July's People

Chapter 3

A dresser made of box-wood in imitation of the kind whose prototype might have been seen in a farmer’s kitchen had shelf-edgings of fancy-cut newspaper and held the remainder of the set of pink glass cups and saucers.

July presented her to his wife. A small, black-black, closed face, and huge hams on which the woman rested on the earth floor as among cushions, turning this way and that as she took a tin kettle from the wisp of hearth ashes to pour tea, silently, over the mug an old lady held, and adjusted the feeding-bottle in the hands of a child past the age of weaning whose eyes were turning up in sleep on her own lap. She frowned appealingly under July’s chivvying voice, swayed, murmured greeting sounds.

— She say, she can be very pleased you are in her house. She can be very glad to see you, long time now, July’s people—

But she had said nothing. Maureen took her hand and then that of the old lady, who was somebody’s mother — July’s or his wife’s. The old lady wore gilt drop ear-rings and a tin brooch with red glass stones pinned her black snail-shell turban. Thin bare feet soled with ash stuck out from the layers of skirt in which she squatted. She demanded something of July, growling a clearing of the throat before each question and looking, her head cocked up, at the white woman who smiled and inclined herself in repeated greeting. There were several others, young women and half-grown girls, in the hut. His sister, wife’s sister-in-law, one of his daughters; he introduced them with a collective sweep in terms of kinship and not by name. The small child was his last-born, conceived, as all his children were, on one of his home-leaves and born in his absence. Maureen provided presents for him to send home on her behalf, at the news of each birth. And to this woman, July’s wife, never seen, never imagined, had sent toys for the children and whatever it seemed surely any woman, no matter where or how she lived, could use: a night-gown, a handbag. When July returned from leave he would bring back with him in return a woven basket as a gift from his unknown wife, his home — in one of these baskets she had carried the money from the bank. His town woman was a respectable office cleaner who wore crimplene two-piece dresses on her days off. She ironed his clothes with Maureen’s iron and chatted to Maureen when they met in the yard. The subject was usually a son being put through high school in Soweto on his mother’s earnings; it was understood July’s responsibility was to his own family, far away. The town woman had no children fathered by her lover; once had put a hand under her breasts with the gesture with which women declare themselves in conscious control of their female destiny: —It’s all finished — I’m sterilized at the clinic. — In confidence: her black, city English sophisticated in the vocabulary relevant to the kind of life led there.

It was early morning but in their hut the women were dreamy, as at the end of the day; a furzy plank of sunlight rested from a single pane-sized aperture in the walls across the profile of a young girl, the twitching, hump-knuckles of the old lady, the fat spread legs of the sated child. On an iron bedstead tidily made up with fringed plaid blankets one of the half-grown girls was plaiting the hair on the bent head of another. Perhaps they had been out since first light gathering wood or working in their fields — Maureen was aware, among them in the hut, of not knowing where she was, in time, in the order of a day as she had always known it.