Philida Read online

  What keep on going round and round in my head is everything that happen to bring me here where I am now. Was it really worth all the trouble? Because it wasn’t just the long walk, and not knowing, and feeling scared, and wondering about what is going to happen. It was the being here.

  Because it’s not just deciding to come and complain, and then to walk to this place and get it done and go back home. I know only too well what it take and that’s a lot. Everything that ever happen to me is here in my two hands, and for all I know it’s for nothing. It’s not much of a life I had at Zandvliet, with the beatings and the knitting and the working day and night and always doing what other people tell you to do and everything else. But it’s all I got, it’s all I am and all I can ever be. It’s my whole blarry life. Because after this, coming to Stellenbosch to complain, it may be over for me. If this do not work out it’s to hell and gone for me. But there is nothing else I can do.

  What have I got at Zandvliet? You can’t really call it a life. It’s not clear like day or night, or like sun and moon, it’s somewhere in between. If I can be sure of Frans, that can make things different, but I’m not. Today, there’s nothing sure about anything for me. But this little chance I got to use, otherwise it may be gone for ever. I mean, you can say the law give me the right to come and complain. But if you ask me, it’s not the law that speak the last word in this land. It’s everything that happen behind the law, and around the law. That is what matter for the big men of the Caab. Ouma Nella already told me about slaves that went to complain with the whole law in their hands, and then afterwards, when they get back to their Baas, they get beaten to death or they get hanged upside down or they get starved to death, and there’s no cock that crow about it, no dog that dare to bark. There’s many ways to kill a cock or a dog or a slave. Even Ouma Nella tell me to stay out of it, but for once I do not listen. Because no one can tell me to let go, not even she. For once I cannot listen to her or to anybody. Now it’s heaven or hell for me. To hell I refuse to go. And to the kind of heaven I got to know at Zandvliet, their kind of heaven, I swear to God, I will not go either. Not now. All I got is to sit here in the cell and wait, with the baby on my lap.

  II

  Philida’s Thoughts wander back to the Secret that did not drown and the Promises left unfulfilled

  AT ZANDVLIET IT all begin. Almost as far back as I can remember, it always been the farm, nothing but the farm. I remember an earlier time when we were still living at the Caab. But mostly I think about the farm and its people, its early people and later people, all the way from the beginning to today.

  I remember my Ouma who always been there. And everybody that come afterwards. All of this Ouma Nella tell me. She got stories for everything, and many of them come from a long way back. Because Ouma Nella keep her ears open for everything that sound like a story. And she talk to everybody. I often hear her talking even to God. Most people, the Oubaas and them, go down on their knees when they want to talk to him. But Ouma Nella can speak any time she want to. She speak to God the way others speak to a man you know well and don’t quite trust, because she keep saying he’s a bit of a cheat and he’ll tell a lie if it suit him.

  My head remember this and that and lots of other stuff as well, but the thing that really remember is my body. Everything leave its mark there. Some you can see, others you can’t, but they all there. Burns and cuts and bruises. The scrape marks on my knees and my elbows and my heels, all kinds of marks. The beatings and the falls, the icy water of early winter mornings, mud on my feet, chickenshit or rotten figs between my toes, I remember Frans’s hands on my body, on my shoulders and my back and my buttocks, my feet in his hands, I remember him hard and swollen between my legs, and I can hear him talking softly in my ear: Come and lie with me, Philida. My body will make yours happy. It will be good for you, you’ll see. I shall buy you free, I shall go to Stellenbosch and speak to the Landdrost, I shall walk all the way to the Caab if I have to, and pay whatever they ask so you can be free, then you can walk everywhere you want to. With shoes on your feet.

  That I remember specially well. The shoes on my feet. What he say about the shoes he promised me from the very first day. Because he knew, as I knew, as the whole world know: the man or the woman with shoes on their feet, they cannot be slaves, they are free, shoes mean that they are not chickens or donkeys or pigs or dogs, they are people.

  I remember walking, with my two narrow feet, walking and walking and walking for days on end. Along the old Elephant Trail that go back to the time before time, when they say big herds of elephants used to trek past this place, first from deep inland and over the mountains where the village of Franschhoek is nowadays, and then past Zandvliet to Stellenbosch, and from there across the Flats to the Caab, all those years since that time before time, when there was no people yet, just the track that seem to move along on its own below my feet, farther than far. It’s a road that come from the beginning of the world and don’t ever really end. Yet at the same time you may say that it’s a road that start this morning before sunrise, from the sands of Zandvliet in the grey dust. That is the farm, it’s Zandvliet. That’s the place they bring me to when I was nine years old, they tell me. I was the knitting girl, with fingers as thin as twigs, but as clever as hell. And I had no choice, otherwise Nooi Janna would have stripped the skin off my arse; Oubaas Cornelis taught her everything about flogging. With a thong, a shoe, a kierie, a switch or a sjambok, if you wouldn’t listen, and Nooi Janna never had a soft touch. Not in the Caab where the Oubaas had the wine shop and the big cellar, nor among the mountains at Zandvliet when they came to live here.

  Zandvliet, in the shadow of the mountains that blue off in all directions – to the clouds and the cliffs of Great Drakenstein, or the heights and caves of Simonsberg opposite. Mountains on both sides, further and further away, blue and pale blue and paler blue, like old bruises getting fainter on your body. Mountains that echo with cries and calls, of the bateleur eagle and the brown bustard, the thin shrilling of the lark like a twine of cotton among the others, a shy tacking stitch. The noisy screams of the hadeda, like messy red and purple and green stitches on a new cloth, the crows like dark patches in the bright sun, black threads in a field of white or blue, or a peacock yelling like a thing that know all about death, but so beautiful with its bright feathers when it open up like the rising sun, growing as stiff as Frans’s thing when the lust grow in him, always the birds, or the bats at dusk, the owls at night tearing your innards out in shreds with their hoots and hoos. All of them calling out Zandvliet, Zandvliet, deep into the secret places of your body until you learn at last to know where you come from. Because their sound is like thin twine or yarn through your head and your stomach and your ribs, reminding you that this is where you belong, this is Zandvliet. Zandvliet is sand, it is stone, it is deep earth covered with white grass and green grass and grey grass and longing and anger and happiness and vines and wheat and rye and oats and misery and joy and weeds and once again vines.

  Zandvliet go back very far, and Ouma Nella love telling the stories of the place, for days on end, and especially nights. Often she go back to the woman called Fransina, who lived here long before Oubaas Cornelis bought this farm, before we came here from the Caab, the white people on their wagons, along the road from Klapmuts, past Simondium and Stellenbosch, and the rest of us on foot, we the slaves, barefoot across the Flats and along the valley and over the mountain, following the Elephant Trail, three days’ walking, four days, and the little ones – I was nine, remember – sobbing snot and tears because our feet are bleeding and the Oubaas refuse to stop or rest except for a few hours’ sleeping at night, he is always right there beside you or behind you on the big black stallion, the riding crop in his hand to spur you on whenever he think you are malingering, bleeding welts on your back and your dusty bare buttocks, nine years old, and at that time there’s some even younger children walking too, all the way.

  Even before that time, long before Fransina is w
orking here on the farm, as the story go, she must have been about the same age I am now, and then she run away, she and the slave Klaas run off together, the name of the Baas on the farm in those days is Marais, and they run away because Fransina cannot take it any more, all those beatings from the Ounooi, who beat her every day. With anything she can lay her hands on, rieme or knotted entjies or quince switches or even a piece of firewood. Every single day she got beaten, at sunset to punish her for what she done wrong during the day, at sunrise for what she will do wrong in the day ahead. And yet she meekly take whatever came her way, she was a slave after all, what happen to her is the will of the Lord. All she care about is her children, her two girls, Philippina and Emma, they are all she got, those two daughters she got from her previous Baas, Dominee Schutte. He make her lie down for him and break into her night after night, and that is how Philippina happen, and later Emma, two pretty girls. What make her lie down for him, is that the dominee promise with his big white hand on the open Bible, promise her before the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, that he will free the children she give him from between her legs, so that is how she give him Philippina and Emma. The same way that Frans later promise me also that he will free our children, he promise it before God, even though he didn’t have his hand on the Bible. But when the time come the dominee forget all about his promise and he sell Fransina and both her daughters to Baas Izak Marais. And after all the trouble Fransina had with her Nooi, and all the beatings, there was an auction in Stellenbosch one day and the Nooi sell the two girls to a farmer from deep in the inland, somewhere in the Sneeuberge, and no one even know for sure where that was.

  Fransina will never see her children again. So that is why she run away with Klaas, after another bad beating in the farmyard, first by the Nooi and afterwards by Baas Izak too, with a piece of wood and a riem and a kierie over her head and neck and shoulders, wherever he can reach; those people was just as bad as Oubaas Cornelis who come later.

  So Klaas and Fransina run away, outlawed and banished as the Landdrost say, they want to go to the Sneeuberge where the two girls was taken after the auction, but they got no idea at all of where that place is. They only get as far as the Steenbrazens River, where they got to live on fish. First there on the Steenbrazens River and afterwards at Saldanha Bay, where they sometimes find vegetables in somebody’s garden. After a while there come another runaway, Afrika of the Caab, and he take them to two other slaves, Philander and Fleur, that was living near Stellenbosch for some months, stealing and breaking into houses and so on. For a while it was all right, but then they steal two sheep and they got caught by a commando just as Afrika was skinning one of the sheep. All of them off to the court.

  Klaas was tied to a pole behind the Drostdy and there his back was beaten to shreds with canes and then he was sent to Robben Island to do hard labour for ten years. Afrika, Philander and Fleur was burnt with irons and their legs was put in chains. But there was one good thing: when the Landdrost hear about Fransina’s children he only send her to the jail for six months. Afterwards she don’t have to go back to the De Villierses, but I don’t know what happen to her after that. Anyway, that is how I got here. Because when I hear that Frans Brink is going to sell me in the interior, and my children too, little Lena who is only two, and the baby here at my breast, Willempie, I decide no, they not going to do that. Because where is Fransina’s Philippina and Emma today?

  So for me Zandvliet is the place where Fransina and them once lived. But Zandvliet is more than Fransina. It is also the birds and the little bushbuck and the trails of snakes and the tracks of meerkats, it’s porcupine and aardvark, it’s the jackals in the night, it’s the sun shining through the ears of a hare, it’s the dry cough of a leopard on cushion feet.

  But what to me is most special about Zandvliet is Kleinkat. How it start is when Langkat get six kittens and the Ounooi say they must all be killed, we already got too many of them on the farm. Not in eight weeks’ time as it usually happen, not tomorrow or the day after, but right now, today. And it is Frans who must put them in a bushel basket to drown them in the Dwars River just down from the longhouse. I tell him he cannot do it, not to Langkat’s babies, because Langkat is my cat, the Ounooi say so herself the day I knitted her the red-and-blue cardigan, the pretty one with the double moss-stitching, so she say I can keep Langkat for myself, and so the kittens is also mine. But then Frans say she told him to drown the litter in the Dwars River and all he can do is follow orders. I go and stand before him and ask him if he always do what his ma say. He just pull a face and say, What else? I ask him again must he always do what his ma tell him, can’t he just say no? Frans say, She is my ma. I tell him those kittens also want to live, don’t they? He ask me, How can I say No to her? If I don’t listen to her she will tell my pa.

  I ask him: Are you a slave then who must do everything she say?

  Her word is her word, he say and he pick up the basket. I can hear the little sounds they making inside and I grab the basket too.

  He say: Give me the basket, and he try to pull it from my hands.

  I grab it back and we pull it this way and that way. The basket fall. Inside, the kittens are screaming and mewing in thin little voices like needles in our ears, and the lid begin to slip off. Frans dive closer to grab the basket and push back the little ones, but one of them, the smallest one, the little grey-striped one, she jump out. I pick her up and put her in the pocket of my apron and hold her tight.

  Philida! he say, and his voice sound like crying. Give it back! I’m going to get into bad trouble.

  Then it’s your problem, I say. I’m keeping this one. I’ll make sure the Ounooi won’t get her.

  Philida, you a shit. Give it back!

  You a shit too!

  I’m going to tell my ma!

  This time I say: Let me be, dammit! And I promise him: Look, I won’t tell anybody. Nobody will ever find out.

  When Frans see he won’t catch me, he stop.

  You promise before the LordGod you won’t tell anybody?

  I promise before the LordGod.

  Then it’s all right, he say, you can have the little one.

  Before he can change his mind, I run off and rush to Ouma Nella’s room where I cannot hear the other kittens outside mewing and crying for help when he drown them.

  For a whole day I stay just there looking after the striped kitten and Ouma Nella give it some milk to suck from her finger and then all is peace on earth again, as the Ounooi always say.

  It’s only four or five days after that, as I sit outside our room with the little one on my lap, that Frans come back to me. He is standing out of the way.

  You still angry with me? he ask.

  It’s not you I’m angry with, I tell him. It’s the big people. Thank you for helping me to keep the kitten.

  He say: You better make sure nobody ever find out about her.

  From that day Kleinkat is our secret. And oftentimes Frans come to play with us if I don’t have knitting to do or if I can slip away when we sure that Ounooi Janna won’t see us. And from playing with the kitten he and I also start playing together. Like we played when he was very small and I look after him and change his nappies and get him to be quiet, the way Ouma Nella showed me. Those games go on until Frans is no longer a baby. And it’s always the two of us together, with Kleinkat, but often without Kleinkat too, in the deep shade of the bamboo copse.

  It’s only after the day they hang the skinny man in the Caab that I know everything is now different, and for ever. Because from that day, whenever Frans come to sit with me and we go off on our own, behind the longhouse, or to the deep well in the backyard, or of course to the bamboo copse, it happen over and over that, when I think of that day, I sommer begin to cry. I was never a cry-baby-tit, not even when the Ounooi took the strap to me, over my dress or on my legs or on my bare bum; I clench my teeth and swear to the LordGod I won’t cry, I won’t cry, even if they beat me dead. But those days I find that the tears co
me by themselves, just like that. Every time I see that thin man hanging by his neck, the crying start all over again. And the pee also, down my knees, no matter how hard I try to keep it in. That is when Frans put his arms around me and start to rub my back, my back and my arms, and at first I try to stop him, but soon I no longer try, and I can feel his arms moving all over my body, first my back and my arms, then down across my stomach and between my legs and between my buttocks, everywhere, while I just cry and cry, and his hands keep moving. And after some time I no longer cry, and I just let him do whatever he want, now I can feel him pushing into me, into the deepest deepness of myself, and then he begin to shake like a sheep that got its throat cut, and then I know that this is it, he is naaiing me, and I cannot and will not stop him any more, I just go on crying in his ears, no, no, no, crying no, no, yes, yes, yes, and then I no longer know or care what is happening. That is how it happen every time from that day on. If I start crying he will push himself into me, until I no longer care any which way, I just do whatever you wish, you are the Baas, just push into me, I no longer want or wish anything, just stay inside me, just keep on, don’t stop.

  And from this beginning what happen for us is not just the thing in the bamboo copse, but everything we do, everything we say, everything we think about. It is the thing, Ouma Nella tell us, that we call love. And not just because it make his thing stand up and push into me, but because we want to be together, he and I, and because he care for me and I for him, and because the world can only happen for us because we are together.