Bloodlines (26 page)

They arrested us and took us to the main jail in Johannesburg, where we were separated—I was taken to the white women’s prison; he was dragged off to the infinitely worse prison reserved for black men.

They gave us a rapid trial, presented all the evidence against us. There was the testimony of early morning walkers who claimed to have seen us at the electric-generation plant, Khabazela scaling the fence, and me throwing a bag over the fence to him. There was no bag thrown, and none found, but it was considered a minor discrepancy. They had been watching us; knew that we spent time at the safe house, knew that he had been sent out of the country for military training; knew that he had a saboteur’s knowledge; had found beneath his bed in his sister’s house in Soweto mimeographed pamphlets with detailed instructions on building and detonating time-delayed explosives. That was the evidence against us for treasonous activity and sabotage.

Then there was the charge of miscegenation, about which they went on at much greater length. They presented evidence of a long-standing, intimate relationship between us that went back to my years at university, when I volunteered at the school attached to the Anglican Mission in Sophiatown where he taught, and where I first met him. But for purposes of the prosecution, it was irrelevant that years passed before anything happened between us. At the trial, Lenny was portrayed as a respectable man, a good husband and father; I was the whorish white wife, the despicable mother, who had given in to a lustful and godless impulse—they made it sound subhuman—for which I was willing to throw away my life and to leave my son motherless, and my husband alone.

Then there was the damning testimony of the police who had broken into our not so safe house. They claimed to have found us, having just committed an act of terrorism, in the midst of copulation so frenzied that we were unaware of their presence. They had entered the house silently and with frightening speed, and it is true that we didn’t know they were there until they were standing in the bedroom with us. But through the lens they shone on us and on our lives, it all seemed venal and ugly, twisted and brutal. And it was sufficient to convict us for a long, long time.

Lenny came to see me in prison. He had been more than a passive observer to my political activities; had been involved in them himself, and at some level we both knew that we took the risk of being discovered and jailed. But this was more than civil disobedience. This involved violent protest, and as far as Lenny was concerned, violence was beyond acceptable, especially since we had you, Steven, to think about. What he felt about me was, of course, equally clear. Poor Lenny. I felt sorry for him when he came to see me in prison—he was lost, mortified and furious.

“You’ve ruined more lives than just your own,” he said. “I’m only glad your father isn’t here to see what you’ve done. All this time I thought you were deeply committed to the cause, but it was more than that, wasn’t it? It was pure selfishness. What a fool I must seem.” He leaned closer to the bars that separated us and continued in an angry whisper. “They’re going to put you away for years,” he said. “You’ve deprived Steven of a mother. You’ve left me alone to take care of him. You’ve humiliated me. My credibility is shot. What the hell am I supposed to do? Where am I supposed to take him?”

I had no answer then, and I have not found one since. But even if I had an answer, it would not change the emptiness of those early years, or massage away the sensation of a lump in my chest whenever I thought of you, Steven. Nor will it bring back to me the missed years of your childhood.

The baby I birthed and suckled grew into a lanky little boy with fine, light brown hair and solemn eyes. I see you respond to something funny, throw back your head, mouth open to reveal white, even little teeth, and the peal of your delight washes over me like liquid joy. In my memory I reach for you, and I have carried with me through the decades the feel of your soft hair brushing my cheek, the warmth of your neck, the feel of your small fingers on my face. From kissing you eyes when you cried, I still taste the salt of tears, and sometimes—walking through the street, opening the refrigerator, greeting a friend, embracing a neighborhood child—I am brought up short, unable to breathe, by the recall of how you smelled, of fresh bread and summer days, of hay and the sea and warm strawberries; of dry leaves, apple and melon.

All gone to ash. Smoke, vapor, wind, air. Nothing. The little boy I remember trapped in an instant of time that never was, grown now to a man I do not know and would not recognize.

We were convicted in short order, me for ten years, Khabazela, as the black mastermind, for life. I learned later that Lenny brought you to see me the day after we were convicted, to say goodbye before I went off to serve my sentence. But when he arrived with you in tow—you were six at the time—they were told that I had already been taken from the holding cell to the distant prison where I was to serve my time. For years I imagined Lenny’s confusion and terror at hearing this news.

It was not until two days later, when they summoned him to the police station to interrogate him about my whereabouts, that he discovered we had escaped, and that there was a country-wide manhunt for us. It was the first and only simultaneous, coordinated break from the white women’s and the black men’s prisons, and it humiliated the police. They were furious, determined to pursue and find us. It could, they said, only have been engineered from inside, and in fact, it was.

If the trial and the judgment against us were unusually rapid, there was a good reason for it. Several weeks earlier, Nelson Mandela had been arrested, and he and his co-defendants were on trial when we were arrested. There was so much publicity around his trial that our prosecution received very little attention, and the security forces were so embarrassed by our escape that they did everything in their power to keep it out of the press. Khabazela didn’t tell me until years later, when it no longer mattered, that he and Mandela were in the same prison. The ANC had spent too much time and money on both men to allow them to spend the rest of their lives in jail. When they sent a message to Mandela asking whether an escape should be planned, he thought about all the ways in which an escape might be beneficial to the organization, and he arranged to have a conversation.

In his soft-spoken, determined way, Mandela had already convinced his jailers that he and his co-defendants be allowed an hour a day walking in the yard. Now he arranged to have the same privilege extended to other prisoners, and he made sure that he was beside Khabazela during their daily walk. Their conversation took place over two days. He started by speaking in very general terms, explaining how he intended to make his case.

“I can do most good for our cause by standing on principle, speaking the words that our people and the world need to hear,” he said, whispering out of the corner of his mouth. “We will eventually bring this regime to its knees by withholding the massive power of our labor from their fields and their factories. The industrialists and politicians are petrified; they already recognize the economic disaster that will follow if we’re able to organize. Until now, they’ve been able to prevent us from showing a united front, but they’ll eventually fail. And when we do show a united front, Khabazela, the world needs to see that we’re a legitimate political force, willing and able to confront the regime.”

“I agree,” he replied. Mandela had addressed him by his clan name, and he replied in kind. “But Madiba, what do you want me to do?”

“A prison break is being planned. Our organization wants me to escape, but the leadership does not recognize that if I run away, I lose all credibility as an honorable participant in this dialogue. In fact, it will be the end of dialogue—the regime will have succeeded in their quest to have the world see us as terrorists and criminals. You, my friend, are a different case. We still need men and women in the world, helping in other ways. Tell me,” he asked, seeming to change the subject, “if you were to find yourself out of prison, would you continue our work with the same energy you have brought to your efforts thus far?”

“Madiba, how can you even pose such a question to me? I’ll do what you ask—whether that means remaining in prison with you, or escaping and working on the outside. But there is the matter of Michaela Green. She’s an innocent bystander in this matter of sabotage, and she will not do well in prison. I would hate to see her spirit broken.” He hesitated. “Besides, if she’s free to travel around, she can be a real asset to our cause. She’s already made a significant contribution and saved many valuable lives.”

Mandela smiled at him as they walked. “There are no innocent bystanders in war, Khabazela. Didn’t she consent to the acts of sex in which you and she engaged?”

“She did,” he whispered, looking down at his feet. “But they were not merely acts of sex—they were also expressions of love.”

“I don’t need to tell you that there can be no acts of love between a black man and a white woman under this regime. Didn’t Father Huddleston tell you that years ago, when he said in any age there is more than one kind of love that cannot speak its name?”

Khabazela started at the reference to Father Huddleston, looking up in surprise. Nelson was taller by at least a foot, and he looked down with a grin.

“You know that the Father and I are friends,” he said. “Yes, Khabazela, I know what happened in that empty hall, and I’ve watched you and Michaela Green since Father Huddleston saved you from a beating all those years ago. And I agree with you—she’s a courageous young woman, and likely to be a great asset to us. But she’s also hotheaded and foolhardy, and without guidance she’ll end up in trouble. You may love each other—and for that, I offer you both my condolences. That love will make the work you have to do easier, but it will also make your lives more difficult. Perhaps unbearable. You may wish in years to come that you had remained in prison—but I want you to take this opportunity. We will arrange for a simultaneous break from the women’s prison. If all goes well, you and she will travel separately to your uncle in Zululand. Once there, you will be contacted and further arrangements made. Go with God until we meet again.”

Their conversation ended abruptly as the guards gathered to escort the prisoners back to their cells. Nelson was taken in one direction; Khabazela, in another.

Several months after our escape, Nelson Mandela was sentenced to five years in prison. You know that he had been instrumental in forming Spear of the Nation, the ANC’s military wing, and within the year, he was brought back to stand trial with other leaders of the organization for plotting a violent overthrow of the government. That’s when he was sentenced to life in prison.

The world knows that while he was serving his life sentence, Mandela could have obtained his freedom by changing his political position, but he refused to compromise. What they don’t know is that even before he was sentenced, he was determined to take the high road, and that he refused the opportunity to escape. What’s also not known is that he was instrumental in organizing an unpublicized prison break that resulted in the escape of one black man and one hotheaded, foolhardy white woman. They did not see each other again until three decades had passed.

I was completely surprised by the plan; had no idea who was behind it, or whether Khabazela was involved. All I knew was that a few hours after lockdown one of the guards handed me a roll of clothing and told me to change, and left the door to my cell unlocked. Shortly afterwards there was a complete power outage in the jail. All hell broke loose, and a woman in a guard’s uniform escorted me silently through the darkness and out a side door to a waiting car. We turned down an alleyway and dropped the woman off at the maintenance entrance to an office building on Eloff Street. I thanked her, but she shook her head.

“No,” she said. “It is I who must thank you, because what you do, you do for all of us.”

Then she was gone. I lay down on the rear floor and covered myself with a blanket. The driver, whose face I never saw and to whom I uttered not one word, drove in tense silence through the pre-dawn streets of Johannesburg, and I fell asleep eventually, exhausted and drained, despite the hard floor and the discomfort of the drive train that ran down the center of the car.