Black and White

CW: Physical violence, racism, apartheid

BLACK AND WHITE

South Africa 1975

It's dark. Not inky-black, you understand. Just city-dark; the darkness of stone-shattered streetlights.

I can still see the road, stretching wet and away; defined by glimmers of reflection. Pavements are lost; the bins and the garbage; the things that lurk on the fringes; the soft splash of foot in puddle.

I'm invisible where I sit on the kerb, damp working its cold way through my body. From beanie to sneakers, I'm enveloped in pigment. God made me this way, or so I'm told: black and evil; a synonymous synchronicity, mama said before she left.

It sounds cool but I'm stuffed if I know what it means.

Eyes aching, I search the shadow-sounds.

When I look to the road again she's there, walking towards me.

Electric freeze-frame; a spatter of sparks.

White dress, white face.

Pigmentally challenged, mama would have said.

There's a frilly ribbon in her hair. A ridiculous apron with embroidered red hearts hangs from her neck; she's been baking.

White flour on a brown board. Essence of cinnamon and lemon.

The dark sees her. Things scurry, footfalls, shadows, movement.

Nothing sees me.

'Hello Toby,' she says, reaching down to take my hand. 'I've brought you a cinnamon bun'.

Her hand is gentle against my calluses, white-bread soft as it guides me up from the damp; her eyes dark holes in the pale of her face as I rise to tower over her. Were there a moon my darkness would plunge her into shadow.

'Come.' I draw my love into the night.

* * *

Buildings brittle-edged in the dawn stand guard over a form discarded among urban waste; alabaster face, incongruous hearts on a white apron garishly splashed with red. Unseeing eyes stare at a half-eaten cinnamon bun boot-heel-crushed into the asphalt.

Alien forms in creaking white plastic don blue nitrile gloves and overshoes, voices muted. 'A teenager … no track marks … sexually assaulted … time of death … ' the language of the law.

Unseen, I watch from above; the scurrying white bugs foreshortened as silent tears slither from my eyes.

'Why me,' I'd asked as we lay entwined, the sweat of our lovemaking chilling on our bodies.

'Because you're my obsession,' she'd whispered, her fingers gently tracing the architecture of my body. 'You’re beautiful and good and kind; my lover; my protector.'

Noble words that lie and confuse when you're black as the things that walk the alleys and as evil as Satan-spawn; or so my mother liked to say.

Destined never to meet describes us perfectly; hers a world of bright colours and shiny white, mine shades of grey and black; her future happy and secure, mine a life-sentence of despair. The time and place of our meeting is evidence of God's cruel humour; Johannesburg at the height of Apartheid, the consummation our love an offence under the law1.

Why then did He send her to fill my dreams with visions of the impossible?

And why, when the impossible had become possible, the reality a gift greater than anything I could imagine, has He taken love and hope and dashed them to shreds.

I walk her home. Always – so why didn't she wake me before she left last night?

I can't go into her home of course. But I always walk her back from where we exchange our love. And we say our goodbyes in the shelter of the wall where the security lights won't be triggered. Then she runs across the lawn in their angry glare to the door she's left unlocked.

I heard her father once, his voice rough with authority. 'You can't go into the garden at night Eleanor,' he scolded. 'It isn't safe.'

But still she comes; risking so much more than walking the garden at night.

So why didn't she wake me?

Satiated by sex, I'd fallen asleep in her arms, the warmth of her body a comfort washing our relationship clean.

The brutal howl of sirens jerked me awake. A raid?

'We have to go …' I reached into the space where she wasn't. I think I knew it was over then, long before I groped my way to the curtains and saw her lying splayed in strobes of red and blue, a discarded mannequin amidst the debris of yesterday.

Cockroaches scurrying to a feed, they descended. Ambulances first, then police, sirens unwinding at last into silence.

I have to go to her; had to take her hand; close her beautiful eyes so she couldn't see the cockroaches surrounding.

Instead, I cower in the room, seeing our love through the eyes of others.

'Maak Oop!' The voice of authority, of terror. There are three of them, guns pointing as they crowd through the door. They are all white.

'Op die vloer, Kaffir2.' The skinny one's voice is shrill. Despite his gun, he's afraid of my size; my blackness. Meekly I drop to my knees, scared he'll pull the trigger.

'Lê, hande agter jou rug,' commands the largest of the three, holstering his gun as I lie face down and allow him to place the cuffs on my wrists. He ratchets them tight.

From the floor, I watch as they tweezer evidence from the unmade bed where our love defied the law. One holds up the red ribbon I’d so gently untied to watch her hair cascade across the beauty of her shoulders and breasts.

* * *

The interview room smells of misery, once-white walls stained with what could be blood. I sit on a metal chair bolted to the floor, hands cuffed to a steel hoop on the table. There's no heating and I shiver my t-shirt and shorts, bare feet absorbing cold from the concrete floor.

Opposite, a grizzled veteran in the uniform of the Special Branch stares at me for an eternity.

‘Why, Kaffir? He asks eventually.

‘Why would you choose to rape the daughter of the Chief Prosecutor?’

Footnotes

1 During the years of Apartheid the Immorality Act prohibited sexual intercourse between "Europeans" (white people) and "natives" (black people). The penalty was up to five years' imprisonment for the man and four years for the woman.

2 The term "Kaffir" was extensively used to disparage black people during Apartheid.