The covenant - James A. Michener [141]
'Send the boys away,' his wife said brusquely, and the two lads were dismissed, even though Hendrik, now thirteen, could guess that the emergency had something to do with babies.
When the boys were gone, Annatjie gasped, 'This one wants to marry Bezel Muhammad!' And when Marthinus looked at his fifteen-year-old daughter, she nodded so vigorously that her pigtails bobbed, giving her the look of a child.
Marthinus sat down. 'You want to marry a slave?' When his daughter nodded again, he asked, 'Does he know about this?' And before she could reply, he demanded, 'Do you have to get married?'
She shook her head and held out her hands to her father. 'I love him, and he's a good man.'
Marthinus ignored this for the moment and said, 'I could find you a dozen husbands at the Cape.'
'I know,' Petronella said, 'but I would not be happy with them, Father.'
The way she said Father melted Van Doorn. Extending his arms, he said, 'Before he died, old Willem told me he had wanted to marry a slave. Said he regretted not doing so every day of his life. Oh, he loved old Katje, you could see that . . .'
'Then, I can marry him?'
Marthinus looked at his wife, a woman who had contracted a marriage almost as bizarre: in her case she accepted a white husband she' had never seen; Petronella was taking a black-brown man she had known for three years. When Annatjie shrugged, the girl took it as a sign that her marriage was approved, but her father said quietly, 'Leave us now, Petronella,' and when she was gone he raised questions too delicate for her ears: 'You know how the Compagnie feels about white and black . . .'
'The Compagnie's worried only about their sailors and soldiers who creep to the slave quarters.' Annatjie sniffed.
'And about men like Boeksma.'
'We all know about Boeksma and his servant girls.'
'With Petronella it is different. She's in love with her slave.' In his confusion Marthinus turned to his Bible, but found no guidance. Abraham had married his slave girl Hagar, and her offspring had populated half the earth, but they could find no account of an Israelite woman's taking a slave husband. There was, of course, constant fulmination against Israelite men marrying Canaanite women, but nothing about the reverse, and it began to look as if God was much more concerned about young men than about their sisters. They even found the obscure text in Ezra in which God, speaking through His prophet, commanded all men to put away their strange wives. They read aloud that extraordinary list of nearly a hundred men who had taken wives from among the Canaanites:
'And of the singers also; Eliashib: and of the porters; Shalum, and Telem, and Uri. . . And they gave their hands that they would put away their wives; and being guilty, they offered a ram of the flock for their trespass.'
In the end Marthinus realized that the decision must be made by the Van Doorns alone, and when reached, must be defended by them against whatever opposition the community might organize, so one afternoon he asked his wife to sit with him at the kitchen table, to which they summoned the young lovers.
'Are you determined to marry?' Marthinus asked.
'We are.'
The Van Doorns sat with folded hands, looking at the couple, and the more they studied Bezel the more acceptable he became. 'You are clean and hard-working,' Marthinus said. 'You're a good carpenter. You never praise your own work, but I can see you prize it.' Annatjie said, 'It's as if you combined the best of your two races, durable like the blacks, poetic like the Malays.'