“We want to talk to you about the Eastern Cape,” Easy’s uncle Taku said, taking a deep breath. We were in the living room of the other Nofemela house on NY41, where a bunch of relatives were huddled together, watching a Nigerian soap opera in which a murderous motorist hits a cyclist on a sandy street and the cyclist obligingly falls to the ground and dies with a flourish. The glossy violet paint covering the walls was cracking, and the unfurling tendril of a potted plant had been affixed to the wall with Scotch tape. One particularly friendly child with a particularly snot-covered face reached up to me, smiling broadly, and demanded to be picked up. The child was heavier than you would imagine and its gender was indeterminate and it kept giggling in my arms. An elder of some sort was wrapped in a plaid blanket next to a petrol heater, on top of which a steaming pot of water had been placed.

This was the house the family had been given after eight years in the shack on the open field, where all twelve of them, and then husbands and wives, had lived until one by one the brothers got their homes. This was the house in which Wowo and Taku had grown up. This was where I had interviewed Easy’s ex, Pinky. Now only two of Wowo’s siblings, and their multiple children and grandchildren, still lived there: an older brother who lived in the backyard and the eldest sister, the old woman who slept beneath blownup photo portraits of her deceased son, her deceased daughter, and her deceased mother.

Taku and Wowo, both wearing eyeglasses and sitting on a couch, stood and herded me to a corner of the kitchen, where they suddenly looked, for all their age and wisdom, like bashful schoolboys. Taku was a retired teacher. “The principal gave his friends jobs,” he said. “While we were twenty years in the field, that new chap will be our manager. So I decided to take my pension.” He was now studying to become a preacher. Wowo was the older one, a man inclined to silence, who had left school to work any and every job: on the assembly line at a steel factory, as a janitor at a nursing college, “putting dead people in the fridge” in the tuberculosis hospital morgue, stocking shelves at a grocery store, and finally working as a cleaner and then a gardener at Old Mutual Insurance. He had also played drums in a band of other gardeners, called the Cape City Kings. After thirty years, he took retirement on February 14, 2009. On February 15, his son Monks was thrown from a car and paralyzed. Upon retirement, Wowo got a one-time pension payout the equivalent of around $14,000 for three decades of service.

“You can’t do nothing on that money,” he observed. “When I think of it, I want to cry.”

Easy, who regressed to boyishness around older relatives, had followed us and was staring at the fridge as Wowo and Taku gathered up their courage to talk to me. I leaned against a kitchen counter, gazing down at the three short Nofemela men before me.

“We’re all going, right?” I asked. “You, too, Wowo?”

“I don’t know,” Wowo said.

“Why not?” Easy and I had been planning a trip to the Eastern Cape, which had absorbed the former Transkei homeland, to see where the Nofemela family had come from. Wowo and Taku, who had spent some boyhood years there, would accompany us and act as guides.

“We don’t have any pocket money, not even for a cool drink,” Wowo said apologetically.

“So, we can’t fund petrol,” Taku added. His shoulders slumped. “We don’t know if you are expecting that.”

Taku and Wowo had worked for white governments and white-owned corporations and then for black governments and corporations still run by whites, from the time of their youth until old age. They had stayed away from drink and drugs and all the temptations available to frustrated people in the depths of poverty. They had raised black boys in Gugulethu, none of whom was dead or in prison; they had lifted paralyzed adult children up on bad backs and slept in beds with little grandsons and taught neighborhood kids soccer and fed their hungry nieces and nephews; they had nurtured marriages for fifty years; they had built and improved family homes with their bare hands. These were the respected elders of their communities, heads of overflowing families. And here they stood before me, a young white American female thirty years their junior, chastened, admitting they were too broke to pay for the gas necessary to make it out to their ancestral land.

“I expect five thousand bucks each,” I said. “Three gourmet meals a day and a bottle of wine from everyone.”

For a moment, the room was quiet. Then Easy began to laugh, and the men followed.

“It’s my research trip and I am grateful you will come as my guides. I have already arranged funding.”

The two breathed out. Then they looked a little bit excited.

“Well then, we will be happy to show you our roots,” Wowo said.

A few days later, I woke at dawn and drove up to High Level Road, which ran parallel to the ocean but far above it. I passed the palms of the N2, the power plant, all the familiar landmarks, and entered Gugulethu. The shacks in the marshlands looked flat in the morning light. At such an hour, the township was more lively than town: these were the nannies that had to arrive before Mom left for work or yoga; the clerks who had to open up shop; the security guards changing over from the night shift to the morning shift. And before all that, everyone had to bathe, dress, and feed their own kids. The nine-to-five jobs were for the fortunate, the middle-class-plus. Those people were served. These were the people who did the serving.

On the morning of the road trip, I walked into the Nofemela house on NY111 and found Wowo sitting expectantly by his suitcase in the living room. Wowo’s two-year-old grandson, perched on a plastic motorcycle, was glaring, alternately at me and at Wowo. The child slept against Wowo every night of his life, and he sensed that the suitcase meant that he would be abandoned. He mumbled something in Xhosa and cocked an imaginary gun, which he aimed at me, and then at his grandfather.

“What did he say?” I asked.

“He say he will kill me and you as well. He say he will shoot us dead.”

Easy, in a puffy jacket and a knit cap, came from the back room with his own suitcase, as well as a small binder of CDs.

We loaded up the car and drove to Taku’s tidy house, which he had been improving whenever he had money. He had managed to build two tasteful and contemporary back rooms, which he hoped to rent out, and had gutted his sitting room, though he was waiting for the next cash influx before he could fit in finishings and floorboards. For now, the windows were covered in plastic and the floor and walls were bare concrete.

Taku finished quarreling with his eldest son, a hollow-cheeked twenty-something with a tik habit, and loaded his own small bag into the trunk. He hopped in back with Wowo, two upright old men with legs short enough to be comfortable in the small confines of a hatchback. They were stocky, though Wowo was more rotund, where Taku made efforts to keep his belly at bay. Where Wowo’s nose was flat and round, Taku’s was long and sharp. Wowo was light, and Taku was dark. Wowo kept his gray beard trimmed and his head shaved, while Taku kept his face shaved and his gray hair trimmed.

On that day, Wowo was dressed in his long woolen overcoat, a green polar fleece, a white cap, and fancy leather shoes. Taku wore a plaid flannel shirt and a plaid flannel scarf, nylon sports pants, sneakers, a brown corduroy jacket, and a beanie cap. Easy was wearing a tan jacket, tan pants, a tan sweater, and a knit cap. These would remain their outfits for the next several days, as it turned out their bags contained—in addition to changes of socks, T-shirts, and underwear—blankets and towels and soap, in case they had to bed down on the floor. I was swathed in a down parka and sheepskin boots, and had packed an oversized sweatshirt and a sweater; I was prepared, for some reason, for an arctic journey. Easy had agreed to drive the first leg, and then I would drive the next.

On our way out of Gugulethu, we passed people standing along the main road.

“Toilet protesters,” Wowo said, unimpressed.

The toilet protesters were the ones who had thrown poop at the mayor’s van, a questionable tactic to communicate how sick they were of relieving themselves in open containers. Now here they stood, assembled in little crowds along the sidewalk, displaying their buckets full of excrement and demanding flush toilets be installed near their shacks.

“They are disturbing people,” Taku said.

We drove east, toward the apple orchards of Grabouw, passing through the mountains, the dry bush, the rocky landscape dotted with pine trees. We ignored hitchhikers, 10-rand notes in their hands if they were willing to pay for gas. We passed an ostrich farm. We passed a rumpled group of men and boys holding out crates of grapes beneath a billboard that warned: BEWARE OF ROBBERS SELLING STOLEN GRAPES.

We played oldies, which Wowo and Taku liked, especially Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Louis Armstrong, Grover Cleveland, and the Zimbabwean superstar Oliver Mtukudzi. Easy sang along badly and inaccurately to every single song.

South Africa is a physically epic place. It contains deserts and seas, rivers and lakes and towering mountains. To drive across the country is to pass through ecosystem after ecosystem, each one ancient and boastful. We drove by vineyards and cut through the mountains, zigzagging up and out. There were swaths of dry bush and miles of rocky terrain dotted with pines. A troupe of baboons trotted along the road, engaged in the many dramas of monkeys, who kvetch and fight and love like they’re on a reality TV show. At one point, a forest of enormously tall trees bordered the highway, the trunks reaching up like skyscrapers, covered in smooth, white bark and topped with deep green leaves. We burst out from the flatlands and before us stretched the sparkling Indian Ocean. We passed through the wealthy vacation town of Plettenberg Bay, where Capetonians kept summer homes. Slate-and-white mansions cascaded down to the famously immaculate beaches. Just as suddenly, we passed the township on its outskirts, pressing against the highway, shacks and a crumbling wooden church.

“This is the N2, the National Road,” Easy said, observing the township. “Is embarrassing.”

We stopped at a KFC. Easy had cobbled together a couple hundred rand, which had been burning a hole in his pocket for the entire morning. He jumped out of the car, rushed into the franchise, and ordered three boxes of chicken and three mini white loaves from a weary, middle-aged colored woman in a little red cap whose name tag announced her as Maritsa.

“What does that mean?” Easy asked, pointing at the tag.

Maritsa ignored him, punching at her register.

“Does it mean you love me?” Easy asked, leaning in. Maritsa didn’t look up. “Does it mean you hate me?”

He collected the chicken and sprinted to the table, where we sat and ate. The three men eyed me as I picked at my food and finally Easy informed me that the family had recently been engaged in a debate about why I was slender, with Kiki arguing genetics while Wowo argued that maybe it was because I didn’t eat hot dogs all day, like someone he knew, and then Kiki spitting back that Wowo was one to talk.

“For me, fried chicken is just…unhealthy,” I said tentatively.

“What do you mean?” Taku asked.

“Fried chicken…It’s really bad for you.”

I had long assumed—naively, I now realized—that people in Gugulethu knew, but did not care, that their diets were generally unhealthy. The staples tended to be fried or barbecued lamb, goat, or skin-on chicken; slice after slice of fluffy white store-bought bread; fried potatoes; boiled-to-death carrots and green beans; pap; a variety of processed meats; soft drinks; packaged cakes; candy bars; maybe a wan apple or cucumber here or there. Looking at Wowo and Taku across the pile of fried chicken, I realized that for a large portion of the population, nutritional education had been elusive, while fast-food advertising had been plentiful. Health food was unavailable, out of reach, while the spaza shops dotting the township sold cheap chips, sweets, and fizzy drinks.

“What is healthy, then?” Taku asked.

“Like, grilled chicken,” I said. “Um, brown bread? Fish.”

He nodded. “Baloney?”

“Not baloney.”

“No more fried chicken for me,” Taku decided. “I don’t want to die of Kentucky.”

Months later, when I visited him at his house one afternoon, Taku would still be abstaining from fried chicken, a decision his wife found baffling, since fried chicken was, she said with a shrug, “very tasty.”

The earth turned red and yellow when we reached the Eastern Cape, and the traffic thinned. Once there, we were often the only car in sight. There were no mansions or industries. Time turned back. The plains and hills were dotted with horses and cows. We saw the silhouettes of sheep walking across a craggy hilltop in a perfect line. “Like soldiers,” Easy said. We bought a sack of oranges on the side of the road, and Wowo prepared each orange with his pocketknife, cutting off a perfect spiral of peel in one piece.

We passed a fake Khoikhoi village, advertised with billboards—we could see the collection of straw-roof rondavels from the road. The Khoikhoi, the first to encounter white settlers, had been largely destroyed or absorbed into other communities so we supposed the endeavor involved a few Xhosa people dressed as ancient pastoralists, willing to pose for a tourist picture if the opportunity arose.

In the Eastern Cape, a white police officer pulled us over for a standard check. He peered into the car. Wowo, Taku, and Easy nodded hello. I handed over my New York State driver’s license, which he examined.

“Where are you going?” the policeman asked.

“Lady Frere,” I said.

“Why?” He was not asking in an official capacity; he was simply overcome by curiosity.

“To visit some friends.”

The policeman returned my license and stood to the side, unsatisfied, as we drove away.

In the Eastern Cape, the main towns were few and far between. They contained Shoprites and Pick n Pays, sneaker stores, cheap clothing shops, run-down auto shops, and gas station franchises. In one such central town, we stopped and bought groceries. As we strolled through the store, Taku asked me to point out healthy foods and unhealthy ones as he took mental notes.

We finally reached Lady Frere, where Wowo and Taku were born. Lady Frere was now a town, spread out over thirteen square miles, of around 2,500 people, nearly 99 percent black Xhosa. Lady Frere’s main road contained little more than a police station and a few shops. The surrounding lanes were built with run-down single-level ranch houses that had once been owned by white government employees and teachers, until they found themselves contained within a homeland ruled by a semiautonomous chief. Then they booked it out of there.

This was the general feeling of Lady Frere: of a place abandoned, first by the whites and then by the blacks, who headed to the cities to eke out work. Anyone who could get out, it seemed, did get out, for there was simply no opportunity here. No jobs, no universities, no money, no nothing. And so the streets had a vaguely mournful quality, as they do in any ghost town.

Wowo and Taku directed me to the house of their late brother, close to the police station. He had died a year earlier, leaving a widow and assorted sons and daughters and grandchildren. The house itself was low and beige. It had once belonged to whites, Taku told me with an inkling of pride, and now his family owned it.

The living room into which we entered was painted fuchsia and decorated with framed photographs hung high up on the wall, so that one had to crane one’s neck to see them—a common aesthetic choice in many Xhosa homes, and one I never understood. At the center of the living room sat a gigantic, severe widow. This was the Xhosa custom that always threw me: it was up to the guest to greet, to welcome herself into the home, to say hello to everyone, and then to take any place she could find. It was the opposite of Western etiquette, in which the host stands, welcomes, and offers the guest a seat, and I almost always screwed it up. I grew shy, or awkward, or greeted the wrong person, failing to properly identify the matriarch or patriarch, using the incorrect honorific, admiring a cute baby first (acceptable in America, but discourteous in black South African households).

Xhosa people were unfortunately accustomed to much grander offenses by whites, and generally received me with generosity and good humor. As far as I could tell, though I certainly deserved multiple helpings of disdain during my time bumbling around a new culture, I was never once corrected harshly or subjected to any grudge holding or even judgment.

“You do try,” Easy once said, and it seemed that this was what counted.

The five rugrats running around the house were immune to social mores, and they promptly tackled me and then, when I stumbled to a seat, climbed atop my lap, and those who could not fit hung over my shoulders. When I looked any one of them in the eye, he or she collapsed into a fit of giggles. As Wowo and Taku and the widow caught up, a teenage girl served us milky tea. In the corner, Easy had reunited with a cousin, and the two of them were laughing uproariously.

Dinner was two loaves of bread that Taku and Wowo had brought, and a cooked chicken I had picked up on the way, having been advised that the family would have a hard time feeding us. Everyone ate on individual trays balanced on their laps. An American sitcom called The First Family, which as far as I could gather centered on a fictional black family living in the White House, played in the background. In the kitchen, various young women cleaned up, and children flew around. Nobody spoke much, not to me or to each other. The lone table was worn and cracked. In the living room, the widow held in her lap an ice cream carton full of change and toilet paper, and anybody in need of either item approached her meekly, and she handed out the goods accordingly. It was the norm, where bathrooms were shared and toilet paper was expensive, for people to keep their own rolls in their rooms, which meant that when I used a bathroom at somebody’s house, I was usually first provided with the roll. As the evening wore on, the matriarch put down the carton and picked up a baby, whom she cuddled to her breast. At one point, she ordered the children to assemble and sing a song for Wowo and Taku.

“Jesus loves me,” they warbled.

That night, the family informed me that I would be sleeping elsewhere. Wowo and Taku planned to sleep on the floor with their woolen blankets, as all beds were taken, but they were all concerned that I would be unable to survive such a night, and so had arranged, without consulting me, to send me to the neighbor’s. The neighbor was a retired schoolteacher who ran a sort of bed-and-breakfast, except without the breakfast part or any advertising. Basically, people in town knew she had some extra space and you could pay what you liked.

Easy and Wowo escorted me out the back door to the car, where each of us grabbed our bags. It was very dark and frigid, but as my eyes adjusted, I could make out a human shape in the shadows, weaving around and then crouching by a rusty car.

“There is someone pooping there!” I yelled, alarmed. “He is pooping!”

“Yes, that is our relative, who is very drunk,” Wowo said, heading back inside. “Good night, Justine.”

The figure pulled up his pants and scampered away.

Easy guided me down the dirt road and we knocked on a door. The neighbor, a plump and smiling woman of about fifty, ushered us through an empty, darkened hall to a living room area, where three young women and a couple of babies were hanging out, warmed by a paraffin stove. The house was low but long, and all of it, save for this area, seemed to have been shut off, to preserve heat and save money. It was like the town, this house: largely deserted, its remaining citizens concentrated in a desolate little cluster. After exchanging pleasantries, we sat and spoke like old friends, about the dying town of Lady Frere, about how it felt to live as women in this lonely house. There was a great deal of crime out here in this barren place, she said, and no jobs. The unemployed boys and men were bored and broke, and, stuck here, had turned to petty crime within the community.

“They are robbing grannies on pension day,” the neighbor said. “Here in South Africa, white people act like they are the victims of crime only. But everyone is scared.”

After giving us glasses of Coca-Cola, she led us to a bedroom, which had been interpreted quite literally: the long space was painted teal and contained eight twin beds, arranged along the walls. At the end of the room, two such beds, with wooden backboards, had been made up with multiple woolen blankets and blue flannel sheets. A space heater pulsed out some warmth. There was no hot running water, the neighbor said, but she had been heating the samovar for the past hour, and I would be able to take a bucket bath. I nodded uncertainly. She presented me and Easy with towels, and left. Easy set down his bag.

“Are you staying here, too?” I asked.

“We don’t want you to be alone in Eastern Cape, in strange house,” Easy said, sitting on one of the beds and taking off his shoes. “Also, is better for my back.”

That evening, I tried to wash, shivering, haphazardly splashing water here and there from a tub my host had filled for me. This was the way so many township and rural residents still bathed: with a plastic basin full of water. Everyone I’d spoken with preferred it to a shower; they didn’t feel clean otherwise. But I was hopeless at bathing this way, until Tiny later explained to me the system: wash face first with the cleanest water, plenty of soap, and a washcloth, then rinse and dry; next comes the neck and the chest and the arms; and you work your way down the body, scrubbing and rinsing and drying piece by piece until you finish with your feet. After, cover yourself in Vaseline; it keeps the warmth in.

When I returned to the bedroom, I found Easy tucked in, talking on his phone to Tiny, giddy as a teenager. They had not been married long, and this was the first night since their wedding that they’d been apart. I nestled under the blankets but my nose was still icy. A car passed, its lights swiping over the room. Eventually, Tiny’s airtime ran out and the phone call ended. Easy turned over and looked at the ceiling. His phone beeped. He read the message, swooning, and passed it over for me to admire: I luv u my bby u r the best hubby a woman could have gudnight.

Then we lay in our little beds, telling stories. Easy, his voice heavy with sleep, told me of his teenage years, of getting stabbed on the streets, of shebeen fights and recovering in his mom’s living room. It was almost like he was telling a fable, and we both grew sleepier, until Easy finally let out a loud yawn and closed his eyes. The room was bright, lit by a fluorescent bulb.

“Should I turn off the light?” I asked.

“No, no,” he muttered. “Is good this way.”

“Wait, do you sleep with the light on?”

“Yes, I prefer like this because this is another people’s house.”

“So?”

“I prefer it.”

“I’m not sleeping with the light on. Who sleeps with the light on?”

“Me.”

“Always?”

“Not always. At my place, I switch off the light because is my place.”

“What is the benefit of the light being on?”

“When you go to somebody’s house and somebody is not your family, you never know if maybe the ancestors will come.”

“What? What are you talking about? If you’re scared of someone coming to kill us, we can lock the door.”

“And then? Ancestors don’t care for locks.”

“Look, if you’re scared of their angry ancestors coming, those ancestors will come if there’s a light on or not.”

Easy considered this. “Okay, we can switch off.”

I made my way to the switch in the hall and then used my cellphone as a flashlight, navigating the many beds back to mine.

“Easy, are you scared of the dark?” I asked.

“Is true, Nomzamo, I don’t like the dark. But we must sleep tightly now, relaxing, because we have a long day tomorrow. Yho, it’s far away, this Transkei. Far, far, far away.”

In the crisp morning, Easy and I walked down the street to meet Taku and Wowo. There, by the ever-simmering fire, a cousin served us bowls of warm umphokoqo, a porridge of maizemeal boiled with salt and water, and then mixed with a kefir-like sour milk called amasi. While staying at one of London’s finest five-star hotels, with its entire culinary repertoire available to him, Mandela was so desperate for umphokoqo that he insisted a visitor from South Africa bring along the necessary ingredients—in her hand luggage no less, to ensure their safety. He then instructed that if she were to encounter any trouble at customs, she was to call Tony Blair directly.

After breakfast, we headed to the driveway. The town was still, the sun slowly rising up in the distance. Outside were various buckets, sheds, a car on blocks, the detritus of country living, some chickens a few houses over, pecking about.

“Now we are getting to our roots,” Taku said excitedly as we loaded into the car.

Easy drove, with Taku and Wowo barking directions from the back and me taking notes in the passenger seat. We left the main strip and headed toward a stretch of empty one-lane highway, flanked by open plains of dry yellow grass, dotted with thousands of molehills. Here the summer rains were followed by a long and arid winter. Piles of dung were being sold by the side of the road, to be used as traditional floor polish and to stoke fires. Two cocks fought in the yard of an isolated house. A brown-and-white dog lounged in a spot of sun nearby. Some women walked along the road, thumbing a ride. One wore a long purple dress. Here and there, bits of litter glistened by the side of the road. A piglet tied to a doghouse was eating from a tiny bowl.

“Yho, Justine, in 1971, I took a bicycle from Queenstown all the way to here,” Taku remarked.

We passed a green sign signaling a turnoff to a place called KwaPercy. In Xhosa, this meant Percy’s Place, a strange name in a land where the villages had either African names or Afrikaans names.

“Who’s Percy?” I asked.

“Percy was a white man, and he is famous because he was rumored to be good,” Taku said. “There was also a white man in our area who sold groceries, general goods, firewood. If I wrote a letter to my family from Johannesburg, it arrived at the white man’s shop. But when they made the homelands, the laws brought by the government caused all the white people to leave this place.”

We turned off the main way and entered a rocky stretch of dirt road. The car bumped along. To one side rose a vertical expanse of brick-colored rock where the locals used to graze their cattle.

“Nowadays, these areas are not as alive as before,” Taku reflected. “When the whites discovered gold and diamonds, they took the people who were capable and left behind mothers and young babies. Our main destruction came when the diamond mines and gold fields were discovered. What happened here, you cannot really rely on historians to tell. They write with their perception, so you must learn to read between the lines.”

“Sometimes if I think too much about this, I feel other way,” Wowo said evenly. “But then I think, I’m still alive, so why worry?”

We drove along the dirt road for nearly an hour and covered only a few miles. Our pace was slow, the terrain difficult and twisted. We passed through clusters of houses set in the midst of obscurity: a dozen or so homes constructed out in the boonies, and then nothing for a half mile, and then another dozen homes. Finally, we curved onto an enormous field and stopped near a village of about twenty-five houses. Sheep roamed the prairie. It reminded me of Wyoming, open and melancholy. The wind whipped across the exposed land, loud and constant. Taku and Wowo led me and Easy to a large pile of rocks by a low tree. Upon this space had once sat the home of Melvin and Alice Nofemela.

Melvin had been born here and was well known locally as a skilled stick fighter. Stick fighting was a waning Xhosa tradition, though one that had once been an important way for a boy to prove his valor.

In his twenties, Melvin had attended his brother’s wedding. His brother was marrying a woman from a village over the hill, and the people from her area came with their offerings of cattle for the celebration. Included in the crowd was a teenage girl named Alice, to whom he proposed that very day.

“That very day?” I exclaimed.

“You don’t believe in love at first sight?” Taku asked.

“You are too much white,” Easy said.

Melvin and Alice had lived by the tree in a traditional rondavel, a thatched-roof hut with a floor that smelled of grass. But soon enough, as the family grew larger and the region offered little in terms of opportunity, Melvin left for the cities to find work.

“If my father had money, he would like to live here,” Wowo said, meaning that his father had always dreamed of returning to his birthplace—the place where his umbilical cord was buried. “He cares too much for this place.” But Melvin had never made it back to stay.

“Can you imagine, to leave this beautiful place with warm homes, to go live in shacks in Langa?” Easy asked, surveying the land.

Wowo sucked in his breath, thinking of his father. “That man. He work hard and have too much pain.”

We left the empty plot and headed back to the car, and then drove farther away from town, and upward, until we stopped at a pale pink house sitting alone on the top of a hill. A crowd of people were milling about. The women wore skirts, sneakers, and aprons, their hair wrapped with cloths. The men wore hats and sweaters and slacks. Wowo, Taku, and Easy pushed their way through to find an elderly man in a cardigan and a knit cap, sitting at a table. The man, a cousin, threw his hands in the air and began to greet the Nofemelas with handshakes and hugs.

It turned out that the man was a widower, his children far away, and his church group made the long trip weekly in taxis and buses and cars, from Lady Frere or even Queenstown, to visit him and bring him groceries. They chipped in money from their small pensions and salaries, and the ladies cooked him food and scrubbed his pots and pans. The men helped him plant vegetables and tend his garden, and kept him company. When we arrived, everyone was sitting down for a meal of goat meat, pap, and boiled carrots.

I was, as usual, an oddity in these parts. In Gugulethu, women usually played interior roles in the family: in the house, in the kitchen, cooking and cleaning and watching the children. Men, meanwhile, milled about outside, fixing cars or smoking and talking. Automatically, due to the subject of my research and my relationship with Easy, I had ended up with the men, hanging in the sunshine and shooting the breeze. My whiteness, my foreignness, and my profession as a journalist separated me, placing me in a sort of gender-role limbo. Here in the Eastern Cape, where such roles were more strongly entrenched, especially with the older set, my presence was an even more confusing matter.

I was herded to the border separating men and women, where I sat awkwardly on a bench, literally half in the men’s room and half in the kitchen area. When lunch ended, the men streamed outside, and I followed. A long-drop outhouse made of corrugated tin sat atop a bluff, overlooking the biblical stretch of land below. A white clay structure with dark floors contained a chicken and newly hatched chicks. The air was very clean. I held in my hand a novel by the famous South African author J. M. Coetzee, and I absently flipped through its pages.

A man approached me. “We want to know if you are Coetzee,” he said. He was not familiar with the bearded, male, septuagenarian Nobel Prize winner, and Coetzee is a common Afrikaans surname. Here I stood: a white writer, holding a book. Could be.

“No, I wish,” I said. “Anyway, I’m not Afrikaans. I’m American.”

“Serious? Please take me there in your suitcase!”

After lunch and chatter and warm goodbyes, we drove farther up the mountain to another cousin’s house. This house, despite also lacking electricity and running water, was a sleek, fresh little number, a new white three-bedroom with shining peach-tiled floors, an expensive sofa set, and gauzy curtains. Its owner was originally from this village, though he now worked and lived in Durban—apparently doing well, if his late-model Mercedes and house back in the city were any indication. But his dream had always been to build a place of his own in his native village, and this house was the realization of the dream.

The man was surrounded by his rural relatives, and he was simultaneously treating them to a braai and displaying his good fortune. Now, with us there, he had even more people to spoil and to strut before. He laughingly challenged Taku to a push-up contest, which Taku won. Easy, meanwhile, had become obsessed with a lilliputian fellow who was hanging around. The man was just over five feet and small-boned, and this delighted Easy, who never got the opportunity to tower over another man. He demanded that I take multiple pictures of him with his arm slung over the agreeable man, and later ran around Gugulethu showing off the prints I had made at his request.

We stood outside as the sun began to set, congregating around the grill, as the relative turned the meat. He was at least six-foot-three, and I couldn’t see how the diminutive Nofemelas and this towering fellow shared any DNA. Somebody had brought a bottle of whiskey, which was summarily shared—though Taku and Wowo, teetotalers, refused. Once the cousin had cooked the first batch of meat, he put another batch over the fire, to be tended by a friend, and everyone filed inside. The sausage and pork chops were set out on a communal silver platter and the six men gathered around, their faces grave. This was serious business, the business of sharing the fruit of the braai. Each pulled from his pocket a switchblade and helped himself. A lady entered, took her own piece, and settled to the side, on an overturned bucket. Once the first helping had been polished off, another platter was brought in. The men, who had been steadily eating for twenty minutes, looked tired, but then the cousin flipped open his knife and started at it again, and everyone followed suit.

The sun was now a flame across the horizon. A larger group of men had gathered outside, and they were deep into their drink. They held cigarettes between their thumbs and forefingers. Dusk fell, and with only candles lighting the earth for miles, everything was bathed in navy. For my benefit, this group, which I had joined in the open air, was speaking to each other in halting English. Then suddenly, one young man, who had been particularly enthusiastic about the whiskey, stopped mid-sentence. He stared at me and then spit out some words in Xhosa. I shrugged innocently and the group waited for him to break the silence.

“You must speak Xhosa here,” he said harshly, in English.

I looked at Easy and considered the situation. He returned my gaze, steady. Everyone else fixed me in their sights.

“Ndisafunda ukuthetha isiXhosa,” I said slowly, like a schoolchild. I am still learning to speak Xhosa. They had taught me this in my class, and it was among the few sentences I could remember.

Everyone continued to stare, and I shifted in place.

Then, just like that, my accuser broke into a smile. Everyone else smiled, too. They started talking again. I stepped away.

“It’s time to go,” I whispered to Easy, and we made our way back to the house, where we said our goodbyes.

Once in the car, Easy took the wheel, with Wowo and Taku in back. A dark blanket was slowly pulled across the plains. Wowo and Taku, bellies full of meat, let out burps. The hatchback lurched down the hill.

“Wowo, tell me about Easy, as a son,” I said.

Wowo shifted in place. “What I like, he respect even my brothers. I like that. All my sons. And if someone fighting, they were not scared to fight. Especially if they not started the fight.”

“I can’t imagine you angry,” I said to Easy.

“Is like Truth Commission here!” he exclaimed.

“What I like with Easy, he was not a skollie,” Wowo explained. “But if you provoke him, want fight, you get it. Is like me. Like me, yho, I fight, don’t worry. Other day, we were there in Langa, me and my brother—”

“Was 1965, and they want to check Wowo’s strength so they come to me and take my money,” Taku interrupted. “So we go together to them.”

“We fighting straightaway, they run away. Yho!”

“Now is terrible. They have words like bullying, but was playing to us,” Taku said.

“Fighting is part of playing,” Wowo said.

“Then in 1976, there were people staying in Gugulethu,” Taku said. “They were trying to help the government to stop us from stoning the property. Those people were having weapons but we are not scared of them. We fight with them. We won the battle! We won the battle!”

Now only our headlights guided the way down the hills, passing over the villages and, once in a while, a solitary pedestrian.

“When it was governed by the white people, it was a better town, it looked nicer then,” Taku said absently. “But when Africans took over, tsho…”

“Tell me, Wowo,” I said. “Do you remember when Easy was arrested for Amy Biehl?”

“He was sleeping on the back side, with Pinky. They go to the back and caught him. Arrest him. Then he gone. Tomorrow, the police come back. Again they check. I don’t know what. They see a lot of pictures, PAC pictures, the flag of PAC.”

“Did you think he was involved in Amy’s death?”

“I was not there. That day was a riot. He wasn’t there, or was there, I don’t know. I don’t know nothing about what he do outside. I was in house.”

“Ntobeko was also at the march? And Monks?”

“Rumors saying, but we don’t know,” Taku said. “It’s hearsay. All of them were mentioned, but Monks wasn’t caught.”

“People say Monks hurt Amy,” I said.

“I think they are confused,” Wowo said.

“I can’t say,” Taku said. “We didn’t see them. But the information that we are getting, some people are saying some things. I don’t say if we will ever know.”

“Monks was there,” Easy said. “We see this white lady running towards the garage. She was already outside the car, already stoned. I think from there, people say they saw Monks.”

“Did he and Monks look alike?” I asked Taku and Wowo.

“But not exactly,” Taku said.

“One theory is that Monks was the one at Amy Biehl,” I said. “Easy came after and they pointed him out because he was well known in the area. I talked to the main witness. She doesn’t even know who Monks is, but she knows Easy. Maybe she saw Monks and thought he was Easy. But nobody will confirm.”

“I never heard this story,” Wowo said.

“What we heard, we heard Easy is the one,” Taku said. “But maybe the witness was scared of the mob. She might never notice exactly who did what.”

“And Monks, he didn’t tell us they make mistake,” Wowo said. “If he is scared to go to prison, Monks can tell us, and Easy also can tell us, ‘Was not me, was Monks.’ We don’t know nothing. We only know Monks and Easy was there in riot. We can say is possible or not possible, we don’t know. I don’t know nothing.”

“What happened that day was beyond our expectations,” Taku said. “Maybe was Easy, maybe was Monks. He knows, Easy does.”

“The one who was there must know everything,” Wowo said.

“And I told you, Justine,” Easy said.

I will never know for certain who killed Amy Biehl on August 25, 1993: who cast the fatal stone, who stabbed her in the chest, who stood above her as she begged for her life, and who snuffed that life out. Was it Easy, his little brother Monks, or neither? Did Ntobeko hit her with a rock, or did he watch from afar? Did Mongezi Manqina, gangster-cum-freedom-fighter-cum-rapist, pierce Amy’s heart and her lungs with a blade, or did he take the credit because he was hungry for some taste of glory in his decidedly inglorious life? Was Vusumzi Ntamo—impoverished, easily manipulated—a guilty part of the frothing mob or just an easy-to-arrest black man? How many others surrounded Amy, and how many of them slipped back into the township forever, to be swallowed by the place? Was Amy a naive student who made a bad choice? Was she a rights fighter who died as she made a stand for equality? Were her friends, who wanted a ride home so badly, victims as well, or had they acted irresponsibly when they brought her into the volatile township?

Linda, it occurred to me, knew about the uncertainty of the South African narrative. She had said as much to that radio interviewer in St. Louis, months after she cut contact with me. The interviewer had called Ntobeko a killer, and Linda had intercepted.

“He was not maybe a perpetrator that actually committed the crime,” she said. “So you use the word killer, but I don’t use the word killer….You know, as much as we tell the story cut and dry, there are all these little sidebars and things that say many of them could have wielded a knife or thrown a stone, but eyewitnesses came forward and kind of picked out some. Ntobeko ran away, was not tried with the other three. But it’s more complicated than just—”

The interviewer, apologizing, cut her off. “These stories always are,” he said, and the conversation veered away.

People, myself included, have a blind spot just here. When Easy, questioned before the TRC in 1997, insisted he had “stabbed at” Amy, but could not be sure if he had really stabbed her, one commissioner had tried to clarify Easy’s actual role in the crime, but Easy’s lawyer led the hearing away from that suspicious detail. I had read the term “stabbed at” many times, and regarded it curiously, but for at least the first year of my research, I simply justified it to myself as the verbal quirk of a court interpreter. White detectives, followed by a white prosecutor and a white judge, had decided Easy’s role in the crime and convicted and imprisoned him; later he admitted to that crime before a diverse group of sympathetic commissioners. And after that, he and Ntobeko had built lives upon this version of the past. They were reformed killers and ex-radicals making good with their victim’s parents; this was recorded for posterity. How could it be otherwise?

Linda also knew that the old records weren’t the whole truth. She had told me this when I was haranguing her for them over the phone. “Nobody wants the truth,” she had said. “Those TRC records aren’t the truth. They are graphic and ugly. The truth is that the country was still in turmoil. She represented the oppressor, and her white face was all that was wrong with the country, and she was killed.”

Newspaper articles and official papers did their part in shaping the story. But they never told of Daniel down the street, his head stomped in. They never mentioned Monks, the lookalike brother. Miss A didn’t figure in as a multidimensional person—a feminist with ANC proclivities, sick of the gangsters in her community, in contact with the police. Nonetheless, the written word—by the court, by journalists—became the mold, and history was solidified within it.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission also created history, a reality for the new schoolbooks. The ANC-aligned progenitors of the TRC wanted to reclaim the past from the National Party, to wipe clean decades of propaganda. Men and women who had once been categorized terrorists were rebranded freedom fighters, and hidden atrocities were brought to light, all captured on color TV and in multivolume reports. But the TRC, despite its name and its marketing campaign, was not purely an exercise in truth telling, nor was it a vehicle for exposure. The TRC, the result of a negotiation between former enemies, was actually designed to circumvent a civil war and help build a nation. Nearly a quarter century has passed since the events took place, and as Easy told me long ago at the Hungry Lion franchise in the mall in downtown Cape Town: “The truth is not anymore existing for years and years.”

The countryside had been so black that once we reached town, even the pitted paved roads and feeble streetlamps seemed like luxuries. We drove to the Nofemela family house in Lady Frere for a quick supper of samp and beans. Wowo wanted to wake at 4 A.M. to drive back to Cape Town, since he was worried that Monks might need him. I negotiated him up to a 6 A.M. start time, and then Easy and I walked down the street to the neighbor’s place. Only a few houses let off a faint yellow glow, and the sky was clear, starry, and infinite.

“Remember in one of our first meetings, when you told me you trained out here for APLA?” I asked. “And you told me you could take me to the training camps?”

“I remember.”

“You never trained for APLA, so what was your plan?”

Easy began to chuckle and hooked his arm in mine. “Nomzamo, no, I will take you exactly to the place. I know exactly what’s going on. I will tell you exactly the place that the people used to go and train.”

“People, maybe, but not you.”

“Me also.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Serious, serious. I know exactly what’s happening here years ago.”

We knocked on the door of the schoolteacher’s house, and she welcomed us in. She had warmed the samovar so that we had hot water. We brushed our teeth and washed in shifts. The little oil heater pumped out as much heat as it could manage, but we each dressed for a night in an igloo, me with a hood tied around my neck and Easy with his hat pulled over his ears. We climbed into our respective twin beds, and huddled beneath woolen blankets.

“In Xhosa we say: Don’t talk the truth on top of the fire,” Easy said. “It means don’t ever try to talk the truth, even if they hold you over fire. The fire make you strong so you never surrender. But I know you, Nomzamo. You did find out the truth. I tell you a straight truth. I’m not now joking.”

It was silent in Lady Frere, set in a former homeland, the birthplace of the Nofemela clan, not far from Nelson Mandela’s ancestral village. The borders had been drawn and rearranged by Europeans, and the town had been named after the wife of a Welsh colonial employee who had warred against Xhosas and Zulus for the British cause. It was situated on a bleak plain, hemmed in by red hills, dotted with sheep. The low-lying house in which we were staying had been set on land once belonging to blacks, then ceded to whites, and then abandoned and given back to blacks, who still had to leave to work in the far-off cities so their families could survive. It was dark in the room, and peaceful.

“No, I’ll never know the true story,” I said from beneath my mountain of blankets.

“I told you before: Is life, this. Full of tricks, disappointment. Love directed in the right direction. Love directed in the wrong direction. People have two side or three or more side. Don’t listen too much to what anyone is saying,” Easy said.

“Including you, apparently.”

“Including me,” he said, and laughed loudly, and then we went to sleep.