The covenant - James A. Michener [578]
'Is there anyone to help us with these things?' she asked.
'Help?' The official laughed. 'You carry your own. Down there.'
So the two women, one black, one white, lifted the bundles and started down the almost impassable road. In some of the shacks lights shone, and this helped them to pick their way, but in others there was nothing, forcing Laura and Miriam to stumble about. They found shack Two-three-nine, then Two-four-zero, and Laura said, 'It can't be far.' But at Two-four-one the shacks stopped. Beyond, there lay only darkness and mud.
'We must be on the wrong road,' Laura said, and they went to the last house and inquired as to where Lot Two-four-three was, and an old man said in Xhosa, 'Just down there.' And he pointed to open space.
'What did he say?' Laura asked, and Miriam said, 'My lot is down there.'
'But there's no house!' Laura exclaimed.
In the gloom the two women stared at the vacant lot, and again Laura was tempted to turn back and ask for clarification, but a faded cardboard tacked to a leaning stick said clearly: Lot Two-four-three.
Good God! This was it. This woman who had worked so hard for so many years, this woman who had reared her children and educated them, who had mended her husband's clothes so that he could hold his precious job, received this as her reward.
'There really must be some mistake,' Laura said brightly. 'I'll ask.' And leaving Miriam, she trudged back to the official at the truck. He laughed again and said, 'That's how they all started. They got their lot and made something of it.'
'But where's she to sleep?'
'That's her problem.'
'No,' Laura said quietly. 'It's my problem, and it's yours.'
'Lady, get in your car and go home. These people find a way.'
She wanted to argue with him, but he turned his back and left. Standing in the drizzle, she thought: It is his problem. Government has plans to move three million eight hundred thousand people. One in six. In America that would be forty million people uprooted from good homes and moved to bad. And tonight I'm responsible for one of them.
Slowly, refusing to cry in her anguish, she trudged back through the mud, unable to believe that what she was experiencing could occur in a civilized society. A sovereign state, in the latter half of the twentieth century, believed that this was a solution to a problem involving human beings. In the muddy darkness, with soft rain slanting at her, she could visualize Superintendent Grobbelaar leafing through his canvas-backed book, finding the applicable law. It would be there, and it would be enforced.
'We'll sleep in my car,' Laura said softly when she joined Miriam.
In the rain the women wept.
In a valley not far to the north, on an eroded hillside, stood two stone cairns marking the graves of Mai Adriaan, who talked with hyenas, and Seena van Doorn, lusty daughter of old Rooi van Valck. Close by was the grave of Lodevicus the Hammer, to whom God had sent two faithful wives. Those Afrikaner pioneers had paid a terrible price for a foothold in this land, and they had done it in order to be free. In sentencing Miriam Ngqika to this awful place, their descendants had become prisoners of their own restrictive laws.
AT RESURRECTION
Despite the deprivations imposed by apartheid, the blacks of South Africa never lost their courage. They dreamed of a resurrection when they would again be free, and it is important to differentiate between the character of this dream prior to 1975 and after. The crucial change can be perceived in the contrasting lives of two men from the Vrymeer area: Daniel Nxumalo, grandson of Micah who had ridden with General de Groot and served the Van Doorns for so many years; and Matthew Magubane, whose parents worked on a farm near Venloo.
As a child Daniel Nxumalo showed such promise that as soon as possible he went not to the mines, like his brother Jonathan, but to the black college at Fort Hare. Since 1911 this institution had grown from little more than a high school to a full-fledged university with a faculty like no other in all Africa,