A Black Son Of A Yenta

I was born among the ruins and dust of the city of Port Elizabeth’s possies. My first playground were frothing sewages and rubbish dumps.  Most of my family died from cheap alcohol and the related  violence of poverty. Then came AIDS. We were at sixes and sevens about it for a long time.  We buried our heads in the sand,  went on with our lives as if we didn't notice the sword of Damocles hanging over our pernicious lives. The underlining truth is that no one was going to stop fucking around because of AIDS, not from the mentality we grew up with. Call it fatalism, or whatever, that’s how things were. Subsequently death mowed sometimes coming as relief to our stranded lives.

                   My brother and I stayed with our mother, a bitch that bonked whoever was prepared to pay for her liquor. Some of her boyfriends stayed longer than others, alternating from a day to three years. Our township was called New Brighton, something to do with a town in England or NewZeland.  We were told some comrades went there for education in how to oppress us through the democratic dispensation and economic theories of imperialist who control global institutions like the UN, IMF, World Bank, etc. None of us really gave a damn on the ground where we were faced with more immediate problems. Between our mother’s boy friends, at least the ones with a heart who provided some modicum of meagre groceries, my brother and I were expected to fend for ourselves from when we could walk.  For me this meant earning a living at the taxi ranks.

My first real recollections is when my brother was three and I was nine –going  on eighteen. My golden goose, the taxi rank, called Njoli, was about four blocks from our house, not a place to fuck around after dusk, unless you had a death wish.  During the day the rank was always teeming with commuters, and deafeningly loud music- bubble-gum stuff of the likes of Brenda Fassie, or Kwaito. However, at night an eerie silence brooded over it and tragedy hid in the shadows.  We had a game we played when we were younger, following the blood steps to the ditches where whoever found the body took the prize. A winner would shout, ‘found one’ and announce what point he/she was at. For every body you found you gained a point –I  was at six the last I remember. The winner got to treat the rest of the gang as his slaves for the day, asking for whatever he/she wants, which usually meant the slaves had to steal something, and sending wherever to do the “master’s” bidding. We didn’t see any need of reporting the bodies to the elders, who were fed up with our finds, so mostly the bodies lay putrefying for a while until a police van came to collect them.

I preferred to hang around the non-probing mini-taxi divers than my mother and her “flavour of the month” boyfriend.  The taxi-drivers were always in need of someone to send to the shops or fast food stalls for something to eat, or just to break a 50 for change. At first I went to the rank after school, but as time went by, it felt silly to waste hours at school learning things I had no interest in, from people who didn’t show much enthusiasm in teaching them anyway.  Once the school principal saw me at the rank when I should have been at school.  Hey you, he called out forgetting my name but evidently not my face, what are you doing here? Who stopped you coming to school?  Not who, Mr Principal, I smirked, but what! I said slamming the passenger door on his face and the driver pulling fast from his suffocating questions. Seating and reading at the library eight years later I found an appropriate answer from what the emperor of Hindustan, Aurangzeb told his former tutor when he asked why he no longer availed himself for the tutorials; I’m tired of reading about things I’ve no interests in –things  hard to understand and very easy to forget . . . a multitude of barbarous adventures in dark words. To this day I wished I had enough education to have said that. Consequently I unwittingly joined the Huckleberry club. If my recollection is correct it was during a short break  I left school. I asked our teacher for permission to go to the toilet. She refused. During the short-break I was consumed by the urgency of an idea to relieve myself at home, not in the squalid school toilets with stall doors broken off and an non-flushing urinal. As my bladder bulged I eventually went with the idea. I never saw the inside of that classroom again. I can’t say I’ve missed it except for the occasional twinge of guilt, like that of a cad jilting a once fond of lover whenever I recalled that I’d left behind my well-sharpened pencil.  I’m certain the long fingers of that locust faced Maqanqa pinched it; a dirty feeted bastard with  garlic smelling hair. Once when he was about to be flogged for not doing his homework he wet his pants and begged the teacher; “Please don’t flog me teacher, I’ll bring you R100 tomorrow.”

“And how is the porridge brained fool like you supposed to come up with hundred bucks?” The teacher asked amused.

“There’s a baboon at our house’s attic that brings us money at night.” The locust faced clown said shivering like a leaf. Can you believe how pathetic that ingratiating starveling could be? He got the flogging despite.

Before I left for the taxi rank I would spend time carrying for mother’s boyfriends who sent me here and there, mostly to buy quarts of Castle Lagers and loose fags. Beer quarts were R4,50 then, and for some reason people always had R5 notes. The fifty cents change would be my tip, if I was lucky. Then after collecting enough I'd buy a  half a loaf for my brother and I. We'd disappear to the cane ditch and eat our fresh bread with Choice butter blocks melted on it. The fun was always slightly soiled by the fact that our mother would normally be in a drunken stupor or something. One day, my brother and I were hungry. There was a pot of smiley on top of the iron stove. You know mos how you can smell smiley from afar even before you open the pot; that inviting smoky smell of scorched wool from the sheep’s head, mixed with peri-peri and fried onions, chakalaka, and next to it,  on a sink cupboard, was  idombolo wrapped in a towel to cool down . The temptation was just too much. I cut a small piece of smiley and a slice of the steamed bread. I also dished chakalaka for my brother and I. The piece of meat was very good, the stinging pungency of peri-peri, the bitter sweetness of green peppers and all. There was no question of not going back for more. In the end we ate the whole half of smiley with cheeky emotions; mos a man cannot keep washing the dishes holding meat he never gets to eat forever. I didn’t feel a shred of guilt. It’s a strange thing, being guilty and unremorseful, as though the gods are taking your side.  That evening I got such a thrashing from my mother’s boyfriend I thought I would die.  Next morning when I felt the stiffness and pain, I wanted to. Blisters had formed at my back like bags of troubled waters, busting into a river of pain on the third night. I woke with a map of blood carved on the sleeping sponge I shared with my brother. Later on that day I found myself wandering with strange thoughts and feelings at the banks of a sewerage dam where my friend and I once threw a rusty gun into that we had found in the bushes.

                   Those of my mother’s friends that were friendly proved too friendly in pederasty style.  Once I woke to a poking stick and the heavy breath of alcohol on my back. When I discovered it was one of my mother’s boyfriend friends I punched on the  balls and jumped up  to wake my mother. She was unconscious from the drink. In the morning when she came to I told her what had taken place she waved me away, saying I’d misunderstood. Like hell I misunderstood, I never went home that night, preferring to sleep under the peach tree watching  stars twinkle between the branches, my mind wondering about death. After that I found myself spending more and more time at the taxi-rank also, partly to avoid pederasts and drunken abusive friends of my mother, and partly to make more money.  It was a Catch-22 situation really, because I spent half the time in the taxi-rank worried about my brother as I had left him unprotected among the self same abusive and pederast wolves.  

Life at the rank was appealing for its constant cash flow. Mini-bus drivers don’t have time nor inclination to run their own errands, being much too fat for that. Hanging around them and running their errands earned you a De Klerk (R2 coin) per request. The errands were varied: buying lunches of fish and chips; delivering R20 to a driver’s home without the knowledge of the taxi owner, or keeping an eye on their khwaphenis.

‘Tis warm in there (the armpit) unlike the cold ring of a wife;’ one of them once confided in me as I handed her a pilfered R50 note. Little did she know that my real duty was to secretly monitor her movements—making sure her cart was not pulling with more than one stud and all. I found out soon enough that she was double dealing, a very dangerous game in the township as you might easily end with a cold iron inside you. When I caught her in a compromising position—kissing her departing lover—I gave her a chance to buy my tongue, an even deadlier game, which meant I got  R10 of her weekly allowance. The arrangement appeared perfect to me: The stallion kept more than one mare on his stable, the maiden was pulling more than one string in her bow, and I was scoring at least  R20 every week from being the understanding middleman. But like all good things that did not last. Things took on a strange turn for me when I started using. They kept on getting into the complicated the more I sniffed. You would not believe the shit we used to sniff, glue, petrol and other toxic shit like benzene. Within no time I graduated to alcohol, white spirits at first, mixing it inside cool drink bottles so that the taxi-drivers would not notice. I only noticed how it was messing with my brain when my takings as a tout kept coming in short. The driver let it go at first, but the last straw was the day I was short by a whooping R20. The fuckin’ bastard chucked me off the taxi in the middle of a Freeway. I walked towards the opposite direction towards a light I saw through misted eyes. My head felt heavy. Things in general had a strange faint glow that day. The traffic noise was muffled as though coming from a distance even as cars were passing precariously close, hooting in screeching loudness. The nearby ocean clapped its waves against the promontory slabs that checked its pride. I kept my distance. I didn’t trust the roar of the sea. That was unusual for me; always, always, when we passed by the ocean there was affinity of old compatriots between the sea and I. I walked and walked until I could not feel my numb legs. I wandered around Highway rails and columns.

“How do they make the roads fly?” I once asked our grandmother when she was still alive.  I was younger and innocent then.  She liked taking me shopping when she got her pension money.

“White people can milk a bird my child,” was her answer, which satisfied me.

        Grandma was my favourite person, and a mysterious soul, wrapped in an enigma of silence. I’m sure she said less than twenty sentences in the last decade of her life, and all of them when she was with me, her only grandchild at the time. People didn’t believe it when I told them Grandma could speak; they said she was possessed by a mute demon. The family members reached a stage whereby they would talk about grandma as though she was not there. One day my mother was talking with her neighbour in that manner when Grandma suddenly retorted. “Pfxim! You’ve no idea of what you’re talking about.” Our neighbour who had never heard her speak nearly keeled over.  There was a distilled essence of isolation about grandma's character I liked.

                  I had walked and walked so far I was ready to give up, when I saw a covered area under the Highway. I went for it and  rested for a while next to some homeless people. I decided to crash there for the night, in a cradle of humiliation. A play of pride and shame rolled up the bundle of troubles in my mind,  embarrassment came tumbling down my cheeks. When the concrete roof of the Highway refused my command to come crumbling down on me I wondered who would fetch death for me. Having grown up avoiding death in the township, where it is as common as sunrise, I could not believe its scarcity when I wasn’t trying to avoid it. They say suicide is a blunt admission of futility, a solipsistic admission of failure –as  if you first take a philosophical discourse before deciding to do away with your life. Not all of us are Nietzsche, and if I remember well, he himself found a nice way of explaining his lack of nerve in considering suicide unnecessary for a person who was brave enough to have decided on it –these clever people are astute like vipers!

               A man with a mangled beard, lying not very far, irritated me with wailing and jeremiads as I lay there. He went on with the jeremiad kind of shit; ‘Woe unto me, my mother has born me to be a man of strife and dissension. Let me die and acquaint myself with the rest of my ancestors.’ He didn’t seem too acquainted with the mysteries of this life, let alone the next one to me. ‘Fuck off!  The peace of the Lord has gone to us all.  Now shut the fuck up and go to sleep.’ Somebody down the row shouted. The fleas and hallucinations of the prophet kept me awake all night. I could not believe the manner by which my life was suddenly roughed up by the dark night.

When I managed to join the city streets the next morning they were already swimming with people going to and from work. I felt grateful and impressed that my legs were still in the place I’d left them the night before. Never before had I realised the importance of having two legs like that day. It is amazing the clarity you find from waking on the gutter. I looked around: so many people, so few men!  I merged easily with the anonymous crowd. I tried marshaling within myself reasons for going back home.  None came.  I decided to perambulate the streets with a vividly shocking realisation that I was done with home. It felt strange being so bankrupt of reasons for going home and bereft of the desire to either. I walked the city streets with Patrician adoration and excited fatigue. In time I hooked up with other street children whose main base was behind the Spar supermarket at Newton Park. With fridge exhausts farting warm air through air ducts all night, things became tolerable even during cold spells. Luckily Port Elizabeth does not have long too much ill tempered weather. As far as the earnings were concerned, the place was truly a gold mine. On bad days we made R50 a day each, begging from madams. You had to target white ladies, use their guilt against them, to maximise your profit. If the madam asks your story you came up with a saddest thing you've ever heard, adding, as a final touch—and this was my personal genius culled from an old mining magazine I found on the bin—that your father died of mesothelioma, on the mines in Joburg, or something.

                  One Easter Friday we made about three hundred bucks each. To celebrate, five of us bought three ‘straights’ bottles of brandy. Alcohol worked well to suppress a certain sadness that always visited us during the holidays. The following day I woke up with a terrible hang-over, parched from the previous night’s indulgence, and went to the Greek café at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Cape Road for something to quench my thirst.  On entering the shop I scooted to the fridge before the owner could see and block my entrance as he always did with us street kids, especially when there were other customers around. Our presence was tolerated only as a operational nuisance. When important people came around, we were expected to make ourselves scarce, like the Queen of England, Elizabeth, who visited the city because it was named after her or something. Wherever street kids were found roaming about the city streets that week they were promptly arrested and I escaped by the skin of my teeth.

                   I felt the embarrass de choix before the fridge of the shop. I had the money to buy any kind of cool drink I wanted but the choices made me dizzy. It was almost a double embarrassment after deliberating my choices to settle for a measly coca-cola. I had thought I'd come up with something classy, more sophisticated, like I saw suburb kids sometimes drink. I went to the counter wishing that it was the Greek’s valetudinarian wife instead of ‘the father bear.’ She was nicer. To my eternal surprise the Greek owner waved me away, signalling that I can leave without paying for the cold drink. I promptly left before he got other ideas. Outside Nigerian Muslims looked like Afghan mujahedin in their flowing salwar khameez and loose black turbans, some in white kaftans. They had stalls, selling ugly masks of African gods, which reminded me, oddly,  that it was Easter Sunday, the day of resurrection. Somehow this realization inspired vague hope; reminded me of my grandma who always took us to Mass on Easter Sundays. On our way she'd share with us her toffolux toffees—boy were those toffees soft and sweet from the warmth of her breast. I allowed my imagination to run wild, thinking how if I were given powers of rising from the dead I’d haunt my enemies with ugly Nigerian masks til’ they shit their pants. 'Maqanqa, I want my pencil you aromat smelling bastard! Thou shall meet me at Philippines!' Or some shit like that. That, to me, was the disappointing thing about this Christ chap; the refusal to revenge himself on his enemies even when he had the power. Emerging from those thoughts I suddenly remembered that Sunday liturgy for suburban housewives was shopping, and berated myself for allowing my mind to divagate on crucified Jews and their complicated relations with Godly parents.   At least the African gods had a better sense of staying aloof and remote to human affairs, even if that costs us culturally a well-developed artistic expression, and a void that missionaries only too readily filled. To master art expression, if Gide is to be believed, the gods must come and dwell within the people. But if our Xhosa gods are nearly as ugly as those mother-fucker Nigerian masks then I understand why our people didn't want them around.  The African way is sensible, because we know the gods are always up to mischief, they must keep their haunting distant, and their abodes away from ours.

I identified my madam from a distance. I stalked her like a lion: observe and choose from the herd an isolated or limping one; mentally prime yourself, perhaps subconsciously lick your lips, then  in a flash,  go for the fast kill. I later learned that her distracted appearance was not due to an ailing spirit, and so catching her would have improved the herd overall, it was simply because her best friend was immigrating to Australia. I felt a curious thrill as I watched her single herself out even more as she tried to rouse a bergie lying stinko against the supermarket wall. I thought it wise to offer my help.

“Please madam, that one will never wake, he’s under the tap.”

“Will he be alright though?” asked the madam with a concerned look, searchingly as thought secretly looking for the tap the poor man was lying under.

“O! Yes mem, the effects of umtshove alale don’t linger too long. It’ll vomit him soon, then somebody will have to clean after him.”  I said, chuckling, signalling with my hand that he would have soiled his pants.

“Agh man, I only need somebody to help me load some chairs on the bakkie,” she moaned disappointingly, moving away from the bergie.

“He won’t be much help to you now. Why doesn’t mam try me?”

“Suka wean! Get away from here! What can you carry, a stripling like you?”     “Everything mam. Mem underrates.” I answered, assuming a serious face.

“Agh, you are a skelem wean. I don’t believe you.”

“S’true’s God mam I can.” 

“Okie dokie, hop in, laat ons wai.” Madam gave in more out of desperation than impression. It felt good to be ridding at the back of that bakkie, drinking the morning air.  There's something about that sort of wild, jerking movement that gives a sense of hope and freedom; the wind pushing against your face, a biting force with vague whispers.

               I looked around to see  a tottering homeless jolie laide with gaunt face, puffed eyes, fire wood stick legs and strained neck muscles lying like a bundle of misery on the pavement. ‘That's my subject,’ I said to the wind. Another bergie, with a depthless stare and mocking face. ‘That too is my subject! Those urchins running wild, stoned from sniffing too much glue, are my subjects also. And even you, in your luxury BMW, with constipated pride! You must pay homage to the king at the tollgate, the shopping centre parking lot. These blood tessellated pavements are the red carpet treatment my kingdom affords.’ So went my musing in the universe of my mind where everything is as I want it to be and we practise communalism. ‘I’m the emperor! The emperor of vagabonds! Here everyone is free to be whomever he or she wants to be! To reveal! To conceal! To re-invent! According to fancy; free from prying eyes and rude questions. Ours is the only republic without boundaries that sails closest to the republic of heaven. If only the rides on madams bakkies didn't reach their destinations. If only madams drove their cars a little faster so the air at the back of would compress time into a single moment of a toffolux on the mouth and warmth against your cheek. If only pain could be bankrupted by the force of the wind.  If only …’ A swerve is a last thing I remember.

There was a violent sound.  The tolling of bells. A stonemason building. The writing on the wall: MATER DOLOROSA. A humble earthnotropic statue. then there was silence, dust; the beginning in the end. Then voices; ‘Call the ambulance, here is my cell phone, call the ambulance.” My body, below the waist, was on fire. Something pressed me down. “Asseblief, asseblief meneer. Call the ambulance, asseblief, asseblief.”  Somebody said: He rolled! 

                   Other things are born on a steep decline. From the start they cannot do much but roll-on through the latent force of gravity. And when their time comes they shudder against the ground into shards. That’s the nature of things, the verdict I’ve collected with my life.          

                    I woke to a glimpse of myself bloody face on the hospital lift mirror. It amused me to see myself lying there on the stretcher, with people fussing over me; made me feel important even. I could not believe that in this life it takes your dying for people to notice your life. There was dried blood on my nose. The skin of my  right foot was badly flayed. Every part of my body burned.

It's been six years since her death, twenty four since that fated day behind the supermarket. It seems like only yesterday she welcomed me with her kyphonic hug after my three week hospitalisation, telling me she had decided to adopt me if I'd let her. It was something of a shonda in those racist times for a white woman to adopt a black child. She wanted to adopt  my brother too, but it was too late for him. Instead he had to be permanently confined into a mental hospital, because one of my mother's boyfriends had smashed his head against the wall, causing some internal injuries. He was never right after that. We've been together with madam ever since. Now she is dead her kind arcus senilis eyes often visit me in my sleep, especially when I have difficult decisions to make. It feels as though I've known her forever, all my life and more. Perhaps I have.

                It is because of her I didn't end up just another statistic, and a product of my environment. If it had not been for her, I'd probably be long dead by now.  She took me to school and, when I matriculated, to university.  In an attempt to devote myself to the best that has been thought and said, I studied classical Literature and Philosophy. On the side she thought me Yiddish, more to amuse herself initially, until she noticed my interest. After school I found myself working as a columnist for a national paper with an intellectual bent, hard-pressed on each column to register new tonalities of cultivated self-protective sarcasm our readers regarded as high culture. With every thought I found myself sinking, depressed with our politics and morals, drinking more to cheer myself. It was, again, madam who rescued me for that second death. Her death found me stuck on this horizon of this exhaustive rounds of reflected glory and ostentatious display of learning that was becoming a norm on my columns. Her death put a hauntingly urgent need to get into the nucleus of my life.  Sometimes, I swear, I can hear her whisper on my ear, just as in those past days when she called me for dinner; 'Time to create something more lasting in this house of sand. We're running out of decades to burn.’  The day I looked at her die I made a promise to lift myself from the modern tunnel of heroic self-destruction.

Last year I went to Germany. I’m not sure why, but I also wanted to do a little research on her ancestry. I was, then, still obsessed with this stupid need to repay her kindness, forgetting that my life, lived to its full potential, is the only repayment I can really grant her. Her home town is popular for art and music near the forests of Thuringia, where I was surprised in meeting people who spoke English with what all my life I thought to be  her accent and now know it's Thurigian. They were just as astonished when I introduced myself as her son. No one had enough courage though to ask how come since I'm black, which in turn amused me. The closest was the blunt old lady who stayed in the block of flats madam was born in, leaving just before the Nazi storm.  She came to touch and rub my skin a little. My guess is she wanted to see if the blackness would rub off. Then she yelled to others; “Come see a black son of a Yenta.”.  She eventually told me enough about madam’s childhood, they’d been at school together before the emperor of lies uprooted their lives. I told her madam provided me with a heimat. The old lady explained to me how a heimat is not merely a matter of roof on top, or geography, but where the heart lies. And so I repeat, madam gave me a heimat, as hers is in my vagabond heart. I carry her wherever I go.  My life has been gemutlich, comfortable and pleasant, ever since I met madam, making me feel guilty for it sometimes when I think about those who didn’t make it through the night that was my life; asking myself what I had done to deserve her. Everything she ever did for me exceeded my wildest dreams.

                     As I sat in a German café, enjoying kaffee und kuchen, it suddenly dawned on me that she actually gave me a life, and hence she's my mother in more than one way.  I wondered how her life might have been before the Nazi madness. She never talked about it, so it felt awkward trying to find out about it.  Suddenly it  didn’t feel comfortable probing so I simply let go. I know that what will come to me about her she'll bring to me as a relief of my loneliness for her absence. What a woman! Hatzlacha u-brakha to her next life. 

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Copyright: 2010