The Covenant: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  The small booklet he devised, 4¾ × 3¾ inches, was a masterpiece of sound planning. It contained forty-eight pages—which summarized a life and provided in one convenient place all kinds of helpful data. Long coded numbers indicated racial derivation, status and domicile. Space was provided for a series of photographs covering different ages and styles. Four pages were given to marriage records, with the printed assurance that if the holder was embarrassed by a proliferation of divorces, she or he could apply for a new booklet and start fresh. Included was a complete record of immunizations, allergies, blood group and any other medical information that might prove helpful to an ambulance attendant or a hospital nurse. It was also a driver’s license, reserving pages 18 through 21 for police endorsements as to arrests; it was also a license to carry firearms, with four full pages to record weapons. Pages 26 through 46 were marked ‘For official use,’ without any clue as to purpose, but available for insertion of whatever information the authorities might in the future wish to include. The last two pages contained a voting record, and a pocket at the rear was to hold a list of all real estate owned.

  Every white citizen, under Detleef’s plan, was obliged to carry this document at all times. ‘Now we will know who everyone is,’ he said, ‘and we can have an orderly state.’

  He was congratulating himself one afternoon when Reverend Brongersma, white-haired and failing, stopped by to pass the time of day. He no longer preached, but he did try to follow the activities of the Broederbond; along with the church, that fellowship had been the high point of his life: ‘I often think back to the vigorous days, Detleef. You and Frykenius, me and Piet Krause. That was a lively foursome. We accomplished so much.’

  Then he said, almost abruptly, ‘Call Maria. I want to see the girl whose life I saved.’ And when stout, squat Maria came into the room, he rose and kissed her. ‘I rode all the way to Stellenbosch to tell this young fellow he had to marry you, and this fine Christian home resulted. I wish I could have visited Marius before he married that English girl. Now he can never join the Broederbond … never play a major role in our society.’

  That was regrettable. He talked of Piet, too, then said something which disturbed Detleef profoundly: ‘Piet was a radical on the left, and he destroyed himself. You were a radical on the right, and you’ve destroyed many of our freedoms.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Detleef has worked only for good,’ Maria said defensively.

  ‘I’m sure he has,’ the old man said, ‘but I fear he got things out of balance. The fellowship of Christ is meant to bring freedom, not restraint.’

  ‘But society has to be disciplined,’ Detleef protested. ‘You know that.’

  ‘I do. But if we read the Old Testament too grimly, we miss the lovemaking, the adventure, the wild triumphs, the dancing and the sound of flutes.’ He shook his head. ‘I was to blame, too. I sought a new world so forcefully I forgot the goodness in all worlds. Do you know my favorite verse in all the Bible, now that I approach death? “Word wakker, word wakker, Debora: Word wakker, word wakker, hef ‘n lied aan.” Deborah, sing us a song! You have killed the singing, Detleef.’

  When he left, Maria said, ‘Poor old man, his mind’s wandering.’

  A few moments later men rushed into the house, shouting, ‘The prime minister’s been assassinated!’

  The Van Doorns, trembling, rushed to the radio. Detleef tuned it so nervously that he could not locate a station, so Maria took over and found the awful verification: ‘Today as he was attending his duties in the House of Parliament, our prime minister, Hendrik Verwoerd, was stabbed to death by an assassin who approached him in the guise of a uniformed pageboy. Three knife wounds entered the throat and chest and he died before he could reach the hospital.’

  In darkness the Van Doorns sat silent, contemplating the nemesis that seemed at times to hang over their nation: a splendid patriot assassinated in the halls of government; foreigners making accusatory speeches at the United Nations; blacks obstinately refusing to accept their assigned positions; and Marius married to an English girl.

  In the days that followed, Detleef’s tightly organized world seemed to fall apart, because the very laws which he had structured to defend the state had been used to destroy its elected leader. ‘It seems as if God Himself willed this tragedy,’ Detleef wailed, and in mounting fury he shared the evidence with his wife.

  ‘Who killed him? A man who should never have been allowed entrance into the country. A nobody from Moçambique.’

  ‘How did he sneak in?’ Maria demanded, voicing the anger of two and a half million Afrikaners.

  ‘You won’t believe it, but four people I trained myself—immigration officials who were supposed to check all entering aliens. The man had a criminal record. It was in his papers and no one saw it.’

  ‘But how could such a man get a job as messenger, right in the heart of Parliament?’

  Detleef shuddered. ‘His papers specifically stated that he was half-white, half-black. Everyone in Moçambique knew it. Our embassy knew it. But what happens? He walks in here bold as brass, and my office gives him an identity card stating that he was white. After that, everything was easy.’

  ‘But why did he want to kill our prime minister?’

  Van Doorn lowered his head and covered his eyes. He did not want to answer this ugly question, but in a weak voice he confided: ‘He said he became bitter over the fact that as a man with a white card, he was forbidden to have sexual relations with a Coloured girl he liked.’

  In a sullen rage Detleef stormed about the kitchen in which his early lessons had been learned. He could hear the voice of old General de Groot, who had never stopped fighting. He listened to Piet Krause, who had such a clear vision of the future. And from the corner came the powerful voice of his sister Johanna, who had been the backbone of the family and of the nation. He was embittered by the sardonic trick whereby his own laws had been used against him, but he could find nothing wrong with those laws.

  ‘What we must do,’ he told his wife, ‘is pass stricter laws. And then enforce them better.’

  The complex fabric of old custom and new law woven by Detleef van Doorn and his peers came to be known as apartheid, a classic example of the misfortune Afrikaners had in naming things. The word meant apartness, and did not appear in older dictionaries of the language; it was invented, and reflected their belief that God willed the races be kept separate, each progressing properly at its own speed within its own confines.

  The word should have been pronounced apart-hate, appropriately ominous, but by foreigners it was usually apart-hite, which is merely ugly. Either pronunciation was unfortunate, for it connoted offensive intentions which its authors did not contemplate.

  As the years progressed, so did the names used to describe apartheid: guardianship, separate development, separate freedoms, separate amenities, indigenous development, multinational development, self-determination, plural democracy. No matter how diligently they tried, the architects of these laws were unable to erase the first, correct name they had given their grand design.

  No one could study the instrumental role played by Van Doorn in drafting these laws without being impressed by the planner’s oft-repeated assertion: ‘I acted from the best and most honest motives, and without personal rancor, in accordance with His will.’

  He certainly wished no harm to the Coloureds, Asians and blacks whose lives he circumscribed; he often said, ‘Some of my best friends are the Bantu who work on my farm,’ and although it was true that he had always refused to alter the conditions under which they worked, he did constantly examine his Christian conscience when deciding what was right and wrong for them. Often he paid them higher wages than they might have got elsewhere. He insisted that he did not regard them as inherently inferior human beings, only different; he did not want to dominate them, only act as their well-intentioned guardian.

  But even honest intentions sometimes create problems which the promulgator of a law co
uld not have foreseen; apartheid became so pervasive that it dominated the lives of ordinary people from birth to death to resurrection.

  AT BIRTH

  The Afrikaner was never afraid to fly against the winds of history, and usually with success. Other nations had learned to utilize, and sometimes condone, the mixture of their races, with enviable results. No more beautiful people exist in the world than the languorous, able Chinese-Polynesians of the South Seas. The black-white mixture in Brazil produces offspring of extraordinary quality, while the Japanese-white children of Hawaii are exceptional in both talent and appearance. The Indian-Spanish mix in Mexico is a good one, and so is the Indian-black in Trinidad.

  The Afrikaner saw the hand of God in the creation of his small nation, and was determined to isolate it from admixtures that would dilute its purity. Indeed, it was difficult to find a more homogeneous, handsome and dedicated body of people than those Afrikaners nurtured on the veld and in the valleys of the continent’s southern tip. Of course, the pure Dutch strain had been infused with contributions from the gifted Huguenots who filtered in, never many in number, and with heavier contributions from the Germans, who at times actually outnumbered the Dutch. But these were peoples of roughly the same physical and mental inheritance. Additions from the English were inescapable; they came to form a large part of the white community. And it would have been impossible for the Afrikaner not to draw, too, from the Hottentot, the black and the Coloured. In pioneer days he acknowledged this, but his descendants were determined to prevent any further penetration of their white laager.

  His jealous guarding of blood purity did exact a social cost, for the Coloured peoples that had arisen, here as elsewhere in the world, had to be savagely excluded from national life. Not only were they forbidden to intermingle with whites socially; they were also cut off economically, professionally, creatively, until the loss to the nation was incalculable. How much poorer the United States would have been without the contributions of persons whose light skins would cause them to be classified as Coloured in South Africa: Frederick Douglass, Ralph Bunche, Martin Luther King, O. J. Simpson, Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll, Senator Brooke and Congressman Powell. Or how the world’s creative pool would have been diminished without the work of Coloureds such as the poet Pushkin, the painter Pissaro, and the flamboyant storyteller Dumas.

  South Africa silenced in the cradle all such potential contributions from its Malay-Hottentot-black-Afrikaner-English-Coloureds, and its loss was never greater than when it rejected young Heather Botha, twenty-three years old and of such a mixture. She was exotic, like a palm tree bending beside a lagoon, or a tawny pearl held in a Balinese hand. She combined the most attractive features of all the wanderers who had figured in her background: the fiery-tempered Malay slave woman who had fought her Compagnie master for nine years, then slept with his son for eleven; the Dutch sea captain who had fought storms in too many seas to give a damn about what Compagnie officials said regarding fraternization with girls of mixed breed; the Hottentot herdsman who had protected with a gun the forty-seven cattle he owned, plus the fifty-seven stolen from Compagnie herds; the black warrior who had defended himself against both Zulu and white man; the fair-faced English officer, India-bound, whispering love to a young Coloured maiden beside a brook on the slopes of Table Mountain. Heather was the child of lusty forebears, and all of them would have been proud of her, for as she said on various occasions, echoing her Dutch sea-captain ancestor, ‘I don’t give a damn.’

  At the university in 1953 she had openly dated white men, despite warnings from the faculty that she might fall into danger and from the police that such action was criminal. It would have been difficult for her to refuse the numerous invitations she received from white students, for she was a spectacular young woman and one of the liveliest on campus. She had a rowdy laugh, a provocative manner of walking, and a smile which showed white teeth against a golden complexion.

  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.