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and uncles had gone off to the cities to find work, and the children who weren’t wanted, or
whom no one could afford to feed, had been sent back to the homeland to live on this aunt’s
farm.
The homelands were, ostensibly, the original homes of South Africa’s tribes, sovereign
and semi-sovereign “nations” where black people would be “free.” Of course, this was a lie.
For starters, despite the fact that black people made up over 80 percent of South Africa’s
population, the territory allocated for the homelands was about 13 percent of the country’s
land. There was no running water, no electricity. People lived in huts.
Where South Africa’s white countryside was lush and irrigated and green, the black lands
were overpopulated and overgrazed, the soil depleted and eroding. Other than the menial
wages sent home from the cities, families scraped by with little beyond subsistence-level
farming. My mother’s aunt hadn’t taken her in out of charity. She was there to work. “I was
one of the cows,” my mother would later say, “one of the oxen.” She and her cousins were up
at half past four, plowing fields and herding animals before the sun baked the soil as hard as
cement and made it too hot to be anywhere but in the shade.
For dinner there might be one chicken to feed fourteen children. My mom would have to
fight with the bigger kids to get a handful of meat or a sip of the gravy or even a bone from
which to suck out some marrow. And that’s when there was food for dinner at all. When
there wasn’t, she’d steal food from the pigs. She’d steal food from the dogs. The farmers
would put out scraps for the animals, and she’d jump for it. She was hungry; let the animals
fend for themselves. There were times when she literally ate dirt. She would go down to the
river, take the clay from the riverbank, and mix it with the water to make a grayish kind of
milk. She’d drink that to feel full.
But my mother was blessed that her village was one of the places where a mission school
had contrived to stay open in spite of the government’s Bantu education policies. There she
had a white pastor who taught her English. She didn’t have food or shoes or even a pair of
underwear, but she had English. She could read and write. When she was old enough she
stopped working on the farm and got a job at a factory in a nearby town. She worked on a
sewing machine making school uniforms. Her pay at the end of each day was a plate of food.
She used to say it was the best food she’d ever eaten, because it was something she had
earned on her own. She wasn’t a burden to anyone and didn’t owe anything to anyone.
When my mom turned twenty-one, her aunt fell ill and that family could no longer keep
her in Transkei. My mom wrote to my gran, asking her to send the price of a train ticket,
about thirty rand, to bring her home. Back in Soweto, my mom enrolled in the secretarial
course that allowed her to grab hold of the bottom rung of the white-collar world. She worked
and worked and worked but, living under my grandmother’s roof, she wasn’t allowed to keep
her own wages. As a secretary, my mom was bringing home more money than anyone else,
and my grandmother insisted it all go to the family. The family needed a radio, an oven, a
refrigerator, and it was now my mom’s job to provide it.
So many black families spend all of their time trying to fix the problems of the past. That
is the curse of being black and poor, and it is a curse that follows you from generation to
generation. My mother calls it “the black tax.” Because the generations who came before you
have been pillaged, rather than being free to use your skills and education to move forward,
you lose everything just trying to bring everyone behind you back up to zero. Working for the