Twelve years after Joseph’s death, in 1930, when Nancy was thirty-eight-years-old and Georgina almost a teenager, the single mother gave birth to a laatlammetjie (Afrikaans, a child born many years after its siblings). Richard Rive’s birth, on the first of March that year, was shrouded in controversy and secrecy, and marked him as exceptional from the beginning. Interestingly, in Writing Black, Rive gives his date of birth as 1931. However, his birth certificate states clearly 1 March 1930. There is wide discrepancy in published texts – 1930, 1931, 1932 and 1933 are all given as dates of birth. At Hewat College, where Rive worked, it was rumoured that he gave a false (later) date to make himself appear slightly younger. It is strange that, for someone as fastidious about detail as Rive, so many dates of birth prevailed even while he lived. He often got dates wrong, for no apparent reason.6
The sizeable age gap between Richard and his siblings was to contribute to the young boy’s acute sense of alienation from the family as he grew up. He was very much a part of the family yet also very apart from it. The United States was the source of the tragedy that had robbed Nancy of her husband; it was also the place of origin of the man with whom she had had a fleeting affair, who was to father her eighth and last child. His father was a ship’s hand called Richardson Moore, who abandoned him and his mother when Rive was just three months, and was not seen again by either. As an adult, Rive tried on a number of occasions to track down his father in the United States. The only trace of his father was in Richard’s name, for his mother had given the name ‘Richard Moore Rive’ on his birth certificate. In his memoir Writing Black, published when he was fifty-one years old, Rive says of his father: ‘About my father and his family I know almost nothing. He died soon after I was born and was seldom mentioned in family circles. Perhaps a dark secret lurks somewhere.’7 Is Rive using ‘died’ here metaphorically to account for the absent father? For, as is clear from Rive’s correspondence with writer Langston Hughes in the late 1950s, the father had not in fact died but rather disappeared leaving no trace whatsoever. Hughes (1902–1967), the iconic black American intellectual, poet, fiction writer and dramatist, and a leading figure of the black American literary explosion of the 1920s, the Harlem Renaissance, was to play a seminal role in Rive’s writing life.
In Writing Black Rive, for some reason, cannot say directly that his father was a black American but instead suggests this circuitously by recounting an incident at an athletics meeting at which he had performed particularly well, and where a black American woman, an intimate friend of his mother’s, commented affectionately to him: ‘“They can’t beat an American boy, can they?” … So possibly the Black strain came from my father and came from far over the Atlantic.’8 Rive was clearly tentative, even reluctant, about revealing this aspect of his life, revealing only certain details to particular audiences. He was restrained not only about his father it seems; in his adult life he rarely spoke about his mother, even to close friends.
By the time the older Rive comes to write this account of his life, he undoubtedly knows more about his father than he lets on, choosing to embed even these spare facts in circumspect and suggestive narrative in his memoir. However, in a letter to Hughes in 1962, almost twenty years before the publication of Writing Black, he is much more candid about the silence that attended the question of his paternity in his District Six home, a silence clearly stemming from his mother’s deep sense of shame at the affair – a shame compounded by Rive’s dark skin:
A very interesting feature of my life is that my father is an American Negro, but he left home when I was a mere 3 months old. I never saw him. I believe that he might still be frequenting the New York waterfront. He was apparently a ships [sic] cook. Name Richardson Moore. Interesting if we should ever meet again. My mother is from an upper class family, and the subject of my father is never brought up.9
The question of Rive’s paternity, with all its unarticulated proscriptions, shame and even disgust within the family (perhaps even within himself), was the first instance in his life where the equation between shame and silence was a mark on the psyche of the young boy. He is clearly reluctant to reveal the full extent of this ‘dark secret’ in his memoir. Was it just too shameful? Was it too private? Was it of no import in a memoir that, like his fiction, was primarily concerned with exposing the injustices of racial oppression? In the very first line of Writing Black, Rive insists on the selective nature of his autobiography: ‘Some [incidents] are locked away in that private part of my world which belongs only to myself and perhaps one or two intimates.’10 Perhaps the deliberate silence Rive acknowledges, as ‘locking away’ particular incidents and emotions, is not simply a choice to edit out certain details but a multiple, more complex silence – silence about both the world of his family and, later, the very private and closed world of his sexuality.
The young Richard grew up in a ‘huge, dirty-grey, forbidding, double-storied’ tenement building in Caledon Street, at number 201. Rive’s detailed, filmic description of the place is reminiscent of Dickens’s descriptions of inner-city settings:
[It] housed over twelve family units … with a rickety wooden balcony that ran its entire length. There were three main entrances, numbered 201, 203 and 205. All faced Caledon Street. Behind it and much lower, running alongside, was a concrete enclosed area called The Big Yard into which all occupants of the tenement threw their slops, refuse and dirty water.11
The photograph by Clarence Coulson is of this double-storey tenement building in Caledon Street, taken from William Street across the square. Aspects of the photograph were explained to me by Noor Ebrahim and Joe Schaffers in June 2012. Both Ebrahim and Schaffers grew up in the District and knew the young Rive well. Each window represents the living quarters of a separate family and the Rives rented the first dwelling on the left on the top floor, with only a bedroom and a small kitchen, according to Ebrahim and Schaffers who visited the Rive house. The square served as a playground for the pupils from the nearby St Mark’s Primary School during the week. On the left is the community hall, which was also used by the school. The image here is of a Sunday morning, in the early or mid-1960s according to Ebrahim, with the uniformed lads from the St Mark’s Church brigade preparing for their march, which would begin with the tolling of the church bell. An intensely curious audience of dozens of children and adults can’t wait for the show to begin. The evident physical density and dilapidation of the space is overwhelmed by the sense of bustle and expectation, of adults and children living the rituals of a special time and day, a Sunday morning in the District.
Caledon Street, District Six (photographer: Clarence Coulson)
This row of dwellings was, fifty years later, transformed by Rive’s memory and imagination into the row of five conjoined, bustling homes called ‘Buckingham Place’, the locus of communal life portrayed in his novel ‘Buckingham Palace’, District Six. A more realistic and possibly more accurate picture of the domestic life of the family in their home is suggested by Andrew Dreyer, the protagonist in Rive’s first novel Emergency (first published in 1964). The description of Andrew’s home reflects the cramped, overcrowded, Victorian conditions in which Rive’s own working-class family lived in the District:
They occupied three dingy rooms on the first floor of a double-storied tenement flat at 302 … One first entered a landing which smelt damp and musty and echoed eerily when the wind blew through it …Then up a pitch-dark staircase till one fumbled at the knob at No. 3 and entered a shabby bed-sitting room grandiloquently called the dining-room. This was dominated by a huge four-poster bed with brass railings, an old-fashioned couch with chairs to match, and a side-board cluttered with Victorian bric-à-brac. A cheap but highly polished table was squeezed between the bed and the sideboard. A bedroom led off this, occupied by James and Peter-boy. Here another fourposter bed was situated in the centre, with an ancient tallboy leaning against the wall, adorned with a pink and white basin and picture. Two broken French doors led to an unsafe, wooden balcony. One