The Covenant: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  Below, he would meet up with Coetzee, who came down only with other white miners; the two men and their helpers walked about one mile hunched over, their heads protected by hard hats, which bumped against jagged rocks, their bodies exuding perspiration. After a long drink of water and some salt pills, they followed a narrower tunnel, in which the noise became shattering. Now they were approaching the face of the gold-bearing rock, and here huge pneumatic drills were sending steel probes far into the rock, prior to the placement of the next charges of dynamite.

  It was hellish work. Jonathan would creep into the working hole feet first, lying on his back and never able to sit erect. When he reached the drilling machine, a heavy instrument with cross-bar handles and stirrups for the feet, he would adjust himself, check the electrical lines, then jam his feet into the stirrups and deftly point the six-foot diamond-tipped drill at the spot to be dynamited. Then, taking a deep breath, which always stimulated him, he would squirm about for a comfortable position, thrust his feet forward, and flick the switch. With incredible power and noise, the water-cooled jackhammer drill would eat into the rock, throwing spray and slush until Jonathan looked like a white man.

  When the hole was drilled, Nxumalo would squirm back out and signal to Coetzee that all was ready. The Afrikaner would then replace Nxumalo in the cramped tunnel and fix the dynamite, the cap and the connecting wires. Whistles would blow. Sirens would whine. And all men would retreat from this area as Coetzee plunged the detonator, exploding the charge and breaking away the next burden of gold-bearing rock.

  When the dust settled and it seemed probable that no last rocks would tumble down from the new ceiling, Jonathan Nxumalo and Roger Coetzee would creep back into the tunnel and start calculating how long it would take for the ore to be hauled away from the stope face to the breaker and then to the refinery. It was hard work, dust-filled and exciting, and the men deep below developed respect for each other’s capacities. Of course, when they left the danger area to go aloft, their lives changed radically. Coetzee could jump into his car and drive where he wished; Nxumalo was restricted to the compound, where all needs were provided by the company.

  He was not exactly a prisoner. During any eighteen-month contract, workers were allowed into Johannesburg six times, but only in a group, with some white like Coetzee holding the passes of thirty-six workmen. Should one want to break away from the ensemble, he could risk it, but he would then find himself with no pass, and since spot checks for pass inspection were quite common, sooner or later he would be detected and packed off to jail.

  Several times, however, Jonathan did receive, through Coetzee’s intervention, a special pass allowing him to visit a Vrymeer friend who, with sheer duplicity, had contrived to land a job in Johannesburg without proper papers. ‘What I did,’ he confided, ‘was to grab on to this white family that had to have help. They protected me.’ He added, ‘Of course, since we’re both breaking the law they pay me less than proper wages. But I don’t complain.’

  ‘You like Johannesburg?’ Jonathan asked.

  ‘Good food. Work not too hard. And look at these clothes.’

  Jonathan was so enticed by city life that he tried on other visits to find an illegal job, to no avail. During the final moments of one leave he pleaded for more information as to how he should proceed, and his friend asked, ‘You know anybody important might help you get a pass?’

  ‘My father works for Detleef van Doorn.’

  ‘You crazy? He’s the one behind these laws. He’s no friend. He’s your worst enemy.’

  Back at the mine, Jonathan asked Coetzee if he could help, but he said firmly, ‘You’re a mine worker now. You’ll never be able to change because we need you.’ And when Jonathan inquired at the pass office about getting an endorsement that would enable him to work in Johannesburg, the official snapped, ‘You have mine papers. You’ll never have anything else.’

  Since he was sentenced to the underground, as it were, he decided to strive for the best job possible, but here again he was forestalled: ‘You’re qualified for drilling. Wasteful to try you anywhere else.’

  Back in his quarters, Jonathan talked with men from Malawi and Vwarda: ‘I’m going to apply for a job like Coetzee’s. I know all he knows, or any of the other white bosses who work our deep shafts.’ But in cautious Fanakalo the black workers warned him not even to whisper such a possibility: ‘That job whites only. No matter how stupid, they smarter than you. No black ever be boss.’

  Coetzee must have suspected Jonathan’s concern, for one day as they crept out of the tunnel he volunteered: ‘You could do my work, Nxumalo, but the law is rigid. No black must ever hold a job in which he might give orders to a white.’ Before Jonathan could comment he reminded him of the Golden Reef work rules, which stipulated that dynamite placers had to be white. No black could ever aspire to that job, for the intelligence required to tamp dynamite into a hole drilled by a black was entirely beyond the capacity of non-whites. The fact that black workmen throughout the rest of the world easily performed that function was ignored; in South Africa they could never learn enough to do it properly.

  Sometimes the white bosses didn’t do it properly, either. One terribly hot and dust-choked day Roger Coetzee placed his dynamite carelessly, and Jonathan Nxumalo started to point this out, but before he could persuade Coetzee to correct it, the charge went off and an unplanned leaf of ceiling rock fell, trapping the Afrikaner behind a mass of rubble. The rock did not fall directly on him, or he would have been crushed. A sliding fragment did break his leg. He was trapped in a pitch-black, airless, waterless crevice with the temperature at 114° F. It was imperative that air and water pipes be got to him in a hurry, and with no white bosses in the vicinity, the task of doing it fell to Nxumalo. He probed through the fallen rock, lifted aside the chunks that he could handle, and called for other blacks to help with the bigger slabs. Within a few minutes white rescuers appeared on the scene, and proceeded exactly as Nxumalo had planned it. They succeeded in breaking Coetzee free, and from his hospital bed he asked to see Jonathan, who was ushered in by nurses who resented his being in the white hospital.

  Coetzee was lucky to be alive, for there was no more deadly work in South Africa than that performed by men like him and Nxumalo. Each year more than six hundred men died in the gold mines—nineteen thousand in thirty years—and more than ninety percent were black.

  ‘I know it was you that got me out,’ Coetzee said, and before Nxumalo could say anything, he added graciously, ‘And you were about to warn me not to do it that way.’ He grinned and extended his hand. ‘I wish I had a cousin in Johannesburg who needed a houseboy.’

  No such luck. With Coetzee hospitalized, Nxumalo’s shift got another boss, a tough Afrikaner who despised blacks. Once, when he saw Jonathan resting after a particularly stiff spell at the face, he growled at him, ‘You work-shy idle black bastard.’ Another day, when Nxumalo suggested approaching the face from a different angle, the boss yelled, ‘No lip from you, you cheeky Kaffir bastard.’

  Since Nxumalo’s contract had only five more weeks to run, he tolerated the new man’s insults, and when the compound manager said, at the termination of his eighteen months, ‘I hope you’ll sign on again,’ he was noncommittal, but he was satisfied that he wanted no more of the Golden Reef. What he would do, he didn’t know.

  AT DEATH

  Old Bloke, who delivered lawyers’ letters at the Cheston Building in Johannesburg, was only fifty-four years old, but his life had been so demanding that he looked older than he was. His name was Bloke Ngqika, and in his early years he had worked at heavy labor in industry, where he had acquired numerous skills that could have been utilized in several advanced positions, but since he was a black he was prohibited from taking any of them.

  After an accident in a tool-making foundry, which left him with a shuffle, he was extremely lucky to land a job delivering important papers by hand. It paid little, and the hours it took to commute to work and back home were intole
rable, but he dared not quit because of a peculiar law which was severely enforced: it was possible for a black to qualify for a legal pass to remain in Johannesburg and permission to occupy a house in Soweto, but to do so he had to work for one employer only for a period of ten years. If he quit or was fired, he lost the endorsement in his pass book, lost his house and his right to remain in Johannesburg. He was like a medieval serf, bound perpetually not to the land, as the serf had been, but to a specific job. This meant, obviously, that his employer could pay him scant wages, and he was powerless to protest, for if he were fired, he would lose not only his job but his entire pattern of living. As his employer often reminded him, ‘Bloke, it isn’t only wages I’m paying you. It’s your house, your pass, the permission for your wife to be here too. Mind your step.’

  He did not mind his step one blustery August day when he stepped off a curb in Commissioner Street into the path of a truck, not immediately in the path, for the driver might have avoided him had he been attentive. As it was, the truck hit him hard, and the last words he heard before he fainted were the familiar ones: ‘Bloody stupid Kaffir.’

  He did not have to die. He could have been saved, except that the first ambulance on the scene was marked WHITES ONLY, and of course it could not help. It did radio for a NON-WHITE; however, Old Bloke lay on the sidewalk for nearly half an hour before the proper ambulance arrived, and on arrival at the non-white casualty ward of Jo’burg hospital he was certified dead.

  The anguish that showed on his face just before he fainted was not caused, as some thought, by extreme pain; nor was it resentfulness at the muttered cursing of the truckdriver, for he got that all the time. It was his instant realization of what his death might mean to Miriam, his wife of more than thirty years. In a flash he saw her patient acceptance of the hardships thrown her way, the years of separation, the hard work of rearing children alone. Whole decades had passed with only brief visits from her husband; she could not join him, apartheid laws forbade that. So she had lived a meager life in one part of South Africa, he in another, and when Bloke at last gained the right that enabled her to live with him, she was so grateful that she advised him to accept any injustice regarding hours and wages: ‘We got each other at last. You do the work, we say nothin’.’

  On the third day after the funeral, Miriam was summoned to the office of Pieter Grobbelaar, director of the subdivision in Soweto where the Ngqika home was located. He informed her that since she was no longer married to a workingman with a legal right to remain in Soweto, she had become what the law called ‘a superfluous appendage,’ and as such, lost all right to remain in Johannesburg. He used the language well and outlined the steps of her expulsion.

  ‘You can stay here to collect your things, but then you must leave for Soetgrond.’

  ‘I’ve never been there. I don’t even know where it is.’

  ‘But you’re a Xhosa. Your papers say that.’

  ‘But I was born in Bloemfontein. I never been in Xhosa country.’

  ‘The law says that you are now a temporary sojourner …’

  At least ten times that first day Mr. Grobbelaar used the phrase ‘the law says.’ On every point raised by Mrs. Ngqika the law had anticipated her. Did she want to hold on to a house which she and her husband had occupied for ten years and had improved significantly? Mr. Grobbelaar could cite a law which said that the widow of a man lost all her rights when her husband died. Did she want to stay for six months in order to find some alternative place to stay? Mr. Grobbelaar could quote a law which said that he could order her to clear out within seventy-two hours. Did she want permission to take with her the new kitchen sink which Bloke had given her last Christmas? Mr. Grobbelaar had a law which said anything attached to the walls of government-owned property had to be left behind.

  The first interview had miserable results. When she left Mr. Grobbelaar with his pile of papers, Mrs. Ngqika wept for two hours, then sent a young boy into Johannesburg to find her son, who had a ‘location in the sky,’ that is, quarters atop the apartment block in which he worked as cleaner. When this young fellow heard that his mother was being dispossessed and shipped off to a country location which she had never seen, he hurried out to Soweto.

  ‘Mom, they can’t send you to a place like Soetgrond. That’s just a bunch of shacks in the veld.’

  ‘Super says I got to go.’

  ‘To hell with Super. I won’t let you go.’

  ‘He told me to come back to his office next week. You talk with him?’

  And there was the difficulty. Her son’s right to stay in Johannesburg, where he had not been born, depended upon his remaining invisible to the law. Were he to complain to Super, his papers would be inspected, the police would be summoned, and he, too, would be banished to Soetgrond. He was powerless to help his mother.

  ‘Mom, there ain’t nothing I can do,’ and he was off to his location in the sky. If he could somehow hang on for ten years, he might earn a pass permitting him to remain in the area.

  On the second visit Mr. Grobbelaar was as patient and as understanding as he had been on the first. He listened quietly to each of Mrs. Ngqika’s frantic requests, then leafed through his gray canvas notebook till he found the relevant law and quoted it. He never raised his voice, and spoke not in Afrikaans, which she might not understand, but in English. He merely leafed through his papers and produced the law. When she got home she felt weak, and now she had only three weeks before she must quit this place into which she had poured so much of herself.

  She was not being evicted because Bloke had been careless with his money; he had even gone to Super to ask if he could buy their little home, but the law book was explicit: ‘No non-white may own land in Soweto.’ And since Johannesburg non-whites were forbidden to live anywhere but Soweto, home ownership was impossible. As Mr. Grobbelaar explained: ‘Bloke, you are allowed to remain here only so long as you do meaningful work to help the whites. And your wife is welcome only so long as your pass remains valid.’

  That evening a group of black ladies met in Miriam Ngqika’s kitchen to console her and to bid her farewell, and there was an awesomeness about the gathering, for each of these women knew that when their husbands died, they, too, would be exiled to some distant black spot which they had never seen and with which they had no affiliation whatever except by dictate of the new laws.

  There was, however, in the group a schoolteacher who said, ‘The Black Sash ladies have been asking us to find a case which they could fight. I think this is it.’

  ‘I don’t want to fight,’ Miriam said quietly.

  ‘But we got to fight,’ the teacher said, and she warned the black women that it could become ugly and that reputations could be injured. ‘Is there any scandal in your family?’ the teacher asked, and the women stayed late at night, reviewing Miriam Ngqika’s history, and it was blameless.

  Early next morning the schoolteacher reported to the Black Sash society, and it happened that Mrs. Laura Saltwood was in attendance at a meeting of the national board, and when she heard the facts in the Ngqika case she exclaimed, ‘Just what we’ve been waiting for!’

  The committee agreed that Bloke Ngqika’s fine record would be an asset in protesting this eviction, and the respectable manner in which he and his wife had lived would also help. Miriam Ngqika had an admirable reputation in the township, and it was assumed that Superintendent Grobbelaar would not be able to testify adversely against her.

  He didn’t. He listened carefully as Mrs. Saltwood made her plea, then in good English explained that the law … Here he turned the leaves to the applicable law: ‘Mrs. Ngqika was always well behaved …’ He sounded like an elementary-school teacher reporting on some infant; in fact, he was saying that he approved of the conduct of a woman fifteen years older than himself: ‘She was neat, didn’t drink, and I had no occasion to reprimand her.’

  ‘Then why can’t she stay?’

  ‘Because all the Bantu are temporary sojourners, in a sense. She has bec
ome a superfluous appendage and must go.’

  For an hour Superintendent Grobbelaar patiently glossed the laws, patiently explained that when a non-white family ceased to be useful to the white community, it must get out.

  ‘But she’s never been to Soetgrond,’ Mrs. Saltwood protested.

  ‘That may be so, but the law says that we must begin to get those non-useful people back to their own homelands.’

  ‘Johannesburg is now her homeland.’

  ‘Not any more.’

  Mrs. Saltwood became almost offensive in her pressure for a humane concession, but Grobbelaar never lost his temper. When Mrs. Saltwood cried in moral outrage, ‘Can’t you see, Mr. Grobbelaar, that this is a great human tragedy?’ he replied gently and with no bitterness, ‘Mrs. Saltwood, every decision I have to make, week after week, involves what to the people concerned seems a great human tragedy. But we’re trying to get our society sorted out.’

  ‘At what human cost!’

  ‘The cost may seem excessive to you, now. But when we have everyone in his place, you’ll see that this is going to be a splendid country.’

  With a wave of her arm she asked, ‘Are you going to evict a million people here in Soweto?’

  Superintendent Grobbelaar smiled. ‘You English always exaggerate. It’s five hundred and fifty thousand.’

  ‘You don’t count the illegals?’

  ‘They will be dealt with.’

  ‘You’re going to evict them all?’

  ‘Certainly not. Those who are essential to the operation of our businesses and industries will be allowed to remain. The rest? Yes, we’ll evict them all. They’ll have their own cities in their homelands.’

  ‘How many black servants does Mrs. Grobbelaar have?’

  ‘Two, if that’s relevant.’

  ‘You’ll allow those two to stay?’

  ‘Of course. They’re essential.’

  ‘Mr. Grobbelaar, can’t you see that if you evict the blacks, Johannesburg will collapse?’