The Covenant: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  With the most obvious stratagems Annatjie endeavored to ignite a romance between the two, inviting the Boeksmas twice to her table and lending Bezel for the building of their house, but Paul wanted nothing to do with Sibilla, and she in turn showed herself to be most uneasy in his presence. Before long she was betrothed to a widower from a farm at the north edge of town, and Paul was still without a wife.

  When he left his sons with Annatjie for two weeks so that he could journey to Fransch Hoek, she was convinced that he had gone in search of a wife among the other Huguenots, but when he returned alone she found that he had only been agitating—as he had so often before—for the establishment of a French school. When Marthinus upbraided him for this, he repeated stubbornly, ‘If a man loses his language, he loses his soul.’

  Two interests kept the families united: their desire to produce a good wine, and their deepening faith in Calvinism. Like all Huguenots, Paul was fanatically devoted to his religion, and because his experience of repression was recent, he was apt to be more fiercely protective than his Dutch neighbors, none of whom had known the Spanish persecution personally. Had the Dutch of Stellenbosch wanted to relax the austerity of their Calvinism, the Huguenot immigrants would have protested. Back in Holland the Dutch were making gestures of conciliation with Catholics, especially their German neighbors, and occasionally a strain of this liberalism would surface at the Cape; when French ships put into the bay, officers and men were treated with respect, even though they were Catholic; but for the Huguenots that religion remained unspeakable, and whatever steps their church took had to be diametrically opposed to Rome.

  This preoccupation with religion was illustrated when a band of raiders struck at the cattle of the Stellenbosch farmers. The attackers were a wild bunch of outcasts, slaves and renegade Hottentots who crept into Dutch kraals and in repeated sorties carried off many of the best animals.

  Neighboring farmers assembled to retaliate, but their efforts made little impression along a hundred-mile frontier, so the burgher militia had to be summoned to launch a serious offensive. Every adult male in the district reported to Stellenbosch, and it was to this meeting that Farmer Boeksma rode up with three of his Hottentot servants equipped and armed for war.

  ‘Madness!’ several of the old-timers argued. ‘You heard what the governor told us. “To allow them to bear arms is nothing less than putting a knife in their hands to slash our throats.” ’

  ‘He was talking about slaves,’ Boeksma reminded the men.

  Over the years the Dutch had had so much trouble with their slaves, who persisted in trying to escape to freedom, that the most bizarre punishments were instituted: when one black woman enraged the community, the commander ordered that she be stripped, broken on the wheel, and tied to the ground while her breasts were ripped off by red-hot pincers, after which she was to be hanged, beheaded and quartered. When certain settlers protested this barbarity, the commander granted clemency: the woman was sewn into a canvas bag and thrown into the bay, where she struggled for half an hour before drowning.

  ‘We must never arm slaves,’ a cautious man warned.

  ‘But these aren’t slaves,’ Boeksma pleaded. ‘They’re loyal. They believe in me like my own children.’

  As he spoke, the armed servants stood silent. One could still be classified as a Hottentot, but the other two were Coloureds, and when Boeksma called them part of his family he spoke the truth, for there was no tribe or captaincy surviving in this area to which they could give their allegiance, no homeland, no human being except ‘Groot Baas Boeksma.’ They had accepted his God, his church, his way of life, and this was demonstrated daily in the language they spoke, an exciting mixture of Dutch-Malay-Portuguese-Hottentot. It was a good patois and it served them well in field and kitchen. A farmer might not be able to afford many slaves, but every settler was able to attract his complement of Hottentot-Coloured families; they tended the vineyards; they served his meals; they nursed his infants and minded his children, scolding when needed and whispering instructions in the language they were building from their disparate backgrounds.

  Still, the idea of arming even such placid dark men was repugnant, and an impasse was reached between Boeksma, who wanted to do so, and the sager heads, who warned against it. It was the Huguenot De Pré who resolved the argument: ‘I seem to remember a passage in our Bible. In the years when Abraham was still called Abram, his nephew Lot fell into trouble, and there was discussion as to how the commando might rescue him. And did not Abraham arm his servants and sally forth to save his nephew?’

  None of the Dutchmen remembered this incident, but all agreed that if Abram really had armed his servants, that would constitute permission for them to do the same, so they consulted Willem, who offered his Bible to the worried men, and in the fourteenth chapter of Genesis, De Pré found specific instructions telling them what to do, but when he encountered trouble reading the Dutch he almost spoiled things by saying, ‘In French it’s clearer.’ It had never occurred to his neighbors that God’s word had ever appeared in any language but Dutch:

  ‘And when Abram heard that his brother was taken captive, he armed his trained servants, born in his own house, three hundred and eighteen, and pursued them … And he brought back all the goods, and also brought again his brother Lot, and his goods, and the women also, and the people.’

  What astounded these devout men was that when they added up those servants in the Stellenbosch region capable of fighting, they totaled three hundred and eighteen, and Andries Boeksma shouted, ‘It’s a revelation—a revelation from God Himself! A thousand years ago, nay, ten thousand, He foresaw our plight and instructed us to arm our servants.’ And he asked the men to pray, expressing their thanks for this guidance, and when they rose they organized a punitive expedition, and for every animal the Hottentots had taken away, the Dutchmen brought back three.

  From then on, no commando sallied forth without its complement of Hottentot-Coloured fighters, and few farmers would venture into the wilderness without their dark families trailing along with them. For generations this alliance would maintain, fortified sometimes by bloodlines when lonely men needed companionship, but more often based on a kind of acknowledged and gentle servitude, for they were, as Boeksma had said, ‘Loyal.’ As the Dutchmen traveled, the little dark men and women might not be visible, and they never ate at table, but they were there, one step behind the Groot Baas.

  Willem did not accompany the raiders, and he refused for a good reason: he still hoped that some kind of peace might be brought about between white settlers and brown. ‘You’re no longer a good Dutchman,’ Andries Boeksma chided when the victorious commando returned. ‘You don’t think like a man from Holland, and you don’t act like a man from Java.’

  ‘I’ve thought of that myself,’ Willem said. ‘I suppose I’m an Afrikaner.’

  ‘A what?’ Boeksma cried.

  ‘An Afrikaner. A man of Africa.’ It was the first time in history this designation had been used, and never would it apply more accurately. And when the day came that Willem’s persistent lung disease, incurred by his hours on the horse, attacked and he lay dying, he counseled his grandchildren never to war with the Hottentots: ‘Share Africa with them in peace.’

  His sickbed stood in the left-hand room facing Bezel Muhammad’s first cupboard, and he passed the pain-choked hours by studying afresh the lovely relationship between the two woods, dark and light. They seemed an augury of what the country he had discovered and settled might become.

  No amount of Biblical glossing helped when the Van Doorns faced their real catastrophe, nor were the teachings of the Dutch Reformed Church of much assistance, either. One spring morning when Marthinus was working at the vines and the three De Prés were far away, he was summoned by the frantic ringing of a bell, and suspecting that this meant fire, he ran toward the big house, shouting, ‘De Pré! De Pré! Where in hell are you?’ But when he reached the house, and found only Annatjie, tall and red-faced, standing i
n the kitchen with Petronella, he was glad he had come alone.

  ‘Send the boys away,’ his wife said brusquely, and the two lads were dismissed, even though Hendrik, now thirteen, could guess that the emergency had something to do with babies.

  When the boys were gone, Annatjie gasped, ‘This one wants to marry Bezel Muhammad!’ And when Marthinus looked at his fifteen-year-old daughter, she nodded so vigorously that her pigtails bobbed, giving her the look of a child.

  Marthinus sat down. ‘You want to marry a slave?’ When his daughter nodded again, he asked, ‘Does he know about this?’ And before she could reply, he demanded, ‘Do you have to get married?’

  She shook her head and held out her hands to her father. ‘I love him, and he’s a good man.’

  Marthinus ignored this for the moment and said, ‘I could find you a dozen husbands at the Cape.’

  ‘I know,’ Petronella said, ‘but I would not be happy with them, Father.’

  The way she said Father melted Van Doorn. Extending his arms, he said, ‘Before he died, old Willem told me he had wanted to marry a slave. Said he regretted not doing so every day of his life. Oh, he loved old Katje, you could see that …’

  ‘Then, I can marry him?’

  Marthinus looked at his wife, a woman who had contracted a marriage almost as bizarre: in her case she accepted a white husband she had never seen; Petronella was taking a black-brown man she had known for three years. When Annatjie shrugged, the girl took it as a sign that her marriage was approved, but her father said quietly, ‘Leave us now, Petronella,’ and when she was gone he raised questions too delicate for her ears: ‘You know how the Compagnie feels about white and black …’

  ‘The Compagnie’s worried only about their sailors and soldiers who creep to the slave quarters.’ Annatjie sniffed.

  ‘And about men like Boeksma.’

  ‘We all know about Boeksma and his servant girls.’

  ‘With Petronella it is different. She’s in love with her slave.’ In his confusion Marthinus turned to his Bible, but found no guidance. Abraham had married his slave girl Hagar, and her offspring had populated half the earth, but they could find no account of an Israelite woman’s taking a slave husband. There was, of course, constant fulmination against Israelite men marrying Canaanite women, but nothing about the reverse, and it began to look as if God was much more concerned about young men than about their sisters. They even found the obscure text in Ezra in which God, speaking through His prophet, commanded all men to put away their strange wives. They read aloud that extraordinary list of nearly a hundred men who had taken wives from among the Canaanites:

  ‘And of the singers also; Eliashib: and of the porters; Shalum, and Telem, and Uri … And they gave their hands that they would put away their wives; and being guilty, they offered a ram of the flock for their trespass.’

  In the end Marthinus realized that the decision must be made by the Van Doorns alone, and when reached, must be defended by them against whatever opposition the community might organize, so one afternoon he asked his wife to sit with him at the kitchen table, to which they summoned the young lovers.

  ‘Are you determined to marry?’ Marthinus asked.

  ‘We are.’

  The Van Doorns sat with folded hands, looking at the couple, and the more they studied Bezel the more acceptable he became. ‘You are clean and hard-working,’ Marthinus said. ‘You’re a good carpenter. You never praise your own work, but I can see you prize it.’ Annatjie said, ‘It’s as if you combined the best of your two races, durable like the blacks, poetic like the Malays.’ But then Marthinus observed ominously, ‘And you also represent two very difficult problems.’

  When Petronella asked what these were, he said, ‘First, he can’t marry a white woman while he remains a slave.’

  ‘That’s simple,’ she said. ‘Set him free.’

  ‘Not so simple,’ Marthinus said. ‘Bezel, you must buy your freedom.’

  The slave, having anticipated this impediment, nodded to Petronella, who from the folds of her dress produced a canvas bag containing coins, which she emptied onto the table.

  ‘How did you collect them?’ Marthinus asked.

  ‘From the wall closets he makes,’ Petronella explained. ‘I save the money for him.’

  Head bowed, Marthinus fumbled with the coins but did not count them. After a while he cleared his throat and pushed the money back toward his daughter. ‘He is free. Keep the coins.’ Then, sternly, he added, ‘But the marriage will still be impossible unless he’s a Christian.’

  ‘He’s willing to become one,’ Petronella said.

  ‘I was speaking to Bezel.’

  ‘I think I’m already a Christian,’ Bezel said, and when this was explored, the people at the table were satisfied that he told the truth, but when they approached the predikant to have him verify the fact, Paul de Pré heard of the negotiation and fell into a rage.

  He was so eager to gain possession of Trianon, a house he had practically built, with vineyards he alone had saved from decay, that he had been quietly devising his own plans for Petronella. True, she was only fifteen and he thirty-four, but on a frontier where wives often died in childbirth, it was not uncommon for a patriarch to take himself four wives in sequence. The bride was always about seventeen, the man growing older and older. He had been giving serious thought to Petronella and now he heard with dismay that she was about to be married to a slave.

  Frantic, he ran across to Trianon, bursting through the doors he had rebuilt. ‘I’ve come to seek your daughter’s hand in marriage.’

  ‘She’s already taken,’ Annatjie said.

  ‘Muhammad? The slave?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But there hasn’t been a wedding!’

  ‘Perhaps there was, perhaps there wasn’t,’ Annatjie said calmly.

  ‘You would never allow a slave …’

  ‘Perhaps we will, perhaps we won’t,’ she said, and when he started to rave, she said without any show of anger, ‘Neighbor De Pré, you’re making a fool of yourself.’

  Paul appealed to Marthinus, but he remembered too vividly his father’s dying comment on what marriage meant at the edge of a wilderness: ‘Tell Hendrik and Sarel to find the best women they can and cling to them. I could not have lived my life without Deborah’s singing in my ears. I could never have built this refuge without Katje’s help.’

  ‘I think we’ll let things work themselves out,’ Marthinus said, and for five months he did not see De Pré at the vineyard, but when the time came to blend the wine, with Trianon’s harsher grapes giving character to De Pré’s gentler ones, Paul could not stay away, and it was he who made the final selections: ‘This wine in barrels, for the slaves in Java. But this good one we put in casks for Europe.’ And it was with this vintage that Trianon became an established name, even in Paris and London.

  It was Annatjie who first detected Paul de Pré’s grand design. She was a hard-minded woman who even as a child had learned to calculate what others might be wanting to do to her. Other unmarried girls at the orphanage had been afraid of emigrating to Brazil or South Africa, but she had perceived this as her only avenue of escape and had never moaned over the consequences of her act. When the man who chose her first at the Cape rejected her, she did not fly to tears, satisfied that someone else would want her in this lonely outpost, and when Marthinus stepped forward to claim her, she was not surprised.

  She remembered that first long ride across the flats; how bleak they seemed, how destructive of hopes! But at the worst part of the transit she had known that something much better must lie ahead, and she had gritted her teeth, held fast to the reins, and thought: He wouldn’t have settled here if the land were all like this—so that when the river appeared, with ibis and cranes gracing its banks, and ducks of wild variety diving to its bottom, she did not feel triumphant relief, but only that this was what she had expected.

  Her life with Katje had been difficult at times, for that quarrels
ome woman loved to complain, accusing her daughter-in-law of being too lazy or too careless, but after two or three harsh battles in which Annatjie stood her ground, Katje realized that she had a strong woman in her house, and the two mistresses worked out compromises. Occasionally it had been necessary for Annatjie to shove Katje aside, when something had to be done quickly and in what she thought was the proper way. When this first happened, her mother-in-law exploded, but Annatjie said, over her shoulder as she did the work, ‘Yell your heart out, old lady, but don’t get in my way.’ In later years, when the younger Van Doorns had three children, Annatjie appreciated Katje’s presence, for she proved a loving grandmother, instilling decent behavior into the children while stuffing them with goodies.

  Annatjie’s relationship with Willem had been more placid. She felt sorry for the crippled old farmer and admired the stalwart way he tended his vineyard, never complaining of the pain that kept him walking sideways, always ready to help any newcomer get started in the Stellenbosch area. She had worked with him in building the huts that had accumulated about the farmhouse: one shed for pigeons, one for farming tools, one for the storage of grain. She enjoyed that heavy work, for with every building that went up, she felt that the Van Doorns were securing their hold upon the land; she, more than his son Marthinus, was a projection of Willem’s dream for South Africa.

  With her three children she was a firm-minded mother, insisting that they work on the land with the slaves and Hottentots during the day and learn their letters at night after the table was cleared. She was desperately afraid they would be illiterate, and made them read with her from the only book the family owned, the big Bible whose Dutch words were printed in heavy Gothic script—and for a child of seven to try to decipher them was much like unraveling a secret code, but the ability to do so was the mark of a good human being, and patiently she drilled her offspring. In this she succeeded, but in her determination to make them hard-working farmers, like the ones she had known as a girl in Holland, she failed, for as the years passed, the white men of Africa grew accustomed to seeing black bodies bent down over the fields. It seemed God’s ordination that labor be divided so that men like the Van Doorns could supervise while slaves and servants toiled. The expression ‘Oh, that’s slave’s work’ became current.