Honorary White by E. R. Braithwaite Page B

rest of us, just look over your shoulder. If you’re quick enough you might learn something.”
    Everything he said struck home. Sure, I had been telling myself that nobody was restricting or supervising my movements. I’d been in and out of Soweto and Alexandra, hadn’t I? My only problem had been my inability to make contact with the so-called black representatives. Buthelezi. Matanzima. The Information Office had promised me meetings with them but had only come up with excuses. Always at the last moment. But I must not let the things this man was saying color everything that happened. If I couldn’t reach the big Blacks, there would be others.
    â€œAre you concerned for me or just sorry for yourself?” I asked, trying to throw him on the defensive, and free myself from the suffocation of his penetrating insight.
    â€œI’m not sorry for me, man. I’ll live. I lost ten years of my life out there on the island. Doing shit, man. Breaking rocks for the sake of breaking rocks. You’re sitting on a pile of rocks today with a hammer in your hand and sometime next week or the week after it’s a pile of pebbles and you can’t remember how it happened. You’ve used two weeks of your life watching rocks turn to dust. And the next week you’re sitting on another pile of rocks. Or is it the same one? You know what they did with the pebbles, man? They just left them there to remind us that we were just shit. You know what our ambition was? To stay alive. Staying alive, that’s all. Living for news from outside. Do you know what was the most important thing to us in there? Not money, man. Not pussy. A newspaper. Any old newspaper. We read every word. Everything. And we talked. Can you understand? Those fucking Afrikaner guards watched us to prevent us from talking. Threatened us. Punished us. But we talked. Even with our mouths shut like, what you call them, ventriloquists, man. Whoever found a piece of newspaper read it, then passed it on and told everyone what he’d read. After a while we were reading more closely, more perceptively than when we were free. We shared our points of view. We talked. Especially about the political situation.” Here he laughed again, scratching his head, remembering.
    â€œOnce a priest came into the prison carrying a briefcase with a newspaper, the Times, stuck under the flap. Like lightning, it disappeared. He never made a fuss about it. That Sunday we had a whole newspaper to read. After that, whenever that priest came to see us, he brought a newspaper and it always disappeared from his briefcase. Survival, man, that’s the word. Nelson Mandela is up there. Living it out from hour to hour. That’s where you learn about hope, man. Without it you’re dead.”
    He came and placed a hand on my arm, a conciliatory gesture.
    â€œWill you come and see me again, friend? I promise to be nice.”
    â€œDon’t strain yourself on my account.”
    â€œThat’s not a strain. Living like this is a strain. Shit, I can’t even see you to the door. Never know who might be checking on me from outside. If I’m seen talking to you, they could come and take me away. Fucking lovely way to live, isn’t it? I’m jealous, man. You, a stranger, can move about as you wish. Right? Me, a native son, I’m denied the right to step outside. Goodnight, man.”
    I left him, his words continuing their disturbing refrain in my ear. I’d gone to his house to talk with him about his time in prison. He’d talked about my visit to his country, sowing in my mind a very sizable seed of doubt about my own motives, and my possible malleability by the South African authorities. Walking away from the Indian’s irritating sneers, I wondered if he was right.
    He’d questioned my coming to South Africa but he’d either forgotten or ignored the fact that my coming made it possible for me to see him and hear his