Going Home - Doris May Lessing [98]
Dickson Mujani, our servant, was one of those who did not want to leave his work.
But he went, and he was away for five days. Then the strike was over, and the Africans coming back to work said that the Government spokesman had promised them all a minimum wage of £4 a month. At that time the average was £1 a month.
But Dickson did not return. A week passed. Then, late one evening, long after the hour when Africans are legally forbidden the streets, Dickson came creeping up the narrow iron staircase that came to the back door of our flat. He looked ill and frightened. His polished black skin had a harsh, greyish look, and his eyes darted this way and that with a roll of frightened white eyeball.
He had under his arm a parcel of dirty, tattered paper.
First we made him eat. Then we tried to find out what had happened. But it was difficult; he was at first too frightened to tell us. He kept begging us to take the papers, because ‘they’ would kill him if they knew he had the papers. Who were they? When we had got the story more or less straight, we put him to sleep on a bed in the kitchen. He did not want to sleep. He said he must get away quickly before ‘they’ got him. We said there was nothing to fear, and in the morning we would take his story to the proper authorities and get justice done, if possible. But in the morning he had gone, vanished. And we never saw him again.
The story he had told us was not about himself but about his father. This was the story:
Long ago, he had forgotten how long, Samson Mujani came from Nyasaland south to find work. He was a young man then, with a wife and child in his village. In the big city he found work on the railways, at the station. He swept the platform, and ran errands for the white bosses, and was a messenger boy. He earned a few shillings each month, and he lived in the location. It was still called the location then. At first it was all frightening and difficult, after the peaceful green village he had known. He did not understand the money, he did not understand at all the customs of the white men, and he was puzzled and unhappy because of their rudeness and rough ways. After a while, he learned how to live, keeping quiet, dodging trouble and the police, keeping a smiling face always for his masters. The green village he had come from seemed a long way off, another world. He thought often of his wife and child, but the women in this town were not as he would wish his own wife to be, so he did not send for her. He took up with one of the women of the town and lived with her in a shack made of iron and brick on the borders of the location where the ground dipped toward the river. She bore him a child, and then another. It was at the birth of the second child that she died. It was then he sent a message to his wife, and after many months she came south, walking with some relatives who looked after her. She brought their own child, and so there was a family of three children in the little shack.
The years went past, and the town grew so that now instead of trains once or twice a week, they came every day, and then several times a day. Samson was a well-known figure of the station. White people who used the trains a great deal grew to know him, and used to give him bits of money, and call him by his name. His own people knew him, too, and when they found it hard to understand the business of buying tickets for a train, and the times of the trains, he would be called in to interpret. By now he was earning about 20s. a month, and it was hard to live with all the children, five of them now, so his wife went to work as