When I heard the pounding on our front door that Friday night I knew, though I was only fifteen, that whoever was standing outside wasn’t bringing us good news: the unwritten rules of South African society permitted us to visit friends anytime during the day, but never to arrive uninvited after dark, or to telephone socially after nine p.m.

:::

In many ways my childhood in Johannesburg wasn’t different from that of a kid growing up in the Sixties in London, New York, or Toronto, except we drove on the left side of the road and went on our seaside summer vacations at Christmas-time. Our house on a quiet, leafy street had a large rose garden; peach, plum, and almond trees; an all-weather tennis court; and the use of a swimming pool next door. My sisters and I went to an English-style public school where we had to wear a ghastly olive-green gymslip that was so shapeless even the skinny girls looked fat, as well as ugly black lace-up shoes and white ankle socks. We took ballet, swimming, and elocution lessons in the afternoons; our parents played bridge, tennis, and lawn bowls, drank whiskey and soda, and on special occasions, took us out for steak and lobster dinners.

:::

Our dog Dusty, a German Shepherd, responded to the intruders at the door by barking hysterically. I ran out of my upstairs bedroom and crouched down to peek through the wrought-iron railing at the top of the stairs.

“Who’s there?” my mother said.

“Police!” said a man with a strong Afrikaans accent.

Holding onto the dog’s collar, Mom unlocked the door. Dusty growled, his hackles raised. “Yes...?”

My father in blue pajamas, feet bare and without his false teeth, came out of my parents’ bedroom to listen with me. None of my siblings were home.

Four men dressed in dark suits, white shirts, ties, and highly polished black leather shoes crowded into our entrance. They didn’t look like police, and if this was a pass-raid to check whether our servants had all the necessary completely-up-to-date official permits stamped in their passbooks, the cops didn’t knock on front doors, but went straight to the back yard where the Africans lived.

A tall man with old-fashioned black glasses showed my mother what I guessed was his police badge.

“Waar’s jou seun? Waar’s Jeffrey?” he said.

Though we all had to study Afrikaans in school, this was the first time I’d heard it spoken in my house. My parents had taught us that apartheid was wrong, and not all Afrikaners were bigots, but we never socialized with them. I knew one Afrikaans person: Miss Venter, my high school teacher.

“Excuse me, I don’t understand you.”

He didn’t answer. I saw his face reflected in the two large mirrors in our entrance hall: it wasn’t friendly.

“Please, I only speak a little Afrikaans, I wasn’t born here. What are you saying? Has something happened to my son?” Mom recognized my brother’s name buried in the string of foreign words. It was strange to hear him called Jeffrey—everyone called him Jeff.

“Where’s your son? Where’s Jeffrey?” he said.

“I don’t know where he is this evening,” my mother said, fiddling with the top button of her floral bathrobe. “With his friends, I think.”

The four men seemed to find something hilarious in her comment. What was so funny?

“What kind of mother are you? How come you don’t know your son’s whereabouts?” said a policeman with a pockmarked face, his brown hair cut as short as his thick eyebrows. He turned to the others and said something I couldn’t hear, and they all laughed.

“My oldest daughter is at her boyfriend’s house, my other daughter is studying with a girlfriend....”

A short, fat man with a black moustache interrupted her, “Ag, man! Did we ask you about your daughters? We don’t care about your daughters. Answer the question, hey! Where’s Jeffrey?” His stomach was so large and his shirt so tight that if he took too big a breath, or laughed too heartily, the buttons would pop.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know where my son is tonight.”

They laughed again, not a happy kind of laugh, more of a taunt, as if they enjoyed my mother’s growing panic, and I realized that if Jeff had been in an accident, they would have told her immediately. Shaking his head, Dad went to the bathroom and came back with his false teeth, bath robe, and slippers.

“What did you put in your pocket when we knocked on the door?” the tall one asked.

“Nothing!” Mom said.

“Ag jong hierdie mense.... Gee dit vir my Mevrou!”

“Pardon?”

He knew she didn’t understand, so why did he keep speaking in Afrikaans?

“We’re not here to play games. We watched you from the street: you were writing at your desk, and you put something in your pocket when we knocked at the door. Give it to me.”

The front elevation of our pink house looked like a child’s drawing: a window on either side of the front door, a row of windows upstairs. Mom’s study was to the left of the front door and, because the house was below street level, anyone standing on the sidewalk had a perfect view inside as my mother never closed the curtains.

Mom stared at him defiantly, her arms folded tightly across her chest.

“Ag, man! Do you want me to arrest you and take you to Marshall Square to interrogate you...?”

Although the government had strict control of the South African press, it was common knowledge that Marshall Square was the Security Police headquarters and the most notorious prison in the country. Were these men security police?

Mom’s face lost all its color. She shook her head no.

“I thought not. Nou ja, give it to me.”

Mom took a letter from the pocket of her bathrobe and handed it over.

He looked at it, put it in a large envelope he was carrying, and said, “Ja goed, we can talk. We’re from the Special Branch. We have a warrant to search your house.”

My mother gasped. Wordlessly taking a tissue from her pocket, she wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

I looked across at Dad. Although his black eyes were narrowed and blinking in anger—a sign that would warn us kids he was about to lose his temper—he seemed paralyzed, his face pale, his mouth a tight line across his face.

The short, fat man waved a piece of paper right up to Mom’s face. “See, here’s the search warrant. Authorized and signed by the Minister of Justice, Mr. John Vorster himself.”

“Where’s Jeffrey’s room?” asked the tall man.

“It’s upstairs.”

“Put your blerry dog in the back yard and then we can go up to the room.”

I ran to my room, closed the door, switched off the light, and sat on my bed in the dark trying to digest what I’d just heard. My heart was beating so fast I could hear it pounding in my ears.

The secret police, known officially as the Security Police (and unofficially by their former name, the Special Branch), investigated anti-apartheid crimes. Why were they in our house?

The Minister of Justice had signed a decree two years earlier that gave the Security Police the power and authority to arrest anyone they suspected of being a danger to the country and to hold these “political detainees” in solitary confinement for ninety days, without a reason, or a trial. My friend Linda’s parents and Nelson Mandela were among the first people to be jailed under the new law.

The sound of feet stomping up the stairs echoed through the silent house and a nasty mixture of cigarettes, sweat, and sickly-sweet after-shave cologne wafted into my room.

I looked at my alarm clock. Ten fifteen.

Filled with regret that I hadn’t gone with my father to his room, I climbed into bed still in my jeans and sweater, and pulled the covers over my head.

Why had they come so late at night? Why did they want to search Jeff’s room? What had he done? He was a university student working on his Honors thesis.

I don’t know how four men and my mother all managed to fit in my brother’s small bedroom. During the hours they searched the room Mom had to remain in there with them. Silent. Ignored. Dad wasn’t permitted to leave his bedroom.

Ten thirty.

I was appalled when I heard Mom say, “Would you like a cup of tea?” I heard one of the men accompany her to the kitchen. She made the tea in a teapot, and put out a plate of shortbread cookies on a paper doily as if Special Branch detectives were guests whom she’d invited to tea. Next morning when I peeked into Jeff’s room I saw the tea things and an overflowing ashtray surrounded by books and papers lying in big messy piles on the floor. I used to love shortbread cookies.

The phone rang while Mom was making tea. Back in the Sixties we didn’t have telephones in every room. The downstairs phone was next to the front door and the sound carried straight up to my room. “Hello.... Yes.... Okay.... Goodbye.”

“Who was that?” the policeman asked.

“No one,” said Mom.

He laughed, but didn’t press her any further.

I also wanted to know who had phoned so late at night. My mother didn’t have such short conversations, and she never said “Goodbye” but always said, “Cheerio.”

The African night was dark and silent. Dusty and some neighborhood dogs barked a few times. Once, far away in the distance, I heard the whistle of a train, while on the other side of my wall I heard the odd indistinguishable word, and sometimes books falling.

I needed to pee.

Who had phoned so late at night? It was a strange call. I didn’t think it was bad news because Mom didn’t say, “Oh how dreadful,” or “What time is the funeral?” It could have been a neighbor checking whether we were okay because police cars were outside our house. I was so clueless about the Special Branch I didn’t even know if they drove marked cars.

Oh my god, the strange man! That’s why he parked his green Volkswagen Beetle in front of our house, and why he always wore sunglasses even at night, and why he brought the newspaper up to his face if we drove past. We assumed someone who spent so many hours sitting in his car was a weirdo who was proud of his old car, and thought it comical when he pretended to read.

“There’s the schlemiel!” we’d laugh, using the Yiddish nickname my father gave him.

We never suspected we were being watched.

It also explained the strange clicking noises we heard on our phone, and why the policeman didn’t insist my mother explain the late-night phone call—he’d know who called as soon as he got back to Marshall Square and listened to the recording—but that also meant strangers had listened to my conversations.

Embarrassment quickly turned to anger and then to confusion. Would I lose any friends? Would boys stop asking me out? Well, to heck with them, I wouldn’t go out with anyone who supported apartheid, or was scared of special branch detectives at my house. Fear had made me foggy headed, but the rush of anger empowered me so I kicked off the covers and sat on the edge of my bed looking straight at the balcony door. I’d been so scared I’d forgotten I shared a balcony with my parents. If I went outside, I could walk into their room, use their toilet, and be safe with my father. I almost cried with relief.

Carefully feeling my way to the door in the dark, I slowly, silently with shaky fingers turned the key, but when I began pushing the doorknob down, it squealed like the brakes on my brother’s old car. I ran back to bed and hid under the covers expecting someone to come investigate the noise.

No one came.

I didn’t try it again. I realized that the balcony door to my parents’ room was also locked, and I’d most probably give my father another heart attack if I knocked on his door.

Soon after eleven o’clock, bright moonlight through the half-drawn curtains lit my bookcase and I could see the titles. I’d kept a few of my favorite children’s books: Anna Sewell’s story Black Beauty was the closest I’d come to riding a horse, because my parents didn’t think it a suitable activity for a girl. The South African government always banned any book with “black” in the title and had placed it, a children’s book, on the list of banned books.

Possession of banned literature could lead to imprisonment, or a fine or both....

The thought of sending someone to jail for owning a children’s book about a horse was ridiculous.

And that’s when I remembered I owned the book Black Like Me. In 1959 an American journalist, John Howard Griffin, used special pigment-altering drugs to darken his skin just to experience the indignities and insults black men and women had to endure in the U.S. deep South.

In the privileged, segregated world where I grew up, our servants were the only people of color I knew. After reading Griffin’s story I began to understand a little of what it must be like to live under the apartheid laws: Even in densely populated areas a black man must cross town for a glass of water.¹

I was glad I’d read it, felt proud to own a banned book, and didn’t care that Possession of one page of a banned book or magazine could send you to jail. The problem with regret is, it comes too late. As I lay waiting to be arrested I didn’t feel proud anymore. I’d been so foolish to keep a silly book about some man’s personal experience in the United States. When those men walked into my room they’d immediately see Black Like Me on the top shelf.

Just one page....

Did they interrogate people in Afrikaans? What would happen if I didn’t understand their questions? In school I worked hard at French, had a good accent, and an excellent vocabulary, but I had no interest in learning Afrikaans, the language of apartheid.

I felt faint and I urgently needed to pee.

Eleven twenty.

I hated the book. I hated myself for stupidly keeping it. I hated those men in the room next to me. I hated that I was so afraid.

I had to get rid of it, but if I managed to get it past the burglar bars to throw it out the window, they’d hear the thud when it landed on the verandah below, and if I went to the bathroom and flushed it down the toilet page-by-page, they’d hear all the flushing. I put it under my mattress, under my pillow; buried it in the mess of my desk drawer, with my knickers, my sweaters; shoved it in the pocket of my bathrobe, in the trash bin, under my carpet ... and eventually decided that a book placed with my clothes would arouse more suspicion than one sitting amongst its relatives on a bookshelf. I returned it to my bookcase, squashed inconspicuously, I hoped, between my French and Afrikaans dictionaries.

Twelve thirty-five a.m.

Lying in my bed, a cold ache seeped out of my eyes. When I had read Black Like Me I underlined the phrase “fear dims even the sunlight” and put a question mark in the margin. I hadn’t understood it because I hadn’t known real fear before.

I needed to calm down. My head ached, my clothes were damp with sweat, and I had cramps from holding in my pee. Trying a calming breath I’d learned in yoga slowed my breathing and my hands stopped shaking. I wasn’t relaxed, but I wasn’t hysterical.

One fifty a.m.

I woke up when I heard someone open my door. “What’s in this room?”

I held my breath....

“Oh just my youngest daughter. She’s sleeping,” Mom said.

A man stuck his head into my room, looked vaguely around in the dark, but didn’t come inside or put on the light.

“Ja, we’re finished here,” he said.

When I heard them stomping down the stairs I didn’t know whether I felt relieved or angry.

“Ja goed, before we go, I can tell you we arrested your son earlier this evening. We’re holding him under the one-hundred-and-eighty-day law.”

I got such a fright I peed my pants.

“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” my mother said.

“Six months solitary, hey!”

“That’s one-hundred-and-eighty days in jail,” they all laughed.

“There isn’t a one-hundred-and-eighty-day law. It’s ninety days.”

“It’s the new law the Minister of Justice signed today. We can now hold anyone for one-hundred-and-eighty days and then send them to Robbin Island to rot with Nelson Mandela!”

“Where is he? Where is my son?”

They didn’t answer. I heard the door closing behind them as they left.

I spent the rest of the night with my parents in their bed. None of us slept.

:::

Early the next morning I threw Black Like Me into the coal-fired furnace that heated our hot-water tank. I discovered it wasn’t easy to destroy a book—the pages simply curled and singed, and I had to keep poking the fire and adding newspaper to make the truth burn.

 

 

Publisher’s Notes:

1. From Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin, published in 1961 by Houghton Mifflin. The expanded quotation below is from Black Like Me: The Definitive Griffin Estate Edition, Corrected from Original Manuscripts (Wings Press, 2011):
   
   “I have been told that many distinguished Negroes whose careers have brought them South encounter similar difficulties. All the honors in the world cannot buy them a cup of coffee in the lowest greasy-spoon joint. It is not that they crave service in the white man’s café over their own—it is simply that in many sparsely settled areas Negro cafés do not exist; and even in densely settled areas, one must sometimes cross town for a glass of water.”
   
   
2. See also this interesting article by Sarfraz Manzoor in The Guardian (27 October 2011), as recommended by Roseanne Freed: “Rereading: Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin”
   
   (“Fifty years after John Howard Griffin darkened his skin and travelled through the segregated US south, his record of the fear and prejudice he experienced is still resonant”)
   
   
3. Additional reading recommendation from Ms. Freed: Rivonia’s Children: Three Families and the Cost of Conscience in White South Africa (Continuum, New York: 2001) by Glenn Frankel, who spent 27 years with The Washington Post as a staff writer and editor.
   
   As described at Frankel’s website, Rivonia’s Children is “the little-known story of three white, middle-class families ... a handful of Jewish activists ... and their remarkable struggle against apartheid in the mid-1960s.”
   
   

Roseanne Freed

grew up in apartheid South Africa and now lives in Los Angeles, where she takes inner city schoolchildren hiking in the Santa Monica mountains. She is a Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee, whose poems have appeared in Blue Heron Review, Contrary Magazine, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Naugatuck River Review, ONE ART, and Verse-Virtual among others.