Clear indeed! As I left the building I passed others waiting in line—Latinos, blacks, Europeans, many not speaking English, some looking defeated—and I had a twinge of guilt. Would he have been so accommodating if I hadn’t been who I was? As in South Africa, white privilege ruled the day. I shook off these thoughts as I walked outside and headed back to the Lower East Side to deliver the forms to my new employer. In my exhilarated state I thought: “Well that was as easy as pie.” American pie.
My salary was $80 a week, one and a half times Eric’s stipend. We could begin apartment hunting in earnest. Back to the Village Voice. Ever since we arrived in the New York area Eric and I had wanted to live in the fabled center of hip culture, Greenwich Village. We soon discovered that the rents far exceeded the $100 per month we had budgeted. Just as we were giving way to despondency Eric heard about a newly completed middle-income housing project in Hoboken, a few blocks from the Stevens Institute. It wasn’t Manhattan but the rent was right. We moved in immediately.
I worked for Two Bridges for two years; there I encountered a level of poverty that I had naively thought I would not find in the United States. At first it wasn’t all that obvious. The community activists whose homes I visited had jobs. They were working-class men and women who could support their families without the specter of abject poverty. They could envision a better life for their children and were willing to fight for it within their community. This was the promise of the American dream. Then I began to see deeper into the places where the dream had failed.
At Christmastime Two Bridges received an allocation of toys from one of the city agencies to distribute to the children of needy families. I picked out a number of age-appropriate gifts for the young children of Amelia, a single mother I had befriended. A few days before Christmas I walked to Eldridge Street with its rows of dilapidated tenements, looking for her building. Carrying the bag of wrapped gifts, I climbed the two flights of stairs to her apartment. A dank smell emanated from the stairwell. Each landing was lit by a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, accentuating the peeling walls. I knocked on her door and she greeted me with a bright smile of surprise. I stepped into her cramped apartment and immediately felt embarrassed that I had arrived without warning. But when I handed her the presents, she hugged me through her tears. She had no money for presents and she’d been worried sick about her children’s disappointment on Christmas morning when there was nothing for them. “I can only thank the Lord for sending you to me,” she said. I walked back down the stairs, disturbed that a small, effortless gesture such as mine could mean so much.
Amelia and I had both left the countries of our birth. Eric and I were struggling too, or so we thought. We ate each night. We had money to buy inexpensive Christmas presents. Most of all, we knew this to be a temporary state: once he graduated, he could expect a financially secure future in academia. I could then choose to work or not. For Amelia, poverty defined her life. There was no way out, no choice, no safety net for disaster. Immigration to the United States meant very different things depending on one’s race, class, and language. I was taking for granted a future in my adopted country that Amelia could not even contemplate.
SLOWLY, HALTINGLY, I BECAME ACCLIMATIZED. For the first time in my life I did not routinely glance over my shoulder to make sure I wasn’t being followed. I no longer needed to head for the bottom of the garden to be out of earshot of bugs—the electronic kind—or monitor what I said on the telephone while listening for telltale clicks.
I wasn’t always careful. After D and A was banned and my parents had left South Africa, there was the immediate problem of covering legal fees, so I came up with a great solution—or so I thought. My parents still had money in South Africa. If my father transferred money from his account to the law firm in South Africa that was working on behalf of political activists, he could be reimbursed in London. But how could I explain this scheme to him? Mail sent overseas was regularly opened. So I naively asked an Afrikaner journalist friend who was traveling to London to take my letter and mail it when he got there. It didn’t occur to me that, given his strong criticism of the government, he might not be the ideal courier. Perhaps I thought that he was immune because he was an Afrikaner. Had he been searched we would all have landed in jail and my father’s money would have been confiscated. Luckily, he read my letter and then burned it—and never spoke to me again.
But now, in New York, I had never known such personal freedom—freedom aided by the nature of the city itself. A city of strangers. A city where strangers found other strangers and so the strange became the familiar.
At the same time my longing for home was still raw. Many a weekend Eric and I drove to Boston, Washington, or Montreal to connect with other South African exiles and émigrés. It was bliss to be able to cook together and recreate our Cape Town dinner parties, drinking California wine (naturally we were boycotting the South African varieties), catching up on our lives, and obsessing about South Africa. Oh, how superior we felt in our little South African enclave. I regaled our friends with stories about the foibles of Americans and the brashness of New York City.
For example, the guy unloading a truck on West 86th Street, who rested his dolly and, shaking his head in mock wonder, blew a five-fingered kiss into the air—mwah!—calling out, “Mama mia! For you I’d leave my wife, my nine children, and my mother-in-law!”
Or the time when I was coming out of the subway at Grand Street and I encountered a man standing at the top of the stairs, his fly open, peeing against the wall. Not wanting to miss the opportunity presented by the arrival of a stream of subway riders, he half-turned his torso and stretched out his free hand, calling out: “Anyone have some spare change?”
Or boarding the F train one morning at West 57th Street together with a posse of policemen in their dark blue uniforms, batons gripped in their hands, hips bulging with guns, walkie-talkies, and other paraphernalia so important to the image of a policeman. They stood looking down at a man stretched out asleep on the bench, his head resting on his hands, his shoes neatly arranged on the floor. I braced myself for an inevitable bullying, a physical shakedown, even handcuffs and a frog march off the train. Instead one of the policemen leaned forward and gently shook the man’s shoulder. “Wake up! Wake up!” he said in a strong Brooklyn accent. “Breakfast is being soived.” Another policeman held the door open while the napper sleepily put on his shoes and shuffled off the train. Only later did it occur to me that the man was white and so were all the policemen.
Ah, New York, New York. Collecting stories helped me settle into my new life. Yet something was missing from this new life. Leonie’s words kept playing in my head: “There is a lot of anti-apartheid work, if that’s what you want to do. You can probably make more of a difference outside, you know.” I still had to find that “outside.”
7 — Anti-Apartheid Activist
I was getting ready to meet Janet McLaughlin at the American Committee on Africa, the stellar, internationally respected antiapartheid organization. Clothes still boosted my confidence, so I chose carefully from my limited wardrobe: thick black stockings, a short burnt-orange corduroy skirt that I had sewn myself, and a soft black woolen sweater. I made sure my naturally frizzy shoulder-length hair was sleek. I put on my “new” coat, a raccoon fur that I had bought for $35 at a secondhand store on West 8th Street in Greenwich Village. It gave me just the right beat-hippy look I favored and kept me warm as I headed out that frigid winter morning in January 1968 to ACOA’s office near the UN.
As I waited for Janet in the front reception area, I looked around. Prestigious address notwithstanding, the place looked just like any anti-apartheid office in South Africa. It had the same feel: mismatched furniture, posters on the walls, a sense of busyness amidst the clutter, books and papers scattered over desks and tables, a typewriter clacking in the background. I found this comforting. Janet was an American, as were all the staff members except one, Jennifer Davis, the part-time researcher, who was a South African exile. She had left with her husband and young children about a year before I did. Not that many exiles were able to come to the United States, unless they were studying or had offers of specific jobs. Britain was bound to South Africa by its colonial past; in the United States, anti-apartheid work was jump-started