The Covenant: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  Among his listeners that morning, when he shared his vision of a new South Africa, were many who could not comprehend what he was talking about; common sense told them that white men who had wagons and guns and many horses were intended to rule and to have lesser people work for them. But there were a few who understood that what the missionary was saying was true, not at this moment perhaps, but in the long reach of a man’s whole life, or perhaps within the lives of his grandchildren.

  Among this latter group was the gifted soprano Emma, whose family had escaped slavery through Hilary’s charity, or rather his mother’s, for she had sent the funds which purchased their release. Emma was now twenty-one, smallish in size, and her face was as jet-black as ever, her teeth even and white. She had a wonderfully placid disposition, worked well with children, and guided the mission whenever Saltwood had to be absent.

  For some time she had been thinking of Golan’s future, and because she was a Madagascan and not a Xhosa, she was able to see more clearly than some. She found the Xhosa in general a superior people, and could name a dozen ways in which they excelled: ‘Baas, they could be as good farmers or hunters as any Boer.’

  ‘Never, never call me Baas again,’ Hilary admonished. ‘I am your friend, not your baas.’

  She was aware, of course, that Hilary had gone to Algoa Bay to fetch a wife, and speedy rumors had reached even Golan, describing the hilarious scene in which he had stood on the shore, arms open to receive his woman, while she ran right past him to embrace another. Emma, better than most, appreciated the agony this sensitive man must have known then, and upon his return she had discharged most of the managerial duties until he had time to absorb his disgrace, and bury it.

  Emma, with no last name, understood the subtle process by which Saltwood had sublimated his personal grief and found, in doing so, his vision of South Africa as a whole, and she supposed that no one would ever understand this country, in which she, like Hilary, was a stranger, until he had experienced some sense of tragedy. She supposed also that once he expressed his vision, he would see its impossibility and would shortly thereafter leave the area and return to England, which must lie very far away.

  So she was surprised one day, and perhaps pleased, when he said, ‘I shall stay here the rest of my life. I’m needed for the building.’

  She believed him, and knowing this, moved closer to him, for it was apparent that no man as fragile as he could survive without strong assistance, and she further observed that he was held in such scorn by the two white communities that there was little possibility that he could ever find a wife in those quarters.

  She was, in some respects, even more solidly informed than Saltwood himself and exercised a sounder judgment, and this had been true when she was ten and realized that her life depended upon escaping from slavery at De Kraal. Her parents had been afraid; the other slaves, all of them, had been terrified of consequences; but she had fled into the night without horse or guide and had made her way to freedom. Now it was she who saw that Hilary must have a partner, and she perceived this on the simplest base: that he could not survive without one.

  Reverend Saltwood, after his vision and his willingness to commit his life to it, was thinking along much different lines. He felt that God had brought him to Golan for some specific and perhaps noble purpose, and he was sure that it was God who had vouchsafed him the vision; in this respect he was much like Lodevicus the Hammer, except that Lodevicus had known that God had visited him personally.

  Therefore, if he had been chosen for some exalted design, it was obligatory that he conform to the inherent patterns of that design—and what were they? That all men in South Africa were brothers, that all were equal in the sight of God and that all had just rights, none standing higher than another. He recognized that there were managerial degrees, and he was certainly no revolutionary; in the Missionary Society, for example, he stood on the very lowest rung of the hierarchy, and in his humility he suspected that he deserved little more. In Cape Town lived officials who gave him orders, and in London lived other officials who sent orders to South Africa, and above all, stood the little group of powerful thinkers like Simon Keer who directed everything. He was quite satisfied with the abstract structure, but he was somewhat troubled by the fact that everyone in the chain of command was white, as if this were a prerequisite for power. At Golan he had delegated command and it had worked rather well.

  He had turned the mission choir over to Emma, and it was she who had trained the voices into a beautiful instrument, not he. He had found that in his absences Emma had run the establishment at least as well as he, and perhaps better. She certainly was as good a Christian, having braved true hardships in forging her allegiance to Jesus, and she was kind and humble in dealing with Boers when they came to complain about their runaways. ‘Humble, but firm,’ he wrote in one report, ‘she displays the true sense of Christ’s teaching. If she is required to face down some arrogant Boer screaming for the return of his Hottentots, she stands there, a little figure in a gingham dress, hands on hips, defying them to desecrate the house of the Lord. One man thrashed her with his whip, but she would not move, and in some confusion he rode away.’

  Another line of thought was pushing its way into Saltwood’s reflections, and he would have been astonished if its historic parallel had been pointed out to him, but like many men from superior cultures who are placed in association with large numbers of persons of inferior mechanical culture, he was beginning to think that salvation lay in rejecting the inherited superior culture and marrying some simple woman from the less advantaged, and in so doing, establishing connection with the soil, with the elementary. Thus, at this very time in Russia young men of the ruling class were coming to believe that they must marry serfs to attain contact with the real Russia, and in France writers and philosophers contemplated marriage to fallen women, so that together they might start from a solid base, as it were, and climb to new understandings. In Brazil gruff Portuguese planters defiantly married blacks: ‘To hell with Lisbon. This is my life henceforth.’ And in India certain mystic-driven young Englishmen were thinking that to understand the land to which they were now committed, they must take Indian wives.

  There was a sense of self-flagellation in all this, and many observers were amused by it, but there was also a sense of primordial experience, of identification with a new land, and of deep-rooted psychological suspicions that in a flowering culture marked by too many books and far too many parties, something fundamental was being lost. When religion, with its example of Jesus Christ’s abnegation, was thrown into the scales, there built up a solid impulse toward actions that would never otherwise have been contemplated, and one bright morning when life at Golan Mission was as placid as it would ever be, Reverend Hilary Saltwood entered upon three days of prayer and fasting.

  He was thirty-six now, and as far in promotions as he would ever go. He was aware that his mother still fondly imagined him coming home to the deanship at Salisbury, but he knew that lustrous prize was lost forever; indeed, he sometimes doubted that he could even secure some inconspicuous English living. He suspected also that his term at Golan had better be ended; he had built so well that any new man from London could take charge. But his productive life was by no means finished; he felt an urgent call to the north, where many lived in ignorance of Jesus, and he envisioned his life as spent in one lonely outpost after another. But to live like that he needed a companion.

  He remembered how excited he had been when his mother wrote that she was sending him a wife. How often he had read that letter, how carefully he had studied his mother’s description of Miss Lambton, visualizing her working with him in outpost stations. In his loneliness he would sometimes recall every item of her dress as she came through the surf that day in Algoa Bay. ‘I need a wife to share the veld,’ he cried aloud.

  But what wife? Dare he ever again enlist his mother in a search? He thought not. Could he ride over to Grahamstown to see if it contained any eligible wom
en, new widows, perhaps, among the immigrants? Not likely. There they would laugh at him and jeer, and no woman would want to share that humiliation. Should he return to Cape Town? Never. Never. His life was on the frontier with the black people he loved.

  Loved! Did he love Emma, his marvelous little assistant with the laughing eyes? He believed he did, but he wondered whether God would approve of such a union.

  His thinking thus far had required one full day; he spent the next two in trying to ascertain whether a man totally devoted to Jesus Christ dared risk such a marriage, and just as the Boers searched the Old Testament for guidance in their time of tribulation, so he took down the New Testament and tried to decipher the teachings of Jesus and St. Paul, and the old familiar phrases leaped and tumbled in contradiction through his mind: ‘It is better to marry than to burn … He that is unmarried careth for the things of the Lord … Husbands, love your wives … It is good for a man not to touch a woman … So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies,’ and St. Paul’s specific command to celibacy: ‘I say therefore to the unmarried, “It is good for them if they abide even as I.” ’

  It was a confusing doctrine, generated in a time when people were living in agitated communities much like the South Africa of 1821, and a searcher could find Biblical justification for either marrying or not marrying, but in the end one incident in the New Testament superseded all others: when a poor couple in Cana were being married without enough money to provide wine for their guests, Jesus stepped forward and converted water into wine so that the celebration could proceed. Laughter possessed Hilary when he thought of it: I’ve always liked that miracle best of all. A celebration. A blessing. And at the end the governor himself saying, ‘At most parties they serve good wine at the beginning, rubbish as soon as the guests are drunk. But you’ve brought us the best wine at the end. Stout fellow!’ I believe that Jesus and his disciples must have danced at this wedding.

  He spent the third night praying, and in the morning he went to Emma and said, ‘Jesus Himself would dance at our wedding. Will you have me?’

  They were married quietly by Saul, who now served as deacon at the mission—this tall white man, this short black woman. They shared a wattled hut beside the church, and since no announcements were broadcast, news of the extraordinary marriage did not circulate.

  It certainly did not reach Grahamstown, seventy-five miles to the east, where Richard Saltwood had found himself a saucy bride, Julie, the Dorset girl who had ridden her own horse to Plymouth to take passage on one of the last emigrant ships. Alone and unprotected, she lacked the funds to hire a sixteen-oxen wagon to freight her to Grahamstown, so she had walked, bringing with her barely more than the clothes on her back. Within a week six men had wanted to marry her, and in her flirtatious way she had chosen Richard. She could not read, but when he explained that one day he would take her back to the cathedral town of Salisbury, she said brightly, ‘Then, by God, I better learn,’ and she had sought out Mrs. Carleton to teach her, and the two women, so unlike in breeding, so similar in courage, had a fine time wrestling with the alphabet.

  When Richard proposed that he send for his brother to conduct the wedding, Julie cried, ‘Capital! It’ll give us a chance to introduce him to the town.’

  So a servant was sent west on horseback to invite Hilary to perform the ceremony, and the invitation seemed so sincere and the opportunity to establish connections with the new settlement so favorable that the missionary accepted. He would take Emma with him so that the Grahamstown people could witness the depth of his conviction that a new era was beginning in the colony.

  Hilary, Emma, Saul and the servant made the eastward journey, with Bible reading each evening, prayers each dawn, and much conversation about Richard and his experiences in India. Hilary, having found great happiness in his own marriage, speculated on what kind of bride his brother was taking, and in his prayers repeatedly asked God to bless Richard.

  As the quartet rode into Grahamstown, Hilary pointed out the little houses that had seemed like secure fortresses that day when he faced the screaming Xhosa, and he showed Emma the site on which Tjaart van Doorn had saved his life.

  As they rode down the principal street they came to the spacious parade ground where a small church stood on land which would be occupied later by a fine cathedral, and another of Richard’s Hottentot servants hailed the procession to say that Baas was at the shop of Carleton, the wagon builder, so the horses were turned in that direction while the slave hurried on ahead, shouting, ‘De Reverend kom! Look, he kom!’ And to the door of the rude shed in which Carleton worked came his wife, his friend Richard Saltwood and lively Julie, the intended bride. All four looked up at the horsemen and saw Hilary sitting high among them.

  ‘Hullo, Hilary,’ Richard said with the casualness that had always marked his behavior toward his brother. ‘Glad you could come.’

  ‘Hello, Richard. I hear God has blessed you with a bride. He has blessed me, too. This is my wife, Emma.’

  From her horse the petite Madagascan smiled warmly at the two women, then nodded to their men. She remembered them later as four gaping mouths: ‘They were astounded, Hilary. Didn’t you see them, four mouths wide open?’

  No one spoke. Emma, with a deep sense of propriety, felt that it was not her duty to do so first, since she was being presented to them, but they were too dumbstruck even to speak to Hilary, let alone his extraordinary wife. Finally the missionary said, ‘We’d better dismount,’ and he extended his hand to his wife.

  The story sped through Grahamstown: ‘That damned fool Saltwood’s married a Xhosa bitch.’

  It was an agonizing three days. No one knew where to put Emma, or how to feed her, or what to say to her. They were surprised to learn that she could speak good English and write much better than Julie. She was modest, of good deportment, but very black. There was no way to alleviate the awfulness of her reality, no explanation that could soften the dreadful fact that a decent Englishman, although a missionary, had married one of his Xhosa Kaffirs. When it was pointed out that she was really a Madagascan, one man said, ‘Know the place well. The bastards ate my uncle.’ And now a rumor circulated that Emma had been a cannibal.

  Richard quietly insisted that the marriage proceed as planned, with his brother officiating, and the temporary church was crowded, most of the spectators having come to see the cannibal. It was a moving ceremony, filled with the soaring phrases of the Church of England wedding ritual, perhaps the most loving in the civilized world.

  ‘Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this company, to join together this Man and this Woman in holy Matrimony; which is an honourable state, instituted of God in the time of man’s innocency … which holy estate Christ adorned and beautified with his presence, and first miracle that he wrought in Cana of Galilee … Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honour, and keep her in sickness and in health … so long as ye both shall live … forsaking all others … for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part …’

  When Hilary intoned these mighty words, standing tall and gaunt, like someone St. Paul might have ordained in Ephesus, he gave them special meaning, for it seemed to him that he was solemnizing not only his brother’s marriage but his own, and when he came to the cry, ‘ “O Lord save thy servant and thy handmaid!” ’ he felt that he was asking blessing upon himself, and some of the congregation suspected this and looked with horrid fascination at Emma, wondering if she could qualify as a handmaiden whose fate concerned God.

  The highlight of the ceremony came with the singing of Psalm Sixty-seven, required by The Book of Common Prayer, for then little Emma, who stood facing the crowded church, let her voice soar as she did at the mission, and other singers stopped to listen:

  ‘O let the nations rejoice and be glad: for thou shalt judge the folk righteously, and govern the nations upon earth.’

  The congregants h
eard the song but not the words.

  On the return trip Hilary said, ‘It was a dreadful mistake to have come. They saw nothing. They understood nothing.’

  ‘What did you think when you met Vera?’

  ‘It was strange. I’d never seen her, you know. Not really. I moved forward. She moved back. And I thought, “How lucky I was not to have married her.” ’

  ‘You never had the chance,’ Emma said.

  ‘I’m convinced God took care of that. He had you in mind.’

  ‘I liked Thomas very much,’ she said. ‘He’ll do well in this country. We need wagons.’

  ‘You and I need one, particularly.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because we’ve got to move north. We’re not wanted here any longer.’

  So when they reached Golan and satisfied themselves that Saul could maintain the mission with Hottentot and Xhosa deacons until some young clergyman arrived from England, they started packing in earnest. They acquired a small wagon and sixteen oxen, a tent of sorts and some wooden boxes for their goods. With this meager equipment they set forth.

  They headed northwest for a destination unknown, one man, one woman traversing barren lands that held no water, moving into canyons where desperadoes might be lurking, and crossing lands often ravaged by wandering bands of Hottentot and Bushmen outlaws. They had no fear, because they carried almost nothing of value that could be taken from them, and if they were to be slain, it would be in God’s service. They were traveling to take His word into a new land, and they would maintain their steady progress for fifty days. Alone, walking slowly beside their oxen, they went into lands that no white man had ever penetrated before.

  In later decades much would be made of treks conducted by large groups of Boers armed with guns, and these would indeed be remarkable adventures, but equally so were the unspectacular movements of solitary English missionaries as they probed the wilderness, these lonely harbingers of civilization.