Philida Read Online Free Page B

her without clothes. As if that could make much difference! Her poor little dresses were just rags and tatters. Philida with the cut and bruised feet, barely a toe or nail unscathed, covered in dust and dirt and chickenshit and cowshit, but I still remember how carefully I used to hold them in my hands and rub lard on them and how much she liked it. Such small, thin feet, but she could run like a steenbokkie if she wanted to. What I wished above all else, and what I kept promising her for years and years, was to give her a pair of shoes. I’d have loved to make her a pair with my own hands, it’s a skill Pa taught me, one of the few things I can really do properly. I’m not big and strong like some of my brothers – KleinCornelis or Lodewyk, who are like tree trunks in the dusty yard. I myself always prefer to be indoors rather than out, and from the time I was only a couple of hands tall Philida taught me to crochet and make quilts. But then Pa decided that was too girlish and it was time to move outside. I learned to manage the fields and the orchards and especially the vineyards with their hermitage and hanepoot and steen grapes and muscadel and a bit of shy cabernet. I have to attend to all of this while my pious brother Johannes Jacobus spends his Friday evenings at an address on the Kreupelsteeg in Amsterdam where he habitually drains a
borrel
before spending a sedate hour with a plump prostitute whom he casually mentions in private letters to me, not sparing me any details, such as his insistence on wearing his bladdy home-made socks knitted by Philida to ward off the cold. To our parents he presumably pretends to be gathering information which may be of use in future sermons to his congregation once he is back home.
    In those early days, before I was forced to work outdoors, I saw Philida the most, because she was the knitting girl. But we never got as far as shoes. For she was a slave child and slaves and shoes had nothing to do with one another. That was why I kept on promising to buy her freedom one day, so she could get those shoes she wanted so badly. I’m sure she never cared as much for freedom as for shoes. And I swear – I really swear – that was what I wanted for her. How could I know that PaCornelis would once again put his foot down? He set Petronella free so many years ago already, the old woman in whose room Philida still sleeps. So why couldn’t he do the same for Philida?
    Or perhaps I should have known it all along, he’s my father after all. Still, I never thought that he’d find it so bloody difficult to agree to buy the freedom of a slave girl. She was always so small, with those narrow little feet, what difference could that really make to Pa, one skinny girl less on the farm, there have always been such a lot of them around, always under one’s feet.
    But the real problem wasn’t the shoes or the work. The problem was MaJanna. When she met Pa, she was the widow of Oom Wouter de Vos, who was an important man at the Caab, and MaJanna always reckoned that Pa could never stand in the shoes of such a man. He was a Brink and everybody knew, she said, that the Brinks were rather ordinary people. All we have is money. Not class. Which is why MaJanna decided right from the beginning that her children should marry well one day. If MaJanna hadn’t been in such haste to get her children’s future settled, I might still have stood a chance of putting in a word for Philida. But then she set her sights on a white girl for me and all I could do was to say Yes and Amen to everything. And now Philida is stuck with Lena and Willempie, our children, my slave children, apart from the two who died early, little Mamie and the one she does not want to talk about, the baby, my four children and hers, so what can I do now?
    It will bring shame on the family, and MaJanna would like for our farm to be counted among the best in the Drakenstein. Look at how it began. Conceived and born in sin, to say it