The Drifters (87 page)

At Bar Texas the group met a clever chap from the American consulate, and Cato asked him bluntly, ‘In your experience do South African men prefer sleeping with black girls?’ and the man replied, ‘Standard. I’d have been surprised, except that I served in Japan.’

And he went on to explain: ‘In Japan I was given the job, with a couple of smart psychologists, of unraveling this bit about GI–Japanese marriages. And what we found after much study was this. In Japan thirty-eight per cent of the troops were from the deep south. I forget now how we categorized what the deep south was, but at any rate, it contained Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina and Georgia, and if I remember correctly, certain others. So the soldiers we were studying contained thirty-eight per cent deep south, which meant that the men who married oriental girls should have come thirty-eight per cent from the deep south. What percentage do you suppose actually did come from there? Go ahead.’

The South Africans guessed figures like eighteen and
twenty. Gretchen said, ‘Thirty-eight, the normal behavior.’ Only Cato guessed a higher figure, fifty. The young official smiled and said, ‘Seventy-eight per cent. More than twice what the normal expectancy should have been.’

There was some hot discussion of this, but the young man held to his figures. ‘Same in Korea as Japan, and I suppose same in Vietnam today. We spent a lot of time on this startling fact, talked to a lot of GIs, and derived one clear generalization. When they first hit Japan, northern boys and southern boys were impressed about equally with Japanese girls, but the southern boys, because they had been told so many things about race, had an inner compulsion to date these girls, then to marry them.

‘Extrapolating, I would suppose that you fellows from South Africa would have an inner compulsion to date black girls … just for the hell of it … to see if what everybody said was true.’

‘And because it’s forbidden at home,’ one South African said. ‘Don’t forget that.’

‘I was coming around to that. From our interviews with a couple of thousand GIs who had married oriental girls, we got the strong feeling that a lot of the fellows had done it principally to irritate their fathers—not their mothers so much … we didn’t get that reading. But, boy, they sure wanted to throw the shaft at their old man.

‘And we discovered one final thing, which perhaps was the most significant of all. When the GIs got their Japanese brides back home, which part of the States accepted them most easily?’

Gretchen asked tentatively, ‘The south?’

‘Yep. Adjustments were much easier in the south, resentment much less. We also looked into this, and found that when a society has rejected one race, as the south rejects the Negro, it bends over backward to be congenial with other races, as if to say, “See. We have no prejudice. It’s just that Negroes really are inferior. Decent races we can accept and do accept.” So extrapolating again, I would guess that the South African, behaving as he does at home, experiences this same compulsion to be gracious toward all other races when he goes abroad and becomes, as it were, a man set free. He wants to say, “See I really have no ingrained prejudice. It’s just that our blacks really are impossible.” ’

Cato kept his beer mug close to his lips, almost masking
his eyes, then brought it down with a bang. ‘Too ingenious. The simple fact is that white men have always had one hell of an urge to mate with black girls, and black men feel the same urge about white women. For what reason? Simply for the hell of it.’ Then, to everyone’s astonishment, he burst into raucous laughter.

‘What gives?’ one of the South Africans asked.

‘I was thinking of this cat. One night he tells me, “Cato, I just as much white as them white cats you knows. I figured it out. I’m one third black, one third German, and one third Episcopalian.” ’ Cato slapped his hand on the table and looked from one white face to the next. No one laughed, and after a moment he said, ‘I didn’t catch it either till I went to bed that night and stayed awake till morning trying to figure out how a man could be thirds. Try it.’ Gradually, around the table, one face after another broke into a grin as minds grappled with the problem and saw its ridiculous aspect.

‘Thirds a man can’t be,’ Cato said, and one of the South Africans said, ‘Damn it all, I still don’t see what the joke is,’ and Cato said, ‘Go back to your four grandparents. How you gonna cut them into thirds?’ and the South African asked, ‘Yes, but what about the generations way back?’ and Cato said, ‘Even you South African cats has got to march by fours,’ and suddenly the man saw it and burst into laughter, which prompted him to order a round of drinks, and it was this camaraderie which encouraged him to confide in the American the terrible fear that was gnawing at him.

‘I’m a newspaperman. I work for one of the finest papers in South Africa … or anywhere, for that matter. And the government is determined to silence both the paper and me. Have you heard about the new bill they introduced yesterday? Proposed by Dr. Vorlanger and supported by his group and others. We’re to have a new secret police called BOSS, Bureau of State Security, and they are to have unlimited powers. If they arrest you, no habeas corpus. At your trial, if any member of the cabinet comes into court and states that evidence which you might produce to defend yourself might be prejudicial to the state, it cannot be given. You cannot testify in your own behalf if they say no. But the really terrifying part is that if BOSS searches your home, which they can do without a warrant, and finds there any notes or photographs or
sketches or even random ideas in any form which might be used to write an article which might be offensive to the state, they can lock you up incommunicado for six months without producing their evidence, such as it might be.’

Cato said, ‘In America they laugh at us when we say, “Don’t do it to the blacks because next week you’ll be doing it to yourselves.” ’

And late that night, when Monica and Cato were sleeping in the pink rondavel, with Gretchen in the blue and Joe in the pop-top, there was a soft knocking at Cato’s door, and when he opened it a crack, there stood the South African journalist asking to be let in, and in the darkness he sat on the bed and asked Cato to summon the other two, and when they were assembled, like conspirators on some dark night, he said, ‘After you left the bar a friend slipped me word that a most evil woman has arrived in Lourenço Marques. Her name is Margaret Villinger. She’s attractive, intelligent. You’ll like her. She writes for a good newspaper in J’burg and she’s going to interview Cato tomorrow. What the American Negro thinks of South Africa … and she’ll print what you say. But her real job is to get the goods on me. She’s an agent of state security, and they’re determined to wipe me out … and my paper. She’ll use every trick to make you confess you know me. She’ll try to discover what I’ve said, so I beg you. Don’t mention my name … not under any circumstances.’

‘Is it that bad?’ Gretchen asked.

‘It’s worse. That’s the real reason we seek vacations in Lourenço Marques. To breathe.’

‘The other night,’ Cato said, ‘Joe asked me why I fooled around with South Africans. It’s because I’m so sorry for you. You think you’re doing it to us blacks. Really, you’re doing it to yourselves.’

When the four wanderers left Lourenço Marques for the long trek north, they entered upon an adventure for which neither Harvey Holt nor I had prepared them: they came upon boundless physical beauty, and at the same time encountered insoluble social problems. And two of them achieved an unexplainable emotional repose.

The beauty consisted of unbroken miles of beach, flawless as it lay vacant beside the Indian Ocean. I had told them, in Pamplona, that the beaches were there, but they could not envision that they would stand day after day at the center of some sweeping reach of sand and be able to gaze miles to the north and south without seeing one human being or even the evidence that one had ever stepped on this beach. True, there were seaside resorts—some of them quite attractive—but these they avoided, preferring the lonely stretches of unbroken sand and ocean.

When they reached the first one, not far north of Lourenço Marques, they established the rather daring pattern they were to follow throughout Moçambique, whenever opportunity permitted. Gretchen was spelling Joe and was driving along the main road, and this in itself was something of an adventure, for Moçambique was so vast and its taxes so inadequate that good roads were a luxury; therefore, only a narrow strip, one car wide, was paved, which meant that when you drove at fifty or sixty miles an hour, you had constantly to be on the alert for someone thundering at you at the same speed from the opposite direction and on the same strip of road. The deadly game you played was to come head-on at the other car, refusing to yield a millimeter, while he did the same, and at the very last moment, swerve aside ever so slightly, holding onto your half of the paved surface. If you were really tough, you bluffed the other man completely and kept your car in the middle, forcing him to leave the macadam completely, but the game grew really sticky when two such drivers approached head-on, each refusing to give way, so that at the last possible moment they both veered at the same instant, passing with their tires squealing only inches apart.

What made the game hellish for an American was the driving on the left, for at each moment of crisis you had to behave contrary to every instinct and veer your car to the left in what always seemed like certain disaster.

After about an hour of this, in which she lost every war of nerves and failed to keep her car even once on the macadam, Gretchen said, ‘I’m cracking up. One of you fellows take over,’ and Joe took the wheel.

As each of the first four cars approached, he slowed down, drove well off the macadam, and gritted his teeth as the victor flashed by, grinning at his discomfort. For
the next four he maintained his speed and kept his right wheels on the pavement, and after that he became an ornery bulldog, fighting for every inch of the macadam, driving people completely off the road when possible, and behaving exactly like a Portuguese.

‘This is William James’s moral equivalent of war,’ he chortled at one point, and Gretchen thought how ironic it was that so combative a young man, one who so obviously loved the challenge of a running bull or a careening car, should have become a conscientious objector. She realized that he was objecting not to war, but to the immorality of the particular war in which our nation was involved.

They now came to a crossroads with a sign pointing to the right indicating that a beach was not far off. On the spur of the moment Joe swung the car down this road, and after about ten miles, came upon a small resort hotel. Beyond it lay the first of the majestic beaches, vast, empty and untouched.

Joe stopped the car. For a few moments no one spoke, for the sight of this almost primeval beach was overwhelming; one had to contrast it with the crowded beaches of England and America and to reflect that they, too, had once looked like this. It was Monica who broke the spell. ‘I’m going for a swim,’ she said, tossing off her clothes and running lightly to the water. Cato also stripped and followed, his handsome black body outlined against the white sand. This left Joe and Gretchen sitting in silent embarassment in the pop-top, and it was her responsibility to decide what course they would follow. She blushed, tried to think of something casual to say, then quickly undressed and skipped across the sand to join Monica, but as she did so, Cato ran up also, and the three of them stood there naked and Cato yelled to Joe, ‘Hurry up!’ So he kicked off his boots and climbed out of his skin-tight trousers and joined them.

They spent the better part of a week this way, naked children cavorting on the endless beaches—the girls very pale to begin with and gradually tanning, Joe bronzed from the start and becoming quite dark, and Cato the handsomest of the lot, a lithe, well-proportioned young male whose blackness lent a noble accent to the scene. There seems to be something in young people the world around that inspires them toward nude bathing; personally,
I have reached the age when I am grateful for whatever cosmetic help a well-designed bathing suit can provide. When Monica told me of the great joy they found in such bathing, I had to ask, ‘Does this mean that Joe and Gretchen …’ and she interrupted by saying, ‘Not at all! I think it was really a struggle for Gretchen to strip. She certainly didn’t want any part of Joe. Also, she was still fond of Clive and …’ I interrupted to ask, ‘Then you mean that these two went swimming nude every day and that was all?’ and she snapped ‘Hell, I’ve gone swimming naked with lots of men I haven’t wanted to sleep with.’ I suppose she was telling the truth, but with my upbringing I found it hard to believe.

The sociological confusions presented by the journey were profound. Moçambique had a population of about eight million, of whom nearly ninety-eight per cent were black, yet it was totally controlled by whites. In Lourenço Marques, where the power lay, white men clustered, giving the impression that the division was something like eighty per cent white, twenty per cent black, but in the country the true situation could not be masked. The blacks did not live in small towns; they lived in tiny kraals, consisting of a clearing in the jungle surrounded by three or four rondavels, and here life continued much the same as it had for two thousand years, altered now and then by a discarded rubber tire or an empty gasoline drum. The major possession of any family was a large wooden cask for lugging water from the government well, which was usually far away. This meant that the women of the huts had to spend most of their day hauling empty barrels to the well and drawing filled ones home. They did this by an ingenious means: they simply laid the barrel flat on the ground, and with ropes secured to the two ends, dragged it along behind them, the barrel itself forming a kind of wheel which rolled endlessly, bumping over tree stumps and almost shattering when it struck rocks. In Moçambique the wheel proper had not yet been accepted.

These kraals had an ugly effect on Cato. In Philadelphia he had ridiculed African dress and felt no desire to learn Swahili, which was spoken by so few in Africa, but he had nevertheless believed that if the white man could be kicked out, the blacks would be able to run Africa at least as well as nations like Belgium and Portugal, and probably better. But the blacks he was now seeing made
him wonder, for in all Moçambique he saw no evidence to indicate that they were ready for self-government, or even for effective minor participation in government dominated by white men.