We Are Not Such Things (28 page)

“What can you do for us?” they asked, again and again.

“What do you need?” the Biehls replied.

The power dynamics of centuries had entered into the communal bloodstream. The relationship between blacks and whites had long been that of recipient and sponsor, so those asking for help had lists at the ready: money, donations, desks for schools, soccer balls. Plus, everyone assumed that Americans had infinitely deep pockets, as a matter of birthright. Once, a young man got into my rickety hatchback in Gugulethu, looked around, and asked, confused, “You’re from America? But where is your Ferrari?”

Linda and Peter, at a loss, said yes as much as they could. They had stacks of small personal checks that had been sent by sympathizers to their home in California and they didn’t quite know what to do with the money, so they began to funnel it back into South Africa. They were energized, not by hate for those who had killed Amy, but by a love for their daughter. She would have wanted this, they believed. How could they deny her? In South Africa, they felt so close to her.

After the Biehls had spent time at the spot of Amy’s death, ANC and city organizers whisked them away to tour a squatter camp. As the cars disappeared, a group of local children streamed by the Caltex, singing a song.

“Settlers, settlers, viva APLA, viva APLA!”

After our first breakfast meeting, Linda and I spent the next two weeks together—“hitched at the hip,” she said. The unspoken deal was that I would drive Linda everywhere in exchange for time that we could spend talking. I am a verbal person by nature and have the capacity to talk, nonstop, for hours. With similarly chatty friends, I can hold conversations for days, breaking only for sleep and shower, while quieter folks like my husband or mother have often begged me to leave them in peace. But I have nothing on Linda Biehl. By the end of a day with her, I was usually shattered into silence. It was a novel experience: I have never been out-talked before or since. She had something to say at every second of every day.

“Makhulu, she can talk, she can drink,” Easy once said, shaking his head as we both slumped on a seat after a day with Linda. He recalled meeting up with Linda in New York City back in 2002 to address the conference of the American Family Therapy Academy on issues of reconciliation. Ntobeko had gone, too, and the two young men had followed Linda around the city on foot, gasping for air as she strutted ahead. “And she can walk and walk and walk.”

That trip was a leap of faith for Easy: his first time on a plane, his first time out of South Africa. When Linda had offered him an all-expenses-paid trip to America, Wowo and Kiki had warned him that he was risking death or imprisonment. That Linda lady is real nice to you here in our country, but wait until you get to her country. Just wait. May as well say your goodbyes now and prepare yourself for jailhouse suppers.

Still, Easy had gathered up his courage and headed for New York. But a small part of him believed his parents. Worse, as Easy noted, “planes can crash.” Upon ascent—an otherworldly sensation that Easy was not eager to repeat—he sat bolt upright in his window seat, convinced that death was imminent. He stayed that way for the entirety of the sixteen-hour flight from Johannesburg to JFK airport, never once unbuckling his seatbelt. He watched longingly as other passengers wandered around, and he wondered how he would die: as the plane tumbled toward the earth or by Linda’s vengeful hand?

To complicate matters, drinks on planes were, apparently, miraculously free, and so Easy had begun to down tiny whiskey bottle after tiny whiskey bottle, hoping to pass out. Instead, he’d been unable to sleep, and his unmoving feet and legs swelled to nearly double their normal size. Upon disembarking, Easy and Ntobeko had been briefly held and interrogated by customs, on account of their criminal records, and by the time Easy reached the arrivals gate, he hardly had time to hug Linda before dropping his duffel bag at her feet and flying off into the distance, yelling, “Yho, yho, yho, I need the loo!”

“Linda has me so tired, Easy,” I said, after my first week with Linda.

“I
know
! Nomzamo, I know!”

Mostly, I trailed Linda. We went to a movie set near the airport, where producers had re-created the scenes from Mandela’s autobiography,
Long Walk to Freedom,
for the movie starring Idris Elba, which would come out in 2013. A fake Robben Island prison had been erected, to model the infamous facility off the Cape Town coast. Black and colored and Indian actors were dressed as prisoners, in rags. White actors were outfitted in retrograde guard uniforms. It was all so believable. One white guard, on his lunch break, smiled at me while eating a cheese sandwich. I glared back, forgetting he was not a real warder. The streets of 1950s Soweto—where Mandela spent his formative years—had been painstakingly rebuilt, little muddy lanes of red-brick houses so nice that some of the laborers, picked up from the townships, wondered if they could move in. Linda glided through the set like a pro, giving commentary to a director working on a “Behind the Scenes” featurette. He was an overweight fellow in his sixties, and he whispered that Linda was “a fox.”

I followed Linda on a private tour of the real prison of Robben Island, guided by her good friend Ahmed Kathrada. Kathrada is a South African legend, an Indian Muslim activist who was imprisoned along with Mandela for twenty-seven years, and later served in Parliament. Kathrada was then over eighty, and still considered Mandela a brother. Over the years, he and Linda had become close, and some mornings they read the paper together at the Mount Nelson Hotel.

“She grieves too much,” Kathrada once told me, sitting in his modest apartment in the city center. “For Peter, for Amy, she never stops.”

When I met Kathrada, on the ferry to Robben Island, he was a fragile elderly man wearing wire-rimmed spectacles, a hearing aid, and a ten-year-old promotional windbreaker that said
NEW PARTNERSHIP FOR SOUTH AFRICAN DEVELOPMENT
. He was accompanied by a mild-mannered white man whom he introduced as “my warder, Chris.” The man who had kept watch over him for so many years in prison now helped him show visitors around the island.

Linda’s American friends were with us: husky Missourians who wanted to make a difference in South Africa and had been devoted to the foundation for years. Kathrada and Linda chatted in the cabin of the ferry as we rode over the rough waters. I tried to take notes, grew queasy, and had to clamber up to the open top deck for air. Kathrada led us around the windswept island, showed us Mandela’s seven-by-nine-foot cell in a cavernous empty block. Here, he slept on a thin straw mat, relieved himself in a bucket, and wore short pants and no socks, a uniform the authorities used to remind black prisoners that they were perennially boys, not men.

A professional guide, giving his own private tour, passed by, saw Linda, and doubled back. He grabbed her hand.

“It’s an honor to meet you,” he said.

Kathrada explained to us the organizing principles of Robben Island. Colored and Indian prisoners were allowed one ounce of fat daily, while blacks received only a half ounce. Coloreds and Indians got an ounce of jam or syrup daily, while blacks got none. Coloreds and Indians received six ounces of meat, blacks got five ounces. Blacks’ main source of nourishment was a drink reserved for them only:
puzamandla,
a sour powdered energy drink that was to be mixed with water. The men wore thin uniforms, cold in the island winters, and worked in quarries, breaking down limestone—a task that eventually damaged Mandela’s eyes.

“But the greatest deprivation of prison is that there are no children,” Kathrada told us. You never heard the voices of children, never saw them playing in the street, nothing for nearly thirty years. Kathrada never had children of his own, anyway. He was sent to prison when he was thirty-four and released when he was sixty. But a lawyer came to visit him once, and for lack of childcare the man brought his young daughter along. Kathrada remembered that day as one of the greatest.

After the tour, we all went to lunch at the waterfront, and Kathrada ordered a tall ice cream sundae with whipped cream and hot fudge and ate it all with relish, sometimes so consumed with his dessert that he zoned out of the larger conversation completely.

Linda adored Kathrada, and her times with him were precious. But she also liked taking interviews, visiting the townships, and meeting with friends and acquaintances that passed by her office. She thought a lot about her movie option with Sony Pictures, which had been renewed for years before eventually expiring in 2013. The option had helped her out financially—plus, she was keen on getting a movie made, and keeping Amy’s memory alive (in March 2016, Tyler Perry announced that he had come on board to produce a film about Amy). She treated herself to a Champagne brunch on Sundays, and favored Eggs Benedict. Though she now lived on Peter’s pension, she would often buy gifts for her staff—baby clothes, suitcases, things she had gleaned they needed.

Linda also loved holding court before anyone who was willing to listen, and told a series of stories on repeat: funny stories of culture clash and misunderstanding, fascinating stories starring South African leading lights, dull stories starring her grandkids, profound stories of courage and forgiveness. There was the time Ntobeko bought a fancy teddy bear on his debit card, which signified his burgeoning success as a man in the world.

“He could’ve been in prison, he could’ve been dead,” she told a reporter. “But he dared to be different. He chose to be brave and reconcile with us.”

There was the watershed moment when Peter and Linda took the young men on their staff to lunch and the men said, “When we get married, we want to be friends with our wives instead of having them as property.” There was the time Linda was presented with an award for her stand against racism and she talked to President Thabo Mbeki—“So tiny! And in a big chair”—for an hour, on the economy of Zimbabwe. And the time Harry Belafonte serenaded her on her birthday, when she almost lost her cool, and
he
asked for
her
autograph.

On that first day I spent with Linda, after we left the cliffside hotel, we drove to the Amy Biehl Foundation offices. Linda swept onto the floor to mixed fanfare. Her core staffers—most of them black and into their forties—approached her with the shy excitement of children, exclaiming, “Makhulu!” When she hugged them, they said “Thank you” reverently. She tried to touch base with each employee, to remember their interests (“Queen, how is your family?”; “Ayanda, the fashionista!”). The mood in the space, often tense from the battles between staff and management, lifted when Linda arrived. She always brought gifts, suitcases full of children’s clothes from Walmart. In the past, she had found ways to bring her favorite employees to America once in a while. When there, she took them shopping at Target and they gained weight by gorging on chocolate croissants. She was like the grandma of Hollywood fantasies, while their own grandmas, for whom most of them would lay down their lives, could hardly scrape together enough change for a sack of yams.

Soon enough, Ntobeko emerged from his perpetually closed office with the bearing of a sullen but secretly delighted teenager, and embraced her. Easy flew in late and yelped when he saw her, throwing his arms around her neck. But the new foreign interns were not in awe of Linda, and some recently hired employees were more reticent and formal. For the most part, they were removed from the history, born in a post-apartheid world.

Linda sat in her office, a room that had not been used in many months, since her last visit. The heat had been switched off, and it was freezing, which did not seem to bother her. The walls were decorated with oil paintings of white lilies and street scenes and photographs of Peter with Kofi Annan, of Peter and Mandela, of Madeleine Albright flanked by the Biehls. Linda kept a bit of limestone from Robben Island on a dresser and a chessboard on a desk.

Outside her office, the larger, communal space was decorated without any restraint, as though by a fun-loving, deranged group of hoarders: plastered wall-to-wall with children’s drawings and framed diplomas and newspaper clippings and dusty homemade sculptures and oversized promotional cardboard checks and computer printouts of inspirational quotes, with barely an inch of orange paint showing through.

“It gives me the heebie-jeebies,” Linda said shuddering, gazing at the big carpeted room.

She sat in her office sanctuary, receiving visitors, chatting, and tapping away at her iPad. There was a video of her youngest granddaughter playing the drums, and she showed it to most anyone who walked in the door.

A middle-aged French volunteer popped in and introduced herself. “I’m thinking of how I can maintain my involvement, Linda,” she said, bursting with enthusiasm.

“Me too,” Linda answered dryly.

Linda was at a crossroads in her life. She was approaching seventy. She had been ten years widowed. Her parents were no longer alive and her brother, a cowboy-type famous for founding the Arizona Trail, a scenic hike that stretches from Mexico to Utah, had died a few years earlier. Amy had been dead for nearly twenty years, the amount of time that Linda had spent traveling between two continents, leading two very different existences. In America, she was a mom, a grandma, an upper-middle-class, left-leaning moderate who had lived comfortably in various suburbs from the moment she was born. In South Africa, she was the founder of a charitable foundation, an icon in the slums, the friend of many famous communists, and a minor celebrity, especially within the black township community.