The Covenant (158 page)

But she was condemned. At birth she had been classified Coloured, which meant that for the remainder of her life this would be her outstanding characteristic, outweighing her intelligence, her beauty and her capacity to contribute to society. Where she lived, the quality of her early education, what job she could hold, whom she could fall in love with, and the role she could play in South African life were all sharply proscribed. Everyone in the nation would know Heather’s limits, everyone, that is, except Heather.

At twenty the police arrested the young student for “inciting white men to have interracial carnal intercourse or to commit an act of indecency,” and rarely was a miscegenation charge more correct—she certainly was tempting, to white men or those of any other color—or more fallacious, for it was not she who did the tempting; it was the men. On that charge she was given three months in prison, suspended on condition that the tempting cease. She was warned that if she was again brought before a magistrate on a charge of immorality, she would suffer the consequences.

“I don’t give a damn,” she told her fellow students after the trial, and continued to behave with an insolence that was charming to those who knew her, insulting to those who merely watched. She went where she wished in Cape Town, ate wherever her crowd stopped for food, and when late October came around she frequented the beaches reserved for whites, where her striking figure, her suntanned skin and her lively manner gained attention, if not always approval. Twice white sunbathers warned her that in using beaches legally reserved for their group, she was breaking the law. She tossed her head and smiled at them.

At Christmas vacation, which marked the height of the summer season, Heather was sunning herself at a white beach when Craig Saltwood, aged twenty, came home from Oriel College at Oxford for a visit with his family, and it was not remarkable that he met her. They talked about college classes, and of recent developments in South Africa. He poured warm sand upon her legs, then gallantly brushed it off, one grain at a time. She told him to be careful where his fingers went, and soon they were kissing in hidden corners where the police would not see them, and on the third afternoon young Saltwood drove her home in his Morris Minor.

He was delighted with her parents. Simon Botha was a skilled builder, head of his own construction company. His wife, Deborah, was a quiet homemaker who took pride in caring for Simon and their three children, of whom Heather was the oldest. Mrs. Botha was often to be found in the kitchen of their home in Athlone making the boboties and sweet confections her family had always prepared with elegance. Like her daughter, she had a glowing complexion, but unlike her, she was shy.

“I often worry about Heather,” she said softly. “Going to the white beach. She’s bound to get into trouble.”

“I’m not trouble,” Craig said.

“For my daughter you are,” Mrs. Botha replied.

Then Mr. Botha talked about the letting of recent contracts to build houses in a new township, and of how white officials discriminated against Coloured artisans, awarding large constructions to certain white builders who really lacked expertise and experience. “They won’t let me build those new boxes, yet when one of the great old houses like Trianon needs attention, they call me.” He laughed. “Then it’s ‘Botha, can you fix that gable in the old way?’ Or ‘Botha, we want to restore that barn built when Jan Compagnie was here. We’ve got to protect our cultural heritage.’ And who protects it? I do.”

There was much laughter in the Botha home, and many books and quite a few records by Wilhelm Fürtwangler and Arturo Toscanini, plus a shelf of His Master’s Voice operas. The Bothas spoke English, but were at ease in Afrikaans, and on Sundays they worshipped at the Dutch Reformed church (Coloured) where Simon and Deborah had been married and their children confirmed.

The Korean War had just ended, and Simon spoke proudly of the South African fighter planes in the Far East, but he could not mask his disappointment when reflecting on his own four-year service during World War II. “Jan Smuts came personally to thank our Coloured unit when it was over, and I can still see the Oubaas standing not ten feet from me, telling us we were needed back home to build a new South Africa. ‘God bless you all,’ he said. ‘May you prosper in peace even more than you did in these years of conflict.’ Fifty thousand men like me fought against Hitler. For freedom, they said. But when we got home, Smuts forgot every promise he made, and now they’re even trying to take away our right to vote.”

When Heather saw how sympathetically Craig participated with
her family, her response was so warm that all suspected that she might be spending the next nights with him in the Sea Point boardinghouse he was using for his vacation, but on the second night a suspicious woman in a room opposite telephoned the police to warn them that a crime was being committed in Room 318. The case was handed to two policemen, a sergeant fifty-five years old who was revolted by such duty, and a gung-ho young fellow of twenty-two from a country district who was greatly excited by the prospect of bursting into rooms where nude couples were in bed. At four-fifteen one morning, having kept the premises under observation for several nights, they crashed their way into the room, took photographs, and arrested the naked couple, the older policeman blushing with shame.

“The sheets! Don’t forget the sheets!” cried the younger man as he watched Heather while she dressed, and the sergeant was forced to strip the bed and wrap the sheets in a bundle. The investigators would send the linen to a medical research institute, where highly paid technicians using ultramodern equipment would ascertain scientifically whether miscegenation had truly occurred.

“I’m sorry for this,” the older policeman apologized as he led the lovers down the corridor and past a doorway in which a triumphant woman demonstrated her pride in having served as guardian of her nation’s morals.

“You pitiful creature,” Heather said to the watchdog, and this “act of arrogance and spite against a decent citizen” was cited against her at the trial.

“Insolent and unrepentant, even though guilty of a major crime,” the magistrate thundered at her, after which he delivered a sentence standard in these cases: “Craig Saltwood, you come of a good family and have a respectable university record. You have clearly been influenced by alien ideas in England, and your behavior is a disgrace. The example set by you and other white men of your ilk cannot but be seen as shocking in the eyes of decent Coloured people, whose daughters must be protected against such liaisons. Three months, sentence suspended for three years’ good behavior.” The magistrate glowered. “But if you ever again consort with any woman outside your own race, you will go to jail.”

He studied Heather for a moment, balefully, then said, “You have chosen to ignore the warning I issued at your previous appearance. I have pity for what your parents must feel as a result of this disgraceful act. But the court has no alternative. Prison, three months.”

It was assumed that the white man, feeling the sting of censure from his society, would slink off and keep his mouth shut. But Craig Saltwood was so outraged by the gross unfairness of Heather’s sentence that instead of hurrying back to Oxford and forgetting his vacation escapade, he phoned his mother and asked her, “Will you help correct a grave injustice?”

“I would like nothing better,” Laura Saltwood said.

She had already battled, with little success, for the rights of black and Coloured ex-servicemen and was appalled by the injustices that were being perpetrated under the new laws promulgated by the Nationalists since their 1948 victory. When Craig explained how he had been excused and Heather thrown into jail, she was outraged.

“Clear up one thing, Craig. Is she a prostitute?”

“Hell no! She didn’t entice me, like the court said. I chased her.”

“You visited her home?”

“Had dinner with her parents. As I would with any girl I liked.”

“Isn’t her father Simon Botha, who restores the old Cape Dutch houses?”

“He is.”

That was all Laura Saltwood needed. Convening the small group of women who had joined her in her efforts to protect the rights of ex-servicemen, she laid the facts before them, and they were disgusted, but when she suggested ventilating the story in the newspapers, a Mrs. van Rensburg asked her if she thought this prudent: “Hasn’t your son suffered enough publicity?”

“We Saltwoods have never worried much about that,” Laura said, and she hurried to Cape Town, where she poured out her anger to the
Argus
and the
Times
. She visited Heather’s parents and told them to be of good courage, but she also advised them that if her fight to get this infamous sentence revoked was successful, Heather should leave the country.

“And go where?” Deborah Botha asked sadly.

“Canada. There they behave like human beings.”

She also visited Heather in jail, ignoring the snide remarks the authorities threw at her when she sought permission. She found Heather to be the kind of young woman a mother hopes her son will meet—attractive, strong and with a robust sense of humor. “We’ll get you out of here, Heather.”

“In three months,” the girl joked.

“I mean out of the country. You must get leave.”

“I like it here.”

“You have no future in South Africa. Elsewhere you could lead a normal life.”

“I lead a pretty normal one here.”

“In a prison cell? For loving a young man? Don’t be a fool.”

Heather had only a week to ponder this advice. In that time Craig Saltwood returned to Oxford, and his mother sought out the one person she thought would listen to her, Detleef van Doorn, chairman of the Committee on Racial Affairs, architect of the new laws. He did listen to her, attentively, then patiently explained that white South Africa had to protect its racial purity against the hordes that were trying to destroy it: “Heather Botha’s sentence is appropriate to the grave damage she might have done if she gave birth to yet another Coloured child.”

“What about my son’s crime?”

“She tempted him,” and he cited several instances from the Bible in which honest young Israelites were tempted by the daughters of Canaan, and when Mrs. Saltwood smiled indulgently, he reached in his desk and produced an English Bible, which contained many paper markers. Searching for the applicable one, he opened to Genesis 28:1, which he read in sonorous English: “ ‘Thou shalt not take a wife of the daughters of Canaan.’ ” Closing the Bible triumphantly, he stared at Mrs. Saltwood.

“He did not, so far as I know, intend taking Miss Botha as his wife.”

Van Doorn, like any proper puritan, was incensed by this flippancy, but after a moment’s silence, he said quietly, “Mrs. Saltwood, if you continue along the path you’ve chosen, you’ll find yourself in great difficulty.”

“No,” she said evenly, “I shall find myself raising merry hell wherever I can about Heather Botha’s disgraceful sentencing.” Laura was a resolute woman who feared nothing, who intended her closing years to be meaningful. The contributions of her family to this nation had not been minimal, and she did not propose surrendering her moral positions to the judgment of Afrikaner Nationalists, whom she considered excessively bigoted.

Van Doorn, looking at her determined face thrust forward toward his, could imagine that he was confronting Hilary Saltwood, that first and worst of the difficult clan. Whenever the trekboers tangled with
that demented missionary, they had come away scarred, and Detleef suspected that in any open contest with Laura Saltwood, he would be scarred too.

“I’ll talk to the proper authorities about commuting her sentence,” he said.

“As of today?”

“I can’t speak for others.” Then he dropped his voice and pleaded with his difficult visitor: “Could we keep this a secret between the two of us?”

“We certainly shall. Detleef, I knew you were a man of common sense.”

“No, I’m a poor Boer, madam, incapable of combating you bedonderde Saltwoods.”

Heather was set free, and six months later, on a visit to Cape Town, Laura found the young woman packing. “I’m off to Canada,” the girl said happily, and she kissed Laura for having shown her how a free woman should behave.

She took up residence in the best of Canadian cities, Toronto, where her style and beauty attracted people of diverse qualities, including several young men captivated by her exotic appearance and spirited wit. Friends helped her locate a job as secretary to a firm with overseas connections, where her facility with languages proved an asset.

In Toronto she was prized for those qualities which at home had made her a criminal: a saucy indifference to outworn custom and an infectious acceptance of people, whatever their station. She was free to contribute to Canadian life to the extent of her capabilities, but she never became pompous or pontifical. When well-meaning travelers tried to inform her about current happenings in South Africa, she smiled graciously and said, “I no longer give a damn what those poor sick people do to themselves down there.”

But she did care, for she never threw away a small green plastic identity card which proved she had been a South African citizen. In red letters it also informed the world that she was
COLOURED-KLEURLING
.

Heather Botha married a young Canadian lawyer, had three fine children and became a patron of the musical arts in Toronto. She kept the plastic card at the bottom of a drawer in her bedroom as a sober reminder of the prison from which she had escaped.

At Venloo there developed alongside the school founded after the Anglo-Boer War by Mr. Amberson, the rugby player, a girls’ school with a notable reputation for producing excellent Afrikaans-speaking graduates who did well at university. It had a patriotic tradition of which its students and teachers were proud. Said the principal, Roelf Sterk, “My grandfather started this school in a cattle shed back in 1913, when our people were in the years of their suffering. He had no money and his scholars had none, either, but he gathered girls from the neighborhood and told them, ‘We will not be able to build a free nation in which Afrikaners can live in dignity unless you future mothers master the skills practiced by the English. You must learn to figure and write and reason. You must study.’ I now tell you the same thing. We’ve won our rightful place in the government of this land, but to keep ahead of those English, we must study as never before.”