Sofiaworx

Unspeakable is my blog page for stories from my family and their communities of District Six, Bo-Kaap and Bridgetown, Cape Town. They are also meditations on the act of remembering.

Growing up I felt frustrated by the lack of stories in my family, the mouthless, heavy hearted silence – myself included. There were memories there, even of my own, that were inaccessible to me and still are. As a teenager, I would imagine a heavy red curtain that stood between us and all our stories. As a family we lived passed each other like ghosts in the same house, trapped in our own hauntings. But I had no evidence, no real reason for thinking this – just this puzzling observation that people did not speak about what was troubling them. Not ever. If the men spoke it was to be funny, to be clever, to be admired, to dominate, to demonstrate, to observe. If the women spoke…it was never to disrupt. It was women’s stories, with its cataloguing of the community, of families and histories that gave some sense of the past. For the most part with my mother, those stories were told to laugh, to hold genealogy and in the case of her mother, to give honour.

Memories of kindness helps you remember whatever is unspeakable in a way that helps the soul, the poverty stricken soul. Those are the stories that lead to love and make it impossible to forget the story and its teller.

This is a story told to me by mother about her mother and a kindness she once showed during some unspeakably brutal times.

My brothers and I discovered that our grandfather, William “Scotty” Butler had a brother called Harry, some time either close to or after he died. It was all too much, too late. Why had we never heard about Harry let alone met him, and was he still alive, we wondered. My aunt Sandra told me it had been many decades since Pa had seen his brother. In fact, the last time he had seen Harry, Pa was eleven years old.

The two boys grew up together with two sisters, Mary and Lulu in East London and after their father died, my great grandmother decided to move the family to Cape Town. Not long before the move, the family decided to visit the circus. That morning at breakfast, Scotty and Harry bickered as siblings do. “You can’t come with us to the circus,” Pa said, “because you’re black”. Harry, who was a handsome boy was dark-skinned. Pa was lily-white and red-haired (hence the nickname “Scotty”). They bickered and Harry, ashamed by this quality of dark-skinnedness that he had no control over, grabbed a fork and stuck it into his brother’s hand. That’s all, I am told, that happened. That’s all that Harry did. He broke his brother’s skin. His mother had Harry committed to an asylum for the insane, and when she took her family to Cape Town, she left her oldest son behind. No-one visited him or saw him again.

Perhaps there is more to the story than that, but it is impossible to know because everyone is dead, and when they were alive, they had no words to give us grandchildren about the past. They were people whose entire lives would pass them by as they dangled in the space between “it can’t have happened” and “it can’t be happening again”. I can say that my grandfather himself was diagnosed with schizophrenia and given shock treatment. He was never the same after that. I knew him to be a man who clung to the whiteness of his skin with fierce insanity. He refused to accept reality when he was forcefully removed to Bridgetown from District Six. He refused to accept reality when he was told he could not sit in the whites only section of the bus. He refused to accept reality when he was chased and beaten often by gangs of young men in Bridgetown who thought his whiteness was a joke whose punchline needed to be explained to him.

In those days, schizophrenia was a diagnosis you were given when people did not know how to diagnose you. My grandfather was also a strong swimmer, a champion chess player, by all accounts a sensitive and imaginative soul. Coming from the Eastern Cape he was terrified of witchcraft and kept every nail clipping and stray hair locked up in a cupboard that was never opened until he after he had passed away. I don’t think his refusal to accept his racial designation was insanity about skin colour. It was an insanity about having your personhood degraded and denied in those every day places like the bench and the bus.

When my grandmother, Hilda found out about Harry, she put together a basket of dried fruit, and nuts and all kinds of goodies and sent it to him for Christmas. She was the only contact Harry ever had from family – a woman he had never met. Ma sent him a goodie basket every year until the year it was sent back with a note that Harry had died of pneumonia. He would have been in his early forties.