July's People Read Online Free Page A

burst in the air. Everyone was burned to death.—
    His mother made the stylized, gobbling exclamations that both ward off disaster and attribute it to fate. —What will the white people do to us now, God must save us.—
    Her son, who had seen the white woman and the three children cowered on the floor of their vehicle, led the white face behind the wheel in his footsteps, his way the only one in a wilderness, was suddenly aware of something he had not known. —They can’t do anything. Nothing to us any more.—
    —White people. They are very powerful, my son. They are very clever. You will never come to the end of the things they can do.—
    When he was in the company of the women it was like being in the chief’s court, where the elders sitting in judgment wander in and out and the discussion of evidence is taken up, now where they drift outside to take a breath of air or relieve themselves among their tethered horses and bicycles hitched against trees, now back in the court-room at whatever point the proceedings have moved on to. His mother went out to pluck a chicken whose neck he’d just wrung. His wife asked the young girls whether they thought she was going to do without water all day? How much longer were they going to hang about with their mouths open? One of the girls was bold but respectful: —
Tatani
, I want to ask, is it true you also had a room for bathing, like the one they had?—
    —Oh yes, bath, white china lavatory, everything.—
    They could only laugh, how could they visualize his quarters, not so big as the double garage adjoining, with in his room the nice square of worn carpet that was once in the master bedroom.
    —There are eggs in the belly—it would still have given us eggs! You should have taken the white one with the broken foot, I told you.— The old woman was shouting from beyond the doorway.
    —What is it she wants?—
    —You killed the wrong fowl… But I don’t know what it’s all about.—
    He called back. —Exactly.
Mhani
, that one with the badfoot is a young one. It will lay well next year, even.—
    The white woman’s hand, when she stood there and offered it—the first time, touching white skin. His wife went with her mother-in-law sometimes to the dorp to hawk green mealies or the brooms the old lady made, outside the Indian store; it had happened that a white from the police post had bought from her sack of cobs, and cents had dropped from the white hand to hers. But she had never actually touched that skin before.
    She fell again into the mannerism of holding her head to one side that had been bashful and that he had found so attractive, inviting him and escaping him, when she was a young girl, and that had become, in the years he was away in the city, something different, a gesture repelling, withdrawing, evasive and self-absorbed. —The face—I don’t know… not a nice, pretty face. I always thought they had beautiful dresses. And the hair, it’s so funny and ugly. What do they do to make it like that, dark bits and light bits. Like the tail of a dirty sheep. No. I didn’t think she’d be like that, a rich white woman.—
    —They looked different there—you should have seen the clothes in their cupboard. And the glasses—for visitors, when they drink wine. Here they haven’t got anything—just like us.—
    She sharply reproached the baby who, staggering around on legs braced wide for balance, had picked up fowl droppings and successfully conveyed the mess to its mouth. Her forefinger hooked unthinkingly round the soft membranes, awareness of the small body was still as part of her own. The man was excluded. She flicked the chalky paste off her fingers. —There’ll be no more money coming every month.—
    Without his white people back there, without the big house where he worked for them, she would not be getting thoseletters (yes, she had been to school, he would not have married a woman who could not read their own language) that came from his