The Atlas полностью

(And here I have to say that the second time I went to Redfern, which was at night, I saw the police slam people down, but 1 also have to say that those people were wretched drunks who were hurting each other.)

Snake pointed. — Police got a camera there on the street. For surveillance.

Always watchin' us. Since we was kids. Always movin' us here and there. My man here, he got took, said Ruthie. He got took, I got took when I was seven, and put into institutions where we got the religion. The gubbers✝ did it.

What did they do that for? I said.

We was just sittin' around at home, said Rob, opening another beer. But they see us in our family and they say you're poor. You run around naked, barefoot. So you get took.

Where did they take you?

I can't really remember, but it comes to me in bits and pieces.

* "Ferals are the people who stand up against the loggers," Rob had told me.

"Hips are the people who deal [drugs]."

✝ "Governors: " white men.

Rob, who'd met his wife at the rehabilitation center, called himself a blackfella but he was pale golden in color, like any Caucasian surfer in Sydney or Honolulu or Santa Barbara. In 1688 William Dampier had described the aborigines he met as "coal black like. . the Negroes of Guinea." The people Captain Cook found were dark brown. Maybe there is no such thing as race now, not really; so many Greenland Eskimos I met were blond and blue-eyed like their Danish fathers; my goodhearted D. is Thai but Thais sometimes think her black African; it seems to me that the most that can be said is that there are loose racial types which some people conform to and others live in between. I wish that I could bring back to life the juryman who addressed the press after acquitting seven whites of shooting and mutilating twenty-eight aborigines at Myall Creek in 1838: I look on the blacks as a set of monkeys and the sooner they are exterminated from the face of the earth the better. I would never consent to hang a white man for a black one. I know well they were guilty of murder, but I for one would never see a white man suffer for shooting a black. What would this man have made of Rob? The only way he could have known that Rob was black would have been if Rob had told him so.

They shanghaied him an' his wife, Sadie explained, they brought 'em from here to there.

'Cause once they take you to the institutions, they drum it all out of you, said Ruthie.

The language, it wasn't taught in our schools, said Sadie, drinking. And my grandmother, she wouldn't teach me, because it all ends in the white man's… — She trailed off.

So you don't remember anything from before?

Me an' him, we're still hunters, said Snake. Sit up in the tree, yes, you sit up in the trees waiting, then you jump off and catch that wallaby. An' cobra's good to eat. Good fish bait, too. Go to the river, look for the right kind of log. There's stinkin' logs and good ones. Willow logs and gum tree logs, those are the good ones. Dive down, cut off the log, you can smell the snake inside. Cobras is musky tasting. They taste like the tree they live in. Smell the leaf of the tree, smell the cobra.

Tell him about that time you saw the snake, said Ruthie to her husband.

Oh, said Rob. (Paint was peeling from the bricks behind him where Ruthie's chair nudged the wall between their house and the next house along the Street of Stares.) — Well, one time I was out in the bush an' I run into a big lizard. An' I seen his eyeballs, an' I saw his red, and then I knew it wasn't a lizard, but a fifteen-foot-long snake, an' it chased me. It chased me 'til dark, when I got on the road. Once they feel that hot tar, they can't go no more.