Jump and Other Stories

Amnesty

When we heard he was released I ran all over the farm and through the fence to our people on the next farm to tell everybody. I only saw afterwards I’d torn my dress on the barbed wire, and there was a scratch, with blood, on my shoulder.

He went away from this place nine years ago, signed up to work in town with what they call a construction company — building glass walls up to the sky. For the first two years he came home for the weekend once a month and two weeks at Christmas; that was when he asked my father for me. And he began to pay. He and I thought that in three years he would have paid enough for us to get married. But then he started wearing that T-shirt, he told us he’d joined the union, he told us about the strike, how he was one of the men who went to talk to the bosses because some others had been laid off after the strike. He’s always been good at talking, even in English — he was the best at the farm school, he used to read the newspapers the Indian wraps soap and sugar in when you buy at the store.

There was trouble at the hostel where he had a bed, and riots over paying rent in the townships and he told me — just me, not the old ones — that wherever people were fighting against the way we are treated they were doing it for all of us, on the farms as well as the towns, and the unions were with them, he was with them, making speeches, marching. The third year, we heard he was in prison. Instead of getting married. We didn’t know where to find him, until he went on trial. The case was heard in a town far away. I couldn’t go often to the court because by that time I had passed my Standard 8 and I was working in the farm school. Also my parents were short of money. Two of my brothers who had gone away to work in town didn’t send home; I suppose they lived with girl-friends and had to buy things for them. My father and other brother work here for the Boer and the pay is very small, we have two goats, a few cows we’re allowed to graze, and a patch of land where my mother can grow vegetables. No cash from that.

When I saw him in the court he looked beautiful in a blue suit with a striped shirt and brown tie. All the accused — his comrades, he said — were well-dressed. The union bought the clothes so that the judge and the prosecutor would know they weren’t dealing with stupid yes-baas black men who didn’t know their rights. These things and everything else about the court and trial he explained to me when I was allowed to visit him in jail. Our little girl was born while the trial went on and when I brought the baby to court the first time to show him, his comrades hugged him and then hugged me across the barrier of the prisoners’ dock and they had clubbed together to give me some money as a present for the baby. He chose the name for her, Inkululeko.

Then the trial was over and he got six years. He was sent to the Island. We all knew about the Island. Our leaders had been there so long. But I have never seen the sea except to colour it in blue at school, and I couldn’t imagine a piece of earth surrounded by it. I could only think of a cake of dung, dropped by the cattle, floating in a pool of rain-water they’d crossed, the water showing the sky like a looking-glass, blue. I was ashamed only to think that. He had told me how the glass walls showed the pavement trees and the other buildings in the street and the colours of the cars and the clouds as the crane lifted him on a platform higher and higher through the sky to work at the top of a building.

He was allowed one letter a month. It was my letter because his parents didn’t know how to write. I used to go to them where they worked on another farm to ask what message they wanted to send. The mother always cried and put her hands on her head and said nothing, and the old man, who preached to us in the veld every Sunday, said tell my son we are praying, God will make everything all right for him. Once he wrote back, That’s the trouble — our people on the farms, they’re told God will decide what’s good for them so that they won’t find the force to do anything to change their lives.

After two years had passed, we — his parents and I — had saved up enough money to go to Cape Town to visit him. We went by train and slept on the floor at the station and asked the way, next day, to the ferry. People were kind; they all knew that if you wanted the ferry it was because you had somebody of yours on the Island.

And there it was — there was the sea. It was green and blue, climbing and falling, bursting white, all the way to the sky. A terrible wind was slapping it this way and that; it hid the Island, but people like us, also waiting for the ferry, pointed where the Island must be, far out in the sea that I never thought would be like it really was.

There were other boats, and ships as big as buildings that go to other places, all over the world, but the ferry is only for the Island, it doesn’t go anywhere else in the world, only to the Island. So everybody waiting there was waiting for the Island, there could be no mistake we were not in the right place. We had sweets and biscuits, trousers and a warm coat for him (a woman standing with us said we wouldn’t be allowed to give him the clothes) and I wasn’t wearing, any more, the old beret pulled down over my head that farm girls wear, I had bought relaxer cream from the man who comes round the farms selling things out of a box on his bicycle, and my hair was combed up thick under a flowered scarf that didn’t cover the gold-coloured rings in my ears. His mother had her blanket tied round her waist over her dress, a farm woman, but I looked just as good as any of the other girls there. When the ferry was ready to take us, we stood all pressed together and quiet like the cattle waiting to be let through a gate. One man kept looking round with his chin moving up and down, he was counting, he must have been afraid there were too many to get on and he didn’t want to be left behind. We all moved up to the policeman in charge and everyone ahead of us went onto the boat. But when our turn came and he put out his hand for something, I didn’t know what.

We didn’t have a permit. We didn’t know that before you come to Cape Town, before you come to the ferry for the Island, you have to have a police permit to visit a prisoner on the Island. I tried to ask him nicely. The wind blew the voice out of my mouth.

We were turned away. We saw the ferry rock, bumping the landing where we stood, moving, lifted and dropped by all that water, getting smaller and smaller until we didn’t know if we were really seeing it or one of the birds that looked black, dipping up and down, out there.

The only good thing was one of the other people took the sweets and biscuits for him. He wrote and said he got them. But it wasn’t a good letter. Of course not. He was cross with me; I should have found out, I should have known about the permit. He was right — I bought the train tickets, I asked where to go for the ferry, I should have known about the permit. I have passed Standard 8. There was an advice office to go to in town, the churches ran it, he wrote. But the farm is so far from town, we on the farms don’t know about these things. It was as he said; our ignorance is the way we are kept down, this ignorance must go.

We took the train back and we never went to the Island — never saw him in the three more years he was there. Not once. We couldn’t find the money for the train. His father died and I had to help his mother from my pay. For our people the worry is always money, I wrote. When will we ever have money? Then he sent such a good letter. That’s what I’m on the Island for, far away from you, I’m here so that one day our people will have the things they need, land, food, the end of ignorance. There was something else — I could just read the word ‘power’ the prison had blacked out. All his letters were not just for me; the prison officer read them before I could.

He was coming home after only five years!

That’s what it seemed to me, when I heard — the five years were suddenly disappeared — nothing! — there was no whole year still to wait. I showed my — our — little girl his photo again. That’s your daddy, he’s coming, you’re going to see him. She told the other children at school, I’ve got a daddy, just as she showed off about the kid goat she had at home.

We wanted him to come at once, and at the same time we wanted time to prepare. His mother lived with one of his uncles; now that his father was dead there was no house of his father for him to take me to as soon as we married. If there had been time, my father would have cut poles, my mother and I would have baked bricks, cut thatch, and built a house for him and me and the child.

We were not sure what day he would arrive. We only heard on my radio his name and the names of some others who were released. Then at the Indian’s store I noticed the newspaper, The Nation, written by black people, and on the front a picture of a lot of people dancing and waving — I saw at once it was at that ferry. Some men were being carried on other men’s shoulders. I couldn’t see which one was him. We were waiting. The ferry had brought him from the Island but we remembered Cape Town is a long way from us. Then he did come. On a Saturday, no school, so I was working with my mother, hoeing and weeding round the pumpkins and mealies, my hair, that I meant to keep nice, tied in an old doek. A combi came over the veld and his comrades had brought him. I wanted to run away and wash but he stood there stretching his legs, calling, hey! hey! with his comrades making a noise around him, and my mother started shrieking in the old style aie! aie! and my father was clapping and stamping towards him. He held his arms open to us, this big man in town clothes, polished shoes, and all the time while he hugged me I was holding my dirty hands, full of mud, away from him behind his back. His teeth hit me hard through his lips, he grabbed at my mother and she struggled to hold the child up to him. I thought we would all fall down! Then everyone was quiet. The child hid behind my mother. He picked her up but she turned her head away to her shoulder. He spoke to her gently but she wouldn’t speak to him. She’s nearly six years old! I told her not to be a baby. She said, That’s not him.

The comrades all laughed, we laughed, she ran off and he said, She has to have time to get used to me.

He has put on weight, yes; a lot. You couldn’t believe it. He used to be so thin his feet looked too big for him. I used to feel his bones but now — that night — when he lay on me he was so heavy, I didn’t remember it was like that. Such a long time. It’s strange to get stronger in prison; I thought he wouldn’t have enough to eat and would come out weak. Everyone said, Look at him! — he’s a man, now. He laughed and banged his fist on his chest, told them how the comrades exercised in their cells, he would run three miles a day, stepping up and down on one place on the floor of that small cell where he was kept. After we were together at night we used to whisper a long time but now I can feel he’s thinking of some things I don’t know and I can’t worry him with talk. Also I don’t know what to say. To ask him what it was like, five years shut away there; or to tell him something about school or about the child. What else has happened, here? Nothing. Just waiting. Sometimes in the daytime I do try to tell him what it was like for me, here at home on the farm, five years. He listens, he’s interested, just like he’s interested when people from the other farms come to visit and talk to him about little things that happened to them while he was away all that time on the Island. He smiles and nods, asks a couple of questions and then stands up and stretches. I see it’s to show them it’s enough, his mind is going back to something he was busy with before they came. And we farm people are very slow; we tell things slowly, he used to, too.

He hasn’t signed on for another job. But he can’t stay at home with us; we thought, after five years over there in the middle of that green and blue sea, so far, he would rest with us a little while. The combi or some car comes to fetch him and he says don’t worry, I don’t know what day I’ll be back. At first I asked, what week, next week? He tried to explain to me: in the Movement it’s not like it was in the union, where you do your work every day and after that you are busy with meetings; in the Movement you never know where you will have to go and what is going to come up next. And the same with money. In the Movement, it’s not like a job, with regular pay — I know that, he doesn’t have to tell me — it’s like it was going to the Island, you do it for all our people who suffer because we haven’t got money, we haven’t got land — look, he said, speaking of my parents’, my home, the home that has been waiting for him, with his child: look at this place where the white man owns the ground and lets you squat in mud and tin huts here only as long as you work for him—Baba and your brother planting his crops and looking after his cattle, Mama cleaning his house and you in the school without even having the chance to train properly as a teacher. The farmer owns us, he says.

I’ve been thinking we haven’t got a home because there wasn’t time to build a house before he came from the Island; but we haven’t got a home at all. Now I’ve understood that.

I’m not stupid. When the comrades come to this place in the combi to talk to him here I don’t go away with my mother after we’ve brought them tea or (if she’s made it for the weekend) beer. They like her beer, they talk about our culture and there’s one of them who makes a point of putting his arm around my mother, calling her the mama of all of them, the mama of Africa. Sometimes they please her very much by telling her how they used to sing on the Island and getting her to sing an old song we all know from our grandmothers. Then they join in with their strong voices. My father doesn’t like this noise travelling across the veld; he’s afraid that if the Boer finds out my man is a political, from the Island, and he’s holding meetings on the Boer’s land, he’ll tell my father to go, and take his family with him. But my brother says if the Boer asks anything just tell him it’s a prayer meeting. Then the singing is over; my mother knows she must go away into the house.

I stay, and listen. He forgets I’m there when he’s talking and arguing about something I can see is important, more important than anything we could ever have to say to each other when we’re alone. But now and then, when one of the other comrades is speaking I see him look at me for a moment the way I will look up at one of my favourite children in school to encourage the child to understand. The men don’t speak to me and I don’t speak. One of the things they talk about is organizing the people on the farms — the workers, like my father and brother, and like his parents used to be. I learn what all these things are: minimum wage, limitation of working hours, the right to strike, annual leave, accident compensation, pensions, sick and even maternity leave. I am pregnant, at last I have another child inside me, but that’s women’s business. When they talk about the Big Man, the Old Men, I know who these are: our leaders are also back from prison. I told him about the child coming; he said, And this one belongs to a new country, he’ll build the freedom we’ve fought for! I know he wants to get married but there’s no time for that at present. There was hardly time for him to make the child. He comes to me just like he comes here to eat a meal or put on clean clothes. Then he picks up the little girl and swings her round and there! — it’s done, he’s getting into the combi, he’s already turning to his comrade that face of his that knows only what’s inside his head, those eyes that move quickly as if he’s chasing something you can’t see. The little girl hasn’t had time to get used to this man. But I know she’ll be proud of him, one day!

How can you tell that to a child six years old. But I tell her about the Big Man and the Old Men, our leaders, so she’ll know that her father was with them on the Island, this man is a great man, too.

On Saturday, no school and I plant and weed with my mother, she sings but I don’t; I think. On Sunday there’s no work, only prayer meetings out of the farmer’s way under the trees, and beer drinks at the mud and tin huts where the farmers allow us to squat on their land. I go off on my own as I used to do when I was a child, making up games and talking to myself where no one would hear me or look for me. I sit on a warm stone in the late afternoon, high up, and the whole valley is a path between the hills, leading away from my feet. It’s the Boer’s farm but that’s not true, it belongs to nobody. The cattle don’t know that anyone says he owns it, the sheep — they are grey stones, and then they become a thick grey snake moving — don’t know. Our huts and the old mulberry tree and the little brown mat of earth that my mother dug over yesterday, way down there, and way over there the clump of trees round the chimneys and the shiny thing that is the TV mast of the farmhouse — they are nothing, on the back of this earth. It could twitch them away like a dog does a fly.

I am up with the clouds. The sun behind me is changing the colours of the sky and the clouds are changing themselves, slowly, slowly. Some are pink, some are white, swelling like bubbles. Underneath is a bar of grey, not enough to make rain. It gets longer and darker, it grows a thin snout and long body and then the end of it is a tail. There’s a huge grey rat moving across the sky, eating the sky.

The child remembered the photo; she said That’s not him. I’m sitting here where I came often when he was on the Island. I came to get away from the others, to wait by myself.

I’m watching the rat, it’s losing itself, its shape, eating the sky, and I’m waiting. Waiting for him to come back.

Waiting.

I’m waiting to come back home.