He was allowed one letter a month. It was my letter because his parents didn’t know how to write. I used to go to them where they worked on another farm to ask what message they wanted to send. The mother always cried and put her hands on her head and said nothing, and the old man, who preached to us in the veld every Sunday, said tell my son we are praying, God will make everything all right for him. Once he wrote back, That’s the trouble — our people on the farms, they’re told God will decide what’s good for them so that they won’t find the force to do anything to change their lives.
After two years had passed, we — his parents and I — had saved up enough money to go to Cape Town to visit him. We went by train and slept on the floor at the station and asked the way, next day, to the ferry. People were kind; they all knew that if you wanted the ferry it was because you had somebody of yours on the Island.
And there it was — there was the sea. It was green and blue, climbing and falling, bursting white, all the way to the sky. A terrible wind was slapping it this way and that; it hid the Island, but people like us, also waiting for the ferry, pointed where the Island must be, far out in the sea that I never thought would be like it really was.
There were other boats, and ships as big as buildings that go to other places, all over the world, but the ferry is only for the Island, it doesn’t go anywhere else in the world, only to the Island. So everybody waiting there was waiting for the Island, there could be no mistake we were not in the right place. We had sweets and biscuits, trousers and a warm coat for him (a woman standing with us said we wouldn’t be allowed to give him the clothes) and I wasn’t wearing, any more, the old beret pulled down over my head that farm girls wear, I had bought relaxer cream from the man who comes round the farms selling things out of a box on his bicycle, and my hair was combed up thick under a flowered scarf that didn’t cover the gold-coloured rings in my ears. His mother had her blanket tied round her waist over her dress, a farm woman, but I looked just as good as any of the other girls there. When the ferry was ready to take us, we stood all pressed together and quiet like the cattle waiting to be let through a gate. One man kept looking round with his chin moving up and down, he was counting, he must have been afraid there were too many to get on and he didn’t want to be left behind. We all moved up to the policeman in charge and everyone ahead of us went onto the boat. But when our turn came and he put out his hand for something, I didn’t know what.
We didn’t have a permit. We didn’t know that before you come to Cape Town, before you come to the ferry for the Island, you have to have a police permit to visit a prisoner on the Island. I tried to ask him nicely. The wind blew the voice out of my mouth.
We were turned away. We saw the ferry rock, bumping the landing where we stood, moving, lifted and dropped by all that water, getting smaller and smaller until we didn’t know if we were really seeing it or one of the birds that looked black, dipping up and down, out there.
The only good thing was one of the other people took the sweets and biscuits for him. He wrote and said he got them. But it wasn’t a good letter. Of course not. He was cross with me; I should have found out, I should have known about the permit. He was right — I bought the train tickets, I asked where to go for the ferry, I should have known about the permit. I have passed Standard 8. There was an advice office to go to in town, the churches ran it, he wrote. But the farm is so far from town, we on the farms don’t know about these things. It was as he said; our ignorance is the way we are kept down, this ignorance must go.
We took the train back and we never went to the Island — never saw him in the three more years he was there. Not once. We couldn’t find the money for the train. His father died and I had to help his mother from my pay. For our people the worry is always money, I wrote. When will we ever have money? Then he sent such a good letter. That’s what I’m on the Island for, far away from you, I’m here so that one day our people will have the things they need, land, food, the end of ignorance. There was something else — I could just read the word ‘power’ the prison had blacked out. All his letters were not just for me; the prison officer read them before I could.
He was coming home after only five years!
That’s what it seemed to me, when I heard — the five years were suddenly disappeared — nothing! — there was no whole year still to wait. I showed my — our — little girl his photo again. That’s your daddy, he’s coming, you’re going to see him. She told the other children at school, I’ve got a daddy, just as she showed off about the kid goat she had at home.
We wanted him to come at once, and at the same time we wanted time to prepare. His mother lived with one of his uncles; now that his father was dead there was no house of his father for him to take me to as soon as we married. If there had been time, my father would have cut poles, my mother and I would have baked bricks, cut thatch, and built a house for him and me and the child.
We were not sure what day he would arrive. We only heard on my radio his name and the names of some others who were released. Then at the Indian’s store I noticed the newspaper, The Nation, written by black people, and on the front a picture of a lot of people dancing and waving — I saw at once it was at that ferry. Some men were being carried on other men’s shoulders. I couldn’t see which one was him. We were waiting. The ferry had brought him from the Island but we remembered Cape Town is a long way from us. Then he did come. On a Saturday, no school, so I was working with my mother, hoeing and weeding round the pumpkins and mealies, my hair, that I meant to keep nice, tied in an old doek. A combi came over the veld and his comrades had brought him. I wanted to run away and wash but he stood there stretching his legs, calling, hey! hey! with his comrades making a noise around him, and my mother started shrieking in the old style aie! aie! and my father was clapping and stamping towards him. He held his arms open to us, this big man in town clothes, polished shoes, and all the time while he hugged me I was holding my dirty hands, full of mud, away from him behind his back. His teeth hit me hard through his lips, he grabbed at my mother and she struggled to hold the child up to him. I thought we would all fall down! Then everyone was quiet. The child hid behind my mother. He picked her up but she turned her head away to her shoulder. He spoke to her gently but she wouldn’t speak to him. She’s nearly six years old! I told her not to be a baby. She said, That’s not him.
The comrades all laughed, we laughed, she ran off and he said, She has to have time to get used to me.
He has put on weight, yes; a lot. You couldn’t believe it. He used to be so thin his feet looked too big for him. I used to feel his bones but now — that night — when he lay on me he was so heavy, I didn’t remember it was like that. Such a long time. It’s strange to get stronger in prison; I thought he wouldn’t have enough to eat and would come out weak. Everyone said, Look at him! — he’s a man, now. He laughed and banged his fist on his chest, told them how the comrades exercised in their cells, he would run three miles a day, stepping up and down on one place on the floor of that small cell where he was kept. After we were together at night we used to whisper a long time but now I can feel he’s thinking of some things I don’t know and I can’t worry him with talk. Also I don’t know what to say. To ask him what it was like, five years shut away there; or to tell him something about school or about the child. What else has happened, here? Nothing. Just waiting. Sometimes in the daytime I do try to tell him what it was like for me, here at home on the farm, five years. He listens, he’s interested, just like he’s interested when people from the other farms come to visit and talk to him about little things that happened to them while he was away all that time on the Island. He smiles and nods, asks a couple of questions and then stands up and stretches. I see it’s to show them it’s enough, his mind is going back to something he was busy with before they came. And we farm people are very slow; we tell things slowly, he used to, too.