Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black Read Free Page A

pals. The argument was about the referee’s decision in a soccer game; he’d played when he was a student and could contribute a generalised opinion of the abilities, or lack of, among referees. In the pause when the others called for another round, including him without question, he was able to ask (it was suddenly remembered) did anyone know a Morris family living around? There were self-questioning raised foreheads, they looked to one another: one moved his head slowly side to side, down over the dregs in his glass; drew up from it, when I was a kid, another kid . . . his people moved to another section, they used to live here by the church.
    Alternative townships were suggested. Might be people with that name there. So did he know them from somewhere? Wha’d’you want them for?
    It came quite naturally. They’re family we’ve lost touch with.
    Oh that’s how it is people go all over, you never hear what’s with them, these days, it’s let’s try this place let’s try that and you never know they’s alive or dead, my brothers gone off to Cape Town they don’t know who they are anymore . . . so where you from?
    From the science faculty of the university with the classical columns, the progeny of men and women in the professions, generations of privilege that have made them whatever it is they are. They don’t know what they might have been.
    Names, unrecorded on birth certificates—if there were any such for the issue of foreign prospectors’ passing sexual relief—get lost, don’t exist, maybe abandoned as worthless. These bar-room companions buddies comrades, could any one of them be men who should have my family name included in theirs?
    So where am I from.
    What was it all about.
    Dubious. What kind of claim do you
need
? The standard of privilege changes with each regime. Isn’t it a try at privilege. Yes? One up towards the ruling class whatever it may happen to be. One-sixteenth. A cousin how many times removed from the projection of your own male needs onto the handsome young buck preserved under glass. So what’s happened to the ideal of the Struggle (the capitalised generic of something else that’s never over, never mind history-book victories) for recognition, beginning in the self, that our kind, humankind, doesn’t need any distinctions of blood percentage tincture. That fucked things up enough in the past. Once there were blacks, poor devils, wanting to claim white. Now there’sa white, poor devil, wanting to claim black. It’s the same secret.
    His colleagues in the faculty coffee room at the university exchange Easter holiday pleasures, mountains climbed, animals in a game reserve, the theatre, concerts—and one wryly confessing: trying to catch up with reading for the planning of a new course, sustained by warm beer consumed in the sun.
    â€”Oh and how was the Big Hole?—
    â€”Deep.—
    Everyone laughs at witty deadpan brevity.

tape measure

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    NO-ONE of any kind or shape or species can begin to imagine what it’s like for me being swirled and twisted around all manner of filthy objects in a horrible current. I, who was used to, knew only, the calm processes of digestion as my milieu. How long will this chaos last (the digestion has its ordained programme) and where am I going? Helpless. All I can do is trace back along my length—it is considerable also in the measure of its time—how I began and lived and what has happened to me.
    My beginning is ingestion—yes, sounds strange. But there it is. I might have been ingested on a scrap of lettuce or in a delicacy of raw minced meat known as, I believe, Beefsteak Tartare. Could have got in on a finger licked by my human host after he’d ignored he’d been caressing his dog or cat. Doesn’t matter. Once I’d been ingested I knew what to do where I found myself, I gained consciousness;