I Didn’t Know What to Do

By five in the morning, I am all dressed up in my Air Force blues, checking every detail of the uniform, the shiny brass bits that the sergeant will examine first at inspection parade when I get to Air Force headquarters in Pretoria, South Africa. I am nineteen years old and grateful that I can commute rather than stay in the bleak, whites-only barracks in the capital, even though it means a lot of time spent on trains and in train stations neatly divided between Black and white commuters. If I do not think about it too much, I can do what all the other white passengers are doing—not look at the overcrowded non-white platform. We do not see the people crowded onto a platform separated from ours by a mere invisible line, the crossing of which, I would learn, would invoke terrible consequences for those on both sides.

In my sleepy hometown suburb of Johannesburg, an hour’s drive from the capital, the train station was old and stood open, exposed to the elements, with a cold waiting room, wooden benches, a payphone in a booth, and a ticket counter that seemed to me always to be deserted in those early hours when I waited for my train to Air Force headquarters. The small group of five or six whites stood politely far enough away from each other that “good morning” was not necessary. And there was that other platform, over there on the other side of the invisible barrier. On that platform, dozens of people crowded together in a closeness that resulted in conversation, and noise and laughter, and shouting, none of which I understood. We were not expected to understand them. They were expected to understand us, an expectation that would eventually result in riots when Black Africans would finally say no to white oppression in South Africa’s education system.

Having caught the train so many times now, I knew what was coming without having to look. The screaming wheels of the train braking into the station would first bring the whites-only carriages, brightly lit, clean, and new, with a dozen or so passengers per carriage, followed by the non-whites carriages, stuffed beyond capacity with people. They sometimes hung out the forced-open automatically closing doors. The carriages would arrive at the station already full. The swell of people on the platform would nevertheless attempt to get on the train, to force their way into spaces between bodies. They had to get to work. The costs of not getting to work were terrible.

One day I sat comfortably in a whites-only train compartment. It was somewhat crowded, enough to cause the white folks to be particularly quiet. We seemed uncomfortable with the closeness. When the whistle from the conductor signaled readiness to depart the station, the automatic doors began to creak closed, and the train began to move in jerky lunges, gathering momentum. Then as the doors made their final attempt toward the closed position, a hand thrust itself between them, the hand of a late-arriving traveler who had nearly missed the train. He leaped forward, as was the custom, forcing the doors open even if it meant riding out of the station clinging to the already moving train. However, the hand was the wrong color. It was a Black hand in a whites-only compartment, and the body that hurled itself awkwardly into the waiting area of the all-white compartment was a Black man’s body. Nobody looked directly at him as he composed himself and picked himself up in the wrong train compartment. And probably he was thinking right then about how to make his way back to the non-white compartment, but it was too late. He had crossed the invisible line. From nowhere, it seemed, police officers appeared. Smartly dressed, politely spoken, well-groomed keepers of order descended on him wielding batons. They beat him immediately, without question. He was on the wrong train. He was in the wrong compartment. He was the wrong color. It was all wrong. As long as we did not look, we could not see the police brutally beating him.

I didn’t know what to do.

I felt my bottom lip quiver and bit it back. I knew what I had seen was wrong. I knew it was wrong. I stared at the passing landscape and let the sounds of protest and punishment dissolve into the background of the clickity-clack. I looked for my book to read. I did not look at anyone. As long as I didn’t look I wouldn’t see. My eyes were stinging; my cheeks were red with shame. Then I stole a look around at other passengers; only one looked back at me with a stern, wordless reprimand in his eyes.

“You know what happens to people like you, don’t you?”

He was right. I had watched it happen countless times before. I had also spoken up once when I was a pre-teen about race discrimination and learned it was not appropriate to do so. I remained anxiously quiet. Later, when the shame of not doing anything on the train had worked its way through me, I took a soul-searching look at what I had done by failing to act. I realized that indeed I did know what to do on that train. My grandmother and other role models had taught me exactly what my alternative actions might have been. The terrible shame I was feeling was precisely because I had not acted on what I knew. I lacked the courage to trust what ordinary goodness was inclined to do. I knew I had to refocus my life to embrace something more meaningful than my learned predisposition to self-preservation and personal safety.

I have struggled with the inclination to live from goodness because of how it has put me at odds with the instinct of self-preservation. I have struggled with speaking up for goodness when doing so would put me at odds with others and with the way everyone understood things to be. But when I have risked doing and saying what goodness would have me do and say, the results—while not always comfortable—have been satisfying in a soul-nourishing way. Similarly, whenever I turn away from goodness, the effect is that of feeling depleted. I have always wanted to trust that living from ordinary goodness would lead to a clearer understanding of how life works and that there would be rewards built into it. However, the journey has been different from what I expected. To pursue goodness is complicated, challenging, but at the same time rewarding.

More times than not the outcome of choosing the “more good” action or word has been unsatisfactory because it exposed me to the risk of being poorly treated, cheated, or vilified. Unexpectedly, though, my faith in ordinary goodness seemed not to depend on favorable outcomes but instead on integrity—I felt at peace with myself when I followed its prompting. I began to develop a difficult-to-substantiate, even unreasonable belief in goodness in general. I had to learn how to protect my confidence in goodness because there was little support for it from society in general. I had to look instead for support from the examples of ordinary people who were quietly going about their private business of living a meaningful life. In this regard, role models have been crucial in shaping and sustaining me.

Note: (On June 16, 1976, a series of student protests took place in Soweto, South Africa, against the introduction of Afrikaans as the main language of instruction in local schools. The protests, known as the Soweto Uprising, were met with brutal police force. The Afrikaans language was associated with the apartheid regime, and the decision to force education in Afrikaans was made without input from education professionals. The deputy minister of Bantu Education at the time, Punt Janson, said, “No, I have not consulted them and I am not going to consult them. I have consulted the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa.” The Soweto Uprising marked the beginning of the violent collapse of the apartheid regime.)'