Free African Laughter by Doris Lessing

things or could think them.
    Next morning, friends dropped in from Banket, among them an old woman I had known when we were children. There is a convention among adults that because they are friends, their children must be too. This girl and I were sent off to play together when our parents visited each other. At once we began to play Do You Remember, the game so useful when other conversation is difficult. I remembered that on hot days we were put into a tin bath under a big mulberry tree and cold water poured over us. Snakes love mulberry trees, and we kept looking up into the innocent branches for a stealthy slithering green coil, a flickering tongue. We were both teased ‘unmercifully’, as was then prescribed, because we were plump. We both played up to what the adults wanted, squealing and splashing water about. She did not remember this. What she knew was that we were sent off into the fields to collect ‘witch grass’, the witchweed or fireweed the farmers don’t like. We were paid pocket money, a few pence for each bundle. ‘I don’t remember that,’ I said, and she was affronted, insulted. ‘But whenever I think of you, you are standing in the mealies holding a big bundle of witchgrass.’ She turned away from me and went to sit at the table on the verandah. In denying her this memory, part of herself, a ‘nice’ memory, chosen from others to enable her to think pleasantly about an unsatisfactory childhood friend, I only deepened what she already felt about this deceiving, treacherous and above all unfair time that was taking everything away from her. She and her brother, my brother and a couple of neighbours sat drinking tea and then beer, while they recited versions of The Monologue. I sat a little away from them, and read one of the novels by African writers I had bought only two days ago. There I sat, apart, reading, just as I had as a child…they sat together, leaning a little forwards, their shoulders hunched and defensive, sometimes sending me accusing glances from inside their little lager. Their voices were miserable, full of betrayal, sorrow, incomprehension.
    When they went off, Harry asked what was I reading, and I told him about the good African writers. Had he ever thought of reading them? He had never heard of them. If he did read them, then perhaps he would understand better how the Africans were thinking? He said he understood quite well what they were thinking, and he couldn’t say he liked it much. Encouraged by this note of humour, I handed him a couple of books. During the next few days, I left them lying around, and even read him a paragraph or two. He listened as if to news from a foreign country.
    I had no better luck in any of the white households I visited on that trip. In not one was anyone prepared even to open an African novel; I was challenging, threatening, some well-out-of-sight, or even out-of-consciousness, prohibition. No said all these faces, when I asked, These are books written by your fellow citizens. Aren’t you even interested?
    Next day we drove into Marondera to shop. Grumble grumble all the way because there were gaps on the shelves where imported goods used to be. I pointed out there was plenty to eat. Bickering, we drove to the post office, where a group of whites stood talking in a tight circle, faces close, their shoulders repelling invisible bullets. Cheerful blacks milled about, talking, laughing, calling out to each other and took no notice at all of the whites.
    On the way home we stopped at a roadside stall to buy mushrooms, and the seller asked if we could lift his wife to the turn-off. With bad grace, my brother said yes. The girl, pregnant and holding a new baby, sat by me on the driving seat. When we had set her down, Harry kept saying, ‘But it’s no distance,’ which statement had layers of meaning. One, that Africans had not lost the use of their legs, as we had, and this was both a matter for admiration, and a symptom of being primitive.