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By Root 3510 0

this out, but before he could persuade Coetzee to correct it, the charge went off and an unplanned leaf of ceiling rock fell, trapping the Afrikaner behind a mass of rubble. The rock did not fall directly on him, or he would have been crushed. A sliding fragment did break his leg. He was trapped in a pitch-black, airless, waterless crevice with the temperature at 1140 F. It was imperative that air and water pipes be got to him in a hurry, and with no white bosses in the vicinity, the task of doing it fell to Nxumalo. He probed through the fallen rock, lifted aside the chunks that he could handle, and called for other blacks to help with the bigger slabs. Within a few minutes white rescuers appeared on the scene, and proceeded exactly as Nxumalo had planned it. They succeeded in breaking Coetzee free, and from his hospital bed he asked to see Jonathan, who was ushered in by nurses who resented his being in the white hospital.

Coetzee was lucky to be alive, for there was no more deadly work in South Africa than that performed by men like him and Nxumalo. Each year more than six hundred men died in the gold minesnineteen thousand in thirty yearsand more than ninety percent were black.

I know it was you that got me out,' Coetzee said, and before Nxumalo could say anything, he added graciously, 'And you were about to warn me not to do it that way.' He grinned and extended his hand. I wish I had a cousin in Johannesburg who needed a houseboy.'

No such luck. With Coetzee hospitalized, Nxumalo's shift got another boss, a tough Afrikaner who despised blacks. Once, when he saw Jonathan resting after a particularly stiff spell at the face, he growled at him, 'You work-shy idle black bastard.' Another day, when Nxumalo suggested approaching the face from a different angle, the boss yelled, 'No lip from you, you cheeky Kaffir bastard.'

Since Nxumalo's contract had only five more weeks to run, he tolerated the new man's insults, and when the compound manager said, at the termination of his eighteen months, I hope you'll sign on again,' he was noncommittal, but he was satisfied that he wanted no more of the Golden Reef. What he would do, he didn't know.

AT DEATH

Old Bloke, who delivered lawyers' letters at the Cheston Building in Johannesburg, was only fifty-four years old, but his life had been so demanding that he looked older than he was. His name was Bloke Ngqika, and in his early years he had worked at heavy labor in industry, where he had acquired numerous skills that could have been utilized in several advanced positions, but since he was a black he was prohibited from taking any of them.

After an accident in a tool-making foundry, which left him with a shuffle, he was extremely lucky to land a job delivering important papers by hand. It paid little, and the hours it took to commute to work and back home were intolerable, but he dared not quit because of a peculiar law which was severely enforced: it was possible for a black to qualify for a legal pass to remain in Johannesburg and permission to occupy a house in Soweto, but to do so he had to work for one employer only for a period of ten years. If he quit or was fired, he lost the endorsement in his pass book, lost his house and his right to remain in Johannesburg. He was like a medieval serf, bound perpetually not to the land, as the serf had been, but to a specific job. This meant, obviously, that his employer could pay him scant wages, and he was powerless to protest, for if he were fired, he would lose not only his job but his entire pattern of living. As his employer often reminded him, 'Bloke, it isn't only wages I'm paying you. It's your house, your pass, the permission for your wife to be here too. Mind your step.'

He did not mind his step one blustery August day when he stepped off a curb in Commissioner Street into the path of a truck, not immediately in the path, for the driver might have avoided him had he been attentive. As it was, the truck hit him hard, and the last words he heard before he fainted were the familiar ones: 'Bloody stupid Kaffir.'

He did