The Covenant: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  After a long silence Detleef asked weakly, ‘Did she send you?’

  ‘I heard about her, and I came on my own, as your friend.’ When Detleef made no comment, the predikant asked in a low voice, ‘Detleef, shall we pray?’ And on his knees beside the young man for whom he had such high hopes, he talked with God about the extreme difficulty men face when they want to lead a Christian life.

  The wedding was to be held in the Dutch Reformed church at Carolina, where numerous Steyns from the region gathered to honor Christoffel’s memory. At the strong suggestion of Reverend Brongersma, Maria’s predikant was asked to perform the ceremony, but on the evening before the wedding Detleef went to the church in Venloo and said, ‘Reverend Brongersma, I wouldn’t feel properly married unless you helped,’ and when the pastor said that he would drive Detleef down to the wedding, the young man fumbled with a package and asked hesitantly, ‘Dominee, tell me. I paid a lot of money for this Bible. Could I give it to Maria?’

  Brongersma took the book, opened the cover, and saw that a page was missing; it required no cleverness to deduce what had happened. He thought for a moment, then asked gently, ‘Don’t you think that a bright girl like Maria might guess about Clara?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose she would,’ he said dejectedly.

  ‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do, Detleef. I’ve always wanted a leatherbound Bible. I’ll trade this for a new one of mine.’ And next day Brongersma printed in firm clear letters on the page reserved for family records:

  DETLEEF VAN DOORN–MARIA STEYN

  Kinders van ons helde. Getroud 14 Maart 1919

  (Children of our heroes. Married 14 March 1919)

  And then Detleef was thrown out into the world, just as the Trianon Van Doorns had advised; the committee that selected rugby players for a team which would tour New Zealand chose him to be one of the principal forwards, and Venloo expanded with more pride than it would have done had he been elected general of the armies. For a small town to provide a Springbok was a glory that rarely came.

  A Springbok was any athlete of world class who wore the green blazer with its golden springbok emblem while representing South Africa against another nation. A cricketer could be a Springbok, so could an Olympic runner, and as such they were entitled to full honors; but it was generally understood that only a rugby Springbok was a true immortal. This was especially true in 1921, because the New Zealand All-Blacks, so called because of their ominous uniforms, were regarded as the finest team that had ever played the game, and it was agreed that the winner of the forthcoming matches would be world champions.

  Detleef was twenty-six that year, the father of a boy, the master of a growing farm. When his picture appeared in the city papers, it showed a stocky farmer, feet wide apart, rope around his ample stomach as a belt, and with absolutely no neck. The line from the bottom of his ear to the break of his shoulder was straight and unbroken, and when he posed next to his heaviest pair of oxen, he resembled them.

  The problem of who would tend the farm while he was absent was conveniently solved: when Piet Krause left Venloo he had expected to find work quickly in Johannesburg, but these were hard times, and at one industry after another he was rebuffed. Chastened, he was glad to accept Detleef’s offer of a free home and meals for himself and Johanna: ‘But only during the rugby tour. I know I can find work in Johannesburg. This nation needs men like me.’

  When Detleef, accompanied by five of the horrible Morkels, stepped ashore at Auckland, he was like some gape-eyed child, for the people of New Zealand were immersed in frenzy over this championship series. The South Africans were allowed to warm up, of course, against regional teams, and in the first match Detleef discovered what he was going to be up against. When he hooked arms in the scrum, he looked into the face of a gigantic New Zealander with the sloping shoulders and quick moves of a true athlete; he was Tom Heeney, soon to fight Gene Tunney for the boxing championship of the world, and when he slammed into Detleef, the latter felt his knees jump backward. In the afternoons to come, he would face Heeney often.

  When the regional warm-ups were finished, the two nations played a series of three games, the first on the southern island at Dunedin, the last two on the northern island, at Auckland and Wellington. Detleef would never forget that opening game: ‘When we lined up for the photographers to take pictures, I was like a little boy. I had to go to the bathroom. So I went and was almost late for the whistle. I remember nothing about the first half, except that I kept bumping into some very strong men. We ended the half ahead by five-to-nothing.’ Whenever he spoke to audiences about that game he stopped at this point, laughed and said, ‘But I certainly remember the second half. New Zealanders kept running up and down my spine. The crowd kept roaring. The ball kept slipping away, and at the end of the game New Zealand won thirteen-to-five.’

  But he was blooded. Like an animal that has gone up against a lion and escaped with its life, he knew what fear was; he understood the meaning of pressure and became indifferent to the roar of the crowd. Before the opening of the second game he gathered the five Morkels on his team and said, ‘We show them no mercy.’ It was an epic struggle, tied at five-all until the gang of Morkels made superhuman plays to eke out a 9–5 victory. ‘That night,’ Detleef often said in later years, ‘was the high point of my life. Nothing could ever excel that victory over New Zealand.’

  The third and deciding game should never have taken place, for the field was so water-soaked and the rain so incessant that play resembled swimming more than rugby. The score was a frustrating 0–0, but the last seconds were a kind of majestic triumph for Detleef; a huge New Zealander broke away for what seemed the game-winning score, except that Van Doorn made a diving tackle that slowed him down. Boy Morkel rushed up to help hold him, whereupon six New Zealanders piled on. In the tangle and mud, Detleef’s leg twisted, then broke. His rugby days were ended, but as he was carried off the field, refusing to surrender to the pain, he was able to tell Tom Heeney, ‘Well, you didn’t beat us,’ and the Hard Rock from Down Under laughed and said, ‘We nearly did.’

  In the ensuing years Detleef was remembered wherever he went as ‘the man who saved the day in New Zealand.’ He treasured his green jacket with the emblazoned antelope and kept it on a special hanger in his wardrobe, taking it out occasionally for some sporting event. It became a sacred object, replacing the ceramic crock in which the men of his family had long made their bread puddings.

  When Detleef limped home on crutches in 1921 and saw how ineptly Piet Krause had managed Vrymeer during the rugby matches in New Zealand, he was tempted to show his disgust, but Maria calmed him by pointing out: ‘Piet kept worrying about Johannesburg. Don’t blame him for what he overlooked here.’

  Krause had found—or more accurately, Johanna had found for him—a minor job as labor advisor to the government. He specialized in gold-mine problems, and when he returned to Venloo for a visit, Detleef, seeing the excitement with which he attacked his new duties, forgave him: ‘You were never meant to be a farmer, Piet. Tell me, why do we hear so many rumbles from your city?’

  That was all Piet needed. In wild bursts of words, interrupted by Johanna with her own interpretations, he explained why the burgeoning city had become the focus of the country: ‘It’s there the real battles are being fought. Our excursions up north, where General de Groot died and you and I took part, they were nothing. Echoes of the nineteenth century. But in Johannesburg …’

  ‘Who’s fighting?’

  ‘The Afrikaner. He’s fighting for his soul.’

  He insisted that Detleef come back with him to witness the struggle of the white Afrikaner workman against the English mine owner, the Hoggenheimer financier, and especially the Bantu worker, but Detleef said that until he could move without crutches that would be impossible. However, he did want to understand the gold mines and promised that he would read whatever Piet mailed him in preparation for his later visit.

  Johanna made the selection, and what she sent wa
s startling. One gang of workers wanted to establish a soviet in which laboring men would take control of the mines, overthrow the government, and establish a Communist dictatorship in harmony with Russia. One group of mine owners wanted to fire all white workers and use only Bantu to work the gold, but when Maria read the literature more carefully, she pointed out: ‘That’s not what the owners said, Detleef. That’s what their enemies said they said.’ But then he received other mailings which proved that many owners wanted to cut back the number of white workers and increase the number of black.

  From a distance, the city seemed such a jungle of competing forces that Detleef was actually eager to get there, and as soon as his leg mended he informed Johanna that he was ready. She advised him that if he caught a train at Waterval-Boven they would meet him at the railway station in central Johannesburg, and when they did they led him into a miasma of urban horror.

  His education up to that moment, except for Chrissiesmeer, had been romantic: old generals fighting lost battles, gallant young men on the playing fields of New Zealand, sentimental remembrances of the Vrouemonument, unrequited love. Now his realistic instruction was to begin; he experienced it first in the section of Johannesburg called Vrededorp, where thousands of rural Afrikaners, driven off their farms by rinderpest and drought, had collected. They stopped at a small house occupied by a family named Troxel: tall, gaunt husband who should have been back on the open veld; scrawny wife with flat, sagging breasts; unkempt children, their faces drawn with hunger. In that dwelling there was little hope.

  ‘Will you take us to other homes?’ Piet asked, and Troxel led them to much worse hovels, whose occupants were desolate. After talking with these forlorn people, Detleef felt sick at the stomach, not figuratively but actually, almost to the point of vomiting. ‘We’ve got to do something, Piet. These people are starving.’

  ‘Tomorrow well see what lies behind the starving,’ Piet said, and on this day he took Detleef to a workers’ hall, where there was much agitation about new rules which the Chamber of Mines had promulgated.

  ‘They’re cutting back the proportion of white workers,’ an agitator explained. When Detleef asked what this signified, the man screamed, ‘Extermination, that’s what it means. Extermination of the white Afrikaner,’ and he explained that tradition in the gold fields had been that for every eight Bantu diggers, there had to be one white man. ‘Now they want to make it ten blacks to one white. We can’t accept that. It would cost too many Afrikaners their jobs.’

  A stronghold of the strikers was Fordsburg, a working-class district near Vrededorp, and here Detleef was taken to an inconspicuous shed in which the future soviet was being planned. Here rabid Afrikaners met with Cornish miners imported to do the basic work down deep and three fiery Englishmen who were determined to take South Africa into the Communist orbit: ‘There’ll be blood this time! Are you with us?’ When Detleef said he didn’t work the mines, but was a farmer, four excited Afrikaners surrounded him, demanding to know why he did not bring food into the city to feed his starving compatriots.

  That night he could not sleep, seeing the pinched faces bearing in upon him, for he knew what starvation was, and when on the third day Piet took him back to Vrededorp to talk quietly with Troxel and the other Afrikaner families, and he heard their pitiful tales of perished hopes on the farms, the doleful trek to the city, the cruel exploitation in the mines, and the endless struggle to maintain their rights against the pressure of the blacks, his earlier sickness returned, and abruptly he informed Piet and Johanna that he was going home. When they accused him of rejecting his own people, he assured them: ‘I’ll be back.’

  And he was, with a convoy of three large wagons bringing all the spare food he had been able to collect in Venloo. He drove the lead wagon, Micah Nxumalo the second, and Micah’s son, Moses, the third. They brought the food into the center of Vrededorp and started to distribute it, but they occasioned such a disturbance that a riot would surely have ensued had not the Communist workers swept in, taken charge, and told the hungry miners that this food came from their committee.

  This second visit had one by-product neither Detleef nor Piet had intended; Micah, left in charge of the three empty wagons, drove them out to a different section of Johannesburg where his people clustered. It was called Sophiatown, and when Micah came back to tell Detleef where he had been, Van Doorn decided to go with him to see how urban blacks lived.

  Sophiatown had come into existence some two decades earlier, planned as a suburb for whites but spurned by them when a sewage works was located nearby. It was only four and a half miles from the center of Johannesburg, and the owner of the land had to do something with it, so he started renting and selling land to the blacks who were pouring in from the countryside to fill jobs in the postwar industrial boom.

  For Detleef it was a journey into hell, for Sophiatown had no proper streets, few proper houses and no proper water supply. It was a mélange of prostitutes, tsotsis, and decent mothers trying to maintain a home against phenomenal odds while their husbands worked ten and twelve hours for a daily wage of twenty pennies.

  When Detleef looked at Sophiatown he saw a festering sore, dark and malignant, threatening to spread over a clean white city. It reached dangerously toward Afrikaner communities, as if it intended to engulf them. He was shocked to learn that blacks could actually own land here, which meant that they could stay permanently. ‘A hideous sore,’ he muttered to himself. ‘It must be removed.’

  This conclusion was intensified when he saw the home Nxumalo’s relatives occupied. The Magubanes had a house with walls of real wood and a secure watertight roof made of paraffin tins. One of the Magubanes told him, ‘Yes, when our people get the money they will make a lovely place of Sophiatown. Just like the homes of the rich people in Parktown.’

  ‘Where do your people work?’ Detleef asked.

  ‘Offices, factories. And if the new rules come for the mines, thousands of our people back in the kraals will be eager for jobs. Fifty thousand, a hundred thousand if you need them.’

  So Detleef left Sophiatown with the certain knowledge that the blacks would insist upon improving their lot, but he saw that this would be possible only at the expense of the white Afrikaners already trapped in poverty. He found that Troxel and the other white miners were willing to express themselves quite forcefully: ‘We want this to be a white nation run by whites and not a black nation run by blacks.’ Detleef could not imagine the huddled blacks of Sophiatown running anything; they would be lucky if they survived. His sympathies lay with the white miners, and when the callous owners announced even more stringent rules which might cost four thousand additional white men their jobs, he knew there would have to be a strike, although he himself did not want to support any moves which might turn this country into a soviet.

  When the strike began, he knew he ought to hurry back to the safety of Vrymeer, but he was hypnotized by the intricacy of the struggle and curious to see how it turned out. So Piet Krause, whose job made it logical for him to stay on the scene in Vrededorp, asked the Troxels whether he and Detleef could board with them during the trouble, and the destitute Afrikaners were eager to have paying guests.

  This was a battle much more fundamental than the pro-German rebellion of 1914. Miners were fighting for survival; owners were fighting for financial control; and the government, led by Jan Christian Smuts, was fighting for continuation of an orderly society. The hatred Krause and Van Doorn felt for Smuts clouded their vision of what was right, and they tended to cheer for whatever group opposed him.

  It was real combat. Detleef turned a corner and saw sixteen civilians mowed down by machine-gun fire. A government building was dynamited and fourteen soldiers were killed. Police were gunned down, and on one awful day airplanes flew over the city, dropping bombs on concentrations of miners.

  The death toll was fifty, then a hundred, then a hundred and fifty, with food running low and arson becoming common. There was talk of shutting off water, an
d children in the streets were slain by stray bullets.

  ‘Why are Afrikaners fighting Afrikaners?’ Detleef asked in anguish, and Troxel growled, ‘Because we Afrikaners want to keep this nation white.’ He was a brave man, and when General Smuts in total frustration warned that heavy artillery would shell the heart of Vrededorp at eleven the next morning, he refused to move his family. ‘Shells matter nothing,’ he muttered, but when they began to fall, monstrous things intended for shattering forts, he quivered. Detleef, comforting the Troxel children, could not believe that his government was doing this, and as the dreadful concussions continued he thought: This is insanity. There must be a more sensible way.

  In the midst of the barrage, Troxel left his shelter and ran directly across the open square where the shells were falling. He was heading for strike headquarters, and when he returned through the smoldering debris he was weeping: ‘They committed suicide!’

  ‘Who?’ Detleef asked.

  ‘Our leaders. The Englishman, the other. Pistol shots through the head.’

  The armed rebellion was over, with the competition between the very poor Afrikaners in Vrededorp and the totally poor blacks in Sophiatown no closer to settlement than when the strike began. Only one poverty-stricken Afrikaner came out of the affair better than when he went in: after the fighting, when Nxumalo reassembled the three wagons for the trip back to Vrymeer, and Detleef saw them standing empty, he impulsively ran to the Troxel house and said, ‘Come with me. This town is no place for an Afrikaner.’ And on the spur of the moment he and Piet Krause threw into one wagon the pitiful collection of goods this family had accumulated after ten hards years in the city; it did not begin to fill it.

  ‘They can use the De Groot place,’ Detleef said as the bewildered cavalcade started eastward. He had seen Johannesburg and was appalled.

  One Sunday, Detleef received the distinct impression in church that Reverend Brongersma was preaching directly to him, not in the long ordinary passages of the sermon, but whenever something of special import had to be said. Then Brongersma would stare in his direction, sometimes looking at others in his vicinity but again and again coming back to Detleef to make his points.