Border Country: Bessie Head's Frontline States

Bessie Head bore the burden of a doubly illegitimate birth: in 1937 she was conceived out of wedlock and, in apartheid argot, across the color bar. Simply by being born, she transgressed the racial and gender edicts of her society, a deviance that portended the torments of her later life. In her thirteenth year, Head learned that the man and woman whom she had presumed to be her parents bore no biological relation to her. That year, the South African state removed her from foster parental care and placed her in an orphanage. It was only then that Head's origins were revealed to her: was born on the 6th July 1937 in the Pietermaritzburg Mental Hospital.... The reason for my peculiar birthplace was that my mother was white, and she had acquired me from a black man. She was judged insane, and committed to the mental hospital while pregnant.' Head's mother, Bessie Amelia Emery, came from an upper-class white South African family renowned for breeding racehorses. The family's professional preoccupation with eugenics may well have compounded their deepseated racial prejudices when their daughter, on the rebound from a failed marriage, flouted racial and class taboos by entering into a sexual liaison with a black stable hand. When she fell pregnant, her parents had her locked away in the Pietermaritzburg mental asylum on grounds of premature senile dementia.2 Emery gave birth to Head in the asylum and, six years later, in 1943, committed suicide there. Head never met her mother, nor did she ever learn the name of her father, who fled the Emery estate without a trace. Head was named not by her parents, but by the South African state: My mother's name was Bessie Emery and I consider it the only honour South African officials ever did me-naming me after this unknown, lovely, and