African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [25]
I had no better luck in any of the white households I visited on that trip. In not one was anyone prepared even to open an African novel; I was challenging, threatening, some well-out-of-sight, or even out-of-consciousness, prohibition. No said all these faces, when I asked, These are books written by your fellow citizens. Aren’t you even interested?
Next day we drove into Marondera to shop. Grumble grumble all the way because there were gaps on the shelves where imported goods used to be. I pointed out there was plenty to eat. Bickering, we drove to the post office, where a group of whites stood talking in a tight circle, faces close, their shoulders repelling invisible bullets. Cheerful blacks milled about, talking, laughing, calling out to each other and took no notice at all of the whites.
On the way home we stopped at a roadside stall to buy mushrooms, and the seller asked if we could lift his wife to the turn-off. With bad grace, my brother said yes. The girl, pregnant and holding a new baby, sat by me on the driving seat. When we had set her down, Harry kept saying, ‘But it’s no distance,’ which statement had layers of meaning. One, that Africans had not lost the use of their legs, as we had, and this was both a matter for admiration, and a symptom of being primitive. Two, he did not see why he should give free lifts to people who had just unfairly beaten his side in the War.
My smug disapproval about the whites not giving lifts was to take a knock, for six years later I found that no one, not ‘liberals’ or the religious; not ‘progressives’ or ‘reactionaries’, no one at all, gave lifts to any person, black or white, whose face was not familiar. It was too dangerous: there had been too many muggings, hold-ups, ‘incidents’ of all kinds.
We went to take morning tea on another verandah full of wonderful dogs, and luxurious cats, who had to be spilled off the chairs so we might sit down, and I heard The Monologue spoken, first by the wife, and then at lunch, which was served by a black girl wearing a uniform not unlike an Edwardian maid’s, black, with white cuffs and lace. This time the husband said The Monologue. Then everyone sneered at President Banana’s funny name.
We walked around the garden. Again a garden ‘boy’–the old word still used, quite unself-consciously, watered a variety of lawns and shrubs, and when his employers were not listening, asked if he could come and work for me, he needed to better himself. He had an O-level, and was only a gardener because he had not yet found a good job. I live in London, I said. He asked if it was in America, because if so, he would come and work for me. I said in America black people did not necessarily have an easy time. He said he had seen rich black people on television and in films, and he wanted to be like them. This took me back thirty odd years, to when I used to sell communist papers around a certain ‘Coloured’ (that was the correct word politically then for people of mixed race) suburb in old Salisbury. While I preached informed opposition to white domination, I was being stopped on every street corner by aspiring young men who wanted to go to America where everyone was rich. I used to give them gentle lectures on the need to think of the welfare of All before self-advancement. What a prig. What an idiot. I can see myself, an attractive but above-all self-assured young woman, in a clean and perfectly ironed cotton dress–which in itself was a luxury for people living crammed in shabby rooms; wheeling a nice clean bicycle too expensive for almost everyone I met, and on the carrier piles of newspapers and pamphlets advocating varying degrees of social discontent, with revolution as a cure for everything.
Next day Harry said he would take me to the Club some miles away. I knew he did not want to go, but he said it would do him good. Since his wife died