The covenant - James A. Michener [322]
Colonel Cuyler, now a respected magistrate and soon to be a lieutenant-general, had a message which was brief and shocking: 'Parliament have passed a law that says all slaves will be emancipated next year. On December 31, 1834, every slave in the empire will be freed.'
'Good God!' Tjaart cried. 'That's revolution!'
'Oh, you'll be compensated, fully. Every penny you spent. And the slaves must work for you during the first four years, so they can move in an orderly way into their freedom.'
Cuyler saluted and departed. For three days the Van Doorns and their neighbors discussed the new laws, and at the end of that time they still could not grasp the full meaning of this radical changethat it defined a whole new way of lifeand to their surprise it was not any of the men who saw clearly the new landscape, but Jakoba van Doorn, the quiet, unlettered woman who had been ignored both at Nachtmaal and in these discussions. Now she spoke with fierce determination: 'The Bible says that the sons of Ham shall work for us and be our slaves. The Bible says there shall be a proper difference between master and slave. The Bible says we shall keep apart, His people to themselves, the Canaanites to themselves. I have never struck a slave. I have always tended my slaves and my Coloureds when they were sick. And I think I have shown that I love them. But I do not want them at my table and I do not like the sight of them in my church. For God has ordered me to live otherwise.'
Driven by her forcefulness, the illiterate men urged Tjaart to consult the Bible, desiring to hear for themselves what the strictures of good Christian life ought to be, and he found and recited those satisfying passages upon which their social order was so securely founded:
'And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren . . . Now therefore ye are cursed, and there shall none of you be freed from being bondmen, and hewers of wood and drawers of water for the house of my God . . .'
After he had read a dozen such passages, which proved conclusively that God had ordained and blessed the institution of slavery, Jakoba, a woman fierce in righteousness, demanded that he seek further for two verses which predikants had explained to her, for upon them she based her belief that the Boers were special people, set free by God to behave in their own special way. After some searching in Leviticus, a book whose laws governed Boer life, Tjaart uttered the statement:
'And ye shall be holy unto me: for I the Lord am holy, and have severed you from other people, that ye should be mine.'
'See,' Jakoba cried with grim satisfaction, 'God Himself wanted us to be apart. We have special obligations, special privileges.' And she urged her husband to uncover that particular verse on which she hung the main body of her belief. He could not find it, and with some impatience she riffled the large pages of the book she could not read, then pushed the Bible back to Tjaart, with the command: 'Find it. It deals with tribute.'
It was this word that reminded Tjaart of a passage in Judges dealing with the establishment of Israel in a new landan exact parallel to the situation of the Boersand with a good deal of useless help from the men, he finally located what Jakoba wanted to hear:
'And it came to pass, when Israel was strong, that they put the Canaanites to tribute, and did not utterly drive them out... but the Canaanites dwelt among them and became tributaries.'
'And that,' said Jakoba, 'is how it should be. We have conquered the land. We live here. We are to be just to the Kaffirs, but they are tribute to us.' 'The English say that's all done for.'
'The English know nothing about Kaffirs,' Jakoba said. She was a small woman, daughter of a trekboer who had defended his land eleven times against black