My Son's Story Read Online Free PDF

that they will take you seriously.—And they followed him.
    But it was not always so easy. Knowing he took them seriously they expected much of him. Not only his own class, but the rest of the senior school. They quickly picked up a kind of pidgin terminology of revolutionary rhetoric that was the period’s
replacement for schoolboy slang, and their demands as well as their actions became more and more strident. They came to him, they expected him to stand between them and the principal. He persuaded the principal to let him go with them when they determined to march across the veld to show solidarity with the children who had been locked out of their school by the police, after a boycott of classes; black solidarity. He took responsibility for keeping stones out of their hands. And he succeeded. For the first time, the old people saw his distinction ratified in a newspaper: not one of the important dailies, only a weekly published for the interests of people like themselves, but there he was above the bobbing corks of children’s heads, tall and thin with dark newsprint caves where his eyes would be. The picture was cut out and passed round cousins, aunts and uncles. It was very likely the first time his photograph went into police files, as well. And when the police did come to his school because some of the children had set alight a bus in frustration that found release in ugly elation at destruction, the children expected him to stand between them and the police; he had not been able to keep petrol and matches out of their hands as he had kept stones. He went to the police station when seven among them were detained; but all that was achieved was, in trying to find out where they were being held, he had to give his name and address, and so the police had that confirming identification to file along with the newspaper photograph; he received no information.
    He was doing it all for the school, for the children of the community. Aila knew that. He didn’t keep anything from her. She knew some of the parents had complained about his having marched with the children over the veld to the blacks’ school: a teacher should not be allowed to encourage such things. She knew that when the principal informed him of this it was a
warning. The principal looked as if he were about to say what his fifth-form teacher was expecting from him; but his authority always wavered before this particular member of his staff; he added nothing. And Aila did not need her husband to spell out realization that including the community in one’s concerns was bringing something the innocence of good intentions hadn’t taken into account: risk to the modest security of the base from which that concern reached out—his job, the payments on the car and the refrigerator, the stock of groceries brought home every Saturday. After such signals as the interview with the principal they went matter-of-factly about the occupations of the day. But in their bedroom, the sight of her folding their clothes away, brushing the jacket he wore to school, told him that this was, that night, a ritual defending her family, asserting the persistence of the familiar against any unknown; and the awareness, for her, that he had lowered his book and was looking at her (she met his eyes in her mirror, he was behind her, lying in bed) while she plaited her hair, was a compact in which they would together accommodate the unforeseen. They were not really afraid; only on behalf of the children. And if it had been only a matter of being able to continue to feed and clothe them! Baby was nearly twelve; some her age were already running excitedly with the crowd, stones in hand, as the first child to be shot had done. Baby displayed no interest in such solidarity—she was absorbed in her dancing lessons, pop-star worship and bosom friendships, but who knew for how long? Will was too young to be at risk—in this community, unlike the black ones across