Snake Dancing Read online

  Snake

  Dancing

  Roberta Sykes

  ALLEN & UNWIN

  Copyright © Roberta Sykes 1998

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  First published in 1998 by

  Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd

  9 Atchison Street, St Leonards, NSW 1590 Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  E-mail: [email protected]

  Web: http://www.allen-unwin.com.au

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Sykes, Roberta B.

  Snake dancing.

  ISBN 1 86448 837 9

  eISBN 978 1 74269 683 6

  1. Sykes, Roberta B. 2. Authors, Australian—Biography. 3. Aborigines, Australian—Civil rights. 4. Aborigines, Australian—Land tenure. 5. Afro-Americans—Australia—Biography. 6. Afro-American women—Australia—Biography. I. Title. (Series: Sykes, Roberta B. Snake dreaming; v. 3).

  920.00926073

  There’s a devil in me who shouts,

  and I do what he says,

  whenever I feel I’m choking with some emotion

  He says: ‘DANCE!’

  And I dance. And I feel better!

  Once, when my little Dimitraki died in Chalcidice,

  I got up as I did a moment ago and I danced.

  The relations and friends who saw me

  Dancing in front of the body

  Rushed up to stop me.

  ‘ZORBA HAS GONE MAD!’

  But if at that moment I had not danced,

  I should really have gone mad—from grief.

  Zorba the Greek

  Nikos Kazantzakis

  1

  The Sunlander rattled its way south overnight to Brisbane. I sat, eyes glued to the window, watching the darkened North Queensland landscape speed by. How many times now had I made this long train trip from Townsville? Two nights and one day—a lot of time in which to reflect on the past and try to summon up the energy for the exciting future which I was sure lay ahead.

  My second marriage seemed irrevocably beyond repair and I was formulating my next moves on the run. I was en route to Sydney, hopefully to become a journalist. I had sent a small number of articles I’d written down to publishers in Sydney, including Pol and Readers Digest, but had not heard back from any of them. I also planned to join up with the fledgling Black movement. First a brief stopover in Brisbane to meet with the charismatic Denis Walker, who had made a political visit to Townsville a few weeks earlier, and then on to only the heavens knew what.

  I should have been sleeping. My two-year-old daughter, Naomi, was sprawled in the adjoining seat, her head cradled on my lap. Keeping her occupied on this cramped train throughout the next day would severely tax me. Yet my mind was too full of imagery, memories and anguish to relax and try to sleep.

  Mum’s voice penetrated my thoughts: ‘Nobody has a right to ask you your business—unless you are asking them for something.’ She had told me this many times. ‘If you want to borrow money from a bank, they’ll ask you your business. Same if you want a loan from anyone or want to get the dole.’

  Her advice was reassuring—I had a lot of ‘business’ I wished to keep secret. Brutally beaten to within an inch of my life, gang-raped and left for dead, discarded in a shack in the bush, I had risen up from the bloodied soil to put four of the perpetrators behind bars. As a result of the attack I had given birth to a son, Russel, who had become the centre of my world and the reason for my existence. Only by mentally distancing him and myself from the event, I reasoned, would he be able to grow up unencumbered by any knowledge of the actrocity by which he had joined me. He was now safely at boarding school in Charters Towers, while I was heading south with his sister to try to set up a new life for us all. I did not want the past to rise up and ruin whatever chances were ahead for us, hence my own ‘secret business’.

  Earlier on, Mum’s advice had only proved partially correct. When I had first appeared around the town with my child, people’s heads had turned. ‘Is this your baby? I didn’t know you were married!’ Many people in Townsville, some of whom I had known since I was a small girl, regarded themselves somehow as my friends, as country people do, and felt familiar enough to ask their questions.

  Friendly inquiries perhaps, but to me they had registered as gross intrusions into my privacy, and I often had to manufacture an acceptable answer to draw the conversation away from their nosiness.

  Mum’s advice, over the years, had been a mixture of both the wise and the injudicious. Only with hindsight was I able to distinguish which category had been given to me on each occasion.

  After the birth of my son, Mum had taken it upon herself to find me ‘a suitable husband’. When I’d rejected her choice of spouse, George Dean, a soccer-playing Englishman, she had nagged and intimidated me.

  ‘Roberta, you’re eighteen years old and with a child in tow. Not a very attractive proposition for a wife, my girl, and you’re getting older every day. If you don’t fix your mind right, you’re going to be left on the shelf. You’ll be an old maid and your life will be miserable, I tell you now. Stop this snooty manner you go on with and at least be polite when men talk to you!’

  During these harangues, Mum chose to overlook the fact that, little more than a year earlier, I’d been so severely traumatised by my experiences that the police were recommending I be committed to a psychiatric hospital. Now she told me to embrace life and become the smiling, happy young woman she so desperately wanted me to be. Perhaps she felt she could force me to become that person.

  Skip, whom I’d met just days before the birth of my son, often came by the house to pay court. Mum began inviting him to meals, and he started to escort me to movies on weekends, carrying Russel in one arm and the bag of baby essentials on the other. He was quite taken by the fact that men and women always stood up for him when we rode into town on the bus, to enable him to sit comfortably with the infant.

  Alone, he was in no way threatening, always gentle and almost shy in manner. He was also strikingly good-looking, like one of those baby-faced Hollywood stars who played in the films we went to see.

  Mum swooped on the attention he was paying me and the baby as an indication of his good intentions. ‘He’d make a fine husband,’ she told me, ‘and he’s a very popular soccer player.’ He played in, and helped coach, one of the local teams. On weekends Mum plotted to get me to the soccer field to watch him play, often arranging to have Arthur, her boyfriend, pick me up from town where I’d been shopping. Only then would she tell me that they were on their way to watch a game and would not be able to take me back to the house until it was over. I’d learned that Skip played centre forward, but apart from that I knew little about soccer and was totally disinterested in any sports which involved grown men chasing around a field after a ball. Still Mum persisted.

  When Skip began to put his arm around me at the pictures and embrace me when he was leaving the house, I grew cold. I told Mum I couldn’t stand to be touched.

  ‘It’s not hard,’ she said. ‘Just think about something else. You don’t have to lead a man. They know what to do.’

  ‘Think of what?’ I couldn’t tell her that every time I closed my eyes I was back in a darkened shack, that fear rose up in my throat and almost choked me.

  ‘Think about what shopping you need. Compile a shopping list in your head,’ Mum advised.

  This became a sort of password that she whispered to me as Skip carried the sle
eping baby out the door on our way to the pictures. ‘And don’t forget to make out that shopping list,’ she’d say. On our return, Mum would make a pot of tea for us and then drag Arthur off to bed, so Skip and I could sit on the back stairs in privacy. ‘Oh, and you won’t forget that shopping list I wanted, will you?’ would be her parting remark.

  Compiling a shopping list was more difficult for me than Mum could ever have imagined. Much like a visit to the dentist, I would sit quiet and frozen, concentrating on willing myself to disappear, preparing my mind to project itself elsewhere.

  Eventually, after much effort and secret anguish, not to mention Skip’s extraordinary patience, I was able to compile a shopping list. Willing one’s self into a state beyond consciousness and caution is one way to become pregnant, and when I did, Mum was elated. I was thrown back into the cave with the demons.

  On hearing the news Skip took off, back to his family in Newcastle. However, he wrote daily and said he would send for me as soon as he could sort himself out, find a job, tell his family and get their approval. Then, he said, we would get married. Mum said this wouldn’t do, and she gave me the bus fare so Russel and I could go to Newcastle. I was apprehensive as I’d never been further south than Brisbane and knew no one across the border.

  As Skip and I were both under twenty-one we could not marry without parental consent, so Mum wrote me a letter of consent. She said it was unlikely that Skip could afford a wedding ring, so she took a plain gold band out of the handbag in which she kept her treasures and gave it to me. ‘Wear it on the bus down,’ she told me. ‘It will help keep the stickybeaks from wanting to know your business.’

  We had to travel almost two thousand miles. It was a long trip, broken only by a few hours stopover with Mum’s sister, Aunty Glad, in Brisbane. Her house in South Brisbane was just a few blocks from the bus depot, I was able to take a shower and re-stock Russel’s food and travel bag. He was a delightful baby, sitting up and taking an interest in everything we passed on the journey, and sleeping soundly for hours, which enabled me also to get some rest.

  The bus had been scheduled to arrive at Broadmeadows at around 3 am. I had no idea how far Broadmeadows was from Newcastle, nor how I would get from there to Wallsend, where Skip was living. In my letter telling him I was coming, I’d said I’d phone him when I arrived. Now, having seen some of the deserted spots at which passengers were being picked up and put down, I began to worry whether there would even be a phone, and about the embarrassment of ringing the number he had given me, at his aunt’s house, at such an ungodly hour.

  On a stretch of road about two hours away from Broadmeadows, one of the passengers suddenly shouted for the bus to stop; he had heard a cry for help coming from the roadside. The driver pulled up short, passengers were roused from their sleep, and some men on board walked back along the road to see what had happened. To everyone’s surprise and dismay, a car had run off the road and crashed into a tree, trapping the occupants inside. The unfortunate travellers in the car could have waited there in the dark until morning or death, whichever came first. One of the occupants, on regaining consciousness, had screamed out as we went by and, almost miraculously, the passenger on our bus had heard him.

  We all gave over our travel blankets to cover the injured people and keep them warm, and the next car along the road was flagged down and sent to the nearest police station and to raise the ambulance. The car’s driver, a young man, and his female companion were trapped by their legs under the dashboard. A second couple, in the back, were concussed and battered but able to be pulled to safety.

  Because of the delay, the bus arrived at Broadmeadow just on dawn, which was a great relief to me. The Broadmeadows stop was marked only by a pole beside the road—no shelter, no phone. Had we arrived as scheduled I would have been too terrified to get off the bus. The driver told me to walk down the highway to a corner and wait there because eventually a taxi would come by. I did so, carrying my suitcase in one hand, and my baby and his travel gear in the other. I strapped our now badly stained travel rug to the outside of the case.

  The taxi dropped us at the address Skip had given me just as the family was rising, but Skip wasn’t there. I learned that his aunt, uncle and nephews lived at this house, but Skip was staying a short distance away with his grandmother. If his aunt and uncle were stunned by the arrival of a thin young black girl with a baby in her arms asking for their nephew, they certainly didn’t show it. Indeed, I was very surprised at their apparently relaxed attitude and the trouble they took to accommodate me and the needs of my child. Skip’s uncle set out by car to fetch him while his aunt helped me bathe and feed Russel and put him down to sleep.

  If the family held any discussions to decide what to do with me, I was not included in them. I showered and dressed nicely, and Skip took me into Wallsend to show me places he had told me about, such as the local milkbar which had a jukebox with all his favourite songs. He introduced me to a few of his friends whom we met on the street.

  In the afternoon his aunt told me that I was to stay with Skip’s grandmother, and that Skip was moving back to her house to leave his grandmother’s spare room vacant for me. Carrying Russel, I was driven to his grandmother’s house where I met a charming lady over eighty years old. She welcomed us warmly and made tea. I was soon sleeping soundly in the comfortable old double bed in her second bedroom.

  Skip’s father was a Mason and, so Skip soon told me, a racist. He refused to meet me and refused to give his permission for us to marry. Furthermore, he said that if Skip went ahead and got court permission to marry me, he would disinherit him.

  As soon as I had recovered from my travel exhaustion, I began to be troubled by insomnia. Each night, after the old lady went to bed and the house was in darkness, I lay in bed and cried. When at last I’d fall into a fitful sleep for a short time, the demons of my earlier nightmares would appear in my dreams and I’d wake again, terrified and sweating. Demons’ laughter rang in my ears and I was unable to rest or go back to sleep. A makeshift crib had been put on the floor beside the bed. Russel, though not yet able to walk, could climb over any barrier and may have fallen onto the floor if he had slept on a bed. I spent nights looking down at him, watching his small chest rising and falling, his dark eyelashes curled on his cheeks.

  During the daytime, too, I had ‘shocks’. Sitting talking or even walking down the street, a flash would go through my mind, like a bright light. When it was over I could only recall a feeling of shock and a memory of the light, though I was told that a look of horror would come over my face and would last several seconds. This was a great surprise to me because I had the impression that this tremor was only going through my mind. After a few of these episodes, I was left feeling that there was some other memory lingering there, something just out of my grasp.

  I was unable to look for a job, and Skip had not found work either. When I had been in Newcastle a little over a week, the family decided that I should go to a government office and ask for a relief cheque so that Skip’s grandmother would not have the added burden of feeding Russel and me, and so that I’d have a little cash in my purse.

  Although I appreciated their concern and I felt very obliged to try to please them in return, I was overwhelmed with reluctance at their suggestion. I didn’t want to have to explain my business to anyone, particularly not to some strange white person who didn’t know anything about me.

  Notwithstanding my efforts to delay taking this step, and torn between fear and my desire to please, I was accompanied by Skip’s aunt to the social security office where arrangements were made for me to be interviewed by a departmental officer. Skip’s aunt then left me to return to her own house duties. The despondency that descended upon my soul as I sat in that sterile room was even darker than the gloomy room itself.

  At last the officer ushered me into another dark room where he sat behind his desk and began to ply me with questions, writing my answers on the pages in front of him. Russel lay asleep on my
lap. After I told him my name and the old lady’s address, the man began to show his disapproval when I told him my age and that the baby was mine. He asked me how I had been supporting myself. I explained that I’d been down from Townsville only a week and that I had received payment for being a witness in some recent court cases, but that money had now run out. Dread flooded through me when he insisted that I tell him more of my business. When I declined, it was obvious that he chose to disbelieve me. He asked about my plans, to which I replied that Skip and I were intending to marry but that Skip needed to find work before we could do so.

  I felt very battered as I left the office, even though I now had a food coupon in my hand. The officer’s parting remarks and stern warning were probably departmental policy, but I was wounded by them anyway. ‘You can use the coupons only to purchase groceries at a store nearest to where you live—and you aren’t allowed to get cigarettes. And don’t come back—you can only have that one voucher.’ If he had asked me, he would have found out that I was not a smoker. Instead, the way he threw these comments after me as I walked from the room left me feeling like dirt and with no way to reply.

  I found my way back to the old lady’s house and lay down on the bed to recover from the ordeal of the interview. This was not, I thought, how I wanted to live. Without dignity and under pressure to retell my story to strangers in order to get money to feed this child; I was extremely dispirited. I knew that even if I had told this man the details, he would have taken it upon himself to be the judge and jury. Without the weight of evidence supplied by all the other witnesses, as had occurred in the Supreme Court, I, not my assailants, may have been found guilty by this departmental officer. But guilty of what? Of having had a child out of wedlock? Or of making up stories to cover my indiscretions?

  When I showed the old lady the food coupon, she said she’d arrange for Skip’s uncle to pick me up at the supermarket in the morning to save me carrying home both the baby and the food. We had dinner, played with Russel for a short while, and as soon as he looked ready to sleep, we all went to bed.