A Sport of Nature by Nadine Gordimer Page B

do.—
    This question was not a question, was the summation of more than the small nuisance of Alpheus. Adults, who always knew what the children should do, at this time were withdrawn, in the presence of the children, into a state of waiting to be told or given a sign. For themselves. In various countries and eras children understand marriage as what it is for their parents in that place and period. Living with Pauline and Joe, the children saw that the meaning of marriage was that Pauline and Joe expected this sign from one another. The volume of the cheerful, restless house was turned down (as Pauline would sometimes stride into the girls’ room, pulling a mock-agonized face, and turn down the volume of their record-player). The rooms strewn with evidence of everyone’s activities were under dustsheets of adult preoccupation. The newspapers Pauline and Joe read and had always let pile up beside sofa and chairs, where they served in place of Olga’s coffee tables, gave information but no guidance. Carole lifted her head like a young buck alert to something—what, it does not yet know—the mature animals have noticed, and Hillela went on with her translation of
Tartarin de Tarascon
while Pauline read out aloud to Joe: —‘I don’t want to be equal with Europeans. I want them to call us baas. I wish I can live till we rule, I will do the same to them: I will send the police to demand passes from whites. Their wives are going to wash the clothes for our wives.We don’t want to mix with whites, we left the African National Congress because we saw Europeans among us. We are fighting for the full rights of Africans. We do not fight to dance and sit with Europeans.’—
    â€”The government bans a non-racial movement like the ANC, it gets black racists as primitive as its white ones. It bans again; and an even worse reaction will come. Are you surprised?—
    When Pauline left the drawbridge down and the watchtowers unguarded she had been at a conference where blacks sat with whites. Only as an observer—she had got in with the help of black friends—the Chief had been a guest in her house. The civil rights organization to which she belonged was one of those that had decided not to take part; they said the All-In African Conference was a front, dominated by communists who had indoctrinated and infiltrated the African National Congress and its allies.
    There were chants and freedom songs one didn’t need to know the language to respond to with an almost physical expansion of being; after having been shut away, so white, so long. For herself, she came back home with ‘Nelson Mandela’s words in my ears, something you can’t stop hearing’. Carole and Hillela saw her unblinking hunter’s eyes stilled and magnified with real tears when she played the tape she had run while the man spoke for the first time in nine years (he had just been released from bans) to the assembly of all colours, to the government, and to the whole country. He knew what he could do. He called for a national convention. —Explain to the girls what that is, Joe.— And Joe explained that a national convention would be that meeting to culminate all meetings, one where white leaders from up there in the House of Parliament in Cape Town (on holiday one year, Olga had pointed out to Hillela and her sons the beautiful white building among oak trees) and black leaders emerged from prison, Underground and exile would decide in a proper and constitutional manner upon the dismantling of apartheid. Sasha, Caroleand Hillela had been taken to see a court in session, once. While Joe explained, they would be visualizing something rather like that, the solemnity at mahogany tables, the carafes of water, the security men standing round the walls to keep intruders from shouting
we do not fight to dance and sit with Europeans
.
    Mandela’s voice said that should the government fail to