A Man of the People Read Online Free PDF Page B

heartedly, to a certain secret yearning for higher education; in 1964 he was valiantly proving that a man like him was better without it. Of course he had not altogether persuaded himself, or else he would not have shown such excitement over the LL.D. arranged for him from some small, back-street college.
    CHAPTER THREE
    Before making the long journey to the capital, I thought I should first pay a short visit to my home village, Urua, about fifteen miles from Anata. I wanted to see my father about one or two matters but more especially I wanted to take my boy, Peter, to his parents for the holidays as I had promised to do before they let me have him. Peter was naturally very excited about going home after nearly twelve months, during which he had become a wage-earner. At first I found it amusing when he went over to Josiah's shop across the road and bought a rayon head-tie for his mother and a head of tobacco for his father. But as I thought more about it I realized how those touching gestures by a mere boy, whom I paid twenty shillings a month, showed up my own quite different circumstances. And I felt envious. I had no mother to buy head-ties for, and although I had a father, giving things to him was like pouring a little water into a dried- up well. My mother had been his second wife, but she had died in her first childbirth. This meant in the minds of my people that I was an unlucky child, if not a downright wicked and evil one. Not that my father ever said so openly. To begin with he had too many other wives and children to take any special notice of me. But I was always a very sensitive child and knew from quite early in my life that there was something wrong with my affairs. My father's first wife, whom we all call Mama, brought me up like one of her own children; still I sensed there was something missing. One day at play another child with whom I had fallen out called me 'Bad child that crunched his mother's skull'. That was it. I am not saying that I had an unhappy or a lonely childhood. There were too many of us in the family for anyone to think of loneliness or unhappiness. And I must say this for my father that he never tolerated any of his wives drawing a line no matter how thin between her own children and those of others. We had only one Mama. The other two wives (at the time---there are more now) were called Mother by their children, or so and so's mother by the rest. Of course as soon as I grew old enough to understand a few simple proverbs I realized that I should have died and let my mother live. Whenever my people go to console a woman whose baby has died at birth or soon after, they always tell her to dry her eyes because it is better the water is spilled than the pot broken. The idea being that a sound pot can always return to the stream. My father was a District Interpreter. In those days when no one understood as much as 'come' in the white man's language, the District Officer was like the Supreme Deity, and the Interpreter the principal minor god who carried prayers and sacrifice to Him. Every sensible supplicant knew that the lesser god must first be wooed and put in a sweet frame of mind before he could undertake to intercede with the Owner of the Sky. So Interpreters in those days were powerful, very rich, widely known and hated. Wherever the D. O.'s power was felt---and that meant everywhere---the Interpreter's name was held in fear and trembling. We grew up knowing that the world was full of enemies. Our father had protective medicine located at crucial points in our house and compound. One, I remember, hung over the main entrance; but the biggest was in a gourd in a corner of his bedroom. No child went alone into that room which was virtually always under lock and key anyway. We were told that such and such homes were never to be entered; and those people were pointed out to us from whom we must not accept food. But we also had many friends. There were all those people who brought my father