A Sport of Nature by Nadine Gordimer

hands about, begins to speak and stops; he is embarrassed by and will only embarrass by what he has to tell. —We had a fish and chips shop. My mother, after my pa passed away. One of the boys that worked in the kitchen, he used to play these things. I got my guitar when I was about fourteen, and we both used to play it. He first taught me guitar.—
    â€”He sings in their languages, too. Come on Gert, one of their songs. Come on. Please.—
    It is always difficult for anyone to refuse Hillela; even people who don’t have, like Pauline and Olga and the family, a duty towards her. She butts the boy with her guitar. He takes it with lowered head but when he begins to sing, in the black man’s voice and cadence, in the black man’s language—as white people hear work-gangs sing in the street, only their song making them present among the whites driving by—his inarticulacy, his fumbling self is broken away. That he is singing against the sobbing beat of a pop singer does not matter; a song that is not his own sings through him.
    Hillela asks him to tell what he’s singing about; producing him for Sasha; she knows the sort of thing Sasha likes to know.
    At once there is difficulty, again, finding words. —Not really a song. Not really. It’s like, you know, it’s a native boy who’s come here to town to work. He’s singing, saying, we come to Jo’burg because we hoping we get something nice, but now we don’t get it. That’s all it’s about.—
    When the joint comes round Sasha feels her—Hillela—look to him before she takes a draw. But she needn’t have worried, the weed has been smoked traditionally, long before white kids discovered it, by the local people in the country where he goes to school; he hasn’t ever brought any home only because he doesn’t want to be the one to be blamed for corrupting the two girls. And Hillela doesn’t drink; he sees that.
    Hillela was all right that night;—a member of the family, after all, was keeping an eye on her. Sasha had his mother’s car to take her home in. First they delivered a lot of other people to various parts of town. It was late. Pauline was away at the All In African Conference in Maritzburg. Joe and Carole were so deep in the hibernation of the small hours that the house seemed empty; without Pauline all the watchtowers of the spirit were unattended, its drawbridges down. Anything could be let in, nothing would be recorded. Hillela fell asleep in Sasha’s bed, this bed which his cousin and sister used to raid, beating him with pillows. There had been a coup; he had usurped and was on guard in place of his mother. He kept himself awake and measured the passing of darkness by the soft sensation of the girl’s breath spreading on his neck and then drawing back like breath clouding and disappearing on a window pane. When he gauged he must, he separated her warmth from his own, so that once again she became herself, he became himself.
    Carole did not know that her cousin was home from a party, had come into their bedroom and slid into her own bed.
    Sasha switched on the witness of his lamp and searched his sheets for frail dark question-mark hairs that Bettie, who insisted on making his bed as a holiday treat for him, would recognize as not his brassy-blond sheddings. He did not want to be reminded—to have to remember in the morning.

Opportunities
    Hillela could have been like anybody else. She had the opportunity. The same opportunity as Carole and Sasha. Or Olga’s spoilt children—if that had been what she preferred. She was a white child, with choices; that was the irony of it. Young blacks had no choice, only necessity and plenty of ignorance about how to deal with that, in addition. Alpheus was so ambitious, so eager to better himself, become a lawyer, and now he had to saddle himself with a girl and baby on the way.—The trouble is we’re