One of them, an Afrikaans speaker, lost no time in berating me for my ingratitude that he and his partner were risking their lives to keep “us whites” from being murdered in our beds. He followed with sarcastic remarks about how he wished that he had the time to go shopping with his children. In the meantime, the other officer was squatting down at the level of my children. In the interested tones of a favorite uncle, he asked their names, then scribbled the information in his notebook. Where did they live? What work did their daddy do?
As fast as possible I yanked my kids away and hurried to get them back in the car. Their interrogator, however, followed me. By the time I had found my keys, the man was in front of my car, pointedly copying down my registration number. What he might do with the information I could not even imagine, though scenarios of knocks on the door during the small hours and the arrest of Rose and Maria, or even Peter and me, raced through my head.
The third incident was the most disturbing. A day or so after Peter and I had attended a party at my sister Lana and brother-in-law’s house, one of the guests told Buzz that he had been contacted by the security police. Apparently he had made a remark at the party that was unpatriotic and smacked of a threat to the state. Given that both the person approached and Buzz were employed at the uranium enrichment division of the Atomic Energy Board where I myself had worked after graduating from university, it did not seem utterly implausible that the security police had indeed made the call. What seemed utterly incomprehensible, though, was that someone among our lifelong friends would have reported him.
Against this background, getting out of South Africa took on an urgency we had not felt before. Shortly after these incidents took place, Peter made a business trip to a client in Salt Lake City, a company then known as Sperry and soon after as Unisys. To Peter—as to the thousands of tourists who vacation here every year—the city seemed magical: snow-capped mountains, friendly, utter absence of crime. Half-seriously, half-jokingly he asked the American team leader whether Sperry had a job for him. The man took his overture at face value. A short while later, the company flew the two of us out to look at suburbs and schools and house prices. I, too, fell in love with the Mormons’ gentile Zion. Peter accepted the job. All that remained was obtaining a work visa. A month or two later, we got word that it had been granted. Ignorant as we were about the then already hellish bureaucracy of the American immigration system, we did not realize that the type of visa that had been issued for Peter was nearly impossible to upgrade to the holy grail of a green card. Two years into our move, we turned into illegal immigrants. It would take eight years of intensive personal and legal effort before we could hold our hands to our hearts and pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.
That we were eventually able to become US citizens is an ironical happiness: if it hadn’t been for the excellent education Peter had received in South Africa as a privileged white person, he would never have been sought-after in the computer field to the point of his company paying thousands of dollars for emigration lawyers so that they could keep someone with his skill set in their employ.
Peter and I made our decision to emigrate at about the same time that my mother was planning her move from Pretoria to her then yet-to-be-decided-upon destination. When we told Susanna that we were going to live in Salt Lake City, she was happy for us. There was, however, something in her eyes other than the vacant look we often saw after her axe injury: a deep sadness, it seemed, about the vast distance our move, on top of hers, would put between us.
Where are you going, Gertjie?
I’m going to play in the sand.
In my memory, my father still persists as the person who stood for logic and rationality in our family, while my mother personifies imagination and the sagacity of seers and sybils. What my father, by the time of our emigration already dead seven years, would have thought of our leaving the country of our birth, I can only imagine. But I hope that since he left the farm for the city under sociopolitical and environmental circumstances, he would know it was in the best interest of our family. As for my mother—now that I have grownup children with their own children, I am only beginning to fathom the wisdom and generosity with which she managed to see our plans to settle ten thousand miles from the formative valley of the Steenekamp farm.
In George, however, all was not well. While Susanna had recovered physically from her injuries and on the phone she said she was fine, it seemed that her former irrepressible drive to find adventure had dimmed. In “the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other,” I sensed—or did I project?—a preemptive, existential loneliness about the great distance my family’s move to America would put between us. But there was another quality of sadness around my mother too, a more ordinary desolation: the grind of daily life without those you love most dearly nearby.
After we had said our final goodbyes—the most wrenching of which took place at the airport on the day of our departure—and after the thirty-hour plane trip during which Marissa’s feet had swollen so much she could not get her shoes back on and thus arrived barefoot in America, after our weeks-long stay in a residential hotel in Salt Lake City, and after we had settled in our house on the shores of prehistoric Lake Bonneville, Susanna once more set out from George. Even her relentless drive to turn negatives into positives had not been able to overcome the irrationality of the sociopolitical circumstance of her environment. Summoning “the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies”—this time herself and her mother—she moved to the Karoo village of Marydale, where her parents had moved after retiring from their Kalahari farm. Her mother, Truia, was in her early eighties, her father, Carel, ninety. Carel was blind, Truia lame.
They used to think she was ouderwets.
Though Carel and Truia adamantly asserted their self-reliance—Carel followed the fence with his fingertips to tend his vegetables, and Truia oversaw from her wheelchair the hotnot woman who cleaned and helped with the cooking—Susanna felt that the time had come for her to take care of them.
As soon as she had made all the arrangements to return to the landscape of her childhood, Susanna recruited my brother Carel, who owned a bakkie, a small flatbed truck, to move her possessions the 375 miles due north. So far did the weight of her remaining memory-steeped worldly goods exceed the bakkie’s payload, though, that its bed sank almost to the tarmac at the back, causing its headlights to beam drunkenly skyward, all the while continuing to lurch fecklessly into the unseen territory that “danger knows full well.” By contrast, Susanna, who had become accustomed to not trusting her eyes, followed the timeless beckoning of the North Star to her kismet, even though from her southern hemisphere vantage point that beacon was obscured by the lobe of the earth’s crust and the bulk of its mantle.
You give your heart to each thing in turn—Ma’s little lamb.
After that comes the open end.
Hosanna, Hosanna.
Chapter Five
Of Madness and Love I
Love is the fourth kind of Madness.
PLATO, PHAEDRUS (249D)
What indeed is madness but the orgasm between consciousness and unconsciousness.
J. F. C. FULLER, THE BLACK ARTS
I SAW MY FIRST MAD person when I was almost five years old. We had just moved from Cape Town to the Transvaal and were living with my father’s parents in the Old House on the farm. We couldn’t have been there more than a day or two when I came face-to-face with Willeman. Our cousins, who lived within walking distance, were visiting. Hendrik and I were the oldest of the bunch, and we ventured out to explore.
Out toward the tobacco barns, the werf, or area of swept dirt surrounding a farmhouse, ended in a tall screen of quince trees. To get around them, we first had to pick a path through a treacherous quilt of quill-sharp, inch-long, V-shaped thorns that studded the earth beneath a giant tree called a pendoring
. The two-pronged thorns called dorings resembled the straight, sharp horns of a gemsbok, a kind of large antelope. After managing to toe our way around the nasty spikes unharmed, Hendrik and I raced toward the row of quinces. When we came around the hedge-like lane, I froze, and the image before me would be etched into my soul: a man with red, bulging eyes; hair matted and sticking out like a mane; torso bare from the waist up, except a sash knotted from small-animal skins that was looped around his chest; a mantle of sackcloth, adorned with bits of fur, feathers, leaves, and bones, swung from where the sash crossed over one shoulder. And then there was the smell: a bitter mix of tobacco juice and sweat, overlaid with the tang of rotting animal. He was surrounded by a pack of yelping dogs, which he thwacked from time to time with his stick. The dogs picked up their pace, and so did the madman.
My legs sprang back to life, and I ran. Hendrik, who grabbed my hand as he tore along beside me, bellowed an earsplitting warning: “Dorings!” He braked with a dust-raising skid that threw me off balance, and I stumbled to the ground. The madman was catching up with us. He stopped, stared, and laughed, his mouth open so wide that you could see the back of his tongue and the spaces in his gums where he was missing teeth.
This time Hendrik did not stop to take my hand. I tore after him blindly, seeing only the back of his shirt as he swung far to the side of our ouma’s front garden to give the advancing front of man and dogs the widest berth possible.
Having gained the garden, we saw that the man had not followed us. As if he had never even noticed us, he had continued to the back door. (I would later learn that he went there for food every day.) We slowed, followed the outer rim of Ouma’s plantings, a row of bushes with red flowers. Hendrik showed me a secret hiding place under the low branches, a den, he said, that was handy when your parents were looking for you after you had been naughty. We crawled inside, wincing at the sharp ends of broken branches poking into our sides and backs.
Once our breathing became quiet, I asked Hendrik about the man. His name was Willeman,* Hendrik said, a moniker I would only later realize was not a real name, but rather the Afrikaans for “Wild Man.” He was a sangoma, or witchdoctor, Hendrik continued breathlessly. He wore a string around his neck; suspended on the string was a bag containing bones that, Hendrik said, he threw to make black people sick or even make them die.
“Bones?” I asked.
“He gets them from the people he kills,” Hendrik ventured, his sky-blue eyes wide. “After he throws his bones, he lets his dogs eat them. He has to kill someone else to fill up his bag again.”
The alarm he must have read on my face drew a reassurance from Hendrik. His muti did not work on white people, he insisted. Then he told the funny part that he had saved for last: each of Willeman’s dogs was called Voertsek, an Afrikaans command used to chase dogs away.
Inside our hiding place, a snake suddenly slithered over Hendrik’s foot. My big cousin screamed and ran. I screamed, too, and ran right back into the thornfield. I stepped hard into a pendoring. Wailing, I hopped to the back step of the Big House.
Hendrik’s mother, Tant Tien, offered to take it out. All I managed in response was a sound that meant “Don’t come near me.”
When my father came home from the lands, he did not take no for an answer. He told me to sit still, or else someone would have to hold me down. I cried out when the needle would slip into the quick, upon which Pa, undeterred, joked that it was a wonder the jackals out in the veld did not join in.
While I soon forgot the pain of the thorn extraction, one certainty burned onto my brain: Hendrik was wrong; Willeman’s dark powers were far stronger than my whiteness.
A characteristic of brain injury, whether caused by disease or trauma, is that it leads to unexpected patterns of skill retention and loss. A 2013 New Yorker article by David Owen includes an anecdote illustrating the vagaries of brain injury. Owen writes about “a gifted structural engineer” who can no longer practice his profession because he “lost his ability to remember new things.” He nevertheless retains “amazing” math skills and the ability to play chess. If the former engineer momentarily leaves the chess game, he cannot remember whether he was white or black and, upon returning, has to infer his color from where his opponent is seated. Remarkably, he is then able to look at the board and “retrace the game backward and then run it forward,” and in this way “he will almost always beat you.”
Today it is commonly understood that the particular way in which a mind goes wrong is inextricably related to where the damage is located in the brain. However, this concept had no traction in neuroscience until about two decades ago. The failing to pair up “local changes in tissue content with cognitive and behavioral changes” was due to a cultural blind spot: the reign in the first half of the twentieth century of behaviorism, a theory that human behavior (and the behavior of other animals) can be explained in terms of conditioning, without consideration of thoughts or feelings. Behaviorism entailed the belief that psychological disorders should be treated by changing behavior rather than delving into the human mind.
Under the reign of behaviorism, the brain came to be regarded as a kind of black box, an organ of “mass action (the brain as a whole determines its performance) and equipotentiality (any part of the brain can carry out a given task, thus no specialization).” Before contemporary neurology could flourish, the vast cultural-conceptual notion that mental and physical processes were, in Stephen Jay Gould’s term, “non-overlapping magisteria,” or fields of knowledge incapable of casting any light on each other, had to be overcome.
I saw my second mad person during our last year in South Africa, when Newton was a four-year-old in preschool and Marissa a seven-year-old second grader. Like most white parents in the area, Peter and I transported our children to and from school by car. At pickup time, the parents—almost exclusively mothers—would stand around chatting while we waited for the final bell. Our preschool-age children, those who stayed at home or who had been picked up at their private nursery schools along the way, played together under the trees. In a separate group, the nannies who stood in for the mothers who were having their hair done, were delayed at their doctor’s offices, or—rarely in those days—holding a job, conducted their own conversations, which were always louder and merrier than those of the white madams. Their own children and grandchildren were forbidden by the pass laws to live with them on their employers’ premises. They had to send their offspring to townships or “homelands” to be raised by grandmothers or aunts and attend substandard schools.
One day a white woman whom I had not seen before appeared under the trees. She was accompanied by a black nanny, dressed in a uniform pink from apron to doek, who was pushing a white baby in a pram. Although the baby’s two caretakers each belonged to a different conversational constituency, they did not join either group. The baby looked very new, so I decided to walk over to congratulate the mother. With a nod at the nanny, I asked the mom, “How old is your baby?”
“What baby?” she responded. She averted her eyes and fixed them on a toddler running a stick backward and forward along the fence.
The nanny wheeled the pram closer so I could peek inside. “He’s a boy, ma’am,” she said. “He has two weeks.”
Without coming any closer, the mom said, “That’s not my baby.” Though her tone was emphatic, her blank expression did not change. The nanny reached out to pat her employer on the shoulder, and the white woman again settled her gaze on the toddler. Turning to me again, the nanny introduced herself as Regina and explained they were there to pick up the woman’s daughter, Addie, then went on to share the baby’s eating and sleeping patterns, topping it off with a report of his sister’s naughtiness. “When I give him the bottle,” Regina began, “Miss Addie, she throw me with crayons. She don’t like I have another child on my lap.”
The mother injected herself into the conversation again. “That’s not my baby,” she insisted. “Somebody else’s baby. Just looks like him.”
As the semester drew to an end, I sought Regina out almost every day. She always rewarded my complaints about all the work related to our packing and leave-taking for America with an “Auwk! Poor madam.” From her side, Regina confided about the baby’s steady growth and increasing cuteness—“He smile at me and he sister this morning”—and also filled me in on her own children and grandchildren back on the farm. Poppie, her seventeen-year-old, was applying to the Normal College to become a teacher. Joshua, her married son, lost his job at the factory and was at the moment living illegally with her in her room, but—with a glance at her employer—madam did not mind because he hid from the pass police all day and only went out at night.
When the term ended, I was sad to say my goodbyes to Regina. She, too, seemed emotional. She said she wished she could one day come and visit me. I told her we would be honored to have her as our guest, though we both knew such a trip would be virtually unfathomable. As we touched in a handshake, we both teared up. I wiped my cheeks with the back of my hand, she hers with the point of her doek. As we parted to each take our own grade one girl by the hand, she glanced at her employer, the baby, and his sister, who was goo-gooing into her brother’s face. Regina sought my gaze, held it while imparting her last words: “Sorry, ma’am, I won’t see you for a long time. Not until I’ve raised these ones up.”
Memory's Last Breath Page 12