teenage years at a prestigious city school, how very old it makes her feel. Oh hear ye the mighty rumble of hormones soaring across our land? Now that ought to be the unofficial anthem of Afrikaans high schools. Although six, seven years ago, when she was in high school, she was less susceptible to the waves of sensuality that are threatening to knock her off her feet here in her rural exile.
Perhaps she was just too young and green. These past few months she has felt fertile, ripened by the sun’s heat, as if her veins might explode. On the eve of her twenty-third birthday the English teacher feels ready to be harvested. Let Janneman Diederiks come and wield his sickle. No, stop it, she reprimands herself, where does this silliness come from?
What would Mammie say!
The fact that she has no intention of marrying Janneman Diederiks – let alone any of the other young farmers who have paid court to the young blonde teacher in the boarding house this past year – is becoming a matter of grave concern to Mammie. At almost twenty-three a girl’s trousseau chest should already be full, if not overflowing, and if she doesn’t want to end up on the shelf, then she should have her mind set on getting married. That is that. What more does Colette want than a smart young farmer from a prominent family with a beautiful farm? Besides, if he has a bit of education like Piketberg’s own James Dean, can pick out a tune on the piano or guitar, and can wear an air of ‘genteel refinement’ like a spray of perfume, well, really, Colette, what more do you want? Mammie asks with growing impatience.
Colette doesn’t know what to say. She just knows she wants more. More than she can get here. Once she has been overseas, travelled for a while, seen something of the world, heard foreign languages, inhaled unfamiliar smells, and tasted exotic flavours, perhaps then she will be content to marry a young farmer like Janneman Diederiks, and go on an annual holiday to Dwarskersbos? But not now, Mammie, not yet, Mammie. Please try to understand!
‘Wakey-wakey, Leendert!’ She smacks her ruler against Leendert van Niekerk’s desk, and he jerks up, dazed, which sets off another ripple of giggling delight through the class.
‘But I’m finished, Miss!’ he objects.
‘I have finished,’ she corrects him automatically. Why does she still bother?
Not the marriage bed, Mammie, not yet. Of that she is certain. What she is by no means certain of anymore is how much longer she will be able to resist her Afrikaans James Dean’s smouldering sexuality without ending up in some bed or other. Maybe not even a bed. What if on some dark night she succumbed in the front seat of his red and white Chevrolet Bel Air with its soft top and swaggering tail fins? Oh, oh, oh, the scandal. The heat keeps getting worse, as does the fidgeting and whispering of the pupils behind her. It is just as well the Christmas vacation starts next week. Thank heavens she can escape back to the city once more, back to the safe respectability of her family, away from the heat of her boarding house room and hot-blooded boyfriend with a sports car.
She picks up a copy of Time from her table and uses it to fan her burning face. Calm down, Miss Cronjé. On the cover Princess Margaret looks rosy in a portrait painted in pastel hues: another young woman who has been plagued by her hormones in the past year – but in the end chose the traditional, rational path. Goodbye, Group Captain Peter Townsend. Shame.
A truck thunders past in Van der Stel Street, named after the governor who three centuries ago was charged and almost trampled by a rhinoceros, not far from the present-day town. There are no longer any rhinoceroses in these parts; they have all been wiped out by the farmers and their rifles, the colonial big-game hunters, the relentless march of white civilisation into Africa. Is that Kleinboet’s mocking voice in her ears? There are, however, still plenty of snakes, scorpions, hairy spiders, horrible flies, and other creatures that give the English teacher from the city the horrors. She read somewhere that there were no snakes in England. Or was that Ireland? How wonderful it must be to live on a soft green snake-free island …
This is how Miss Cronjé dreams away the final tormenting minutes of the school day, leaning against the wall at the back of the classroom, with Elizabeth I peering over her left shoulder and the present-day Elizabeth II, older sister of the princess with the hormones, over her right shoulder. In front of her the pupils are fidgeting like horses that have smelt the barn – nothing can restrain them now. Only Samuel Levy, the clever little Afrikaans-speaking Jew two rows from the back, is still bent over his essay. Because he is severely short-sighted, despite his black-rimmed glasses, his big nose almost touches the desk, which makes it difficult to see what he is writing so diligently. Miss Cronjé steals closer. He is the only child in the class who can speak English with ease. Or could, if he wasn’t far too shy and too awkward to do anything easily, whether it is tossing a ball or speaking a language.
Then she notices two words that leap off the page like flames, and she backs away as if to avoid getting burnt. Emmett Till, she reads. And, with bated breath, a few lines on, gouging out his eye before shooting him. Near the bottom of the sheet of paper, just before Samuel Levy turns the page, she manages to read a full sentence. His mother decided to have an open coffin funeral because she wanted the world to see what white men had done to a 14-year-old black boy.
Here comes trouble, Miss Cronjé feels it in the blood she can suddenly hear rushing to her head. She knows who Emmett Till is. Was. She has read somewhere about the Negro boy who was tortured and murdered by white men in Mississippi and tossed into the Tallahatchie River for allegedly speaking to a white woman in a cheeky tone. Not in the copies of Time she brought to class, no, she doesn’t know if Time’s respected journalists reported on Emmett Till’s murder at all. Why would they? It is the kind of disturbing event that white middle-class readers in America would prefer not to read about. Much less in South Africa, of course.
It is not a pretty story, it is a stinking tale, and what has made clever but shy Samuel Levy decide to crack open this rotten egg right under her nose? It upsets her, it unnerves her, it disturbs her, not because it happened in faraway Mississippi, but because she can imagine how easily it could happen here. Piketberg or Potchefstroom, Pretoria or Port Elizabeth, from the dustiest hamlet to the biggest city, everywhere in this country there are angry white men who would think nothing of punishing a brazen hotnotjie or a cocky kaffertjie in the cruellest possible way.
The National Party’s policy, this constant accumulation of laws upon laws that is called apartheid, is another egg that is starting to smell. The Mixed Marriages Act, the Immorality Act, the Group Areas Act, the Population Registration Act, the act to segregate beaches, sports facilities and bioscopes, the law that forces Bantus to attend separate schools, and the distasteful way in which the government is busy expanding the Senate in order to remove Coloureds from the voters’ roll in the Cape, and, and, and, all of it in barely seven years! And now that the aged Dr Malan has been succeeded by the fiery Lion of the North, now that Strijdom is in charge, the eggs are probably going to become even more rotten.
Where will it all end? Miss Cronjé wonders in her stuffy classroom while her heart beats ever more wildly and her head spins as if she might faint. If all these eggs break at once, it is surely going to stink to high heaven. She is breathing so hard that Samuel Levy looks up at her over his shoulder, his eyes blinking behind his thick glasses. Is it her imagination, or is there something cheeky in his gaze?
Calm down, Miss Cronjé. It is her own fault, isn’t it? There it is on the blackboard in her own pedagogical script, I shall always remember 1955 as the year when, followed by three suggestive little dots just like in a cheap romance novel. She had after all nursed a tiny flame of hope that some of her pupils would write about something more than their narrow little small-town lives. Hadn’t she? Now she feels as though she has dropped a burning match in a haystack. The flames are licking at the sky and there is nothing she can do about it, except look on helplessly and wonder where it will all end.
She swallows hard and nods to Samuel Levy,
