My Son's Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

become like the people of the town. And who wanted to become like the very ones feared and hated? Envy was not freedom.
    After he was married, while the children were still small, although he knew that the instinct of responsibility extended beyond his part in maintaining the safety-net of families a marriage
brings together, he thought he had found the instinct’s natural bounds in the time, energy and imagination he put into his projects for the community and the participation of his family in these. The Rotary Club and the Lions granted money for Aila and the committee of housewives she had mustered to set up a crèche, impressed by the respectability of the schoolteacher from across the veld—his distinction, if they could go so tar as to use that surprising term in description of one of those who made Saturday a day to avoid shopping in town. Baby was a member of the Junior Red Cross (community branch, segregated from that of the town) and went solemnly, holding hands with a small companion, from door to door with a collection box. And little Will was a keen Scout Cub (community troop) by the time another small boy, running with a crowd of older schoolchildren towards the police, was shot dead, and a newspaper photographer’s picture of his body, carried by another child, became the pietà of suffering happening everywhere across the veld where the real blacks were.
    When did distinction between black and real black, between himself and them, fade, for the schoolteacher? That ringing in the air, ‘equality’ beginning to be heard as ‘freedom’—it happened without specific awareness, a recognition of what really had been there to understand, all the time. All his time. In the year after the pietà (he had a photograph of the one in Rome, reproduced in one of the books in his bookcase) was re-enacted in the black areas that were everywhere across the veld outside the towns, the children at his school began to stay out of class and stand about in the schoolyard with bits of cardboard slung from their necks. The lettering generally ran out of space before the message was completed, but it was so familiar, from pictures and reports of what was happening in the schools of real blacks that it could be read, anyway. WE DONT WANT THIS RUBBISH
EDUCATION APARTHEID SLAVVERY POLICE GET OUT OUR SCHOOLS. They were copying the real blacks, the headmaster told his staff meeting, and he would have none of it. They would not grow up to carry passes, their schools were better than the blacks’, they were advantaged—no, he did not say it: they were lighter than the blacks. But the hardest-working, best member of his staff was thinking how children learn from modelling themselves on others, mimicking at first the forms of maturity they see in their parents and then coming to perform them cognitively as their capacities grow; why should they not be learning something about themselves, for themselves, by mimicking the responsibilities recognized precociously by certain other children—their siblings. To recognize the real blacks as siblings: that was already something no irritated, angry headmaster could explain away as a schoolyard craze, wearing bottle-top jewellery, passing a zoll round in the lavatories.
    The schoolteacher walked back to his empty classroom; stood there at his table alone; then picked up a red marker with a broad tip and went out among his boys and girls. They stirred with bravado and fear; they had had many calls for silence from teachers who came to harangue them with orders and even to plead reason to them. But he went from cardboard to cardboard correcting spelling and adding prepositions left out. Giggles and laughter moved the children now, like one of the gusts that kicked dust spiralling away in the trampled yard.—Let’s take your placards into class and rewrite them. When you want to tell people something you have to know how to express it properly. So