotiation with my students. It was not a negotiation about money, like with Auntie, but about lessons. I needed to find a way to teach that went further than playing every noisy piece I knew. But I proceeded slowly, as young Master Phil had told me. Negotiations, even about things that don’t involve money, take time. So I played and played, and waited for the day when they would be prepared to give me some quiet at the start of each lesson to talk about what lay behind the tunes they loved to dance to. That was the negotiation: a little teaching, in return for more jive.

But, as it turned out, I had no need for such tactics. Dawn proved to be the ultimate silencer. One look at the child’s pale skin and all riotous behaviour ceased. ‘Have you heard of a man called Beethoven?’ I asked into the unexpected hush, playing the first bars of the
Eroica
symphony. They stared at me, they stared at one another, they peered furtively at the new baby on my back, and then they listened. They discovered that Beethoven had been deaf and yet still managed to make beautiful tunes. They also discovered that many musicians were as poor as they themselves were, and experienced hunger like they did, and found joy in music as they did. Many were outcasts among their own people. The colour of Dawn – herself an outcast – was somehow a backdrop to the stories I told, and to the tunes that brought the class alive at the end of each lesson.

So while I had feared jeering, it did not come about. Instead, Dawn provided both the lull and the spur to take my teaching to a new level. Now, I taught first and played afterwards – to a rapt audience. They accepted the new arrangement without objection.

After this success, I went further. Since hearing the St James choir, I began to play tunes that could be sung to. I would write the words on the blackboard before the children arrived in class, and leave them to sing along if they wished. Rousing pieces, like
Ode to Joy,
or lilting songs like the ones Madam used to sing about Ireland. At first they only danced. Then, later, they began to sing too. Roughly, wildly at first, then with more understanding, even though, like me, they’d never seen the places we sang about.

‘Oh Danny boy,’ they crooned, discovering tenderness amidst the school’s clamour, ‘the pipes, the pipes are ca-a-lling…’ The human voice is every bit as able as the body to take us to another place.

I was under no illusions. There was certainly gossip about me and some laughter behind my back. But in the classroom, where I could hold their attention, music occupied us more than the shame of a teacher who had sinned with a white man rather than with one of her own. As long as I could keep their interest with my stories and my playing, they overlooked the colour of the child. If only it had been so with Auntie. And with my colleagues on the staff.

* * *

The first year of Dawn’s life coincided with a lack of rain. This took on a new meaning for me, beyond the brown dust and the shimmering heat and the worse-smelling latrines and the longer queues for water at the communal tap.

It meant that the drifts were open.

It meant that my journey to school from Lindiwe’s hut in the township beyond Bree Street could be made across the Groot Vis at the drift. It required only for me to take off my shoes and wade across. It meant that although I now lived on the same side of the river as Master and Madam, there was little risk of them seeing me. I could stay well away from Bree, from Church Street where it ran down to the iron bridge, and Dundas Street beyond that, where Cradock House lay with its apricot tree that once carried me in its sap, and its wooden floors that once shone back at me as I polished them each week.

Yet even as I stayed out of sight, there was nowhere to hide my black skin. For around the time that Dawn was born, the people who ruled my country began to make many new laws in relation to skin. Some of them I knew about, like the ones that said black people were less important than white, and that you had to be born in a place or have lived there a long time before you would be allowed to stay. One law that I didn’t know said it was illegal for a white man and a black women to lie together.

I already suspected that such a lying together was not right in the eyes of God but I learnt only later that it was against the law of the land and that, if discovered, you could go to jail. I wonder if Master knew of this law when he stood in the doorway of my room at Cradock House and said he would not hurt me? If so, why did he take such a risk? Was the loneliness in him so great that he was prepared to risk even the white man’s jail – and the shame that would fall on him and on Madam? Perhaps, therefore, it was a good thing for him that I left.

Mama had always said that jail could reach out and take you even if you had done no wrong. As I grew up I used to doubt if that was true, but perhaps Mama was wiser than I realised. She knew what was coming. For with these new laws, jail now had the right to do so. You did not need to be a bad person to be sent there, you did not even have to do anything wrong, you just had to be someone of the wrong colour. The policemen that cruised the township in their vans knew this.

The arrival of Dawn with her coloured skin amidst such new laws presented a dilemma for my fellow teachers. It was bad enough that black people were beaten for the smallest offence, and suddenly forbidden to enter certain places or sit on certain benches – there were now ‘Whites Only’ signs in the Karoo Gardens – and unable to move away to work just because they wanted to. But now they faced the difficulty of having to take sides over a mixed-race baby. Our once happy staffroom became divided territory. Silas would arrive early, turn his back on me and gather about him those who agreed I should leave rather than advertise my betrayal of fellow blacks daily via the pale child. Into my corner, however, strode the colourfully turbaned Dina – after initial dismay – and the quiet Sipho Mhlase who taught numbers. Dina was sure I must have been the victim of a wicked man. I had shown courage in not pleading for help – shades of not grovelling – therefore I deserved support. At the worst of this time, I wondered if it might be best to stay away from the staffroom altogether. It was Lindiwe who talked me out of it.

‘You have to fight!’ she said to me in the candlelight of her tiny hut as we ate soup one night. ‘Hold your head up and they will respect you.’

Through this difficulty, Mr Dumise trod a careful path. He had no grounds to dismiss me because my teaching was popular and I was never absent from school.

‘But look at the example she sets for our students!’ retorted Silas.

‘Have you no pity?’ I heard the headmaster say softly. ‘She was no doubt raped.’

‘She deceived us!’ Silas went on heatedly. ‘She should have said she was having a coloured child when she applied for the job.’

Chapter 28

I played the
Raindrop
today and it brought back memories of Ada.

As I expected, there was nothing to be found about her on my trip to KwaZakhele, not from the minister, or from the site of dear Miriam’s grave in a cemetery of the utmost starkness.

Such was the poverty and deprivation of the place that I came back determined to do something – not in KwaZakhele, for that is too far away – but here in Cradock. We sit across the river from a township where the people must be equally wretched. Unlike KwaZakhele, they do not even have a church. I believe they meet outdoors on Sundays at the foot of a koppie.

And as for Ada, I still feel she is alive. I sense her every time I play. But as the months turn into years I am less hopeful of seeing her again.

T
he township beyond Bree turned out to be different from Auntie’s Lococamp community. It was not a jumble of huts and a tangle of alleys with no order to it. This place had been laid out with roads that were intended to be straight, and schools and playing fields that encouraged healthy minds and muscles. Good behaviour comes from such a combination. At St James School the children wore their uniforms proudly, and played football, or sang in the choir I’d heard that first day. This township had pride. Even the mayor sometimes listened to Rev. Calata when he spoke out against the police that careered along the rutted streets and threw residents in jail for no reason other than the matter of skin. Indeed, Rev. Calata used to say, why should such a place not think of itself as part of Cradock, subject to the same laws and benefits? In contrast, Auntie’s township over the Groot Vis had grown up on its own and knew itself to be separate and unworthy.

But sadly, at the time I arrived, I could see that much of what had been planned was falling into the kind of disrepair I knew so well from across the river. The straight roads reeked from overflowing latrines. Rubbish that was once collected now piled up to attract flies, and illness followed toddlers that played in it. Paint peeled from the impressive walls of St James School, and the grass on the sports grounds withered from missing care and water. The soup kitchens that used to feed the poor were manned less often now, and I even heard talk about the taking of money from the
shebeens
into the bank account of the town council to pay for white services, instead of black. I wondered if Master knew of this, if Master approved of such theft. There were also signs that the well-behaved children were starting to run wild like the youngsters across the river.

Down on the riverbank, the women that I thought were my friends now steered clear of me – probably warned by Auntie – and tried to turn their backs on Lindiwe as well. Their views were a mixture of what I faced at school. Like Silas, they believed I had deceived them – and, more importantly, Auntie – by keeping quiet about the colour of the coming child. Like Veronica and Mildred, some would not condemn me to my face but rather avoided my eyes and took their washing to a distant rock. Others never spoke to me again. The low singing that I loved now came from further away.

Lindiwe even had to reassure some that I would have nothing to do with their washing. I could tell she was worried and I used to ask her at the end of each day if she had had enough business and whether she wanted me to leave.

‘Stay,’ she would say with a weary sigh as she stretched out on her bed and closed her eyes for a rest before our simple evening meal. ‘It will be all right.’ Between those of her customers who stayed faithful and the money I paid to her in rent – I willingly gave her more than I had paid Auntie – she kept going and after a while there were no more questions of Lindiwe, although I myself was never particularly welcome on the riverbank.

As the washerwomen turned away from me, so did others. There was no invitation to return to the church on the
koppie,
where vibrant singing swept over the polished stones and far into the Karoo veld. I could go to St James Church now, with its disciplined choir and its carved cross above the pulpit, but I still missed those Sunday mornings outdoors – I even missed the minister with his wild talk of a war of liberation, and the joyous chants of the congregation in response. Joining their soaring hymns had bound me to a new family. Not since Cradock House had I felt such a sense of belonging – even though some of what they said frightened me – and such a sense of escape.

For this new belonging was indeed a kind of escape. As I sang, it lifted me out of the township, it freed me to roam across the veld in my mind, like I used to imagine from Master Phil’s toy box on the top floor of Cradock House. It showed me the brown desert floor rearing up to the mountains where there was snow in winter, it let me trace the first shining trickles of water that fed the Groot Vis. It even flew me to another desert where Master Phil lay beneath the palms of an oasis. To belong – and yet to be alone under a seamless sky – surely this was a gift from God? A gift to replace the house and garden of my childhood? A gift to replace the people who were once my horizon?