The covenant - James A. Michener [232]
'We stay with you. We your people now.' His name was Pieter, son of that Dikkop who had traveled with Mai Adriaan. It was ten years since he had lived with the Van Doorns; he had run away after a beating for eating a melon from the family garden. He had drifted from farm to farm, working just enough to avoid being classified as 'Vagrant Hottentot,' which would allow his being assigned arbitrarily to any farmer who wanted him.
In truth, Pieter was a man who saw virtue in idleness; he could happily pass an entire day with his back against a tree, eyes firmly shut.
But before sunset that first day the Hottentots had shown Hilary how to dig a foundation to keep out rain, and by the second nightfall they had cut enough saplings to frame out a dwelling. Hilary saw in his imagination how Golan should look: rows of huts facing each other, a meeting hall and a church to close off one end of the rectangle.
He was pleased with the rapid growth of his little communitysix Hottentots to forty within three weeksand within a short time Hilary and his followers had the mud-and-clay walls of a mission church in place. Before the thatching of the roof was complete he preached a message of dedication inside the little structure. Having mastered several words of the Dutch-like language these people spoke, and some Hottentot with its click sounds, he delighted his congregation by offering the benediction in their language. In the days that followed he heard members of the mission saying gravely to one another as they worked, 'Peace be unto you.'
Peace was a commodity almost unknown. Young Xhosa warriors persisted in raiding cattle from white men's farms, and not long after Hilary's first sermon English troops, fortified by a Boer commando, had launched a massive attack against the black men, driving twenty thousand of them back across the Great Fish River and liberating, as they phrased it, vast herds of cattle. The gallant leader of this rout would be honored by having a newborn town named after him: Grahamstown.
Hilary was untouched by these events; but it grieved him that after six months he had not met one Xhosa, and he began to fear that he had made a mistake in locating Golan here. During his studies at Gosport he had imagined himself bringing Christianity to black savages, wrestling with their pagan beliefs and finally welcoming them to Jesus. Instead he was surrounded by brown Hottentots, more than ninety in the huts that faced the rectangle, while all the Xhosa lurked far across the river, a gang of cattle thieves.
In his reports to the LMS he called his flock 'my Hottentots,' knowing that few were of the pure strain; they ranged from light, yellow-skinned half-Malays to very dark half-Angolans. They were not inclined to hard work, and a distressing number loitered about the mission doing nothing. But Hilary always remembered the name he had given this place, Golan the refuge, and he believed that these 'mild and peaceable folk,' as he wrote of them, merited all the sanctuary they could find. Many had come to him with terrible tales of beatings, chains, and years of labor without pay from Boers who made their lives a misery. Simon Keer's impassioned indictment of the colonists echoed in his ears, and he saw it his duty to succor the weak.
Even his hopes for the Xhosa soared when a black man finally came to Golan, an elderly fellow from a kraal to the east. He proclaimed himself to be a Christian, stating in halting English that he had been baptized by a missionary with red hair called 'Master Keer,' and he indicated that his village contained several other blacks who had been converted by 'our dear little man who could speak Xhosa.'
His Christian name was Saul, and Hilary promptly sent him back to Xhosa lands to spread joyful news about Golan, and because of Saul, at the end of six months the mission was home to one hundred and forty Hottentots and twenty Xhosa. The latter taught Hilary the traditions of their people, and he developed respect