Bloodlines (6 page)

I spent the evening thinking about the way she held herself, the dark hair framing her face as she looked back at me. Walking between the muscular officers whose authority gave even more weight to their already substantial bulk, she seemed diminutive and fragile, but there was a way in which her sense of resolution and grace were made even more powerful for being housed in so slight a body. I kept hearing her voice calling my name, and realized that I wanted to hear her say it again. She had referred to me as her friend, and I wondered whether she had done so because she wanted the officers to think we were friends, or because there was indeed a possibility that we might be.

The next day when I was through with classes I walked by the newspaper office to see what had happened to her, but she wasn’t there. None of the other students in the office had heard from her. I was surprised by my disappointment as I left, and went home, planning to call her that evening. But I didn’t have a chance, because she called me first.

My father was a widower—my mother died in a car accident when I was in my last year of high school. The night Michaela called, my father was out taking inventory at the furniture store, as he did twice a year. It was something I had helped with throughout high school, but when I reached university my father insisted that I stay home and study. Usually I insisted, and ended up helping out for a few hours at the end of the day. But that evening I was at home, working on a paper evaluating stress measurement in steel railroad trestles, an area in which I eventually specialized. When the phone rang, the last person I expected to find on the other end of the line was Michaela.

“Hello?”

“Lenny, this is Michaela. Michaela Davidson.”

“Michaela,” I said, rising from my chair at the kitchen table. “I’m so relieved to hear your voice,” I said. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she said. “I wanted to thank you for yesterday, and to apologize for imposing. I hope you didn’t mind the way I asked for your help.”

“Not at all,” I protested. “You didn’t have much choice.”

“I suppose I didn’t.” She paused, and for an awkward moment we listened to each other breathing.

“Did they treat you with respect?”

“Respect?” She laughed. “That’s the last thing I expected from them. They’re bullies. My father came down to the police station as soon as you called the house. They only kept me in a cell for a few hours.”

“They put you in a cell?” I said, feeling more confusion than anger. “Like a common criminal? For what—writing an editorial in the school paper?”

“Don’t sound so shocked, Lenny. Where have you been? It’s happening all over the country, and this is just the beginning.”

“But on university grounds? To students? Women? It’s madness. Where was the university administration?”

“Scared into silence, like the rest of the country,” she said. “Did you read the editorial that got me arrested?”

“Yes,” he said.

“What did you think of it?”

I wondered whether to be truthful, or to simply praise her, and quickly decided that this—and she—were too important to be glossed over.

“I thought it was well written,” I said, gathering my thoughts.

“We both know I’m not asking about the writing.”

“It was good, Michaela. You interviewed people about to be thrown out of their homes, and that put a human face on the problem. Great interviews, by the way. No one could question the intentions of the writer, or her courage.” I paused. “But I’m not sure the editorial will achieve anything, other than making you some dangerous enemies.”

There was silence on the other end, which I took as a sure sign that she was displeased with my response. But I underestimated her tenacity and determination to get it right, and to get what she wanted.

“Will you be at the university tomorrow?” she asked.

“In the afternoon,” I answered. “How about you?”

“I’ll be in the newspaper office after three,” she said. “Will you meet me there?”

“Wait for me,” I said. “I’ll come by when my classes are over.”

I was in the last year of my engineering degree; your mother was just beginning her third year in the school of music. We were an unlikely match. In my graduating class photograph I stand in the back row, tall and serious. Looking today at that young man, I see long, smooth cheeks, deep-set eyes, and what looks like a wide, easy smile, and nothing of the reticence I felt inside. Your mother used to say later that my face was unusual—it combined serious intensity with the possibility of wild abandon. Throughout my life, mostly unknowingly, I have used this contradiction in my appearance to unnerve people and put them off balance—but it was just this contradiction, she said, that attracted her.

Like most students, we both lived at home. I was an only child, and although my father and I were close, he was not a talkative man. Once my mother died, he spent most of his time in the furniture store they ran together. I don’t think he ever fully recovered from her death. We lived together amiably, but the house was haunted by my mother’s absence, and I spent as little time at home as I could. I was focused on engineering and on my career, and while I might have been interested in socializing, I had neither the time nor the confidence. I did have friends, but most of my contact with them was playing cricket on weekends. In my spare time I read—but until I met Michaela, I made no connection between the political philosophy I was interested in, and the realities we lived with.

In contrast, your mother was a whirlwind. She thought quickly, moved rapidly, and spoke her mind. She gave the impression of knowing where she was going. At the university she knew everyone, began writing for the paper in her first year, and was voluble and opinionated. She loved music and had chosen it as her area of study, but I don’t think she ever intended to use it to earn a living, and in fact she never did. She had an attractive, open face, wide brown eyes and an infectious smile, and with her fair skin, her enthusiasm, and her slender figure, there had never been a lack of boys in her life. Luckily for me, she found them all immature and shallow.

Like me, your mother was an only child; your grandfather, Samuel Davidson, was a dentist, your grandmother, Selma, a teacher. Even in the early 1950s when such activity was unheard of, Selma made it a condition of employment that her domestic servants be willing to learn the educational skills they were denied as black South Africans. Four evenings a week after supper, sitting around the kitchen table, she taught reading, arithmetic and basic science to a group that also sometimes included servants from neighboring homes, if their employers approved.

As soon as your mother was old enough, she watched the classes, then she sat in on them, and finally, as a high school student, stood in as a relief teacher. And of course—it could only have been recognized in hindsight—the contact she had with domestic servants over the kitchen table at night gave her a respect for their intelligence and their personhood that was denied the rest of us.

Both of your mother’s parents were opposed to the political direction South Africa was taking. Your grandmother was by far the more radical of the two, and your grandfather was horrified when it became clear that their daughter intended to put into practice what she had heard spoken in their home. He tried to dissuade her. The times were dangerous and the laws more stringent; the opposition had achieved frightening increases in power. The stakes were higher, he said, and she did not yet understand what price she might have to pay.

But in the end, her father’s opposition was not equal to the combined weight of her mother’s radical commitment to change, and the anarchist leanings of her mother’s Russian parents. Michaela was so much a rebel by nature that it would have been strange had she not gravitated to the more extreme position.

Eventually your grandfather Samuel realized that he could do no more for his daughter than he could do for his wife—that his job was to love them both, provide for and protect them as best he could, and, ultimately, let them live their lives. While Michaela was still at university, however, he thought he could still have an impact on her behavior and on her choices. About that he was mistaken—but about much else he could not have been more accurate.

At the time we left South Africa, Steven, you were too young to understand its history. And when we reached Boston you were so intent on becoming an American that current events outside the United States were of no interest to you. As far as I know, you never took a course or read a book about the country of your birth. But to understand what those committed to changing the country were up against, you need to know a little of the past. This is my understanding of how we arrived at the events that landed your mother in jail.

South Africa’s history is a succession of minor events that were unforeseeable, yet inevitable. It started with the need to prevent scurvy, a vitamin C deficiency that was the scourge of sailors on long voyages. In 1652, the Dutch East India Company established a re-provisioning center at the tip of the continent to provide fresh food for Dutch ships sailing around the tip of Africa. It came to be known as the Cape Colony.

Within a few years, employees began agitating for permission to start their own farms, and soon the company started offering settlers free passage to the Cape Colony. It was a new, wide open place at the tip of fertile Africa, and settlers came in droves to escape a Europe that seemed to them crowded, tradition-bound and burdened by its history. Others, like the French Huguenots, came seeking freedom from Catholic persecution. They merged with the descendants of the Dutch until all that was left was the Dutch pronunciation of their French names.

When Napoleon conquered the Netherlands in 1795, Britain sent troops to Africa to ensure that the Cape Colony didn’t fall into French hands. Twenty five years later, the first British settlers began to arrive. By then, the Netherlands had formally given the Cape to Britain. The Dutch settlers, the Boers, resented British colonial rule, and because Boer farmers were dependent on slavery to work their lands, they especially resented the interference of abolitionist missionaries.

Boer farmers had enslaved the two yellow-skinned indigenous people, the San and the Khoikhoi, using them as house servants and farm workers, and many farms were ruined in 1833 when the British Empire abolished slavery. A few years later, seeking freedom from British rule, several thousand Boers loaded their belongings into ox-drawn wagons and traveled inland in what came to be called The Great Trek. As they spread north from the Cape Colony, the Boers became the Afrikaner nation, and their history is one of battles with the black tribes they encountered, among them the Zulu and the Xhosa and the Shangaan.

Through the teaching of the Dutch Reformed Church, the Afrikaners came to believe that they were the modern Israelites, a Chosen People to whom God had given South Africa. Their hardships—battles with black tribes as well as with the British—were the trials they had to endure before the Promised Land could be theirs.

When the Union of South Africa was established in 1910 as a self-governing country and a part of the British Empire, the constitution put control completely in the hands of a deeply divided white population. They spoke different languages, had different cultures and religions, and while the Afrikaners were primarily farmers, the British gravitated to industry and commerce.

In the years leading up to the Second World War, Afrikaners began leaving rural areas for the cities. Because they lacked training, they were at an economic disadvantage to the better educated and more culturally sophisticated British; worse yet, they found that they had to compete for jobs with blacks. This was politically unpalatable. In the election of 1948, their party, the Nationalists, came to power with a promise to strengthen what had until then been separation of the races in fact, if not in law.

The election was really a minority victory since blacks, who made up eighty percent of the population, were denied the vote. Nevertheless, the Nationalists wasted no time putting their much more severe version of apartheid into the legal code. It became a crime for different racial groups to live together; sex across color lines became a punishable offense, and they established a system of job reservation to ensure that the massive black labor force was relegated to the lowest paying, most menial jobs.