The Monday morning after the riot there was a policeman on almost every other corner of the town; we saw them standing on the pavements as we drove down to work, with their rifles grounded and their helmets tilted low over their eyes. At the factory, none of the Africans we employed came to talk to us about the week-end’s events, and we for our part stood guiltily aloof, too guilty to ask them questions about what had happened. Until one of the workmen, David, could not restrain himself, and came to the office to show us his hat, through which a police bullet had gone; and then one or two others told us about the fighting in the “location,” where the Africans who work in the town have to live, and where, over the week-end, they had burned down everything that stood for the white authority they hated. They had burned down the municipal beer hall, the infants’ crèche, the offices of the location superintendent; they had overturned all the cars they could lay their hands on and had set fire to them; they had stoned the incoming van-loads of police; and by the time the riot was over eighteen Africans had been shot dead by the police, and another eighty were in hospital. As whites we felt that we had been protected by the rifles of the police—so as “liberals” we could hardly meet the eyes of the Africans who worked for us, the morning after the riot. Nor could we believe any longer that the small spread-out town in which we lived was immune from the sort of violence which before we had associated only with other countries, with wars at the other end of the African continent. That Monday morning began for us with guilt and fear, and with silence for almost all the Africans in our employ.
Guilt and fear was the pattern of the morning, for it was renewed with every white man who came to the factory. None of the white customers who came with their lorries to load the bags of meal we sold them could speak of anything but the riot, and whether they said sadly, “It’s a bad business,” or gloated, “There’s hundreds dead, not eighteen,” we saw mirrored in their eyes our own guilt and fear. There was hatred too, in some of the eyes, and those we preferred not to meet, though they were set in faces as white as our own. From them all guilt and fear and hatred produced wild talk and rumors, and sudden awkward excesses of politeness to the African employees, who went on with their work, all around us. And many of the customers said in fear—yet some patently willing the event they feared—“There’ll be more trouble still.” By lunch time we felt the day had already been as long and tiring as any day should have been: my father, my brother, and I drove home for lunch, and the policemen were still standing on the street corners, their helmets even lower over their eyes than before. Every figure seemed a reminder of what had been said throughout the morning: “The trouble’s just beginning.”
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Lunch was served by Ben, the African houseboy, for the girl, Betty, had gone to the location to make sure that her son, who lived in the location with his grandmother, was not among those injured. After lunch we had to go down to the factory again, where we found the Africans sitting on the pavement in the sun, in front of the factory, eating bread and drinking bottles of cool drinks, as they usually did during their lunch-break. They got to their feet when they saw us coming; and then across the square there rushed a packed van-load of police, all carrying rifles, and the Africans on the pavement did not move at all until the van had gone out of sight. Then one spat on the ground and said dispassionately, “They want to kill us all,” but the rest moved off together in silence. We opened the door of the factory and work began again. About an hour later a lorry-load of African convicts was driven through the square, and all our workers rushed to the front of the building and simply cheered the convicts right across the square. We pretended not to see or hear the incident. They went back to their work and then two of them suddenly began shouting at one another, and before one could even guess at the reason for the quarrel, they were grappling, rolling over on the concrete floor, locked together and snarling. Everyone was on edge, and the fight was merely a symptom of this; in a moment the entire factory staff seemed to be on the spot where the fight had broken out, and they were all shouting and shoving—a free-for-all could have broken out in a moment, and might have been a disaster, but the contestants broke apart, and one or two of the others held them apart long enough for them abruptly and inexplicably to lose enthusiasm for the fight, and to turn with grave faces and drooping shoulders to those who held them.
My father prides himself on, as the South African saying goes, “being good at handling Natives”; and he was certainly good with them that afternoon. I was moved by the calmness of his tone, the deliberation with which he spoke, his concern for their welfare and his own. “I don’t want the police here,” he said. “I don’t want them, but if a noise goes up from here they’ll come, and when they come they’ll bring their rifles and they’ll start shooting. You know that—we all know what’s been happening: the whole town is just waiting for something to start again. And just this—just what you are doing now can start it off again, and then God help all of us.” He paused and looked round at the assembled Africans: some nodded at his words, all seemed relieved that he had spoken to them as he had. It is true that “paternalism” may not be good enough, may positively be a bad thing if persisted in, but I was only too grateful that the Africans seemed as innocent of any such notion as my father. He then told them to go back to their jobs, and quietly they began to disperse. And they went on with their work until at last it was five-thirty, and the doors of the factory were closed, and the workers pedaled home to the location on their bicycles, and we drove home.
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A few weeks before, my brother and I had arranged to visit that very Monday night (following the riot) a friend of ours who worked with us in the committee of a social club of which we were members. At supper he phoned us to say that if we thought it better not to go out then we needn’t come, and could arrange to come round some other evening. But the evening was quiet; and the fact that he had phoned up to say such a thing, the fact that the policemen still waited on their street corners, the fact that, as we had learned during the day, certain dutiful white citizens had gone to the headquarters of the local regiment to demand arms for themselves, the fact that everyone in town was expecting more trouble, suddenly seemed all the more reason for us to go out, to do what we would have done anyway, to live as though we were used to and expected peace, not violence. And my father said, “Go out, of course, go out!” And he took his book and went to read it on the stoep. My mother planned to have an early night; and my father encouraged her—I think he rather enjoyed the idea of sitting out on the stoep, peacefully reading, when so many people of the town waited for trouble.
So we drove off to our friend’s house. It was not far from ours: a house like so many others in the town—single-storied, with a roof of corrugated iron, a garden in front, a small cemented drive-in leading to the garage. My friend’s name was, let us say, Eddie, and with him was his girl friend, whom we had also known for many years. He is tall, blond, well-to-do, and was living with his parents, whom for the evening he had banished to the back stoep. We sat in the living room, and made small talk, and discussed the entirely unimportant committee whose work we were supposed to be doing. The time went pleasantly enough: once the talk went on to the riot, but though Eddie generally regarded his own remarks with considerable seriousness, this did not in the least mean that he enjoyed talking about serious matters, and he led the conversation away from the riot to such innocent topics as the films which were showing in town and the weather. The weather was beautiful, as it can only be in the evenings of a hot climate, when all the heat that has been coming off all day from brick and tar and sand and concrete seems to draw into these things, leaving their surfaces cool. The French windows of the living room were wide open, and the low houses and the low trees beyond the fence seemed no taller than the fence itself, and the darkening sky rose sheer above them all.
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Then the phone rang. Eddie went to answer it in the hall. He came back a moment later. “It’s your mother,” he said.
I went to answer it. “Hullo, Morn, is everything all right?”
“Well, I’m not sure.”
“What do you mean?”
“The police have just phoned up. They say there’s some sort of trouble at the factory, and they’ve asked Dad to go down.”
“We’ll be over right away.”
“Yes. Dad asked Ben to go down with him, but he wouldn’t. He said he was too frightened.”
“We’re coming at once.”
My mother rang off. I went into the living room. Eddie and my brother were both on their feet. “What is it?” my brother asked.
“I don’t know. We’ve got to go. Dad’s gone down to the factory, there’s some kind of trouble there. The police said he must.”
“The police!”
“Come on,” I said.
Eddie said: “I’m coming with you.” He turned to his girl friend. “Darling, you stay here with Mom and Dad. I won’t be long. And don’t tell them where I’ve gone. Say that we had to get some papers or something.”
“Eddie—must you go?”
“Yes, darling, I must.” Eddie said to us, “Wait here, I’ll be back in a minute.” We heard him going down a passage; a minute or two later he came back into the room, carrying a small automatic pistol, and a .22 sporting rifle. “We must take something with us,” he said. He leaned the rifle against the sofa, and shook out a little box of cartridges into his hand and began clipping them into the magazine of the automatic.
“What’s all this—?”
But Eddie handed the rifle to me. “Here,” he said, “you take it.”
And I took it. Eddie showed me brusquely, “This is the safety catch. It’s on. Keep it on.”
“I know,” I said, unwilling to take second place to Eddie in my knowledge of rifles, but feeling an immense fool with the brown-butted, black-barreled thing in my hand, all the same.
“Come on.” We turned to go.
“Eddie,” his girl friend called, “you’ll look after yourself.”
Eddie smiled at her from the door, stuffing the automatic into his pocket. “Come on,” he said to us.
When we reached the car, Eddie’s girl friend was standing in the front door, the light of the hall behind her. “Eddie, be careful—” she called urgently, stretching one arm towards him. But Eddie slammed the door of the car, and we began driving down the road.
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I should explain here that the car we had taken with us on the visit was the Dodge, my father’s car, and we had left behind the little English car which my brother and I shared, which my father despised and very rarely drove and then only with the direst effects on its rather delicate little gear box—the fact that it had four forward gears always seemed to baffle him. And while I am explaining I should add too that my father’s “paternalism” toward his African employees had resulted in three or four of them converting a shed in the back yard into a kind of dormitory for themselves in which they lived rent free and in defiance of innumerable municipal by-laws. There had been trouble from that shed before, for its inhabitants were given to brewing illicit beer, singing songs, entertaining women, and generally leading quite a cheerful communal existence which disturbed the people who lived on the other side of the factory yard. If there was trouble it would have started from them, I was sure; but too much had happened the previous night, too much had threatened to happen throughout the whole day, for rowdiness now to be innocent or to have results which would be innocent.
The streets through which we drove were empty, but for the occasional patroling policeman, and the lampposts peacefully threw their light down at regular intervals, over the tar, the sand of the pavements, the hedges of houses. But though, as the lamps passed, the rifle across my knees still seemed absurd, a matter for embarrassment, I could not put out of my mind how inexpert my father was with the car he was driving, how light the car was, how easily it could be overturned by a handful of men.
To get to the factory we had to pass our house, and when we drew near it my brother said, “We better stop. Perhaps he’s come back.”
He parked the car in front of the house, and we ran across the pavement, up the garden. My mother was in the hall, in a dressing-gown, and with her was Ben, the houseboy.
“Has anything happened?” we asked.
“I haven’t heard anything,” my mother said.
Then Ben broke out suddenly, “Hoe kon julle die oubaas alleen laat gaan?” How could we let my father go alone? He said it again, almost passionately, “Hoe kon julle die oubaas alleen laat gaan?”
I turned on him and shouted, “He asked you to go with him!”
“No, baas,” Ben said, retreating a little, holding the edge of his apron with one hand. “I’m too frightened to go, baas. But you must help the oubaas,” he said. He was telling us this, his face shadowed under his flat, black brow, his hand clinging to the edge of his apron.
We turned and ran back to the car. I groped about on the floor of the car for the rifle. The factory is not far from the house, and in between, in the same road, is the police station at which my father had been asked to call.
“Should we stop at the police station—?”
“I don’t know—”
“There’s no time, man.”
But we had to stop at the police station, anyway, for the road outside was blocked with cars. Lights shone staringly, dazzlingly, in front of the blockage. We edged our way forward between a van double-parked and a traffic island; the lights of other cars on the other side of the island stared towards us. And when we came past the van we saw an ambulance standing with its doors wide open, its interior lit up and white, as big as a room. My brother stopped the car and jumped out, leaving it where it was in the middle of the road, and ran to the entrance of the police station. The office was filled with black policemen in khaki uniforms, white policemen in dark blue uniforms—there seemed to be policemen and rifles everywhere. My brother began pushing his way into the charge office; I ran to the ambulance. But as I came to it the double doors at the back swung closed and it went off slowly, swaying at the back with its own weight. In front of me was the blocked, blazing road, with yet another car stuck now behind ours. Car doors were slamming, engines were racing: I could make no sense of anything I could see. Then I saw the egg-shaped, little gray car which my father was driving, and I walked over to it. It was empty. I looked back to the police station. I heard Eddie say, “Everything’s all right,” and I saw my brother and my father emerging from the building.
I remember what a sensation, of ease, almost of luxury, it was to be able to walk, instead of having to run. I walked toward them, feeling the familiar gritting of the sand under my feet. Everything suddenly seemed familiar again: the street, the sand, the faces I saw, the lights of the cars, even the rifles and uniforms.
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We got the rest of the story from my father when we came home. He had been reading, as we left him, when the phone rang. It was the police.
“Look, there’s trouble reported from your premises down here. We want you to come down right away.”
“What sort of trouble?”
“What sort of trouble do you think?” the policeman shouted in anger. “Trouble with the kaffirs. We want you there. If we’ve got to smash your place up, we want you there—”
“I’ll come down right away.”
The policeman was unexpectedly and urgently solicitous. “Hey, look, you mustn’t go down by yourself. Stop here at the police station, on your way down.”
“All right,” my father said.
Then he went into the back yard and knocked on the door of Ben’s room and asked Ben to go down with him. But Ben refused to go. “No, baas, I’m too frightened.”
So he drove down by himself in the little car, and stopped, as he had been told to, at the police station.
There they had an alarming force waiting for him. Four white policemen, armed with rifles, one of them with a kind of hand-operated little searchlight slung around his waist, and no less than twelve black policemen, armed with heavy kieries, lined up on the pavement outside. They had telephoned for a patrol van to take this force down to the factory, but none had come, there had been some mistake. The station sergeant sat rapping at the telephone, trying to get through to headquarters; my father asked of them all, “What’s happening? What are they doing at the factory?” but no one could answer him. “There’s trouble,” was all they said. “People phoned us up and said there was trouble.” Still the patrol van did not come, and my father went on to the pavement and looked in the direction of the factory: he saw no flames, he heard no shouting, and the factory was not more than a few hundred yards away. The twelve black policemen who stood in file on the pavement looked in the same direction as my father, but made no comment.
But what he had seen gave my father courage to go back into the charge office and say, “Look, we could get there quicker by walking than by hanging around like this.”
“Yes—and how do we get away?” one of the men asked, not the least ashamed of the point he was making.
“There’s nothing there, it looks to me,” my father said. But he was anxious about his property. “For God’s sake, I can take you in my car.” He had forgotten that he had come in the little car, but the station sergeant thought this an excellent idea. He went outside and told the black policemen that they were to follow the car of the oubaas; but his face fell when he saw the car my father had come in.
My father too was distressed. “Well, I can take three at least,” he said.
Eventually it was agreed that three white policemen would go in the little car to the factory, and that the twelve black policemen would follow on foot. One white policeman dropped out of the party: the others began climbing into the car. But they were all big men, and the car was very small, and they couldn’t get in until the station sergeant took their rifles from them, waited until each one was seated, and then passed them their rifles through the windows of the car. Even then they could not bring the rifles right into the car, and had to hold them sticking out of the windows, each one thrust out at a different angle.
The station sergeant came round to my father at the driver’s window. “You’re doing this voluntarily,” he warned my father. “You offered the use of your car.”
“All right, all right.”
The station sergeant turned and yelled at the file of twelve black policemen. “You must run!” he shouted. “You must keep up with the car.” To my father he said, “You must drive slowly, hey, so that they can keep up. It’s for your own good, hey.”
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My father started the car, put it into gear, let the clutch out, and the car stalled. The twelve black policemen, who had been poised to start, relaxed. My father started the car again, and managed to get it crawling down the road; behind him there marched the twelve black policemen. By this time all the preparations had roused the interest of more than one passing pedestrian and motorist, who stood and watched the cortège go off. Inside the car the policemen shifted uncomfortably, their rifles scraping against the metal window frames and pointing in all directions around the car. My father drove on, battling to get the gear-lever to do what he wanted of it.
A few hundred yards beyond the police station the road goes into a subway, under the railway line, and the car trundled towards the subway and then ducked into it, going rapidly down, and more slowly up the other side. The twelve black policemen, who had broken into a run downhill, labored up the other side too. The car turned into the square, at the edge of which was the ramshackle brick building of the factory, with its corrugated iron roof and its fence around the yard. It was dark and silent, and no one moved on the wide, sandy expanse of the square between the factory and the railway line. My father was told to pull up at the entrance to the factory yard, and to wait until the twelve black policemen had caught up with them. This they soon did, puffing a little, and then the white policemen started struggling to release themselves from the little car. They could do it, in the end, only after my father had gone round from window to window, collecting the rifles which they handed to him, and which they claimed from him once they were all out.
“Now through this gate, through the back, this way,” one of the policemen commanded; and my father unlocked the swinging gates to the yard, and the policeman with the searchlight switched it on. The beam of light leaped across the yard, and the other men also pulled out pocket torches, and shone them to the right and left of the beam from the searchlight. All sixteen of them moved together, rifles or kieries in their right hands, torches in their left. The light of the searchlight went far ahead of them, over the stacks of lucerne, the outlet pipes of the lucerne-mill, the weighbridge: it could stare only in one place at a time, but every corner that it touched it filled with light, and it swung this way and that, occasionally doing a quick sweep round, even behind them, as they moved cautiously forward.
“Those sheds,” the leading policeman said, and the ragged arc of sixteen men swung to the left, across the yard, to the row of sheds. In the first shed, the one used as a dormitory, there was no one at all: everyone who lived there seemed to be out for the night. The second shed was used for storing empty grain bags—there were stacks and stacks of empty bags laid flat and piled on top of one another. The policemen jostled into the shed, and looked about it, and they were beginning to crowd their way out of it again when one of the stacks started to sway, and then with no sound at all began to fall towards them. All fifteen policemen seemed to shout at one moment, torches went clattering as rifles were grasped in both hands; the beam of the searchlight beat itself against the bags and the corrugated iron wall of the shed. The stack fell slowly, soundlessly, from the top downward: some moments had passed before it had fallen far enough over to reveal the two crouching figures who had sheltered behind it.
There was another shout from the policemen, and one darted forward and lifted one of the two figures by the back of the neck. The man was naked, but for the grain bag which he held in front of his loins. The woman next to him was naked too. But her grain bag, when she was dragged to her feet, she held at the neck and let hang as far down her body as it could reach.
The searchlight shone straight at them, and in the beam of light both figures were reduced to a uniform colorlessness, but for the glitter from their eyes and the teeth in their appalled, open mouths. The glitter at the eyes twitched as they blinked, twitched again. To the right and the left of them were the rifles pointing, the kieries raised, the ribs of corrugated iron striped in light and shade. My father made his way between the weapons, and when he saw him among the weapons, the male figure squirmed fiercely in the grip of the policeman and shouted between a wild despair and a hope as wild, “Dammit, baas, it is only Phineas!”
My father leaned forward to have a closer look at the man. “It’s all right,” he said. “I know him. He works here.”
“And this one,” the policeman said, shaking the woman in his grasp.
“No, I don’t know her. She doesn’t work for me.”
Phineas was one of the youngest of the employees, and one of the most stupid. No thought of the previous night’s riot had been permitted by Phineas to disturb him from the planning and the execution of his embraces, but to disturb them nevertheless there had come three white policemen with rifles and a searchlight, twelve black policemen with kieries, and my father.
So back they all went to the little car, and when they reached the police station they found waiting for them the patrol van, which could more comfortably have taken them to the factory and back again than the little car, and an ambulance, and half a dozen parked cars belonging to people who were still waiting patiently to see the disasters which the presence of the ambulance had promised them. The arrival of the little car, with its rifles sticking out of the windows, was greeted with much excitement; the precision-marching of the twelve black policemen raised some favorable comment; and excited voices called out, “That’s the way to treat them,” and, “They’ll cut our throats if we give them a chance,” and, “The trouble’s just beginning, you mark my words.”
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“What happened to Phineas’s woman?” I asked my father, when he had told us his story.
“They let her go.”
“And Phineas?”
“They let him go too. He wouldn’t stop crying,” my father said. “He got a hell of a fright.”
“Like us.”
My father nodded. “What I don’t understand is why those people next door phoned up and said there was trouble. How much noise could Phineas and that woman have been making?” he asked, reasonably enough.
“I don’t know. Everyone’s pretty tense.”
And Eddie said: “You can’t take risks at a time like this.”
Then we took Eddie home. When the car stopped his girl friend came running down the path to Eddie, and took him by the hand. “I’ve been so worried,” she said. “You shouldn’t have gone.”
“I had to go,” Eddie said simply. He was holding her with one arm round her back; in his other hand he held the rifle. He turned to say goodbye to us.
“Thanks very much for the help,” I said. I felt I should apologize to him. But for what? That there had not been another riot? That it had all been merely the night after the riot, Phineas’s night out?
But Eddie did not seem to think an apology was called for. “Oh, everyone helps,” he said modestly.
“Phineas too, in his way,” my brother added, as we drove home.
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