Lucky 1

THIS IS LUCKY

When one looks at a photo of our (my wife Mariki and me) five children there is one immediate noticeable difference between Lucky and the other four children, Lucky is black.

Lucky came to live with us in 1992. This is the story of Lucky.

Some people believe that we adopted a black child – in South Africa this is a praiseworthy thing to do, it shows true liberalness. It is something like the Americans adopting little Vietnamese. It is also appears to be a potentially Christian thing to do.

Fact is that he came to visit us, and then there was no one to give him back to.

So one might say that Lucky adopted us.

One of the FAQ’s we get is ‘Where does Lucky come from?’

Technically Florida Afrikaans Primary School is where Lucky comes from. Most children’s parents, at some stage, will drive them past a hospital and tell them that this is where they were born. When the day comes that Lucky starts to raise these questions we will show him Florida Afrikaans Primary.

Schools, especially White schools, were legally segregated until a few years ago. Black schools were technically also legally segregated. Of course this did not really matter because the whites did not really want to go to the black schools. That is because whites did not feel welcome at these schools, and would have been made to feel unwelcome in practice did they try to bus to these schools. (But then, the American busing was also not from white areas to black schools.)

When Florida became – by law, not voluntarily – multi-racial, Lucky was entered in the school be some one. We don’t really know whom. The person that subscribed him was the person that Lucky thought was his father, at that stage. But this also changed.

Our son Charl was also entered in Florida. A strange friendship developed between the largest child the school had ever seen, and one of the first black children the school had ever seen.

Mariki, my wife, often took Lucky home after school. It is fairly standard practice in South Africa for mothers to drive to school to pick up their children, so Lucky got a lift to his home. Home for Lucky meant a single room outside the house that his father was restoring. There was no electricity, although there was running water. The two people Lucky believed to be his parents and himself shared this room.

After Lucky came to life with us we started to piece together some of the fragments of the place that Lucky called ‘home’.

A white builder who was in the process of restoring it, or breaking it down owned it. During the two years Mariki delivered Lucky here, she could not establish whether things were going up or down.

The man that Lucky believed to be his father, who was the white builders foreman, was allowed to live in the backroom with the woman that Lucky believed to be his mother. The builder and the ‘father’ registered Lucky at Florida Afrikaans Primary School.

As far as we know no money was paid to the school. The new laws in South Africa state that no school can refuse to accept any child – especially not because of his skin collour. The law also says that non-payment of school fees is not a reason to not accept a child.

It might seem to have been a peculiar choice to place a black child in an Afrikaans school. Later we learned the reason for this: Lucky could speak only Afrikaans. Which is even a lot more peculiar for a black child in South Africa.

One day Lucky told Charl that he learned some very good news the night before: “The Shangaan that beats me every night is not my father! My mother said so.”

So what is known of the person Lucky believed to be his father is only that he might have been a Shangaan (one of the black cultural groups in South Africa), was a building foreman, and was unlikely to have been Lucky’s father.

In this single backroom Lucky’s family ran a shebeen (illegal bar), which regularly erupted in bar-brawls.

Lucky disappeared from school for three days in grade 1, assumed to be sick by the teachers. When Mariki asked him where he was, he told her that the police had arrested his mother and father for disorderly behavior and running an illegal shebeen, and he ran away being scared that he will also be taken to jail. For three nights he slept under the hedges in the neighbourhood without any food.

This does not explain how he came to live with us, but it does tell something about where he came from.

When he was in grade 2 the school held a concert, and had the ideal opportunity to have an actual black child play the lead role to the song of Mama Thembo’s Wedding. Fortunately the other black child in the school was a girl, so that the roles were perfectly matched (i.e. the children need not have been disguised with shoe-polish.)

A grade 2 concert is always a big event for mothers – fathers (like me) that have already had three children in grade 2 before tend to be less enthusiastically involved.

Despite Lucky having the required skin collour, naturally, there was still a certain amount of dressing up required. His mother’s involvement was non-existent. The parents felt that she could not be relied on to ensure that Lucky will be at the school for the concert on time every night. Since he had to walk to school one could also assume quite reasonably that he was not going to walk in the streets with his bridegroom outfit for the concert – in Mama Tembo’s Wedding the bridegroom basically wears a loin-cloth with a tiger motif (ignoring the fact that there are no tigers in Africa).

So Lucky came to stay with Charl for the three days that the concert was on.

And he never really returned to his own home. Maybe one should say ‘house’ rather than ‘home’ because the word ‘home’ implies a lot of things that were not at Lucky’s house – or room.

At first Mariki took him home on Fridays, but he stayed with us from Monday evening onward. His mother preferred this arrangement – she had lost her job, and the building foreman was not earning money. She probably felt that we were buying Lucky clothes, his schoolbooks, he had decent meals, someone is seeing that he does his homework, and he is not bothering her.

Toward the end of that year, because Lucky’s ‘mother’ was workless, we employed her for a month and learned some interesting things about her.

The most interesting being that she could not speak a word of Afrikaans. Lucky could not speak English or any black language. Obviously an improbability for a natural mother and son – we have, to this day, not yet found out what the true relationship between them might have been.

And then, one day, they were gone. There was no one to take Lucky back to.

That is how Lucky came to live with us.