I can vividly recall telephoning my mother after my first day working with Ms Makeba and I don’t mind telling you there was a degree of relish on my part. When I had earlier revealed how I was earning my living, she consoled herself in the idea that Ella Fitzgerald was legally an American. It was obviously devastating to her that her son was cleaning, and more devastating still that he was cleaning for Black people, but at least I wasn’t attending to the cleaning needs of actual Africans. She fondly recalled the height of the British Empire when many of the African nations were firmly under British rule, so the idea that her son might be tidying up after an actual African was simply too much for her to endure.
So you broke it to her gently?
No. You may think ill of me but challenging my mother’s inherent racism was something I confess I rather enjoyed. I recall starting the conversation with some small talk and inquiries after the family, knowing full well that it at any moment she would be moved to direct the conversation to inquiries re my employment status. When the question finally arrived I announced I had spent the afternoon cleaning for a wonderful South African lady who made clicking noises when she sang.
Did she take it well?
It’s impossible to distinguish between a real faint and an affected faint through a telephone line. It’s not out of the question she did actually lose consciousness for a period of time and genuinely required reviving, but it’s also highly likely she simply placed the receiver down and had a quiet sob, later to claim that her absence from the conversation had been due to fainting dead away with horror.
Did she come around to the idea eventually?
She quickly adhered to the fanciful delusion that possibly Ms Makeba was actually a white South African and I’d simply made an error in racial identification. “She probably just has a tan!” I recall her crying with an air of panic in her voice. “She’s a white woman exposed to the African sunshine,” I assured her this wasn’t the case which led her to conclude that the ebony appearance of Ms Makeba was entirely due to a layer of soot acquired on the walk to the studio. At that point, she demanded I sally forth and wipe a section of Ms Makeba’s face with a moistened cloth to reveal the white skin underneath. I said, “Mother I can assure you that the lady in question is not soot-stained in any way and I am not going to forcibly scrub a recording artiste mid-song in a futile attempt to remove their god-given skin pigmentation.” She was not pleased. Racist people seldom are in my experience.
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