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In the mid-1990s, South Africa’s new democratically elected parliament passed several statutes that offered black people on white-owned farmland security of tenure. In response, many white farmers began destroying the fixed structures on their land.
‘When an old man dies,’ the owner of a large commercial farm about fifty kilometres from Normandale told me, ‘we bust up his house so that nobody else can move in. His children must live elsewhere. If they make a claim on the land, we go to court to contest it and we usually win because we can work the law better than they can. A generation from now, there will be no black people on the land. We are mechanizing. What labour we need we will employ by the day; it is easy to recruit from the slums.’
In the last decade of the twentieth century, almost a million black South Africans left their homes on white-owned land. They filled up the rural slums and shacklands from which farmers now recruited their labour.
jeez. chilling
Mitchell bought Normandale because it was wedged between his vegetable farm and his cattle farm and it was no longer controlled by a white proprietor. He told me that he bought the place in order to keep the tenants confined to Langeni and to prevent new black families from moving onto the land.
‘If they and their people are free to roam all over Normandale, farming will become impossible for me,’ he said. ‘Their cattle will mix with mine and bring diseases. The land will soon be teeming with strangers come to live here; they will break the fences and steal from me. I cannot afford to have a squatter camp on my doorstep.’
whew boy
‘He was trying to force them off the land,’ the old man told me. ‘If they cannot collect firewood from Normandale, they have no means to light their stoves. If they cannot walk through his land to the river, they have no access to water. They have been on that land five generations. They have nowhere else to go.’
‘What did you make of the Cubes?’ I asked the old man. ‘Were they good people? Bad people?’
‘Just people,’ he replied. ‘Ordinary folk.’
‘They gunned down a young man in cold blood,’ I said. ‘Do ordinary folk do that?’
I had been working with the old man for several months and had grown to like him very much. He had a gentle way about him; he was gracious and kind. But now he looked at me coldly, with the unpleasant, estranged look a black person sometimes gives a white person.
‘If I had been living there five generations,’ he said, ‘and a new landlord told me in broken Zulu that he wanted to interview my family before I could build a hut on my own land, I would also have killed him.’
fuck this kills me
I asked after Arthur Mitchell.
‘He and his wife live in Perth,’ I was told. ‘With their daughters.’
‘How are they?’ I asked.
A long silence.
‘Nobody here has been in touch with them for years.’
The silence continued another moment or two, the distance between these people and Arthur Mitchell filling the room.
‘Who farms there now?’ I asked.
For the following three hours, he told his story, a string of minutely remembered incidents strung across the length of a century, each about a white landlord, and what he had and had not done. All of Normandale’s landlords had been cruel, he said. Mr Player had paid wages in kind, not in money, and so the family could buy nothing. They built their home from the clay in the river and they paid for the tin roof with their children’s labour.
Mr Steyn was better, Baba Cube said. He paid some of the wages in money. But when he bought Normandale in 1969 he pulled Baba Cube out of school to work on the farm. Had the Cubes resisted, Baba Cube said, Steyn would have evicted them.
‘I do not read and write,’ Baba Cube said. ‘It is the twenty-first century. What can you do in this century if you cannot read and write?’
But the worst landlord of all was the last, Mr Mitchell.
‘His aim was to chase us away,’ Baba Cube said. ‘To abide by his rules was to have no water, no firewood, to watch your cattle being taken off to the pound. He wanted us gone.’
christ
It never gets dark in Times Square. Sometimes I’d wake at two or three or four and watch waves of neon pass through my room. During these unwanted apertures of the night, I’d get out of bed and yank the useless curtain open. Outside, there was a Jumbotron, a giant electronic screen cycling perpetually through six or seven ads. One had gunfire, and one expelled a cold blue pulse of light, insistent as a metronome. Sometimes I’d count windows and sometimes I’d count buildings, though I never reached the end of either.
intro paragraph. i like
In the mid-1960s all three kids either ran away to or were dumped on their mother, who was living in Manhattan, in a tiny apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. Dolores was emotionally warmer than her former husband, but she was also erratic and struggled with the burden of raising her by now troubled children. At fifteen, David was turning ten-dollar tricks in Times Square, and by seventeen had left home entirely. He almost starved while living on the street. Later he’d remember his gums bleeding each time he smoked a cigarette. He never got enough sleep, either. Sometimes he’d spend the night on the roof of buildings, curled against the heating vents, and in the morning would wake covered in soot, his eyes and mouth and nose filled with a choking black dust.
As I worked my way through the archive, I kept thinking about what it means to be the generation that comes after, growing up with the knowledge that there are legions of missing persons, that one’s tribe is full of ghosts. What are our responsibilities? Are we witnesses or voyeurs to someone else’s incalculable losses? I don’t have answers to these questions, but I turn them over all the time.
Towards the end of my stay in the library, I ordered up David’s audio journals. Over the past few years I’d grown accustomed to picking through the most intimate papers of the dead, but nothing prepared me for the intensity of listening to those tapes. Many were recorded on waking, or in the middle stretches of the night. Often you could hear car horns and sirens, people talking on the street outside. Then David’s deep voice, struggling upward out of sleep. He talks about his work and his sexuality and sometimes he walks to the window, opens the curtains and reports on what he sees there. A man in the apartment opposite, combing his hair beneath a bare bulb. A dark-haired stranger standing outside the Chinese laundry, who meets his eyes and doesn’t break the gaze. He talks about what dying will feel like, about whether it will be frightening or painful. He says he hopes it will be like slipping into warm water, and then on the crackling tape he starts to sing: low plaintive notes, rising and falling over the surf of morning traffic.
One night, he wakes after a bad dream and switches on the machine to talk it out. He’s dreamt about a horse being caught in some train tracks, its spine broken, unable to escape. ‘It was very much alive,’ he says, ‘and it was just so fucking upsetting to see this thing.’ He describes how he tried to free it, and how instead it was dragged into a wall and skinned alive. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea what it means for me. And I feel horror and a very deep sadness about something. Whatever the tone of the dream carries it was just so sad and so shocking.’ He says goodbye then, and shuts the machine off.
Something alive, something alive and lovely caught and damaged in the mechanisms, the gears and rails of society. When I think about Aids, when I think about the people who have died, and the conditions they experienced, when I think about those who have survived and who carry inside themselves a decade of mourning, a decade of missing people, I think of David’s dream. When I cried while listening to the tapes, which I did periodically, surreptitiously wiping my eyes on my sleeve, it wasn’t just out of sadness, or pity. It was out of rage, that I lived in a world in which this kind of mass death had been permitted, in which nobody in a position of power had stopped the train and freed the horse in time.
on AIDS
At Broadway and 39th I passed a man sitting in a doorway, crying. He must have been in his forties, with cropped hair and big cracked hands. I went over to ask if he was OK. He said that he’d been sitting there three days and not a single person had stopped to speak to him. He told me about his kids – I got three beautiful babies on Long Island – and then a confusing story about work boots. He showed me a wound on his arm and said I got stabbed yesterday. I’m like a piece of shit here. People throw pennies at me. It was snowing hard, the flakes whirling down. My hair was soaked already. After a while, I gave him five bucks and walked on. That night I watched the snow falling for a long time. The air was full of wet neon, sliding and smearing in the streets. What is it about the pain of others? It’s not like it’s infectious, is it?
And then everything righted itself again. It felt important spiritually to go to weddings: to give balance to the wakes and memorial services. People shouldn’t have been set in motion on this planet only to grieve losses. And without weddings there were only funerals. I had seen a soccer mom become a rhododendron with a plaque, next to the soccer field parking lot, as if it had been watching all those matches that had killed her. I had seen a brilliant young student become a creative writing contest, as if it were all that writing that had been the thing to do him in. And I had seen a public defender become a justice fund, as if one paid for fairness with one’s very life. I had seen a dozen people become hunks of rock with their names engraved so shockingly perfectly upon the surface it looked as if they had indeed turned to stone, been given a new life the way the moon is given it, through some lighting tricks and a face-like font. I had turned a hundred Rolodex cards around to their blank sides. So let a babysitter become a bride again. Let her marry over and over. So much urgent and lifelike love went rumbling around underground and died there, never got expressed at all, so let some errant inconvenient attraction have its way. There was so little time.