Why should we live in comfort while (the servants) were crammed into rickety shacks with tin roofs and had to wash in the yard, filling a bucket from a cold water spigot?
Appalled by the servants' living conditions, my mother made curtains for their tiny rooms, covered the bare floors with rugs, and installed a radio. The result: the servants left in the night, taking the radio with them. "That was extremely foolish of you, Virginia" Jackie (Virginia's third husband, Jack Pringle, a British military officer) scolded her, "and I hope you've learned from your mistake."
"But…"
"You frightened them away, you silly woman, with your rugs and curtains, and American notions of how to treat them. These people aren't used to our amenities. How do you think they live in the bush?"
"I have no idea"
"You better smarten up, Virginia, before you make utter fools of us both."
To hasten the process of converting my mother to the racist views Jackie held in common with the majority of white South Africans, in that era of Apartheid, he arranged to have a group of white women visit Virginia at teatime to "smarten her up."
"You must never treat them as your equals" one of them told her, "or they will rob you blind."
"You hire them to do a job, and if they don't do it, or annoy you in any way, you sack them at once," another advised.
My mother was also instructed to "sack" any "native" who was lazy, spoke out of turn, or showed the slightest sign of being "uppity" or impertinent. The houseboy could get drunk every night and beat his wife on his own free time, but if he was caught helping himself to the master's liquor cabinet, it was back to the bush with him. Before they left, I heard one woman advise my mother to lock up her jewelry, the silverware, and the liquor, since even a "good boy" was not to be trusted. It struck me as curious, listening in my corner, that the mature African men and women working for these white South Africans were referred to as "boys and "girls".
During our first year in South Africa, my mother changed from the open-minded American woman who had treated African-Americans as her equals, the woman who had loudly cheered and danced around the room with Charlie Lederer when we heard on the radio that Franklin D. Roosevelt had been elected to a fourth term. She became a female clone of Jack Pringle, and the two of them teamed up against me, because I refused to change my essential self and blend in seamlessy with my surroundings. I was not a chameleon like my mother. And strangely, the absence of my father made me realize how much he had already shaped me and that his power did not depend on his presence. I was Orson's kid - not Virginia's and certainly not Jackie's - now and forever.
http://www.amazon.com/In-My-Fathers-Sha ... 1565125991