Hum If You Don't Know the Words

by Bianca Marais

What greater gift can you give another than to say: I see you, I hear you, and you are not alone?

“When in doubt, just do what I do, Robs. Hum if you don’t know the words.”

“What is that saying? ‘Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ I do not believe in utopia. There is no such thing and I fear that chasing that dream will only lead to disappointment for us all.”

If people didn’t come in the right colors, how would we know who to be scared of?

I didn’t know what to say in a world where people were hated and attacked for not being the right color, not speaking the right language, not worshipping the right god or not loving the right people; a world where hatred was the common language, and bricks, the only words.

Black, white, homosexual, heterosexual, Christian, Jew, Englishman, Afrikaner, adult, child, man, woman: we were all there together, but somehow that eclectic jumble of labels was overwritten by the one classification that applied to every person there: “friend.” •

She is wondering if heaven is also divided with a section for whites only and a section for blacks, and if prayers go up to God color coded so he knows which ones are more important and which ones should be ignored.

“I think that heaven makes people forget about the things that used to worry them when they were alive. And so the people in heaven are happy when we are happy. That is what is important to them. All your parents want is to see you happy and loved and taken care of. The rest doesn’t matter anymore.”

I wanted to wipe away the tears that were running down his cheeks, but knew that removing the evidence of pain wasn’t the same as taking the pain away, which was what I actually wanted to do.

But you couldn’t outrun your fears because that was the thing about fear: it was a shadow you could never shake, and it was fit and it was fast and it would always, always be there just a split second behind you.