Bloodlines (55 page)

“Hello, Mandla,” she said.

“Hello, Madame,” I said, feeling awkward with the two boys wriggling in my arms.

“You have a very handsome son,” she said.

“Thank you, Madame,” I said. “He is a good boy.”

“He and Simon are lucky to have one another,” she said.

Miriam came up from behind me and put out her arms to Simon, wanting to separate us before this woman who was watching so closely.

“They play well together,” said Miriam. “Come to Miriam, Simon.”

Simon waved her away and put both arms about my neck. Thulani giggled, and Simon did the same.

“Yes,” said Anna McWilliams, “they do play nicely together. The only thing that might separate them would be if you had another child, and gave Thulani a brother. Are you ready for your next child, Miriam?”

It was the kind of invasive comment that a white woman could make to a black servant without thinking twice about personal boundaries. But in this case, after she spoke, something flickered across Mrs. McWilliams’ eyes, and her cheeks paled. Both boys still had their faces buried in my neck, and she looked from my face to the back of Simon’s head, and then from Simon’s head to Thulani’s and back again. By then Michaela had put her broom down and come to stand with us. She quickly took Simon from me. Anna recovered herself and the color returned to her cheeks.

“I think Thulani doesn’t need a brother,” she murmured. “And neither does Simon.” She turned to look from Michaela to me. “They have each other, don’t they?”

There was much that I did not understand about the relationship between your mother and Anna McWilliams, and I did not know what their friendship was based on. But whatever concerns I might have had about our security turned out to be groundless. Perhaps, when you come to know your mother better, she will tell you the whole story. It might reveal much to you about how committed she is to what she believes in, and the lengths she has been willing to go for those she loves.

.

twenty-five

MANDLA

Natal, South Africa
,
1982

M
ichaela was a most protective mother, but by the time the boys were fourteen, she had made the decision that keeping Simon at home raised too many questions in the community. She recognized that it was time for him to face his world, and to learn what he needed in order to negotiate it, and she sent him off to the central white high school.

He was tall and slender, a handsome boy; his short curls had somehow loosened as he reached puberty, and if he had a dark complexion, his manner, his open smile and his obvious intelligence were enough to convince even the most diehard proponents of racial separation that he couldn’t possibly be anything but white. He had a wonderful sense of humor and a good sense of himself, and besides, he was strong and muscular. He would be able to defend himself if challenged, and he could certainly withstand any comments about his complexion. And if he couldn’t, then it was time for him to learn.

For the boys, the separation was difficult, as it was for Michaela, and for me. The change we had hoped would come to the country was nowhere in sight, and I found it even more difficult than I had imagined to accept that there was no way my two sons might live similar lives. I was close to Simon, and I loved him; if he felt a closeness to me that was beyond what he might have expected, he probably attributed it to the fact that I was his best friend’s father. But Michaela and I had decided that it was not yet the time to tell him the truth, and there was always between us the tension of what could not be disclosed. He was so curious about everything else, but Michaela said that Simon never asked any questions about his absent father. His lack of curiosity surprised me—but it should have alerted us to the possibility that he already suspected the answer.

The two boys were the same height; Thulani slightly bigger in the shoulders. Michaela was much taller and bigger-boned than Miriam—but Miriam’s father had been a huge man, and perhaps Thulani’s bigger build came from his grandfather. I loved to watch them together, whatever they were doing—they were the face of the country we knew would someday be born. Sometimes, remembering that when Michaela told me she was pregnant, I wanted her to have an abortion, I felt the heat of shame in my face, and I was filled with gladness that she had the determination to go ahead with her pregnancy.

We could have sent Thulani to school, but it would have meant a boarding school far from home. Neither of the boys was prepared for the complete separation that would mean, and Miriam did not want him to leave home yet—he was a young fourteen, she said, and she wanted him close by for a few more years. So he remained at home, spending mornings in the Barn School, and afternoons learning about the workings of the farm, either with Michaela, or with my uncle Solomon. We planned to send both boys to university—if necessary, out of the country. Michaela made sure that she duplicated as closely as possible the syllabus being taught at Simon’s school, so that Thulani didn’t fall behind.

On the rare evenings I was on the farm, I was privileged to watch the two boys doing homework together. Sometimes we sat outside, Miriam and I, when the weather was warm, in the yard behind the farmhouse. Sometimes we sat together in the farmhouse kitchen or in the little room with the fireplace next to her bedroom in the servants’ quarters. Less frequently, we went home to our house in the village. I read the newspaper; she peeled vegetables for the next night’s dinner, or she ironed, or she darned. When she was done, she, too, read the paper, and then we talked about the news, and about what was occurring in the country. But wherever we were, we would both be focused on the two boys, who often sat within earshot. We listened to their conversation as they sat together, their heads bent over homework. Simon was the bookworm; historian, philosopher, poet. Thulani, on the other hand, was the realist. Math came easily to him, and science; he thought like an engineer. We listened to their quiet voices one evening as they went over the day’s assignments.

“I don’t get it,” Simon said. “Why does mass multiplied by acceleration equal force?”

“It’s just a formula,” Thulani explained. “Everything follows from the basic concept. All you have to do is understand it.”

“I understand multiplication,” said Simon impatiently. “But I don’t get what mass has to do with acceleration.”

Thulani’s smooth forehead crinkled as he frowned, and then smoothed again as he broke into a smile.

“There’s your ‘why’ question again,” he said. “Sometimes you just have to accept that a fact is a fact, Simon. It’s not complicated like your chicken or egg question—either it’s true or false. And this is true. So just accept it.”

“I can’t just accept it, Thulani,” said Simon, “until I understand it. If it’s that easy for you to understand, then explain it to me.”

Thulani thought for a moment.

“We know that if an object is accelerating,” he said, “it’s because something is exerting a force on that object. This is just a way to measure the force. The fact that we’re dividing force by mass—instead of multiplying—tells us something about the relationship between the two. Know what it is?”

“That the greater the mass of an object, the more force is needed to move it?”

“Exactly!” He shrugged. “That’s why force is equal to the mass of an object multiplied by its acceleration. It’s just the way the universe works,” he said. “Accept it.”

Simon did—and he understood it, too. Whether the concepts had do with Pythagorean theory, or Euclidean geometry, or the basic laws of gravity or physics, Thulani had an instinctive understanding, and an ability to make it comprehensible.

But if Simon needed to understand the ‘why?” in any scientific discussion, the need he had to question did not extend in the same way to literature. As long as the world created by his author was convincing enough, he found it easy to suspend disbelief. The giant squid wrapping itself around a submarine in
Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea
was quite believable to Simon—but Thulani found it foolish. They ended up wrestling on the grass, Simon’s legs gripping Thulani’s waist like the giant squid, and they laughed together until one of them gave in.

I seldom involved myself in their conversations—I was content to sit and listen as they worked out their differences, as they taught each other, and as they grew in brotherhood. It filled me with pride. But sometimes they came to ask me questions, and as they matured, I found myself more and more frequently pulled deep into conversation with them on political issues about which I felt great conviction.

One of these issues was the internecine bloodshed we lived with. It was horrendous—and once it started in earnest in the 1980s, it was difficult not to be drawn into the conflict.

When the underground military wing, Spear of the Nation, was established in 1960, the leadership of the organization, including Nelson Mandela—who himself went to Ethiopia for military training in 1962—made clear that our mandate forbade violence against civilians. We believed that a government incapable of delivering power, water and communications cannot govern, and the theory was that by disrupting the infrastructure, we would force them to the bargaining table.

But the violence we experienced, which intensified in the 1980s, was not directed at the government. The newspapers called it black on black violence. It was politically motivated conflict, in which the two most powerful anti-government parties struggled for dominance in what they all hoped would become the new South Africa. The policies that distinguished the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party from each other will be disputed long into the future. But the basic distinction between them was tribal.

The Inkatha Freedom Party was founded by Mangosuthu Buthelezi, a Zulu prince and Chief of the Buthelezi tribe, and it was understandable that tribal Zulus would gravitate to him. But Buthelezi was seen as a man willing to compromise with the regime, while Nelson Mandela was not. In 1985, responding to public pressure, the government offered Mandela freedom from a life sentence in prison if he would renounce violence. He responded by saying that the organization had only adopted violence because other forms of resistance were no longer available, and he refused. This kind of integrity, and the commitment it implied, was one of the reasons that the ANC had a wide appeal nationally.

But Michaela’s farm was in the Midlands, not far from Zululand in the area now called KwaZulu Natal, and it was an area where there was an almost virulent tribal loyalty to the Inkatha Freedom Party. It made the work we had to do for the ANC far more difficult, and placed us and those working with us at great risk.

The tragedy is that both parties forgot their common enemy, and allowed themselves to be manipulated. The Special Branch understood this, and took advantage of the mistrust between them to create chaos. It was just another example of the attempt to continue the age-old strategy of divide and rule that the apartheid government had applied so successfully. Agencies of the government even went so far as to commit political assassination and mass murder, leaving behind false evidence that these were acts of revenge by members of one party against the other.

As Michaela and I watched the political conflict intensify, we reminded each other of the prediction that a time would soon come when brothers would shed each other’s blood. And they did. In the years that followed, in ones and twos and groups of five and ten, more than 20,000 of our people would be killed.

At school, Simon was exposed to the regime’s view that the Zulus were uncivilized and violent, and that the violence meted out was either the result of old tribal hostilities, or a primitive response to the demands of the modern world. This position was motivated by fear, and there was no place in it for complexity, compassion or understanding. And I had to be careful in my conversations with my sons to give sufficient information without revealing the depth of my involvement in the conflict.

When the boys were fifteen, an incident at a railway station between Johannesburg and Durban caused deep divisions amongst urban and rural Zulus. It was discussed for weeks in the news, and it became a topic of discussion at school, in every village, and at the farm.