Stories about my Mother 5
When I was five, my mother took my sister and me to live with my grandfather in South Africa. At the beginning of World War II, my grandfather had sent my grandmother from India along with my mother and her siblings to South Africa and they settled in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape Province. Grandfather then followed them over when the British handed India back to the Indians in 1947.
I look at that date and I’m amazed that it was only twenty years later when we would move there. India always seemed like ancient history to me, but it simply wasn’t. As to why we went to stay with my grandfather, some of these stories are not mine to tell. Suffice it to say, life happens. We would stay in South Africa for about two years before returning to my father in the United States. I went to nursery school and to the beginning of primary school in Grahamstown. It’s where I learned to read and write.
My cousins never got to know my grandfather. Some of them never even met him. My cousin Michael in Toronto played correspondence chess with him for a while. Grandfather would be involved in multiple games at a time with players from all over the world. He would set up his chess table in the living room when he got a postcard from one of his opponents and figure out his counter-move. He’d then let me keep the postcard with its stamp from Russia or England or wherever it had come from.
To this day, Grandfather’s house is my favorite of anywhere I’ve ever lived. It was an old, whitewashed stone house with impossibly high ceilings and tall windows that looked out over beautiful well-tended gardens. The roof was made of corrugated iron so when it rained or hailed, it was like living inside a drum. The whole property was surrounded by a wall of tall, dense honeysuckle bushes. In the summer we could find slow-moving chameleons climbing slowly up the branches looking for the insects that were feasting on the sweet flowers. Their eyes, perched on the ends of small cones could swivel in any direction. We’d pry them off their twigs and put them onto something with a pattern so that we could watch them change color.
The house was shaped like an H. The crossbar was a long central hallway that had four Indian carpets laid down. Off to one side was the living room and off to the other was his office. The right upright of the H was where the bedrooms were: Grandfather’s on one end, off the main front entrance hall, Mom’s in the middle, and Sue’s and mine across from each other at the opposite end. At the other end of the house, was the dining room off to the right, the bathroom in the center, and the kitchen off to the left.
There were red-stained porches on either side of the house. We almost never went on the front one between the dining room and the main entrance, but the other one, between the kitchen and our bedrooms, was prime playing space. The red polish that was used to shine the floor ended up on everything we wore. My poor grandfather. I have vivid memories of us riding our bicycles in a loop past our bedrooms down the hall over the carpets and left again into the kitchen and out. Poor Maude and Agnes were always there to clean up after us.
We have two of the carpets from Grahamstown in our apartment now, but they aren’t the central hallway carpets. At least a couple of those were finally tossed out because they were so worn. I can’t imagine why. The others may be at either my mother’s or my sister’s houses.
In addition to playing chess, my grandfather golfed. He was a member of a club in town and would go out and play a few holes several times a week. Sometimes after lunch, he’d work on his swing on the front lawn. I can hear the whoosh of his club hitting the hollow plastic practice ball in my head as if it is happening now.
My mother got a job as a librarian at the old library in the center of town. She spoke Afrikaans and English because both languages were official. We went back to America before I had to start learning to speak the Dutch dialect, myself. The White people of South Africa had to learn both in school. The Black people also had to learn both, in addition to either Xhosa or Zulu depending on where they were from. There was a dark wood-paneled reading room in the back of the library with a huge table in the middle. Desk lamps made small pools of light to read by and there were armchairs along the side. At the appointed hour, we’d be sent back there to tell Grandfather that it was time to go home.
Meals were at precise times. Always. Supper at 6 pm. The four of us would sit around the big dining room table, my grandfather at one end, my mother and me across from each other in the middle, and my sister at the other end. Grandfather would ask Mom what we’d done that day and we’d listen to what she said as if it were a story about someone else. Maude would serve the food. Dessert would be brought out and placed on the sideboard behind my chair. I remember canned peaches or pears laid out in a glass serving dish and my grandfather pouring cream over his.
Maude had worked for the family since my mother was a girl. Not long after we left, she retired, and her daughter Agnes took over. Maude’s son Bennett worked as the gardener. The three of us must have added an enormous amount of extra work. Where my grandfather was orderly, methodical, and predictable, we were not. A woman named Regina was brought on to act as a kind of governess for my sister and I, but I have very few real memories of her. Maude and Agnes, however, are as much a part of my childhood as anybody.
For either Christmas or a birthday I was given a Siamese kitten that we named Cleo. Cleo would curl up behind the stove in the kitchen to keep warm. In time, the cat would come to rule the house. I have a distinct memory of overhearing Maude having a conversation with her in the pantry. In every letter he wrote to us in later years, Grandfather would always include an update on how Cleo was doing.
Agnes had a son named Jabulani who was a few years older than me. Bennett had a son named N’Kosinkulu who was maybe a year older than my sister. The four of us played together all the time. N’Kosinkulu had a cousin named Marva who was living there by the time we came back on subsequent visits but by then we were too old to push cars around in the dirt.
Everyone was terrified of Grandfather. The servants all called him Master. Agnes called my mother Sisi. Anytime there was a household issue, Agnes would go to Sisi to sort it out. My grandfather was always open to anything that was needed but it was far easier to have my mother do it. He paid for both Jabulani’s and N’Kosinkulu’s school fees and for other things that came up without complaint. He was happy to do it. It’s such a shame that we were all so scared of him because he was a genuinely kind and compassionate man who was truly fond of all of us. He was a bit deaf, so that can only have helped.
Jabulani, along with the rest of his family, was a member of the Fingo tribe who were part of the Xhosa people. When he was sixteen, he went through a tribal initiation that involved him getting circumcised. A whole series of letters went back and forth between Agnes and my mother and then between my mother and my grandfather about needing to buy several pigs that were required as payment for various parts of the ceremony. I think that my mother finally had Agnes go to Grandfather directly which scared the daylights out of her. It all went fine, the pigs were bought and Jabulani successfully made the transition to manhood.
I am sure that it was my grandfather’s pronounced stutter that made him seem far more foreboding than he was. Because of that, he seldom spoke. He had false teeth and occasionally he’d either sneeze or stutter them out. When that happened, or if he spilled something, he’d say, “oops, dearie me.” My sister and I would giggle about it behind his back but only when we were sure he was well out of earshot.
That time in South Africa was an idyll for me. I have spent my life trying to recreate that sense of responsibility-less serenity. Sometimes a smell or a noise, or the texture of a wooden door will pull me right back into that house, but only for a moment. I treasure those instants. An idyll is defined as “an extremely happy, peaceful, or picturesque episode or scene, typically an idealized or unsustainable one.”
South Africa was ruled under a system called Apartheid which segregated its society according to race. Maude, Bennett, Agnes, Jabulani, N’Kosinkulu, and Marva could only stay at my grandfather’s house with a pass. There was a line of three rooms across from the back porch without electricity or running water where they slept. I don’t think that they were allowed in the library where my mother worked. They certainly weren’t allowed at the club where my grandfather played unless they worked in the kitchen or on the grounds or caddied.
At the time, White South Africans made up about 20% of the population and yet they controlled everything.
My grandfather retired from the Civil Service with a full pension in his very early 50s. He never worked again after that. All that government money that paid for the house and our food and everything else ultimately could be traced back to spoils that had been plundered from India over centuries.
When we went back to visit South Africa in my teen years, I was already starting to take pictures of the world around me. At the train station, I snapped signs that said, “Whites Only,” on the bathrooms and the platforms. At seven, I just accepted them. At that age, I was starting to understand how the system worked, but I wasn’t really questioning it yet. I knew that if my mother took us all out on a car trip together and we stopped somewhere that Susan and I would have to go to different places to eat and use the bathroom. Asking, “why?” came later.
The New York Times just published a harrowing article describing the twelve-hour factory workdays that migrant kids who are eleven and twelve years old are forced to put in so that Cheerios, and Cheetos, and Golden Valley granola bars can be made. This is happening now, it’s not something left over from the olden days. I’ve eaten all those foods and enjoyed them in a guilty way – not because they were using child labor, I had no idea, but because they aren’t nutritionally good for anyone. I munched away in blissful ignorance. We all did. But now I know.
We make choices every day about which injustices we can live with and which we can’t. We don’t think about what really happened to the cows whose leather skins are parts of our sneakers. We don’t really think about where the food we eat really comes from. I look at young gay men munching away happily at Chick-Fil-A, even though the owners of that company despise them and think them less-than and wouldn’t think twice if they vanished off the earth. “But it tastes so good!”
There is no country or civilization on the planet that happened to find some open space with nobody there and just moved in. They all had to push out somebody else or subjugate them. The few have always controlled the many. Wars are great for economies. Human progress has always left a trail of bloody victims in its wake.
I’m stuck in this narrative, now, because what I want to say is, “but…”
I am not sure that it is possible to do what I am doing - dredging up the past - and not see what I am seeing. Of course, I see it everywhere now. I see it in my working life - how producers deal with the people that work for them – actors and directors and those of us behind the scenes trying to tell our stories. I see it in the way I have treated people when I’ve been in charge. It’s impossible to un-see it once you’ve focused on it.
Thomas Hobbes, possibly one of the world’s most pessimistic thinkers, believed that all people are inherently selfish. If everything broke down and we had to live as individuals in nature, he believed that we would all resort to theft and murder to survive. Life outside society he famously said, would be, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” His solution was to advocate putting some powerful person or parliament in charge who had absolute authority to uphold the rules. We would create a contract with that person or group and give up the individual rights that Hobbes saw as dangerous. We would accept the extreme consequences that would befall us when the rules of whoever was in charge were broken. That would keep society running and keep us safe.
The choice at the end of the day, then, seems to be that either we live under a total dictatorship without any freedom, or we keep moving forward as we are doing and try to make the best of it. I think that even Mr. Hobbes were he to spend a few minutes surfing through what passes as news channels these days or skimming through recent history would have to concede that his proposed solution is often worse than no solution at all. I certainly don’t want to live like that. Samuel Beckett was not quite as pessimistic as Thomas Hobbes, but his eyes were just as open. “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Both men, however, like me, were at the top of the food chain, looking down. None of us are looking up at the lives of others from the point of view of a migrant kid trying to keep his eyes open in school after a 12-hour factory shift for which he gets paid next to nothing.
We aren’t all evil, and many of us are truly trying to live good lives. That we sometimes flail around and make egregious mistakes is, unfortunately, the price of our so-called freedom. Try as we might we always seem to fall prey to who we are – humans. I don’t see any alternative, however, but to keep trying. And learn to fail better.