Philida (19 page)

XVI

In which the Reader is informed about the Slave Auction in Worcester where Ouma Nella fends off a bothersome Bidder until Cornelis Brink comes to her Rescue with a surprising Announcement and the Business of the Day can resume

THE DAY IS
unbearably hot. Like a place from the Bible. Like hell. Since well before sunrise the cicadas are shrilling with such piercing loudness that it penetrates flesh and bone and marrow and numbs one’s ears. Friday 22 February 1833, auction day in Worcester. In front of the huge new Drostdy close to the church, the townsfolk are gathering on the large open square, together with a number of farmers from the district, and even from as far as the Bokkeveld and Tulbagh where in the past they’d used the old Drostdy with its tall pillars and high stoep for all the business that was subsequently transferred to Worcester. In the environs of the Caab people do not care much for auctions any more. It is no longer profitable to sell slaves, since everybody knows that emancipation is just round the corner and then, no matter what kind of compensation the English are promising, it is widely believed your money will be lost. And to buy is even worse. The only people still interested are the elderly or widows or others in desperate need of cash who have no choice but to buy or sell because for them there is no other way out. But here in the interior the situation is not so desperate, or not yet. The Caab is too remote to be of much importance. The people live far apart, and
auctions
are one of the few occasions when they still bother to get together, provided these can be combined with something like a funeral or
nagmaal
. Then one can bring one’s hides and biltong and lard and chickens or ostrich eggs and sheep or pigs or
beskuit
or conserves or needlework or woodwork or tallow and dip candles to barter or sell, and exchange news and remedies. There are
knegte
that come to hire themselves out to the highest bidder, and itinerant teachers in search of work, and the occasional preacher who turns up to offer his services. More often than not an itinerant
smous
who has heard the news in time will turn up with ammunition and paraffin and salt and sugar and medicaments – balsam and white dulcis and green amara and red lavender and chest drops and essence of life, and purgatives – and bales of dress material of chintz or corduroy, or mirrors or tools or pieces of furniture or pins and needles and hairclips that may be of use to people far from the Caab. These are also occasions for baptisms and weddings and death notices. Many of the townspeople and also a crowd of farmers’ wives will come to town with cakes and tarts and lemonade to exchange for the odd rix-dollar or half a crown or a bale of chintz. And through all this bustle the cicadas go on shrilling, and stray cats run wild and dogs fight and howl and bark and copulate and children cavort like mad creatures and a tame baboon may run amok or a pet meerkat may attack someone and get killed in return. Some of the farmers from the district make last-minute surreptitious visits to their carts and wagons to fetch bottles and jugs and pitchers to help business along. Cornelis Brink also collects a few flagons from his mule cart. He never goes on a journey without a decent supply. One cannot tell when it may come in profitable.

At last everybody can prepare for the day’s serious
business
to start. First there is a farmer, Maans Oosthuizen, from the farm Goedemoed, who has something to report to anyone within earshot. He’s come in to town, he explains, to tell his story to the Commissioner, but everybody knows that His Worship tends to have problems over the weekend, which for His Worship usually begins on Friday, if not as early as Thursday. This means that Maans first has to locate a man who can replace the custodian of the law, because they have a busy day ahead and cannot proceed without some order and ceremony in their midst.

It takes a while to round up a small greyish man who is prepared to stand in for the magistrate, and at last Maans Oosthuizen can lunge into his narrative. The longer he speaks, the redder his face becomes as he relates the shit he’s had with his Bushman Hottentot Kees who refused to listen to reason so that Maans was obliged to
klap
him. But then Kees jumped over a wall and came back with a bow and arrows and prepared to shoot left, right and especially centre. Whereupon Maans lost his temper and ordered two of his slaves to hold Kees down for a proper hiding with a new sjambok he wished to try out before the auction. Maans wasn’t really angry, he explains, but a man cannot just allow God’s water to spill freely into God’s garden, so he did his Christian duty and applied some corrective treatment to Kees, not for too long, perhaps half an hour, but it could have been an hour, one cannot always keep an eye on the clock. And then the useless Kees just went and died on him. A real nuisance, just before the weekend, for how was he supposed to get his sheep into the kraal unaided?

At this stage the man who stands in for the Commissioner approaches. Very officiously he demands to know how many stripes Maans Oosthuizen has already given the late Kees. The law stipulates a maximum of thirty-nine. Maans is in a
rage
right there, his fleshy face like a large glowing coal. How the hell must he know? he asks. Who can bother to count so far? If he had to give an estimate he’d guess about thirty-nine stripes, no more. And immediately some of his friends and neighbours are prepared to testify that they’ve known Maans for many years, he will never hurt a man without reason, and anyway he can only count to thirty-nine.

Then we are agreed, says the small, greyish man who stands in for the Commissioner.

But at this point one of the slaves who were instructed to hold the late Kees down during the flogging intervenes to say no,
seur
, it was forty-four, he knows all about counting. And suddenly the second slave, a Hottentot called Snel, also speaks up to say no, he counted as far as two hundred and twelve. Many tempers are ablaze by now, because precious time is being lost. The man who stands in for the Commissioner says there is no way out, he will have to count the stripes himself. For the time being everybody moves from the square in a big throng to Maans Oosthuizen’s town house two streets away. By the time they reach the backyard where the body lies, it is more a matter of guessing than counting, because most of the spectators have had time to take courage and refreshment from their wine flagons, which has affected either their eyesight, or their arithmetic, or both. Moreover there is little evidence one can rely on beyond any doubt, except for the marks on the body’s back and buttocks and upper legs, and these are in such a mess that only the clearest stripes, those that broke the skin, can be readily distinguished. The rest forms too much of a criss-crossing jumble to be of any use. But at last, after numerous attempts, they all count loudly and in unison up to forty-three. Which is not all that far from thirty-nine, after all.
So,
to avoid further delay, they may just as well agree on thirty-nine. The crowd breaks up briefly for some more serious rumination around the flagons and bottles, before all those gathered in the yard announce that they are prepared to agree on the figure of thirty-nine.

Just when everybody is finally ready to wind up the preliminary proceedings, a large man, allegedly from the Bokkeveld, approaches and pushes with his right foot against the deceased (the term introduced by the little man who stands in for the Commissioner), which brings to light more lashes on the front of Kees’s dust-covered body. All the way from the shoulders down to the knees, not excepting the bloodied private parts. Let’s make it seventy-two, as a fair estimate, says the surrogate Commissioner. In which case, we have a problem, gentlemen.

Yes, but, says the big man from the Bokkeveld. Yes. But. The law talks about the back and the buttocks and the upper legs, not a word about the stomach et cetera. Which means that any stripes on the front are irrelevant. So we can still agree on thirty-nine, and everybody should be satisfied.

Thus they reach agreement and the dead man is dragged off to where his wife and three small children are sitting at a distance in the sand, crying softly. Softly, because it is obvious that these farmers are in no mood for nonsense today.

Let us go back to the square then, announces the man who stands in for the Commissioner. We have a lot of work to get through. Whereupon everybody troops back from the town house to the town square, past the church to the front of the sober and imposing Drostdy, where they take up position to empty some more jugs and flagons in celebration of a job well done.

At last the auction can begin. The first few persons offered for sale do not resemble the slaves Philida and Old Petronella
are
used to. These look more like dusty Bushmen rounded up in the veld in a far place and dragged here yesterday or early this morning, presumably tethered to the horse of a Baas. There are four women with bulging stomachs like calabashes, and elongated breasts, and altogether seventeen or eighteen children in tow, some still infants at the breast. It is the mighty man from the Bokkeveld who has brought them for sale. After taking another swig from his wine jug he casually flicks his long sjambok around the group by way of timely warning.

This lot, he says, I brought from the other side of the Cedarberg after they came to steal sheep from my farm.

Nobody enquires for particulars about the how and when and where and why, not even the miserable greyish man who stands in for the Commissioner. They need labourers and one of these days they’ll be without slaves. If these creatures can be booked into service straight away, they can at least see one through a few more years.

Against the law, Old Petronella hisses in Philida’s ear from behind.

You shut up! Cornelis snaps at her. If you’re looking for trouble today, just you try to take on this little runt that stands in for the Commissioner.

There were twenty-four of the vermin, says the big man from the Bokkeveld. But some of them were too weak for the long walk, so I had to discard them along the way.

How are you selling them? somebody asks from the crowd. One by one or the whole lot together?

Take your pick, says the man from the Bokkeveld. As long as we don’t have to stand in this ungodly sun all day.

A long argument ensues. Then some of the bigger children are sold in ones or twos or threes. Two of the women are allotted to a buyer from Paarl, the other two separately, one with two small children, the second on her own, the rest
of
the children in a group. The prices remain pretty low. Nobody wants to venture too much on a bunch of good-for-nothings that probably won’t last a month.

This is followed by some commotion as a man comes pushing through the crowd with another Khoe woman and three children. Somebody recognises them as the wife and children of the dead Hottentot, Kees. The man who pushes them to the auction table is none other than Maans Oosthuizen, who caused the first interruption of the day.

I reckon we can
maar
finish this business right here, he says, his face an even deeper red than before. Get these things off my hands too, and the sooner the better.

A bid of three hundred rix-dollars for mother and children is on the point of being knocked down when someone else pitches in with a hundred for the oldest boy, who must be about ten years old. He should be quite useful around the house by now.

The greyish man who stands in for the Commissioner asks cautiously whether it isn’t against the law for families to be broken up in this manner.

That law is made for slaves, a large woman with a split palate corrects him and he almost chokes as he tries to scuttle out of her way, and these are just
Boesmans
.

The information is accepted with acclaim and the transaction is clinched.

The mother and her two youngest children are dragged off, not without crying and scuffling, and it takes two of the heftiest farmers with sjamboks to return them to order. After that the eldest boy, still sobbing and with his small face smeared with snot, is loaded into a horse carriage and the farmer and his thickset wife drive off with him.

A few more indentured Hottentots are brought in one by one. This goes relatively fast. Only one of them, a little
stick
insect of a man with a white-grey head, who says his name is Ben Goliath, threatens to cause a disturbance. When he was a child, he protests, his Baas told him he would be booked in until he turned twenty-one, to pay off his father’s debt. Today that Baas, who was only a beardless boy at the time, already lies in his grave, a grandfather with many offspring, yet here he, Ben Goliath, is still around on the farm. It is time they let him go, he pleads, surely his father’s debt must have been settled very long ago.