Pretoria in Black and White

From his shop on Church Street in Pretoria my father sold groceries, produce, and some dry goods. His customers were both a small passing trade and, on a larger scale, the Indian and African shopowners in the black townships. He had a truck driven by a giant African man named George. No doubt George had a last name as well, but I never learned it. George could shoulder, carry, and hoist hundred-pound bags of mielie-meal or sugar onto the back of the truck with ease and aplomb. As the bags landed in the truck, George would breathe loudly, "My baas" (boss). Despite the inequality of their condition, George and my father liked and respected each other. They had a good relationship given that this was South Africa in the fifties and sixties. My father treated the men who worked for him fairly and humanely, and he paid them better than did the other merchants in the area. This may not sound like much, but it mattered to the men, who remained loyal to him and affectionate to me, his son, who came to help out sometimes at the shop after school, rather ineffectually and shyly trying to help George with his loading. George was kind to me and encouraged me when, at fourteen or fifteen, I was finally able to throw a fifty-pound bag of mielie-meal onto the truck. I was called kleinbaas—little baas—and the men assumed that when I was old enough I would take over the business. I hovered on the margins of the group of working Africans on the occasions when I helped out at the shop.

My mother, sisters, and I had confused and contradictory feelings about the shop. It enabled us to live well, but, to my mother, it was a major source and symbol of her unhappy marriage. We all believed that my father was more closely wedded to the shop than to the family. The shop was what took him away from home (though we kids were fairly content with his absence); and, when he brought his apparently endless business worries home with him, we felt how the shop invaded our lives. My father was not a particularly good businessman and seemed endlessly consumed and regulated by the vagaries of the business. The one of us who would be "asked" by my mother to phone daddy and ask him to bring home a can of peas or bag of this or that was the unfortunate recipient of an impatient grunt of assent and the hostile thunk of the phone's being slammed down in his or her ear without the favor of a goodbye. At the same time the shop was a rather exotic and interesting place, with its storage area piled two storeys high with bags of grain, produce, sugar, and spices and boxes of tinned goods and sweets and barrels of achar (preserved mangoes) and hundreds of cases of goods of unknown origin, type, or utility. It smelled good in there: sweet and savory at once—earthy, clean, and strong. There was always a swirl of activity in the front office and the back storage room, of men working, singing, loading the truck, arguing with one another. The shop was downtown, where life was black, busy, interesting, and wonderfully different from the suburbs where we lived. The shop was full of active, almost musical, life.

I liked nothing more than to eat lunch with the men at the shop, to dig my fingers into the communal pot of pap (pronounced pop)—a stodgy kind of white polenta—and gravy, and to twirl the pap around until it was covered with the hot, salty brown sauce and pop it into my mouth and suck my fingers as the men did. I loved these tough black men who worked in the shop, in their dirty overalls and with sweaty bandannas around their heads. Their shoes were, often as not, homemade from pieces of old tires roughly cut in the shape of soles and held together with wire. Loading the truck was a rhythmic musical ritual accompanied...