That day I vowed never to talk to her. But as my mortification wore off (and I became more adept at walking with boots) I also got to know her, and she was to become my greatest friend at Clarkebury. She was my first true female friend, a woman I met on equal terms with whom I could confide and share secrets. In many ways, she was the model for all my subsequent friendships with women, for with women I found I could let my hair down and confess to weaknesses and fears I would never reveal to another man.

 

 

I soon adapted myself to the life at Clarkebury. I participated in sports and games as often as I could, but my performances were no more than mediocre. I played for the love of sport, not the glory, for I received none. We played lawn tennis with homemade wooden rackets and soccer with bare feet on a field of dust.

For the first time, I was taught by teachers who had themselves been properly educated. Several of them held university degrees, which was extremely rare. One day, I was studying with Mathona, and I confided to her my fear that I might not pass my exams in English and history at the end of the year. She told me not to worry because our teacher, Gertrude Ntlabathi, was the first African woman to obtain a B.A. “She is too clever to let us fail,” Mathona said. I had not yet learned to feign knowledge that I did not possess, and as I had only a vague idea what a B.A. was, I questioned Mathona. “Oh, yes, of course,” she answered. “A B.A. is a very long and difficult book.” I did not doubt her.

Another African teacher with a bachelor of arts degree was Ben Mahlasela. We admired him not only because of his academic achievement, but because he was not intimidated by Reverend Harris. Even the white faculty behaved in a servile manner to Reverend Harris, but Mr. Mahlasela would walk into the reverend’s office without fear, and sometimes would even fail to remove his hat! He met the reverend on equal terms, disagreeing with him where others simply assented. Though I respected Reverend Harris, I admired the fact that Mr. Mahlasela would not be cowed by him. In those days, a black man with a B.A. was expected to scrape before a white man with a grade-school education. No matter how high a black man advanced, he was still considered inferior to the lowest white man.

 

*    *    *

 

Reverend Harris ran Clarkebury with an iron hand and an abiding sense of fairness. Clarkebury functioned more like a military school than a teacher training college. The slightest infractions were swiftly punished. In assemblies, Reverend Harris always wore a forbidding expression and was not given to levity of any kind. When he walked into a room, members of the staff, including white principals of the training and secondary schools, together with the black principal of the industrial school, rose to their feet.

Among students, he was feared more than loved. But in the garden, I saw a different Reverend Harris. Working in Reverend Harris’s garden had a double benefit: it planted in me a lifelong love of gardening and growing vegetables, and it helped me get to know the reverend and his family — the first white family with whom I had ever been on intimate terms.