The covenant - James A. Michener [565]
So, reluctantly, Dr. Adams resumed his chair and watched as the Albertyns and the spectators were brought back into the room. The family was ranged neatly along one wall, and little Petra, hands primly at her side, was again asked to stand facing her judges, who looked down upon her.
'Petra Albertyn, you are Coloured.'
She made no response, but did turn slightly to see what the noise was to her left. Her mother had fainted.
The fateful decision in Petra's case launched a time of terror for the Albertyns. She was immediately dismissed from school, and when her family appealed to the courts they were turned down: 'Clearly Coloured.' In a few months the board declared Henricus Albertyn Coloured, too, so he could no longer work at the garage, since his foreman position was classified 'whites only.' Nor could he find work elsewhere; he was unemployed and would remain so for more than a year.
It was absolutely forbidden for the Albertyns to continue living where they had for the past forty years; as Coloureds they must move into some township reserved for their race, but no such group area existed in Venloo, so they decided to uproot their entire family and move down to Cape Town, where the vast majority of Coloureds lived. Because they were forced to sell their house under crisis conditions, they received £2,000 for a £4,500 investment.
When they reached Cape Town the only accommodation they could find was in a collection of three-story hovels originally designed as a transit camp for the military. It was now one of the shames of South Africa, with multiple families crammed into each flimsy-walled apartment.
When the shattered Albertyns moved into Orchard Flats they contemplated suicide. The cleanliness of Blinkfontein was gone, the neatness of their home, the warmth of their relationships in the tiny communityall lost. In their place was filth, criminality and social hatred. That anyone should have to live in such surroundings was disgraceful, but that proven good citizens could be forced into them by a government acting in the name of God and racial purity was criminal.
Henricus Albertyn discovered how criminal one evening when he came home from his job as grease-monkey in a distant Cape Town garage. As he climbed the stairs to his third-floor room, assailed by the smell of cheap wine and urine, he racked his brain trying to devise some tactic whereby he could organize a decent life for Petra, for upon her he now fastened all his dreams.
But when he reached his door he heard sobbing, not Petra's but his wife's, and he burst into the roomto find her quivering in a corner, with a pair of long scissors, covered with blood, in her hand. For one terrible moment he suspected that something beyond words had happened to his daughter, but when he looked about in frenzy, he saw Petra seated by the lone window, reading a book. Whatever foul thing had happened, she had remained untouched.
Quickly embracing her, he asked, 'What's happened?'
'Just the skollies,' Petra said, apparently unconcerned. 'Mama stabbed them, and they ran away.'
From her corner Mrs. Albertyn said softly, 'No skollies will rape my child. We'll never surrender to this dreadful place.'
And Petra, putting aside her book, showed her father the long knitting needle she had for some days kept secreted in her dress: I stabbed them too. Shamilah downstairs told me how to jab at their eyes.' And without any sign of agitation she returned to her homework.
She was in school again, at a much bigger institution in nearby Athlone, staffed by a group of dedicated Coloured men and women. When her father attended a parent-teacher meeting, the chairman of the school committee, a prosperous builder named Simon Botha, sought him out: 'Albertyn, our teachers tell me that your little Petra is a near-genius. You must give thought to her future.'
'In this country what can a Coloured do?'
'You mustn't limit your horizon to this country. My daughter in Canada tells me the universities there have many