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The Coffee-Cart Girl 1
The crowd moved like one mighty being, and swayed and
swung like the sea. In front, there was the Metropolitan Steel
Windows Ltd. All eyes were fixed on it. Its workers did not
hear one another: perhaps they didn't need to, each one
interested as he was in what he was saying-and that with his
blood. All he knew was that he was on strike: for what? If you
asked him he would just spit and say: 'Do you think we've
come to play?'
Grimy, oily, greasy, sweating black bodies squeezed and
chafed and grated. Pickets were at work; the law was brandishing batons; cars were hooting a crazy medley.
'Stand back, you monkeys!' cried a black man pinned
against a pillar. 'Hey, you black son of a black hen!'
The coffee-cart girl was absorbed in the very idea of the
Metropolitan Steel Windows strike, just as she was in the flood
of people who came to buy her coffee and pancakes: she
wasn't aware of the swelling crowd and its stray atoms which
were being flung out of it towards her cart until she heard an
ear-splitting crash behind her. One of the row of coffee-carts
had tipped over and a knot of men fallen on it. She climbed
down from her cart, looking like a bird frightened out of its
nest.
A woman screamed. Another crash. The man who had been
pinned against the pillar had freed himself and he found
himself standing beside the girl. He sensed her predicament.
Almost rudely he pushed her into the street, took the cart by
the stump of a shaft and wheeled it across the street, shouting
generally, 'Give way, you black monkeys.' Just then a cart
behind him went down and caved in like matchwood.
'Oh, thank you so much, mister!'
'Ought to be more careful, my sister.'
'How can I thank you! Here, take coffee and a pancake.'
'Thank you, my sister.'
'Look, they're moving forward, maybe to break into the
factory!' When next she looked back he was gone. And she
hadn't even asked him his name: how unfriendly of her, she
thought ...
Later that winter morning the street was cleared of most
people. The workers had gone away. There had been no
satisfactory agreement. Strikes were unlawful for black people
anyhow.
'Come back to work, or you are signed off, or go to gaol,' had
come the stock executive order. More than half had been
signed off.
It was comparatively quiet now in this squalid West End
sector of the city. Men and women continued their daily
round. A dreary smoky mist lingered in suspension, or clung
to the walls; black sooty chimneys shot up malignantly; there
was a strong smell of bacon; the fruit and vegetable shops
resumed trade with a tremulous expectancy; old men stood
Buddha-like at the entrances with folded arms and a vague
grimace on their faces, seeming to sneer at the world in general
and their contemptible mercantile circle in particular; and the
good earth is generous enough to contain all the human
sputum these good suffering folk shoot out of their mouths at
the slightest provocation. A car might tear down the cross-
street and set up a squall and weep dry horse manure so that it
circled in the air in a momentary spree, increasing the spitting
gusto ...
'Hullo.'
'Hullo, want coffee?'
'Yes, and two hot buns.'
She hardly looked at him as she served him. For a brief spell
her eyes fell on the customer. Slowly she gathered up the
scattered bits of memory and unconsciously the picture was
framed. She looked at him and found him scanning her.
'Oh!' She gave a gasp and her hand went to her mouth.
'You're the good uncle who saved my cart!'
'Don't uncle me, please. My name is Ruben Lemeko. The
boys at the factory call me China. Yours?'
'Zodwa.'
To be
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