Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,35

but this time he gestured towards a group in which there were white men only, and so she gave up.

The dance was cut short with a sudden wailing screech as someone lifted the needle of the gramophone in the middle of the record, and it appeared that a man was about to speak. It turned out that it was to be a song and not a speech, for Martin Mathlongo, little Shabalala, two coloured women and a huge African woman with cork-soled green shoes grouped themselves with their arms hanging about one another’s necks. When the room had quietened down, they sang. They sang with extraordinary beauty, the men’s voices deep and tender, the women’s high and passionate. They sang in some Bantu language, and when the song was done, the girl asked Eddie Ntwala, next to whom she found herself standing, what they had been singing about. He said as simply as a peasant, as if he had never danced with her, exchanging sophisticated banter, ‘It’s about a young man who passes and sees a girl working in her father’s field.’

Roy Wilson giggled and gave him a comradely punch on the arm. ‘Eddie’s never seen a field in his life. Born and bred in Apex Location.’

Then Martin Mathlongo, with his spotted bow tie under his big, loose-mouthed, strong face, suddenly stood forward and began to sing ‘Ol’ Man River’. There was something insulting, defiant, yet shamefully supplicating in the way he sang the melodramatic, servile words, the way he kneeled and put out his big hands with their upturned pinkish palms. The dark faces in the room watched him, grinning as if at the antics of a monkey. The white faces looked drunk and withdrawn.

Joyce McCoy saw that, for the first time since she had been introduced to her that evening, she was near Jessica Malherbe. The girl was feeling a strong distress at the sight of the coloured man singing the blackface song, and when she saw Jessica Malherbe, she put – with a look, as it were – all this burden at the woman’s feet. She put it all upon her, as if she could make it right, for on the woman’s broad, neatly made-up face there was neither the sullen embarrassment of the other white faces nor the leering self-laceration of the black.

The girl felt the way she usually felt when she was about to cry, but this time it was the prelude to something different. She made her way with difficulty, for her legs were the drunkest part of her, murmuring politely, ‘Excuse me,’ as she had been taught to do for twenty-two years, past all the people who stood, in their liquor daze, stolid as cows in a stream. She went up to the trade-union leader, the veteran of political imprisonment, the glossy-haired woman who used good perfume. ‘Miss Malherbe,’ she said, and her blank, exquisite face might have been requesting an invitation to a garden party. ‘Please, Miss Malherbe, I want to go with you next week. I want to march into the location.’

Next day, when Joyce was sober, she still wanted to go. As her brother-in-law had predicted, she felt sick from Derek’s punch, and every time she inclined her head, a great, heavy ball seemed to roll slowly from one side to the other inside her skull. The presence of this ball, which sometimes felt as if it were her brain itself, shrunken and hardened, rattling like a dried nut in its shell, made it difficult to concentrate, yet the thought that she would march into the location the following week was perfectly clear. As a matter of fact, it was almost obsessively clear.

She went to see Miss Malherbe at the headquarters of the Civil Disobedience Campaign, in order to say again what she had said the night before. Miss Malherbe did again just what she had done the night before – listened politely, was interested and sympathetic, thanked the girl, and then gently explained that the movement could not allow anyone but bona-fide members to take part in such actions. ‘Then I’ll become a member now,’ said Joyce. She wore today a linen dress as pale as her own skin, and on the square of bare, matching flesh at her neck hung a little necklace of small pearls – the sort of necklace that is given to a girl child and added to, pearl by pearl, a new one on every birthday. Well, said Miss Malherbe, she could join the