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LEARNING TO WALK
If you
wore shoes – as I did for one day only -- at the local Eastern Cape Government
School, you were ridiculed and beaten, so you did not wear them. You went home
and put them in the cupboard and ignored them, as shiny and black and tough as
they may have been, forever more.
Learning
the art of walking barefoot was a necessity for any child who did not want to
be ridiculed and beaten or put in a metal rubbish barrel and rolled down a hill
or have his head held over the school long drop (outdoor toilet) and forced to
inhale, exhale and inhale as a barefoot farm boy twice your age kicked your
backside as if it was a rugby ball.
Shoes were
for the sissies and the rich, and as schoolboy law forbid either, that was
that.
Barefoot,
or die.
For the
soft-soled, pink-fleshed farm boy, the initial steps are agony. The dusty sand
offers heated granules that swamp your naked flesh and the hard trodden areas
on the path to the milk shed are as hot as the plate on a stove, so you start
your learning by hopping from foot to foot which is witnessed by the herd boy
who daily washes the milk cans who quickly and politely turns his back on you,
but you can see by the movement of his shoulder blades that he is laughing.
You
retreat to the steps of your porch, which is cooler in the shadow offered by
the jacaranda creeper where the bumble-bee flit to and fro and there you start
to breathe again.
Tomorrow
you will have to take the bus to school, and you know that if you wear shoes
you will be staring into the long drop as some barefooted, bigger-than-you farm
boy kicks your backside so you step back off the porch and you avoid the loose
gravel but you adopt a form of hopping because, in your mind, you think this is
how the native children that you have seen running to school do it.
You are
wrong. The red earth is now blistering hot, and you feel your toes curl away
from the heat, so you take unusually long strides toward the soft ground where
the dogs sometime rest when the heat gets to them, but you don’t see the
masticated bone on the ground, and when you step on it, you bite back pain and,
again, retreat to the porch where you collapse onto your soon to be kicked
backside and hold your aching feet in your hands.
Thus far,
you have learnt only to hop, and it is guaranteed that the herd boy who washes
the milk cans has already told the tractor driver who is now telling the maid
that he is hoping to marry, that the white farm boy cannot, or does not know
how to, walk properly.
I have
surrendered and have sounded the horn of retreat. On the stoep, I begin putting
on my veldskoens, but as I am doing up the leather laces I have a picture of
those children that I see every morning running to the small school on Old Man
Ford’s farm (the one with the red tin roof that has no glass in its windows and
the playing field is as barren as a bush pig’s hole) in my mind.
As routine
as a school bell, these children run, daily, some miles down the length of the
main dirt road that navigates past the farm gate. It is a wide road that is
covered with corrugations, stones and jaw-breaking potholes. The children run
barefoot carrying their slates or a tatty exercise book. They are always
smiling and will always wave to you as you drive past in the school bus.
I study
this picture in my head as my hands pause over the laces of my veldskoens. I
think of their faces, and I am seeing, in my mind that they run with their
heads held high; that they are proud to be running barefoot on that road to
school. They are focused on what lies ahead for the day, their eyes darting
left to right occasionally in case they may see a bird’s nest with eggs in it
or the silver of a hub-cap that may have fallen off a pot-hole dodging car the
night before.
They are
not watching their feet on the ground. They are not running on the ground.
Their feet are not touching the sharp, granite stones or the rusty lid of an
abandoned sardine can or the heated granules of sand or even the hard cowpat
left there by stray cattle.
This is I
realise, about mind over matter.
I take off
my veldskoen and stand with my bare feet on the waxed surface of the stoep, and
I look toward the milking shed where the herd boy is no longer washing the
empty cans. A thin spiral of smoke is coming out of the chimney on the roof of
the tin sided hut where the water is boiled for milking. To the left of the path
the fence there is covered with Granadilla plants and to the right there is a space
dotted with clumps of khaki weed and stinging nettles. I focus on the milking
shed, the door of the dairy, and the thin spiral of smoke. I keep my back
straight. I step off the stoep and onto the sun-baked path.
I get to
the milk shed in seconds flat, but I know I never did wince with pain once.
I spent
the remainder of the day walking around the farmhouse with a straight back and
head held aloft and ignoring my naked feet. Because of this posture, I was soon
nicknamed “Skolomanzi” by the herd boys. This is the name they have given to
the Blue Crane birds that wade in the shallows looking for fish, frogs and
snakes.
That night
as I step into the tepid, soapy water left in the bath, I shout out with pain. I
rest my bare, no-longer-to-be kicked backside on the edge of the bath and look
at the soles of my feet. They are red and inflicted with razor-like cuts.
When I sit
down in the school bus the next day, I make certain that my bare feet protrude
out into the aisle so that their lack of leather covering can be seen by all,
especially the pimple faced over the age of his class farm boy seated across
from me.
“Hey,” he
says to me.” How come you wear your blerry hair so long? Hey? Just like a blerry
girl, man! Sis!”
I stare
out of the bus window hoping to see the native children running to school.
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