Philida (5 page)

I am used to walking. When we first came from the Caab to Zandvliet, I had to walk beside the wagon all the way, and it was a bladdy long way, until my feet were bleeding. But this time, when I came to Stellenbosch, it was different of course. This time it was my own choice, and I noticed every little thing along the Elephant Trail. Now and then
I
can see a springbok or a ribbok or a civet cat in the distance, but I don’t care about them, they move away like shadows as I come closer, they’re like the ghosts that come and go wherever I move, some of them are there to look after me, others to try and scare me. I sometimes wish one of them would come to help me carry the baby in the
abbadoek
, he may be barely a month old, but he keep drinking all the way. My breasts are full.

Every step take me further away from Zandvliet. It’s like a sharp pain in my chest, because I’m moving further and further from everything that was never mine. What else can I do? Where else can I go to? That was why I keep following the Elephant Trail that bring me to this tall Drostdy where I must now keep waiting in this cell.

So far from Zandvliet, from the farm. The house, the longhouse behind the thin row of palm trees. How well I know that place, every furrow and every stone I know, every bit of field and vineyard, the reeds and the bluegums, the deep shade of the bamboo copse, the small whitewashed cemetery between the longhouse and the bamboos, where the dead lie buried. The copse where Frans take me that first time we go there on our own. Before that, it is only fun and games, like when the boys taking us girls with them to the peach orchard. To climb the trees, they say. But it is always the girls who got to climb up first, followed by the boys, so they can stay behind us and below us, then we cannot run away, they stay between us and the ground. And always, from the time we are small, there is Frans right behind me, his head between my feet, his head between my knees. Just for fun. But that day in the bamboo copse it was not for fun, and it was just him and me. And because of that I got to come all the way along the road with its many bends today, further and further away from the farm and the longhouse.

How well I know that house. The long low stoep and the heavy front door made of coffin planks, and the wide passage, always cool in summer when the cicadas are shrilling outside. The small table in the passage, yellowwood and stinkwood, and the mirrors. Mirrors everywhere inside, one can never get away from them. Which is why the ghosts never go away, they come for the mirrors.

Almost every room got its ghost, some rooms got two, some four or five. In the early days I am too scared to sleep in that house, but Ouma Nella soon teach me not to be afraid. They’re our people, she told me, the greyfeet, and they’re of all kinds. There’s the white woman that drown herself in the Dwars River right next to the bamboo copse, in the very early days of the farm, because her husband beat her so badly. And the slave woman who run away just after she arrive on the ship from Boegies. But the Baas of the farm go after her, it was long before Oubaas Cornelis, and he catch her and chop off her feet. She die soon after that. And now she only walk when the moon is full, round and round the farm, but she cannot find the way back to Boegies. There’s a slave man too, they say he lay with the white Nooi of the farm when the Baas was gone to the Caab with two vats of wine. When he got caught, the people say, his Baas took him back to the Fiscal and he had to run all the way there behind the horse, and there they made him sit on a long rod stuck up his backside, nine days before he died, without food or water. Ghosts, ghosts everywhere, there are nights when they’re moving and swarming and moaning and screeching so much that nobody can sleep a wink. Worst of all is the dead baby that cry and cry all the time and never stop, no matter how deep you try to hide under the
karosses
, and that one I know very well, he just cry and cry, it’s the ghost of my own Little Frans. He’s so small and thin, you can look right through him, but he’s there.

It’s from the cats that I always know when the ghosts are out and about. A cat know all about ghosts, they say. It can see and hear them when they just beginning to stir in the distance, and then it start growling and hissing and puffing up its hair like feathers. Then you
sommer
know there’s ghosts about. Go away, I tell them, move off,
voertsek
, but they don’t listen. And some of them can get very difficult, you got to keep your eyes wide open.

Each one of those ghosts got its own story to tell and they walk along all the roads and paths and trails of the land. Perhaps my own story will also learn to find its way. In the end it’s only the road itself that stay behind and a road don’t talk much to anybody. That’s why I’m not expecting too much from this road to Stellenbosch. The most I can do is to go as far as I can, writing my own story in the dust with my two feet, word for word. All the way, from the longhouse to here where I am waiting for Frans to turn up.

And when it’s finished I’ll go back home. Back to our house and to our room. The room where Ouma Nella live, and I with her. It’s not an outroom like those of the other slaves, ours is part of the house. If you go through the wide front door into the
voorhuis
, you turn left and then keep on to the end. There you’ll find our inside door. We got an outside door too, but that’s just for the two of us and people who visit us, nobody else. Not even the Oubaas. Because Ouma Nella was a slave once, but she’s a slave no more. She was set free. And only the LordGod and the Oubaas can tell how that happened.

And then at last, one day, the door of the cell is opened and I am called out. And there I find Frans waiting. Hurry up now, they tell me. Your Baas Francois is come to see you, move your backside.

V

In which Ink and Blood are spilled

NOW PHILIDA HAS
gone and lodged this complaint against us and everything is a terrible mess, just because there wasn’t time enough before she left to arrange and discuss the situation properly. I was shocked when I heard what Pa and MaJanna were planning for me, but I thought they would see reason and talk about it first. Then, before any of us knew what was going on, we heard that she’d gone to Stellenbosch to accuse us. Accuse me. As far as they were concerned, everything was already agreed and done and my whole future was planned without me. It came like a jug of water in the face when the messenger arrived from the Drostdy to demand an answer to the accusations she had brought against us.

At least I needed to get to know this woman they had decided I had to marry, Maria Magdalena Berrangé. All I knew about her was from the day Pa took the whole family in to the Caab, to the Oranje Street where she lives with her family, and now things have to go as they must, there’s nothing I can do to stop or help them along any more. I can say that she is a fine young woman, dressed like the top ladies in the Colony, long dresses and shawls, one over the other, giving one no hint of what may be going on underneath. But she showed a glimpse of ankle once and that didn’t look bad at all, a bit bony and very white, but enough to make one curious. It’s just that she looks rather
uppity,
her small pointed nose in the air, with a spread of freckles where the sun of the Caab has got to her. As it happens I quite like freckles, although MaJanna can be vicious about them.

If only I could have spoken to Philida about her before she left for Stellenbosch, just so that she could know and I could hear what she thought, but she was gone before I ever knew about it. And then the summons from Mijnheer Lindenberg arrived out of the blue. A bad time for that, it is summer and the fruit are getting ripe, the early apricots, and the plums, and the grapes beginning to cluster, they need attention all the time. But the folk at the Drostdy cannot care less about a farmer’s time and seasons. If they say the word one must jump. And talk is not enough either, everything has to be in writing. In English, mind you, even though I know Mijnheer Lindenberg is an Afrikaner just like me. Not English nor Dutch like most of the other officials at the Caab, but born and bred here in the Colony, so he should know better.

When it comes to writing the officials at the Drostdy are the worst, but of course they get all their orders from above, all of it in writing, it’s the English government’s way of doing things. Even Philida has caught the bug. For weeks and months she went on pestering me to show her the names and things written about my family at the back of Pa’s big black State Bible. Not as big as the one Oom Daniel inherited from Oupa Andries, because Pa is only a fifth son in the line, not the eldest. But this Bible is big and heavy enough.

Over and over, whenever we find a moment without anyone else around, Philida gets me to show her the pages at the back of the Bible, where Pa wrote our names in ink. Starting with Andries Brink from Waarden or Woerden, nobody is quite sure about the name of the place, followed by a date, 1739, and all of that I explained to her. Then in
a
long row all his children with his two wives. Four of them with the first, Sophia Grové, followed by nine more with Alida de Waal. And from his seventh son, a Johannes, there came fifteen children, of whom the fifth was my father Cornelis. And that is how we got here.

Below the name
Cornelis
in the long row Pa wrote in the names of his own children: from Ouboet Johannes Jacobus, who is in Holland now, learning to be a dominee, and then I, Francois Gerhard Jacob, past KleinCornelis and Daantjie and Lood and the few who died when they were small, down to Elisabet and Alida and ending with Woudrien, the twelfth, who also died as a baby. Our whole family, it seems, has got this dying streak.

And that was where Philida became a real pest. She kept on saying she also wanted to get into the Book. The more I told her it was a book for white people only, the more she kept on: It’s just a lot of names, Frans, it says nothing about white people and slaves.

Philida, it doesn’t work like that, there’s nothing you or I can change about it, this is just the way the world is.

Then we got to change the way of the world, Frans, she goes on nagging, otherwise it will always stay the same.

No, I keep telling her, some things just
cannot
be changed from the way the LordGod made them.

Then we got to start with changing the LordGod, she says.

You don’t know that man, I warn her. He’s a real bastard when it comes to making trouble.

I tell you I want to be in that Book, she goes on.

I’m telling you, Philida, I keep insisting, it can’t be done and it won’t be done, and that’s the way it is.

Then give the pen to me, she says in a temper one morning, when all the house people are busy outside, it is only her and me in the
voorhuis
. If you can’t or won’t do it,
I’ll
do it myself. And she grabs the pen out of my hand and the feather at the tip scrapes against the side of the Book, the shiny side, and her arm knocks over the brown ink jar so that the ink Pa had mixed himself from the powder he ordered from Holland, everything just perfect for writing, is overturned and a huge black-blue blot starts to spread right across the page where she has dreamed of her name written next to mine.

Now they’re going to kill both of us, I promise her. But Philida only says, even though I can hear her own voice is getting thin and reedy: Nobody will ever know, man. For all they know, it was the LordGod himself that made this mess.

Until today, as far as I know, nobody has seen it yet, because there’s been no need for anyone to turn that page. That will only happen, if you ask me, when MaJanna has another child, and I’m sure that won’t happen very soon, I don’t think it is likely if one looks at her, or if Pa decides to fill in
Maria Magdalena Berrangé
next to my own name. And by that time, if God wills, nobody will ever know or wonder about the matter any more.

That isn’t a day I care to think about a lot. The mere idea terrifies me. To think that by that time Maria Magdalena Berrangé may already be at my side. With her fancy thin ankles. And Philida? Nobody will know about her any more. She’s the reason why I got that message from the Landdrost in Stellenbosch. And hard on the heels of the messenger it was Pa himself who called me to the
voorhuis
to talk about it. His tanned face looked like a thunderstorm. I had to listen very closely, he said. Because he is a notable man and in our own way I suppose we’re a notable family and he doesn’t want his name to be dragged through shit just because I’m too hopeless to deny something a damn slave girl did with me.

Easy for Pa to talk, I said. There was a time when you yourself had a lot of good things to say about Philida. At that time everybody could see that Philida had her first child inside her and they knew it came from what she and I had done. It’s the sort of thing most of the men at the Caab do, so you can’t pretend you don’t know.

That was where he started breathing more heavily from being so angry. I’ve never had anything to do with a slave
meid
, he said.

I was tempted to ask him: And what about the thing everybody keeps talking about? That it was our own grandfather Oupa Johannes who first took Ouma Petronella nine months before you yourself were born, and that that is the reason you later bought her freedom? But I knew that it would be asking for trouble if I dared to talk about it. I myself had heard him say openly that if anybody on this farm, big or small, slave or white man, ever tried to gossip about that, he would be thrown into the shithouse pit to choke in
kak
. Did everybody understand? So I rather said nothing. I didn’t want to lead him into temptation.