Born and raised in the city, Rika knew very little about rural life—only that it had always seemed so idyllic on her springtime day trips to the countryside. But during her first winter in her new town, she must have discovered that all those blossoming flowers and frolicking lambs were just a rosy picture of the slow, hard reality of farm life. She felt as if she’d been buried alive on the island and grew restless with the steady rhythm of nature. She preferred to buy her flowers neatly wrapped in paper from a stand rather than to watch them slowly sprout in the black soil of her own backyard. She longed for the bustle of the city and the sense of freedom it offered. More than anything, she missed the anonymity. Everywhere she went in the small town, all eyes were on her. The locals eyed the new mistress of the Rijkswaterstaat house with a mixture of curiosity and mistrust. She was Catholic, and thus a heathen by default, and you could see it in her eyes—the sin lying in wait.
Rika’s attempts to make peace with her new life only made things worse. She went swimming in the sea near Ouddorp, which was, in the stern eyes of her fellow villagers, a highly unsuitable activity for a married woman. Her spacious kitchen was always full of children—her own, their little friends from the village, and their cousins from the city—and Rika was prone to organizing all kinds of gatherings, including a “heathen” party for carnival. And one day she set up Willem’s big portable gramophone in the empty salon and started hosting the kind of parties they’d been used to in Den Bosch. The children bore a hole in their bedroom floor so they could spy on the fun below. The whole island talked about Rika’s scandalous soirees: wild dance parties until late in the night—clearly the work of the devil himself.
It didn’t take long for the stories of Rika’s unseemly behavior to reach Willem. He, for one, was quite happy in their new town. He enjoyed his status and the respect he received as Mr. Hagenaar from The Hague. He was also much less bothered by the conservative attitudes on the island. Most likely, he was more comfortable with their straight-and-narrow norms and values—the same ones he’d grown up with himself—than he had been with the Catholic gaiety in Den Bosch. Willem loved Rika with a burning, even obsessive, passion, and he had always had trouble with the fact that other men found her attractive. This had inspired numerous bouts of jealousy, though always unwarranted. He could hardly forbid her from laughing and moving about freely as she did. But now, he finally had a reason to demand a bit of restraint. A man of his position, he reasoned, simply couldn’t be yoked with a wife who made herself the subject of gossip. The least she could do was try to conform to his role on the island. After all, his job provided them with the beautiful roof over their heads, two household servants, and a thick layer of butter on their daily bread.
But no matter how good-humored and easygoing Rika was in daily life, she wasn’t one to be forced into anything, as her parents had already figured out at their own expense. She found the weekly sermons in the local church—about how wives were to submit to their husbands—downright absurd. Perhaps that was how things worked in the Hagenaar home, but when she was growing up, her mother had been in charge of everyone, especially her father. Rather than succumbing to this new way of life, she only became more disturbed by it, and all the things about Willem she’d once been so attracted to—his power, his sense of purpose, his passion—started weighing on her as heavily as life on the island itself. Rika’s restlessness aroused panic in Willem. The less control he had over her, the more threatened he felt, and the more jealous and irascible he became. And the harder he tried to rein his unruly wife, the harder she tried to break free.
With the same passion they’d loved each other with in their early years, they fought with each other now. Sometimes they took after Willem’s parents and stewed for days in silence. Other times they exploded, making a loud scene as Rika’s parents were wont to do. However, by this point in their marriage, Willem and Rika were no longer capable of passionate reconciliation. When they fought, their oldest son, Wim, would carry glasses of water back and forth between his parents in a desperate attempt to calm the storm. Even eight-year-old Bertha’s friends started to notice that the atmosphere at her house had become very tense.
In the spring of 1926, a year and a half after they’d moved to Goeree, the Hagenaars posed for another family portrait, this time in the grass under the blossoming fruit trees behind their house. As idyllic as the setting was, their faces tell another story. In the photo, Willem has a markedly wry smile on his face, and Rika looks far from happy. Though she had always had a voluptuous figure, she has clearly put on weight and even looks a bit dowdy. Her husband viewed the extra pounds as a reason to seek attention and affirmation from other women, many of whom had their eye on him. This created yet another source of conflict between the couple. Their marriage was quickly unraveling at the seams, and they kept the island’s gossip mill turning day and night. Willem Hagenaar had neither his wife nor his temper under control, and it reached a point where, in his anger, he couldn’t control his hands either.
At the end of February 1928, Rika fled to The Hague. She took only Henk, the toddler, with her. She left her three older children in the loving hands of their maid, Jans, a girl from the island who had proved herself exceptionally devoted to the Hagenaar family. Rika’s parents, however, did not welcome their daughter with open arms. Marrying a Protestant had been bad enough, but no number of candles or prayers in the world could absolve her of a divorce. To them, the situation was clear: their oldest daughter was having another one of her overly emotional fits of passion, and she needed to come to terms with her husband—the sooner the better. Despite his being Protestant, they had always found him rather charming.
But there was no way Rika was going back to the island, and in the end, she was taken in by one of her sisters. Jo van der Lans knew from her own experience that there was no saving a doomed marriage. Her German husband, whom she’d been set up with by her own father, had left her a few years earlier. Since then, she had supported herself and her two young daughters by renting rooms in The Hague’s Bloemen- en Bomenbuurt, the “flowers and trees” neighborhood, which sounded much greener than it was. The royal capital of the Netherlands had long played host to soldiers on furlough from the colonies; therefore, there was a high demand for temporary rentals. For single, uneducated women, renting out rooms was one of the only ways to earn a decent living.
That spring, Rika did what women often do after making a major life decision: she chopped off her long, dark locks. Having rediscovered her old bravado, she sent a photo of herself with her short, modern bob to Goeree: “Mama at the beach!” the caption read. The rest of the children joined her in The Hague in June. “Jan reunited with his mother!” Rika wrote happily on a photo of them at the beach in Scheveningen, where she took the children almost every day in an effort to compensate for the major changes in their lives. For the oldest boys, in particular, the move was a disaster. Wim and Jan had spent wonderful years on the boundless island, where, as the children of the dike warden, they were free to roam around in the dunes—their father had even had two wooden playhouses built just for them. Now they found themselves cooped up in a stuffy upstairs apartment in a new housing district in the western part of The Hague, where the flowery street names were a sharp contrast to the tightly packed housing blocks. Rika’s oldest sons were as unhappy here as their mother had been in Goeree, and they fervently hoped that their hot-tempered parents would make up soon.
Willem Hagenaar also assumed that his spouse would ultimately choose money over freedom and would humbly return to her stylish life as a Rijkswaterstaat wife. What else could she do? She couldn’t count on any support from her parents, and her sister could barely provide for herself and her own children, let alone an entire extra family—and the only thing she had learned during her time at the boarding school in Moerdijk was how to be a lady. But Rika didn’t go back. She decided she’d much rather follow Jo’s example and become a landlady, even if it meant giving up her life of luxury to becom
e a sort of servant—cooking, washing, and toiling away for strangers.
In October 1928, Rika found an upper-floor apartment on the Azaleastraat, not far from her sister’s place. It was around that time that she received her first boarder. He was introduced to her by Christien, a cousin of Willem’s with whom the boarder had been living at the time. Rika had always had a good relationship with Christien, if only for the fact that she, too, had ventured into a controversial marriage. For all the uproar Willem and Rika’s relationship had caused at the time, it was nothing compared to the tumult that erupted when Christien came home in 1919 with the news that she was pregnant by a black man whom she planned to marry. Her fiancé-to-be was from Suriname and had just stepped off the boat a year earlier with nothing but a stuffed crocodile and a bow and arrow for luggage.
The Hagenaar family’s idea of people of color consisted of ferocious tribesmen in straw skirts—with bones through their noses—dancing around steaming pots, like the people they’d seen in the educational films at the cinema. To their tremendous surprise, Christien’s lover, David Millar, turned out to be neat as a pin, with stylish spectacles, tidy clothes, and manners that could win over many a Dutch heart. Moreover, he was a man of great ambition, and shortly after he arrived in Holland, he became friends with an egg dealer in The Hague, Albert Plesman, who was in the process of establishing the Koninklijke Luchtvaart Maatschappij. Six years later, Millar was the financial director of a rapidly growing airline known as KLM.
“Uncle Dave,” as Rika’s children called their father’s exotic cousin, was enamored with anything that had to do with modern technology. As soon as he could afford it, he bought himself a motorcycle with a sidecar, which he promptly drove into the Haarlemmertrekvaart canal with his young family on board. Still, this didn’t stop him from exploring the Netherlands on his motorcycle, and in the spring of 1927, he paid a visit to Goeree-Overflakkee. The island was up in arms—no one had ever seen a black man before, let alone one traveling alone on a roaring motorcycle. Who cared if the older people in the village were calling it a sign of the apocalypse—the Hagenaar family donned leather helmets and goggles and proudly posed for a portrait with their extraordinary “uncle” and his motorcycle. Rika, in particular, had really hit it off with the man from Suriname: his easygoing, lighthearted way of doing things, his taste for adventure, all the faraway places he’d been—his visit had been a breath of fresh air in the oppressive world of Goeree.
For Christien Hagenaar, however, the romance of her exotic marriage had long since worn off. Dutch through and through, Christien struggled to cope with the tropical ways of her husband and his fellow countrymen. She was not at all amused when David announced in the fall of 1927 that a relative of his would be arriving from Paramaribo. Officially, the boy was a nephew, but the two looked so much alike that it soon became clear that he was more like a half brother. This didn’t surprise Christien in the least. As far as she could tell, the whole colony was an utterly primitive, degenerate mess. She couldn’t stand the thought of having yet another black man in her respectable household, and she didn’t mince words about wanting to be rid of their new guest—she was all too happy to have cousin Rika take him off her hands.
2
Waldemar’s World
Waldemar Nods had known from a young age that one day he would be an ocean swimmer. This had nothing to do with his swimming abilities but everything to do with the fact that he belonged to an elite group of boys with parents who could afford to send them to study in Holland, that faraway wonderland on the other side of the ocean. He and his friends were the pride of Paramaribo, the best that Suriname had to offer, and upon their return, they would be ushered into highbrow positions where they would earn double the salary of someone who had been educated in the colony. All good things came from Holland; that’s just the way it was. And it was no wonder—when you consider that Suriname had been so literally created by its colonizers that it could almost be called a Dutch product.
The only ones who had had any real claim to the Wild Coast of the Guianas, which was discovered around 1500 by Spanish navigators lusting after gold, were the shy native tribes roaming the area at the time. But they were skilled in covering their tracks, and when the Portuguese arrived, they vanished into the vast jungle without protest and without leaving a trace. Meanwhile, their home was tossed around by European powers in search of conquerable land and colonial riches. In the end, it was small but reckless Holland that—in exchange for what would later become New York—claimed the promising land around the Suriname River in 1667. By that time, the colony’s bountiful lowlands were covered with flourishing plantations, and the settlement that the natives had named Parmobo, or “place of flowers,” had expanded into one of the most handsome cities in South America: Paramaribo, also known as “the Pearl of the West.” But as beautiful as the landscape was, it was a harsh and primitive place to live. In that era, the West Indian colonies were viewed as a kind of trash pit of Europe. Their thin layer of elite white society was made up of people the Old World had wanted to get rid of or who had their own reasons to leave: Jewish-Portuguese planters; French Huguenots; poor farmers; and a hodge-podge of dangerous and not-so-dangerous criminals, fortune seekers, and adventurers. The lower echelons of society were made up of black African laborers who, because they were seemingly able to withstand the merciless heat, were purchased by the thousands on the West African coast and trafficked to the colony by Dutch slave traders from Zeeland.
In the centuries that followed, the slaves were treated reasonably well in the colony—at least in most cases. This was largely due to the fact that the whites knew they were outnumbered, and they wanted to avoid any kind of uprising. Moreover, everyone who had been sent, lured, or forced to this sweltering land in the middle of nowhere was ultimately dependent on each other. When winds of change swept across the world at the end of the nineteenth century carrying ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity, Holland, too, was forced to heed the cries for universal freedom. In 1863, it became one of the last nations in the world to abolish slavery. But it turned out that for some, the reality of freedom wasn’t exactly the triumph that the abolitionists had envisioned from the comfort of their salons on the other side of the world. The white plantation owners cashed in on the damages they received from the Dutch government and returned to Europe, leaving the colony behind with no leadership or capital to keep up with the Industrial Revolution. As plantation life crumbled, so did Suriname’s social structure. Centuries-old communities fell apart, entire demographic groups were left adrift, and many former slaves fell into a state of extreme poverty that would have been unthinkable under their old masters.
Then the land itself came to the emerging population’s rescue. In 1876, a group of explorers discovered in the eastern part of the country along the Lawa River what the Spanish navigators had been so desperately searching for three centuries earlier: gold. Black men headed into the jungle in droves, and all of Suriname was struck with gold fever. Sleepy Paramaribo developed into a booming, bustling gold town. But although the Pearl of the West had taken on a golden sparkle and was by no means lacking in colonial grandeur, it never really had the romantic appeal of other cities in the Dutch West Indies. The shiny veneer of civilization had always been thin, and there was still something wild and untamable about the Surinamese capital. And even though slavery was a thing of the past, racial discrimination was not. Color still determined social status, and having whiter skin improved one’s chances of a successful life.
The slower the pace, the less that happens, and the less that happens, the more people gossip. And Paramaribo was certainly no exception. The city was brimming with old coteries from the end of the nineteenth century, when ladies in high-society circles had little to do but fan themselves and count the days until the next opportunity to don a new dress. The marriage of Koos Nods and Eugenie Elder in 1904 had people talking for months. For he, despite all his money and sweet-talking, was nothing but a gold
digger, a ruffian with tanned black skin, whereas she was a lady in every sense of the word: proper, well-bred, and above all, nearly white.
Waldemar’s mother bore the name of a bona fide plantation owner, which in the colony was a status symbol in itself. The fact that her ancestor, William Elder, had been nothing but a simple drummer who had enlisted in the colonial army because he had absolutely no prospects in Scotland, didn’t matter in the least. What mattered was that he had worked his way up to owning a small but prosperous coffee and cacao plantation and that he had given not only freedom, but also his own untarnished name to his black mistress and their children. Since then, for generation after generation, the Elder women had chosen their patrons very carefully, until eventually their bloodline was nearly white—opgekleurd, or “upcolored,” as it was called. The fact that there had never been a wedding wasn’t the least bit unusual in the colonial world. Nonwhite people simply didn’t marry—it was even forbidden under slavery—and white men all the way up to the governor himself were known to openly have relationships with black women. As a disheartened priest once stated: “The white lily of chastity will not flourish in tropical lands.”6 The best a woman of color could hope for was a relatively stable concubinage, otherwise known as a “Surinamese marriage.”
The Boy Between Worlds: A Biography Page 2