The Sun Between Their Feet (32 page)

He lifts the tin and throws the water in a fine, gleaming curve over the bushes, watching the drops fall in a glittering shower; and an old hen, which was seeking shelter from the heat, runs away squawking. He roars with laughter, seeing that flapping old hen. Then he tosses the tin away into the bushes. It is new and glints among the green leaves. He looks at the tin, while an impulse stirs in him – that same impulse that always hurts him so, leaving him limp and confused. He is thinking that his mother, who paid a shilling for the tin in the Greek store, will not know where it is. Secretly, as if he were doing something wicked, he lifts the tin, carries it to the door of the hut and, stretching his hand carefully around the opening, sets it inside. His mother, who is stirring meal into boiling water for the porridge, does not turn around. Yet he knows that she knows what he is doing. He waits for her to turn – if she does and thanks him, then he will shout at her; already he feels the anger crowding his throat. And when she does not turn he feels even more anger, and a hot blackness rocks across his eyes. He cannot endure that anyone, not even his mother, should understand why he creeps like a thief to do a kind thing. He walks swaggering back to the shade of the tree, muttering: I am Jabavu, I am Jabavu – as if this were the answer to any sad look or reproachful words or understanding silence.

He squats under the tree, but carefully, so that his trousers may not fall completely to pieces. He looks at the village. It is a native kraal, such as one may see anywhere in Africa, a casual arrangement of round mud huts with conical
grass roofs. A few are square, influenced by the angled dwelling of the white man. Beyond the kraal is a belt of trees, and beyond them, the fields. Jabavu thinks: This is my village – and immediately his thoughts leave it and go to the white man's town. Jabavu knows everything about this town, although he has never been there. When someone returns, or passes through this village, Jabavu runs to listen to the tales of the wonderful living, the adventure, the excitement. He has a very clear picture in his mind of the place. He knows the white man's house is always of brick, not of mud. He has seen such a house. The Greek at the store has a brick house, two fine rooms, with chairs in them, and tables, and beds lifted off the floor on legs. Jabavu knows the white man's town will be of such houses, many many houses, perhaps as many as will reach from where he is sitting to the big road going north that is half a mile away. His mind is bright with wonder and excitement as he imagines it, and he looks at his village with impatient dissatisfaction. The village is for the old people, it is right for them. And Jabavu can remember no time when he has not felt as he does now; it is as if he were born with the knowledge that the village was his past, not his future. Also, that he was born longing for the moment when he could go to the town. A hunger rages in him for that town. What is this hunger? Jabavu does not know. It is so strong that a voice speaks in his ear, I want, I want, as if his fingers curl graspingly in a movement. We want, as if every fibre of his body sings and shouts, I want, I want, I want …

He wants everything and nothing. He does not say to himself: I want a motor car, an aeroplane, a house. Jabavu is intelligent, and knows that the black man does not own such things. But he wants to be near them, to see them, touch them, perhaps serve them. When he thinks of the white man's town he sees something beautiful, richly coloured, strange. A rainbow to him means the white man's town, or a fine warm morning, or a clear night when there is a dancing. And this exciting life waits for him, Jabavu, he
was born for it. He imagines a place of light and warmth and laughter, and people saying: Hau! Here is our friend Jabavu! Come, Jabavu, and sit with us.

This is what he wants to hear. He does not want to hear any longer the sorrowful voices of the old people: The Big Mouth, look at the Big Mouth, listen to the Big Mouth hatching out words again.

He wants so terribly that his body aches with wanting. He begins to day-dream. This is his dream, slipping, half-ashamed, through his mind. He sees himself walking to town, he enters the town, a black policeman greets him: ‘Why, Jabavu, so there you are, I come from your village, do you remember me?' ‘My friend,' answers Jabavu, ‘I have heard of you from our brothers, I have been told you are now a son of the Government.' ‘Yes, Jabavu, now I serve the Government. See, I have a fine uniform, and a place to sleep, and friends. I am respected both by the white people and the black. I can help you.' This son of the Government takes Jabavu to his room and gives him food – bread perhaps, white bread, such as the white man eats, and tea with milk. Jabavu has heard of such food from people returning to the village. Then the son of the Government takes Jabavu to the white man whom he serves. ‘This is Jabavu,' he says, ‘my friend from my village.' ‘So this is Jabavu,' says the white man. ‘I heard of you, my son. But no one told me how strong you were, how clever. You must put on this uniform and become a son of the Government.' Jabavu has seen such policemen, because once a year they come gathering taxes from the villages. Big men, important men, black men in uniform … Jabavu sees himself in this uniform, and his eyes dazzle with wanting. He sees himself walking around the white man's town. Yes, Baas, no, Baas; and to his own people he is very kind. They say, Yes, that is our Jabavu, from our village, do you remember? He is our good brother, he helps us …

Jabavu's dream has flown so high that it crashes and he blinks his eyes in waking. For he has heard things about the
town which will tell him this dream is nonsense. One does not become a policeman and a son of the Government so easily. One must be clever indeed and Jabavu gets up and goes to a big, flat stone, first looking around in case anyone is watching. He flips the stone over, brings from under it a roll of paper, quickly replaces the stone and sits on it. He has taken the paper off parcels of things he has bought from the Greek store. Some are all print, some have little coloured pictures, many together, making a story. The bright sheets of pictures are what he likes best.

They have taught Jabavu to read. He spreads them out on the ground and bends over them, his lips forming the words. The very first picture shows a big white man on a big black horse, with a great gun that spits red fire. ‘Bang!' say the letters above. ‘Bang,' says Jabavu slowly. ‘B-a-n-g.' That was the first word he learned. The second picture shows a beautiful white girl, with her dress slipping off her shoulder, her mouth open. ‘Help!' say the letters. ‘Help,' says Jabavu, ‘Help, help.' He goes on to the next. Now the big white man has caught the girl around the waist and is lifting her on to the horse. Some wicked white men with big black hats are pointing guns at the girl and the good white man. ‘Hold me, honey,' say the letters. Jabavu repeats the words. He slowly works his way to the foot of the page. He knows this story by heart and loves it. But the story on the next page is not so easy. It is about some yellow men with small, screwed-up faces. They are wicked. There is another big white man who is good and carries a whip. It is that whip that troubles Jabavu, for he knows it; he was slashed himself by the Greek at the store for being cheeky. The words say: ‘Grrrrr, you Gooks, this'll teach you!' The white man beats the little yellow men with the whip, and Jabavu feels nothing but confusion and dismay. For in the first story he is the white man on the horse who rescues the beautiful girl from the bad men. But in this story he cannot be the white man because of the whip … Many many hours has Jabavu spent puzzling over that story, and particularly over the words which say: ‘You
little yellow snakes …' There goes the whip-lash curling over the picture, and for a long time Jabavu thought the word snake meant that whip. Then he saw the yellow men were the snakes … And in the end, just as he has done so often before, he turns the page, giving up that difficult story, and goes on to another.

Jabavu cannot merely read the stories in pictures, but also simple print. On the rubbish heap behind the Greek store he once found a child's alphabet, or rather, half of one. It was a long time before he understood it was half only. He used to sit, hour after hour, fitting the letters in the alphabet to words like Bang! and later, to English words he already knew, from the sorrowful, admiring stories that were told about the white men. Black, white, colour, native, kaffir, mealiemeal, smell, bad, dirty, stupid, work. These were some of the words he knew how to speak before he could read them. After a long time he completed the alphabet for himself. A very long time – it took him over a year of sitting under that tree thinking and thinking while the people of the village laughed and called him lazy. Later still he tried the print without pictures. And it was so hard it was as if he had learned nothing. Months passed. Slowly, very slowly, the sheet of black letters put on meaning. Jabavu will never forget, as long as he lives, that day when he first puzzled out a whole sentence. This was the sentence: ‘The African must eat beans and vegetables as well as meat and nuts to keep him healthy.' When he understood that long and difficult sentence, he rolled on the ground with pride, laughing and saying: ‘The white men write that we must eat these things all the time! That's what I shall eat when I go to the white man's town.'

Some of the words he cannot understand, no matter how hard he tries. ‘Any person who contravenes any provision of any of the regulations (which contain fifty clauses) is liable to a fine of £25 or three months' imprisonment.' Jabavu has spent many hours over that sentence, and it still means nothing to him. Once he walked five miles to the
next village to ask a clever man who knew English what it meant. He did not know either. But he taught Jabavu a great deal of English to speak. Jabavu speaks it quite well. And he has marked all the difficult words on the newspaper with a piece of charcoal, and will ask someone what they mean, when he finds such a person. Perhaps when a traveller returns for a visit from the town? But there is no one expected. One of the young men, the son of Jabavu's father's brother, was to have come, but he went to Johannesburg instead. Nothing has been heard of him for a year. In all, there are seven young men from this village working in the town, and two in Johannesburg at the mines. Any one of them may come next week or perhaps next year … The hunger in Jabavu swells and mutters: When will I go, when, when, when? I am sixteen, I am a man. I can speak English, I can read the newspaper. I can understand the pictures – but at this thought he reminds himself he does not understand all the pictures. Patiently he turns back the sheet and goes to the story about the little yellow men. What have they done to be beaten with the whip? Why are some men yellow, some white, some black, some bronze, like himself? Why is there a war in the country of the little yellow men? Why are they called snakes and Gooks? Why, why, why? But Jabavu cannot frame the questions to which he needs the answers, and the frustration feeds that hunger in him. I must go to the white man's town, there I will know, there I will learn.

He thinks, half-heartedly: Perhaps I should go by myself? But it is a frightening thought, he does not have the courage. He sits loose and listless under the tree, letting his hand stir patterns in the dust, and thinks: Perhaps someone will return soon from the town and I may go back with him? Or perhaps I can persuade Pavu to come with me? But his heart stirs painfully at the thought: surely his mother and father will die of grief if both sons go at once! For their daughter left home three years before to work as a nanny at the farm twenty miles away, so that they only
see her two or three times a year, and that only for a day.

But the hunger swells up until his regret for his parents is consumed by it, and he thinks: I shall speak to Pavu. I shall make him come with me.

Jabavu is still sitting under the tree thinking when the men come back from the fields, his father and brother with them. At the sight of them he at once gets up and goes to the hut. Now his hunger is for food, or rather that he should be there first and be served first.

His mother is laying the white porridge on each plate. The plates are of earthenware, made by herself, and decorated with black patterns on the red. They are beautiful, but Jabavu longs for tin plates such as he has seen in the Greek store. The spoons are of tin, and it gives him pleasure to touch them.

After she has slapped the porridge on to the plates, she carefully smooths the surfaces with the back of the spoon to make them nice and shiny. She has cooked a stew of roots and leaves from the bush, and she pours a little of this over each white mound. She sets the plates on the mat on the floor. Jabavu at once begins to eat. She looks at him; she wants to ask: Why do you not wait, as is proper, until your father is eating? She does not say it. When the father and brother come in, setting their hoes and the spear against the wall, the father looks at Jabavu, who is eating in disagreeable silence, eyes lowered, and says: ‘One who is too tired to work is not too tired to eat.'

Jabavu does not reply. He has almost finished the porridge. He is thinking that there is enough for another big plateful. He is consumed with a craving to eat and eat until his belly is heavy. He hastily gulps down the last mouthfuls and pushes his plate towards his mother. She does not at once take it up to refill it, and rage surges in Jabavu, but before the words can come bubbling out of his mouth, the father, who has noticed, begins to talk. Jabavu lets his hands fall and sits listening.

The old man is tired and speaks slowly. He has said all this very often before. His family listen and yet do not listen. What he says already exists, like words on a piece of paper, to be read or not, to be listened to or not.

‘What is happening to our people?' he asks, sorrowfully. ‘What is happening to our children? Once, in our kraals, there was peace, there was order. Every person knew what it was they should do and how that thing should be done. The sun rose and sank, the moon changed, the dry season came, then the rains, a man was born and lived and died. We knew, then, what was good and what was evil.'