We Are Not Such Things (21 page)

After college, lacking an Olympic-size pool, Amy stopped diving and took up running. Some days, to clear her head, she ran eighteen miles for the hell of it. In Cape Town, five months before she died, she finished the Two Oceans Ultra Marathon, a thirty-five-mile course around the peninsula, from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic.

Amy was equally devoted to her friends, and to having fun. During her adolescence in Santa Fe, she’d become a margarita connoisseur, and for her graduation party she invited her friends to a margarita party at her house. Linda and Peter took the kids’ car keys away, put out stacks of blankets, and fired up the Jacuzzi. The lime stains never came out of the wood deck.

When Amy moved to Stanford, Peter—more businessman than handyman—installed an oddly slanted margarita bar in her dorm room, topping it with a blender. Every week, she and her friends, many of them sorority sisters from Pi Beta Phi, gathered in front of the nighttime dramedy
Moonlighting,
an event they referred to as “Margaritas and Moonlighting.” In D.C., she went out most nights and drank European ale and ate roasted peanuts.

In South Africa, she learned to swear in Xhosa and to drink lying down. She smoked her first joint after learning she’d been offered a four-year scholarship for a doctorate in African Studies at Rutgers University. Melanie, her roommate, took photos of her giggling all night, and Amy signed each print, “Amy’s first dope experience.” She also loved to go to the townships to dance and hang out.

“I remember going into Gugulethu to a shebeen on a Friday night, which is a little weird, and she was really taking me there to rattle my cage and wake me up,” her boyfriend, Scott, the only American friend to visit her in South Africa, told me. “And it worked, walking into those kinds of situations with her and seeing the whole place welcome her and welcome me. She would walk into places like that and it felt very natural. Quite frankly, that’s what got her killed.”

Amy’s ten months in South Africa were illuminating but imperfect. Amy, Rhoda recalled, was lonely. She missed Scott, and had a complicated relationship with some of her friends and colleagues, who, sensing her generosity and her privilege, tended to take advantage of her.

“Everyone is pulling at me,” Amy told Linda when she called home.

Moreover, Amy had long dreamed of South Africa’s righteous revolution, but upon arriving in the midst of it, she observed the contradictions of the liberation movement firsthand. The ANC, which she had long idolized, had tendencies toward sexism and misogyny, reflected today in the party’s black male domination. Many of Amy’s colleagues, Rhoda noted, were a “bunch of disorganized Stalinists.” The scales had fallen from her eyes, but she had nowhere to turn with her observations. The opinion of a girl from California was not welcome in freedom-time activist circles.

“In the Struggle, you had to know your place,” Rhoda said. “If you were a woman, even more. If you were colored, even more. If you were white, even more. If you were American, even more.”

“So she knew her place?”

“She did, and she hated it.”

I wondered what Amy would have thought of South Africa today, and her family’s role here. But Rhoda would not speak of the Biehls on the record; according to her, their friendship had dissolved years earlier over differences of opinion. (Linda Biehl later claimed to be unaware of any conflict.) “I hate white people who bend over blackward,” she said. She was shaking her head. “Lots of things happened in the name of the Struggle. But the kids who were convicted of killing Amy were common criminals. They weren’t politically motivated, they were bloodthirsty. A white girl was in the traffic, they took bricks, and they smashed her to a pulp.”

Soon after my meeting with Rhoda, I found myself sitting on a stoop across the street from the foundation offices. I was waiting for Easy, who was nearly an hour behind schedule. Finally, he flew out the door and ran across the street, grinning.

“My friend, my friend!” he exclaimed, and hugged me with great force. He pulled away, his hands still fixed on my shoulders. I glared at him, but he was impervious to the irritation of others, which allowed him the freedom to be endlessly, gleefully unreliable.

“What is the point of your watch anyway?” I asked. For a few weeks, he had been sporting a massive, rectangular, white plastic watch that a volunteer at the foundation had brought him from the Netherlands. He was certain somebody would steal it from him in Gugulethu, so he had taken to sleeping with it on. I grabbed his wrist, hoping to make an example of this particular tardiness, when I realized that the watch could not have helped even if he had paid attention to it. It ran two hours and seventeen minutes behind, and Easy had no clue how to fix it.

“Ahhh, but soon you won’t be angry,” he said. He slipped off his backpack and placed it on the pavement with a flourish. Then he fished two items out of the bag. “Lucky enough,” he said, extravagantly presenting me with an old photograph and a leather band.

As Easy explained, he had gone to one of the hand-hammered rooms at the back of his house, rooms filled with old dressers, odoriferous rolled carpets, and bunches of crumbling papers. The Nofemelas did not employ a filing system, and with dozens of people in and out every day, they were forever pawing through different drawers in attempts to find important papers that were always being moved, trashed, and lost. Only Wowo maintained a smidgen of organization in the form of a maroon notebook in which he diligently recorded the funeral benefits of his old colleagues from the neighborhood, all of them on the same pension fund. Funeral benefits were gold in Gugulethu, where the indignity of a pauper’s ceremony was too painful to bear. The book was meticulous and never left its hallowed spot on a bookcase in the TV room, but that was pretty much the only item that didn’t eventually disappear into the home’s Bermuda Triangle. Despite the mess, Easy had been compelled to go rooting around, and had come up with the mementos now in my hands.

The leather band, worn and cracked, was midnight blue and smelled as cool and fungal as a cellar. It closed with a rusted buckle. I dangled it in the air.

“It protect me from my enemy,” Easy explained.

The band was the creation of a sangoma, the traditional healer of South Africa. Easy had for decades visited a sangoma he categorized as “too powerful,” an obese old lady with a raging case of diabetes who lived in a dry, remote village in the Eastern Cape. There, when she was not sopping up goat stew with spongy white bread, she ministered to a clientele from across the peninsula, using herbs, powders, grasses, flowers, leaves, and potions. I later visited the sangoma with Easy. She wore a sash upon which were woven the words
HERB SECRETARY
and kept a room brimming with ingredients to cure ailments of the mind, body, and heart. Kiki had called several days before our arrival and explained the various family woes, and the sangoma carefully packaged up remedies, dispensed with careful directions, to be carried back to Gugulethu.

Easy tried to make the expensive, six-hour taxi journey to visit this sangoma every few years so that she could perform an elaborate cleansing ritual, purifying and fortifying him, driving away bad luck, bringing forth fortunes, and releasing sickness.

“We call it cooking you,” Easy explained. “She put you in the pot and cooking you.”

Decades earlier, the sangoma had inserted
muthi—
the medicine of the herbal healer—into the band I now held. The idea of the sangoma’s healing muthi holds sway over a diverse collection of people: my Zimbabwean housekeeper shrieked and bolted to the other side of the room when I later held up the armband, while my Australian immigrant friend shook her head gravely and warned me to be careful. Bad muthi, they both informed me, could wreak havoc on your life.

I’d been skeptical about the powers of muthi, until one day, when Easy told me a drawn-out story about how muthi made from the powder gathered from a crushed hyena tail had the ability to render entire households unconscious for hours, during which thieves robbed them blind.

“Bullshit.”

“No, my friend, is true. Check it on your computer.”

I subsequently found a trove of breathless newspaper articles, in publications both respectable and less so, detailing the nationwide spate of hyena-tail robberies, conducted with the help of unethical sangomas, who were spending their days grinding the dried snout and tail of ill-fated hyenas into fine powders.

SOUTH AFRICAN HOUSE RAIDERS TURN TO WITCHCRAFT,
announced the British
Telegraph
.

THIS MAN BLOWS HYENA SMOKE UNDER YOUR DOOR—THEN HE ROBS YOU!
exclaimed the
Daily Sun
, which included a color photo of a disheveled man squatting by the door of a shack, exhaling through a small tube that he had wedged into a crack. Across the country, it was reported, people were wandering around their homes, minding their business, when they were knocked out cold, along with their guard dogs, only to awaken with pounding headaches to find their TVs and CD players, their couches and stoves, their shoes and designer jeans gone. The thieves even ate leftover food.

For his part, Easy claimed that his muthi-rich armband had shielded him during his fighting days, and it was true that he had lived through a perilous time and emerged alive.

“If it protects you, why don’t you still wear it?” I asked.

“Now I’m old,” he said, shrugging. “If someone really want to kill me, they can kill me.” Plus, he had permanent medicine flowing in his veins, as did Aphiwe: as babies, their scalps had been lightly cut, and muthi poured in and sealed inside as the cuts healed into scars.

The other memento Easy gave me was a small photograph, yellow from the years, water-stained, lightly spotted with mold, and torn in the right corner. I examined it. It was a photograph of three Nofemela boys perched expectantly on a parquet floor. One boy, his face partially obscured by damage to the print, wore a tiny tan suit and leather sandals. He looked about six years old. In the middle, a toddler stood atop a stool, wearing a white collared shirt and slacks. He stared out, mouth slightly open, friendly and engaged. The third boy wore an oversized beige suit and matching sneakers. He was perhaps five.

“Who am I?” Easy asked.

I pulled the photo close to my nose, squinted, and then pointed at the youngest.

“No,” Easy said, delighted. “Is me here.” He placed his finger on the child in the beige suit.

“So who is the one I thought was you?”

“Is Monks,” he said. “My brother who is paralyze.”

“But you look different now.” In the photograph, the boys had carbon-copy features, identically arranged, separated only by time.

“But when we are little, like twin.”

I brought the photo home and pinned it to my bulletin board. Three brothers, dressed for a formal occasion, a single snapshot. I still don’t know why Easy gave me that particular photograph. Maybe it was just a coincidence or maybe there was something else guiding him, some unconscious or shrouded desire to communicate an unspoken story to me. Maybe he knew precisely what he was doing. You never could tell with that guy.

Easy was only one of the many players in this long drama. He had been on one side, the militant black kid from the township accused of a heinous crime. But there was an opposing team made up of people who had put him away. The member of that team who worked the lead in the Biehl murder investigation was the hulking detective sergeant Ilmar Pikker. In a snapshot from his 1980s squad days, Pikker stands before an intricate map pinned to a board. He wears an expression of fatigue and menace, his brown eyes slightly hooded. This, combined with his mane of uncombed ginger hair sloping into a fluffy ginger beard, gives him the look of a large lounging lion. He stands with his arms outstretched, displaying an ANC flag, the symbol of the group that Pikker and his security force colleagues aimed to destroy.

Since the old days, Pikker had fallen off the grid. He was not in the phone book, and he didn’t pitch up on any Google searches. As new bureaucrats of color took up state positions and old white bureaucrats took retirement, bureaucratic threads frayed. I needed to find Pikker, but months of calls, searches, and inquiries had drawn up blanks.