His relationship with the Stow woman was one that laid great emphasis on self-respect, and yet for him the real fillip of self-respect came when he was finished with her; it seemed possible to live again quite simply, without making a lot of talk about it. He was back at his teaching job, his lousy job; the crowded faces of hungry children facing his own every day; the timidity, earnestness, self-importance and pomposity of the other teachers in the staff-room, with their consciousness of themselves as “educated”. They were very conscious, too, that he was an “artist”, and reminded friends that he was a colleague of theirs. Hadn’t he competed with white artists and won a scholarship to go to Italy? In the city, too, in the white houses and flats where he was welcome, he was always accepted as a painter—“the one who was supposed to go to Rome”. He did not paint any more but he realised that this did not matter. It would not matter if he never painted again; he could live for the rest of his life, in the townships on the fact that he had once painted something that competed favourably against white artists, in the city on the fact that he was both a painter who had achieved notice overseas and a black man. The idea coldly frightened and fascinated him. It seemed the real reason why he could not paint. He chuckled over it and at the same time the fact of his amusement was the confirmation, the finish — let him laugh; he would never paint anything again.
After he had turned away from Callie Stow, like a man who goes out for an evening stroll and never comes back, he had come to see his own old view of his home as as inaccurate as hers: she thought of the townships as places exalted by struggle; like treasure saved from the rest of the plundering world in a remote cave, she believed the Africans kept love alive. He went about the townships again now almost as he had worn the coating of streets there as a child, without any moral or spiritual conception of them. He went in from the white world like an explorer who, many times bitten and many times laid low with fever, can go back unthinkingly into territory whose hazards mean no more to him than crossing a city street.
His room was far down from the terminus. Shoes scuffed and twisted against the uneven ground so that by the time you got there you had taken on again the dust and shabbiness of the place, you were given protective colouring. The room itself was in a row added behind a house that was solidly built for a location, a brick house with a verandah. A piece of bald swept ground before it was fenced in with scrap — railway sleepers, bits of corrugated iron, chicken-netting — and a dog on a chain attached to a wire that ran the length of the fence raced barking from end to end of the scope of its existence. The owners of the house, the old woman and her husband, sat on the verandah behind this fierce frieze and added figures on bits of smoothed sugar bag. There were tins of fire in the yard and the small children called out, some even in English, “Hello”, while the bigger ones, who were no longer friendly and had not yet learned the substitute of politeness, took no notice of who came or went.
Ida was in the room; he heard her gentle, breathy voice with the sound of agreement in it as he put his foot on the thick doorstep. Some shirts and socks were lying on the bed; she had a key and must have brought his washing. Sol was there too, a friend who drove a dry cleaner’s van. He challenged, with pleasure: “You’re not easy to get hold of, man! I’ve been here twice, everything locked up. I met the old man and he said he hadn’t seen you for two days.”
“Yeh, I know.” Shibalo grinned. He was looking round the room with the roving interest of one who wants to keep up with whatever life has been going on in his absence. “Did Bob do anything about the record player?” he said to the young woman.
“Well, I don’t know. I haven’t heard from him. He might have tried to get hold of you.”
“Night duty?” he asked her.
She shook her head and moved her feet so that she could admire her patent shoes. “Day off.”
“Where’re you people going to eat?” Sol asked.
“I’ve eaten at my sister’s already,” the girl said.
“Well, what about it, then?” Sol gestured as if to set her about preparing a meal. She laughed, “I don’t think there’s anything.”
The room had the disturbed look of a place that is subjected to quiet neglect alternating with vigorous raids on its resources. A suitcase stuffed with papers had burst a lock on one side, there were paper-backs embossed with candle-drippings beside the bed, four or five different tobacco tins, some bottles of pills and a broken chain that had once been on the door. Sol sat in a smart yellow canvas chair shaped like a sling; it was of the kind advertised for “modern leisure living”. The black iron bed, book-shelf sagging under canvases as well as books, the cupboard where the girl Ida unearthed a tin of pilchards — each held objects that had been turned up in the rummage for something else, and never found their way back where they belonged. The window was overgrown with a briar of strips of wire and tin provided as burglar-proofing by the landlord, and as it gave no light or air anyway was covered with a strange little wool carpet. A primus, a basin of pots and dishes, and a big old typewriter, filled up the space between the legs of a table; there was a clean square on the top where the record player usually rested. The back of the door was covered with a huge travel poster reproducing a Romanesque madonna, and magazine cut-outs of Klee, Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Sidney Nolan and the Ife bronzes curled away from the walls. When they fell in an autumn of their own they were replaced by others, but the cutting of a photograph that had appeared in a newspaper when the Italian scholarship award was announced was stuck back again, and was already yellowed and brittle.
Ida went to the corner shop to get bread and polony and Shibalo took out the brandy bottle. Sol was talking politics — it was about some point that was going to come up for discussion at a meeting that he had wanted to canvass Shibalo — and looking over Shibalo’s newspaper at the same time. “There you are”—he chopped the side of his hand against a column. “There you are”—he took the glass of brandy and began again—“they want a conference. ‘Liberals and Progressives urge consultation with all races.’ There it is. What do we want to talk about, for Christ’s sake? Jabavu talked to them, Luthuli talked to them, talk, talk, what do we want to talk for when we’ve got the whole continent behind us?”
“A long way off,” Shibalo suggested. “Rhodesia, Portuguese East in between—” Sol stared at him to indicate that he knew better, whatever he might be saying: “Going, going, man.”
“You think Nkrumah’s going to sail round to Cape Town and land troops?”
“No, man. I didn’t say that. You know what I think. I think the guns are going to come in through Bechuanaland and Basutoland and the U.N.’s going to take over in South West.” He stopped at the obstacle of his own impatience because these things had not happened already.
“And the guns are going to come in from Southern Rhodesia and the Portuguese to blow those guns out.”
“So what do you want? You think we’ll have a nice talk to the whites and they’ll push the Government out and hand over to us?”
“Look — even when you’re being smart, you don’t get it straight. Most of the whites don’t want to talk to you, they wouldn’t be ready to talk to you until you’ve opened their brains with a panga. Make no mistake about it, they won’t waste any words on the blacks. They don’t want any palaver with black leaders because there are no black leaders so far as they are concerned, understand? They are the ones who decide what’s going to happen to us. Where we’re going to live. Where we’re going to work. What bloody stairs we’ll put our stinking black feet on — talk! My God, it’s only a miserable handful without a place up there in the Government between them, who want to talk. The others want to shoot it out, man, once they can’t wangle it out any longer with shit about homelands. But when it comes to shooting it out, stop dreaming, that’s what I’m telling you chaps. We may need sticks and stones and whatever we can lay our hands on, as well as the promises from our brothers out there.”