There was a tree in the orchard, larger than the others; no blossoms adorned it. It bore no fruit. It towered above the surrounding arboreal splendor, whose froth of pink and white promise shivered in the breeze; frivolous springtime bridesmaids surrounded the aging groom in whose grey arms she sat. Sturdy branches spiraled around a scarred trunk, some so low they touched the ground; low enough for fairly small children and one pregnant woman to climb. She sat high enough in the branches to be safely hidden, for who in their right mind would look upwards for a pregnant woman? She perched, immobile. Only her hair stirred. The soft air, alive with singing insects, buzzing wasps and the perfume of a Cote de Azur afternoon dried the moisture on her face and between her legs.

She leaned her back against the trunk and rested one hand on her huge belly.

Hidden, hidden. She longed to stay invisible forever, never to be found by the two visiting mothers, the three older children, the au pair (missing for two days already), and the husband, who only stopped lusting after the au pair when he got up close enough to observe that she was not attractive. (“She’s not even pretty,” he complained, impervious as usual, to any lack of discretion or sensitivity.) She wanted to sit there until the hoped-for son slid out from between her legs, red, healthy, and above all, male. Continued…

The woman had a new maid. Despite having been born at the opposite end of the social spectrum, being servant, not mistress, Miss Sarie Julie had some things in common with her namesake, Mr. August Strindberg’s tragic heroine. She did not have the vote; her social status was dictated by birth, she had little or no responsibility for her fate, and her boyfriend was crude, worthless and controlling. While he did not send her to her suicide, he did cause her to go (occasionally) to the VD clinic for painful injections. He also required her to extract her entire row of upper teeth, which marred her generous smile, but enhanced the fulfillment of his less than generous sexual demands. With the insertion of a few words, Mr. Strindberg’s preface to his play could well describe this Miss Julie. Viz;”She is the victim of false belief-namely that a (Colored)woman-this stunted form of human being compared to (White) man, the lord of creation, the creator of civilization-is equal to man or might become so.”

Also, in a letter to the poet Verner von Heidenstam; Mr. Strindberg elaborates; “PS. (Colored) Woman, being small and foolish and therefore evil, should be suppressed like barbarians and thieves. She is useful only as an ovary and a womb….” In this case while Miss (Sarie)Julie did, on occasion thieve a minor trinket here and there—she always returned it ruefully when her employer, the woman, asked for it back-she was historically deemed useful only as a cleaner of White Madams’ toilets and caretaker of their children.

Continued…

The Las Vegas Girls were not Lilies of the Field. Daily, they toiled mightily. They sweated and stretched, pliéd and spun and kicked their legs as high as their bouffant do’s. They kept their mascarared eyes on the goal, restricted their intake of sugar and fat and loved their dance partners much more than their husbands or boyfriends. Center stage, they climbed onto rickety prop chairs in high heels and executed pencher arabesques, and no risk to life and limb, no horrible wobble of uneven chair legs could displace their effervescent smiles nor quench their steely determination. The woman had been part of the company for more than a year.

She had been recruited by Audrey Turner of The Pagets dance team (Audrey and John Paget had dissolved their dance partnership shortly after arriving in South Africa but had decided to form a Jazz Dance company together.) Audrey had seen the woman dancing at a house party in Sea Point and invited her to join their company. The woman was reticent at first, never having had any Jazz training, but the idea of dancing again since leaving the Ballet Company at nineteen and doing her miserable best to forget her dreams and conform to marriage and motherhood, proved irresistible. Now into her second marriage and second child, it had felt as if the last few years had stifled the very life out of her. She seemed to have been holding her breath, as if any deep inhalation would reignite the tamped down longing in her breast and implode into total destruction of the manufactured “normal” role expected of her. After the first few weeks of training she felt that she could breathe again and looked forward to each day with its morning classes and rehearsals. The challenge of learning a new style, the joy of being back in her body; feeling the ache in her muscles, the pounding of her heart, all this revived her. The rivulets of sweat that trickled over her skin seemed to penetrate all her cells and quench the inner thirst, hydrating the desiccated core of her. Continued…