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Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night
Sindiwe Magona
(First published 1988)
Joyce
‘My mother got me this job, but believe me, I’m not going to be a maid for long.
‘I was a student doing matric. But since the riots, there have been no real classes. So Mother said: "Ntombi, go to work until this thing is over and then you’ll go back to school."
‘Do you know how many African women doctors there are? In this whole country? Five. F I V E – that’s all.
‘Well, look at me. Look at me real well. Look! There will be six – that, I promise you.
‘I look at the people I work for. I look at them and I feel sorry for them, you know. The days of masters and medems with lots of slaves are going. Friend, before long, these people will learn to cook for themselves, clean for themselves, and scrub their own floors and do their laundry for themselves.
‘This exploitation of the masses will stop. Its days are numbered. Workers are going to be paid a decent wage. Have you ever seen a non-white loaf of bread? Can you go and buy black milk? Does the price of cheese drop when a black person is buying it? It’s fine to have cheap labour. But fodder costs the same whether the horse chewing it is black or white.
‘Antie Sophie’s medem is right in some way. Domestic workers should work civilised hours like all other workers. They should be able to live with their families. And it should be a crime to pay a full-grown woman less than the pocket-money you give to your twelve-year-old.
‘She is also right, the domestic worker should improve herself. But I don’t agree with her idea of what that improvement means.
‘Thank you, very much, but I don’t want to learn to iron starched shirts better. I don’t want to learn the ways of laying the most attractive table. I feel no woman should be condemned to life in another’s kitchen.
‘There ought to be a law – that no one serves as a maid for more than ten years unless they get certification that they are mentally impaired and there in no hope of rehabilitation.
‘Only beyond-repair mental invalids should be domestic servants for all their working life. And the medem should be held responsible for the advancement of her maid – that should go hand in hand with the privilege of being served.
‘And the colour of the maid should not automatically be black. White women and men of all colours should be liberated enough and secure enough that they take jobs as domestic workers. This should not be the preserve of black women only. Neither should the position of master and medem: black too should experience those positions. We all need to expand, to grow, to stretch out and be free. We must stop living according to prescription.
‘You tell me of the kind white women who buy books for the children of their maids. But aren’t these maids working women? Why do they need to have someone else pay for their children’s books? And, why do the white women feel compelled to buy books for children who are not theirs? Could it be that somewhere in their foggy consciences there are vague disturbances? Could it be that they themselves are not fully convinced of the adequacy of the wage they offer their employees? If that is the case, even half the case, then buying books is hardly the answer.
‘Surely, even in the minds o people who have long forgotten what it is to be without blinkers, white woman must see they do not pay their servants a living wage or an adequate wage: to say nothing of a fair wage. That can only come from a just medem or master.
‘The white woman can do all sorts of things for her maid. She can take the maid to her doctor; she can give her groceries to take home to her children on her day off; she can give her her cast-off clothes; she can pay for the education of the maids’ children; she can take the maid with her when she goes to Pampoenstad on vacation; and thousands of other good things like that: but, she, is doing for the maid what the maid would do for herself if she had the money.
‘If the white woman were to buy heaven itself for the black woman in her employ, that would be hell. Nothing can make up for underpaying one’s employee. Nothing, except increasing her wages.
‘The dribs and drabs the white woman sees as charity are nothing but a salve to her conscience, and insult to the maid’s dignity, and an assault to her self-esteem. The maid remains in a never-ending position of indebtedness. She works. Pay her and pay her justly. Then and only then does she become – even in the eyes of the medem – the adult she is.
‘Feminism in this country has been retarded, in part, by this paternalistic attitude of white women towards black women. How can I be a sister to my father, the white woman?
‘Living is learning. When is the domestic worker ever going to learn to mind her money if she never sees any? Two hundred rands. That’s not enough for food money. Where is the rent for the four-room in Mdazzbhi? Children get sick. That’s money for the clinic, money for medicine, and money for the special food doctors and nurses insist on when you take a child to them: "Give her milk. Give her fruit. Give her fresh vegetable." They don’t tell you where you must get the money to buy all these things. Oh, no. And children’s bodies are covered in bristle, from the way they tear away at clothes. Their clothes don’t last at all. And the flimsy material the clothes-makers use don’t help either. They make clothers that will not last; they make them that way so that you can come buying every other day. And then there is the money the schools demand. And the money the children demand to go to school – to buy vetkoek and cool drink. The children want their school money otherwise they won’t go to school. You who work for this money are the very last person to use any of it on yourself. Don’t forget, the church wants its ticket money too. Mmmhh? No, the woman who works in the kitchen never has money. And this is a woman who is working, not part time but every day. She even sleeps at her place of work so, in a way, she works a twenty-four hour day, except for rest and sleep. With luck, she sees her own family less than ten waking hours a week. For two hundred lousy rands a month.
‘Instead of being kind and buying this and that for the maid, just translate the kindness to this woman’s wages – to rands and cents she can count on and knows what are due her each month, whether or not your children have chicken pox or you need to replace your coloured contact lenses or your husband’s Mercedes must be serviced.
‘Until white women do this, maids will remain stuck in poverty while in gainful employment. And I am sick and tired of people telling me about this one woman who bought a house for her maid. Who bought the house the maid cleans every day? The house the kind white woman lives in with her family? Do you hear her boss or her husband’s boss going around crowing about how he bought a house for his employee? Why not?
‘Because the boss probably doesn’t even know whether his employee’s house faces east or west, north or south. It is none of his business unless they are friends. Why do we become not just friends but family to the people we work for? People whose own families are bereft of kith?
‘White people work. They earn. They live.
‘We also work. We earn peanuts. We live in hope of living one day. But the one day never comes and we die poor, hoping still.
‘Believe me, I mean it when I say I will not stay long in this kind of work. I would rather kill myself than be a nanny for the rest of my life. My mother is a domestic servant. So is her mother. And so was her mother before her. Four generations of domestic servants – that’s enough. NO MORE. I refuse to be a slave.
‘When I see myself cooped up in this box they call the maid’s room I ask myself how the maids who have worked here didn’t lose their minds. Imagine sleeping in a room whose walls look as if they could close in on you any minute you annoyed them. And then I think of all these women who work around here. Some are no longer young, you know? Why are they still here?
‘Late at night, have you noticed all these men, fathers of children who are left to fend for themselves through the night, killing time near the shops waiting for the white families to go to sleep so they can come creeping to their wives and girlfriends?
‘Mornings, see all the women in their uniforms taking white children to school. What a sight; until you ask yourself who takes the black child to school. And the white woman knows the black woman working for her has children. Knowing this, why is she not bothered by this mother in her house, the mother who never sees her children to school, who is never there when they return from school with some hurt, real or imagined, or when they have had a tough day just being children?
‘These black women, in most cases, are more housekeepers than anything else. But no, in the eyes of the white women they work for they are children, worse than children: children grow up but domestic workers remain children to their death. When the white children the black woman raised become adults, they see the maid as a child, just as their parents have done all the time this woman has been working for them, smoothing their days and making them forget the coarser side of keeping house.
‘White women may grow; they may become distinguished writers, champion golfers, renown fashion designers, executives, and anything else; it is the unappreciated black women, who slave for them for next to nothing, who give them the time to indulge their fancies, follow their dreams, and live their fantasies to the fullest. "Time is money," don’t we say? Then where is the money the black woman should get for her time?
‘The time the white woman is given by the black woman who works for her, that time is more than money; it is freedom to the white woman: freedom to become whatever she would become. And she fails to see her indebtedness to the black maid who asks for so little in return: freedom from want, fair wage for sweat.
‘These people I work for thought they were paying me a compliment: "Read Penelope a story from her Xhosa book." No mention of extra pay while I am being asked to tutor their daughter in Xhosa. Fine, it is my mother tongue and I am happy she is learning it; but can you imagine my mother asking the woman she works for to teach me English? The cheek. Of course, my poor mother wouldn’t dream of such an imposition on her medem, but the medem thinks nothing of exploiting the maid. During my time, I must read a story so that their child’s Xhosa can improve. And here I am, in the first place, when I would rather be in school. But that does not make them think of me as a student whose learning has been disturbed and who is pining for school. No. Even when they recognise that I can read, all they can think of is how that may benefit their child who deserves to be in school and to do well there. Me? I don’t count except as a donkey that must work. I just told them I was not good at reading and I did not like stories. They haven’t asked me again. I am waiting for the day they will ask me if I would like tutoring in, say English or Maths.
‘I wonder what they will say when I tell them I’m taking Friday off next week. A meeting for students, teachers and parents had been called for next Friday. I have to go. I want to be there when a decision is taken. I want to know what is going to happen so I can make appropriate plans. I am not going to see my twentieth birthday in this job. There is only one way for me to go from here: and, that is: OUT! … OUT! …OUT!
