The Covenant by James A. Michener
So a hedge of bitter almond was planted to separate the Cape from Africa.
In 1662 the glorious day arrived when a ship from Amsterdam brought the news that Commander van Riebeeck was at last being transferred to Java. Katje van Doorn immediately wanted to know why she and Willem could not go, too, and was distraught when she learned that Willem had never applied. Upon upbraiding him, she discovered that he had no intention of leaving the Cape: ‘I like it here. There’s no place for me in Java, with Karel in command.’
‘But we must go, and force Karel and Kornelia to find us promotions!’
‘I like it here,’ Willem said stubbornly, and he refused to plead with Van Riebeeck for a transfer.
The new commander was an extraordinary man, not a Dutchman at all, but one of the many Germans who long ago had sought employment in the Compagnie. He had served in Curaçao, in Formosa, in Canton, in most of the Spice Islands and particularly in Japan, where he had been ambassador-extraordinary that year when more than one hundred thousand persons died during the vast fire that swept the capital city of Edo. When he reported to the Cape he was a weak, sickly, irritable man, much plagued with gout and a moody disposition. During the days of interregnum, when Van Riebeeck was making his farewells but before his replacement assumed command, the German behaved circumspectly. He had a German wife who had mastered the complexities of Compagnie rule, and together they studied conditions at the Cape. They were therefore well prepared to take charge as soon as their predecessor left. Especially they intended to halt—and punish—the evil and costly flight of slaves.
So on the day that Van Riebeeck sailed, his eyes aglow with visions of Java, the new commander faced the problem of a slave who had fled to join a Hottentot camp but had been recaptured by horsemen galloping across the flats. As soon as the escapee was brought within the fortress walls, the commander ordered that his left ear be chopped off and both cheeks branded.
A few days later another slave was caught eating a cabbage grown in the Compagnie gardens; he was promptly flogged and branded, after which both ears were chopped off and heavy chains attached to his legs, ‘not to be removed for the duration of his life.’ When similar punishments were meted out to other recalcitrant blacks, Willem slipped into the fort to talk surreptitiously with Jango and Deborah: ‘I know you still seek freedom. For the love of God, don’t risk it.’
Jango, sitting with Willem’s two sons on his knees, laughed easily. ‘When the time comes, we’ll go.’
‘The chains! Jango, they’ll catch you before sunset.’
‘Of course we’ll go,’ Deborah said quietly, and Willem looked at her in astonishment. He had lived with her, had sired two children with her, and had known almost nothing about her. He had assumed that because she had a quiet, placid face and spoke softly that her heart was placid too. It had never occurred to him that she hated slavery as much as Jango, and it appalled him to think that she would risk losing her ears and having her face branded, just to be free.
‘Deborah! Think of what they might do to you,’ he pleaded, but she merely looked at him, her eyes resolute, her face immobile. Finally she placed her hand on his and said, ‘I will not remain a slave.’
On his way back to his hut he prayed: Oh, Jesus, help them come to their senses. But one night when the guards were inattentive, the four slaves set forth once more.
When they were dragged back, the new commander ordered everyone in the little settlement to assemble for the punishment: ‘Jango, for the fifth time you have tried to escape your dutiful labors, depriving the Compagnie of its property.’ Willem felt sick, wondering what awful thing was about to be done, but when he turned his ashen face to Katje, he saw that she was stretching forward to watch the proceedings.
‘Jango, you are to have your ears lopped. You are to have your nose lopped. You are to be branded forehead and cheeks, and you are to carry chains for the rest of your life. Deborah, twice you have run away. You are to be branded forehead and cheeks, and shall wear chains for the rest of your life. Adam and Crisme, you are slaves—’
‘No!’ Willem shouted. The commander turned to take note of who had interrupted him. An aide whispered that this was the father of the two boys, which angered the commander even more: ‘You are slaves, and you are to be branded on the forehead.’
‘No!’ Willem shouted again, determined that such dreadful punishment not be visited upon his children, but two soldiers pinioned him, and the sentences were executed.
A week later the slave Bastiaan stole a sheep belonging to the Compagnie and was hanged, and now the new commander had time to study the case of Willem van Doorn. He learned that he was the younger brother of the powerful Karel van Doorn, but he also learned that Karel had little regard for his brother and knew him to be troublesome. He knew that on four occasions Willem had petitioned to become a free burgher, stating that he had no desire to work endlessly for the Compagnie, and at the punishment he had, of course, behaved disgracefully. Here was a man begging for discipline, and the commander was determined that he receive it.
‘Willem van Doorn,’ he said at the public sentencing, ‘you’ve been a disruptive influence. You’ve consorted with slaves. You were seen only last week slipping in to the slave quarters, and you require discipline. The horse, two days.’
‘Oh, no!’ Katje pleaded, but the words had been spoken, so Willem was grabbed and bound, while two heavy bags of lead pellets were attached to his ankles. The high wooden horse was dragged in and stationed where everyone could witness, and four men held him aloft while two others kept his legs pulled apart.
In the moment that he was held thus suspended, the mutilated slaves Jango and Deborah were brought forth to watch, and for the first time Willem saw the hideous face of the man, the deeply scarred face of the woman he had loved. ‘No!’ he screamed, and all who heard, except Jango and Deborah, supposed that he was protesting the cruel punishment he was about to receive.
‘Now!’ the commander called, and he was dropped. The pain was so terrible that he fainted.
When he recovered, it was night and he was alone, chained to the horse whose rough edges tore sullenly at his crotch, spreading it, cutting it, wounding it horribly. If he moved to alleviate the pain, new areas were affected. Against his will deep groans escaped, and when he tried to move to a new position, the awful weights on his legs pulled him back.
Twice that night he fainted, partly from the pain, partly from the vicious cold that swept in from the bay. When he awakened, he began to shiver, and by the time the dull sun rose, he was feverish.
Residents of the fort came to mock him, satisfied that he deserved what he was getting. They had envied him his home at the garden, the fact that he had a wife and they didn’t, and his relationship to a powerful brother in Java. They noticed that he was shivering, and one woman said, ‘He has the ague. They all do after the first day.’
That afternoon, when the wind rose, his fever intensified so that when dusk came, with rain whipping in from the bay, he was in grave danger. His wife, unwilling to visit him while others were mocking him, crept up to the horse and whispered, ‘How goes it, Willem?’ and he replied through chattering teeth, ‘I’ll live.’
The fact that he had said this made Katje suspect that he would not, so she forced her way into the commander’s office and said, ‘You’re killing him, and Karel van Doorn will learn of this.’
‘Are you threatening me?’
‘I am indeed. I am the niece of Claes Danckaerts, and he’s a man of some importance in Amsterdam. Take my husband down.’
The commander knew enough of Compagnie politics to appreciate the influences that might be brought against him if a determined Dutch family declared war upon a German hireling, and from the manner in which Katje spoke, he suspected that she would pursue her threat, so against his own best judgment he put on a cloak and went out into the storm.
He found Willem unconscious, his body trembling with fever, and when he twice failed to rouse him, he ga
The stiff body was carried to the garden-hut and placed on the dung-polished floor, where Katje brought him slowly back to consciousness: ‘You’re home. It’s over, Willem.’ And their love, awkward and strained as it would always be, dated from that moment.
The ordeal of the wooden horse had a powerful impact on Willem van Doorn. For one thing, it crippled him; he would always walk with his body slightly twisted, his left leg not functioning like his right. And he would be susceptible to colds, a deep bronchial malaise affecting him each winter. An even more powerful result, however, was that he began to frequent the smithy in the fort, stealing pieces of equipment, which he kept sequestered behind the shed in which the vines were grafted.
One evening, when he had assembled a heavy hammer, a chisel and a bar for prying, he grasped Jango’s arm as he dragged his chains homeward. Without speaking, he kicked aside a covering of grass, displaying the cache. Jango said nothing, but his eyes showed Willem his gratitude.
It was not easy to look at Jango. Instead of ears he had lumpy wounds. His face, lacking a nose, lost all definition. And the three bold scars on forehead and cheeks imprisoned the glance of anyone who saw that ugly, repulsive face. Willem looked only at the eyes, which glowed.
The two men never confided in each other. Jango refused to tell Willem what his precise plans were, or how he would carry out his final attempt. The instruments for his freedom lay there under the grape cuttings and would be called upon when time was proper, but how and where he would cut away his chains and Deborah’s, neither man knew.
Then one afternoon, half an hour before sunset, Jango quietly quit his work and dragged his chains to the grafting shed, removed the covering grass and wrapped the chisel in a canvas bag. With strong blows, well muffled, he cut the chains that bound his legs, then tied them inconspicuously back together. Secreting the tools under his sweaty shirt, he walked unconcernedly past Willem, as he always did at close of day, and for a brief moment the two men looked at each other, one with face terribly scarred, the other with heart in turmoil. It was the last time they would ever be in contact, black and white, and tears came to Willem’s eyes, but Jango refused to allow emotion to touch him. Clutching his tools, he moved toward the fort.
‘You’re very nervous,’ Katje said when her husband limped in to supper, and when he stayed for a long time reading his Bible, she said, ‘Willem, come to bed.’ Desperately he wanted to go to the fort, to stand upon the wall, to witness how Jango and Deborah and the boys made their escape, and where her chains would be struck off, but he knew that he must betray nothing. He was not afraid of the punishment that would be meted out to him if the commander deduced his role in this escape; he was afraid only for Jango and Deborah and his sons. At nine, when Katje went to bed, she saw her husband still at his Bible, his head lowered as if in prayer.
They fled into the desert lands northeast of the fort, Jango the black from Angola, Deborah the brown from Malaya, Adam and Crisme, half-brown, half-white, and the baby girl Ateh, half-black, half-brown. When they were well away from the hedge of bitter almond, Jango struck off his wife’s chains, then discarded his own, but she picked them up, thinking that they would be useful in trading with the Hottentots or Bushmen.
This time they escaped. As they entered into a wilderness unknown, uncharted, they exemplified that reverberating report of Karel van Doorn:
Neither hunger nor thirst, neither the murderous arrow of the Bushman nor the spear of the Hottentot, neither the waterless desert nor the impassable mountain deters the slave from seeking his freedom.
They survived, and in time the descendants of Adam and Crisme and thousands like them would not have to flee to freedom bound in chains. They would be able to live in places like Cape Town, where they would come to know a greater bondage, for they would be stigmatized as Coloured. They would be preached against by predikants, because they would be living testimony to the fact that in the beginning days whites had cohabited with brown and black and yellow: ‘They are God’s curse upon us for the evils we have done.’ The land of their birth would be the home of their sorrow, and they would be entitled to no place in society, to no future that all agreed upon, but they would forever be a testimony.
The German commander was not really sorry about the disappearance of Jango and the Malayan girl. Had they been apprehended, he would have had to hang them, and there would be the ugly question of the three children, two with those heavy scars upon their foreheads.
Nor was he especially concerned when spies informed him that Willem van Doorn was showing signs that he might be preparing to quit the colony to head eastward for a farm of his own: ‘He’s building a wagon. He’s putting aside any objects that fall his way. And he’s collected more grape rootings than he needs for his fields.’
‘When the time comes, we’ll let him go. He’s a troublemaker and he belongs out there with the Hottentots.’
In 1664, when one of the homeward fleets brought to the Cape an unexpected visitor, the German commander was pleased that he had not overreacted in Willem’s case, because the visitor was Karel van Doorn, bringing the exciting news that he had been summoned home to become one of the Lords XVII. ‘My father-in-law had something to do with it,’ he said modestly. ‘He’s Claes Danckaerts, you know, the wealthy merchant.’ He moved into the fort with considerable pomp, followed by Kornelia and her two children dressed in lace and satin. Celebrations were held for five nights, during which the commander confided that he was exhausted by this damned Cape, and that he hoped Karel would do everything possible to get him transferred to Java.
‘I know how you feel,’ Karel said. ‘Van Riebeeck told me the same when I was last here. This is certainly no place for a man with ambitions.’
‘What’s Van Riebeeck doing?’
‘Like everyone else, he wanted the supreme job.’ Here Karel smiled weakly at the commander. ‘But no one from the Cape would ever be given that.’
‘What’s he doing?’
‘Governor of Malacca. And there he’ll stay.’
‘But at least he’s near Java.’
‘And you shall be, too. Not near it. In it.’
The commander sighed and started dreaming of that fortunate day when he would again be back in civilization. But he was interrupted when Karel asked, ‘What’s this I hear about my brother?’
The commander supposed that Karel was referring to the incident of the horse, and said, ‘As you know, out of compassion I had him taken down—’
‘I mean, his making himself a free burgher.’
‘We’d never permit anyone to make such a decision on his own,’ the commander said quickly.
‘But might it not be a good idea to get him out of here?’
The commander, having served in foreign capitals, recognized a devious suggestion when he heard it: Good God, he’s trying to get rid of his brother. Why?
He never discovered Karel’s reason for proposing that Willem be allowed, even encouraged, to leave the fort. For some undisclosed family complication, it was to Karel’s advantage to get rid of Willem, and sending him into the assegais of the Hottentots might be the most practical way. Maps were produced, sketchy affairs which represented almost nothing correctly, and the two men selected an area where a frontier post might profitably be established, supposing that Willem survived the bleak initial travel and the threats of Bushmen and Hottentots.
It lay to the east, where a lively river debouched from the first range of mountains; exploring parties had commented upon it favorably, and here Karel outlined an area of some sixty morgen: ‘Let him try to raise his grapes there. God knows we could use the wine.’
‘How was the last batch he sent to Java?’
‘Barely acceptable for the hospital. But each year it gets a little better.’
When arrangements were completed, the two officials summoned Willem, who limped sideways into the fort. ‘Willem! We’ve great news!’
‘How??
‘Oh, she died two years ago.’
‘Her house? The garden?’
‘The Compagnie took it back. It was theirs, you know.’
‘Did she … was she in pain?’
‘She died easily. Now, what we wanted to see you about … You tell him, Commander.’
The German said, ‘We are going to allow you to become a free burgher. Far across the flats. Here.’
‘That’s about where I’ve decided to go,’ Willem said softly.
The two officials ignored this rebuke to their authority. ‘Look!’ Karel said. ‘We’re giving you sixty morgen.’
‘You don’t need sixty morgen to grow grapes. I could do it on twenty.’
‘Willem!’ Karel said with some harshness. ‘Anytime the Compagnie offers you something free, take it.’
‘But I can’t farm it.’
‘Take it!’ Karel shouted. A Lord XVII was offering a laborer sixty morgen of the choicest land, and the laborer was raising objections. This Willem was beyond salvation; the only good thing about this visit was learning that his brother’s two bastard children had vanished somewhere in the desert. It reminded him of Hagar—but did her bastards die?
The meeting between Katje and her cousin Kornelia was equally cold, and shrewd Katje warned her husband, ‘There’s something wrong about them, Willem. They’ve done something wrong and are ashamed to see us.’ She brooded about this for some time, then one evening at supper snapped her fingers: ‘Willem, they’ve sold your mother’s house and are keeping the money to themselves.’
‘Let them have it,’ Willem said, but Katje was the niece of a merchant, and it galled her to think that she might have been defrauded of property that was duly hers, or at least her husband’s, so she went to the ship and confronted the older Van Doorns: ‘Did you sell your mother’s property?’
‘No,’ Karel said carefully.
‘What happened to it?’
‘It was Compagnie property. You know that. Like the house you’re living in—’