A Very Interesting Group of People
MY MOTHER’S FATHER looks relatively normal in photos. There he is, sitting in a group surrounded by members of his new wife’s family: her brother-in-law Charlie, and her nieces and nephews. Jimmy looks young, slightly sheepish, perhaps, or shy. They are sitting on a patch of dust in rough clothing, a few parched sprigs of vegetation behind them in what the back of the photo identifies as Zululand. They look hot and awkward, as if they have just stepped off the boat.
In fact, the DeKiewits, my grandfather’s family, had been in the country since the turn of the twentieth century, when they emigrated from Holland. My grandmother’s family had much deeper roots in South Africa. Their name was Doubell, which it pleased my mother to think of as French, although she must in her heart have known better. I’m not in South Africa long before I notice with a shock that Doubell, like other French-sounding names in those parts—Roux, Terreblanche, Joubert—is Afrikaans by association. My grandmother’s ancestor might have come from France a hundred years earlier, but her mother was a Van Vuuren and her grandmother was an Oosthuizen, and whichever way you slice it, those are not French names.
My grandfather was born in Johannesburg to first-generation European immigrants, which put him higher up the social scale—a whiter shade of white—than his young wife, although in any other immigrant community, as the newer arrival, this would not have been so. His family were poor, resourceful, ambitious, multichild-bearing, and given the nature of the country they had moved to from the security of Holland, deeply eccentric. By the time my mother was in her mid-twenties, the family name had become somewhat famous. She used to tell me about this with a mixture of pride and anxiety. Her father’s first cousin Cornelius, with whom her father had grown up and who bore the same surname, was in the newspapers a lot in the era. He was a historian with stout antiapartheid views who after leaving South Africa for England had found tenure at a liberal arts college in the United States.
Not long before my mother emigrated, he visited Johannesburg from his home in upstate New York to deliver a lecture under the auspices of the South African Institute of Race Relations. My mother read about him in the newspaper and felt encouraged; if she didn’t go mad or shoot herself, she thought, there was a chance someday she might amount to something. She longed to meet him, her father’s illustrious cousin. But she hesitated to get in touch. She had been in the newspapers, too.
It is a strange quirk of history that, while I know none of my closer relatives, I know Cornelius’s granddaughter Caroline. She is American; we became friends online and then met up when she was in London one time. It is thanks to Caroline I know anything at all about the world my grandfather grew up in: Cornelius wrote a short, unpublished memoir of his childhood, which she very kindly sent to me—and which, in spite of myself, I have raked through time and again, looking for clues; why, of the two boys who grew up next door to each other, did her grandfather became the successful academic and mine the murderer?
It doesn’t get you anywhere, this kind of speculation, but there is a temptation to mine for small variables. Did one have an inspirational teacher, which the other didn’t? Or suffer a bang to the head, which, I discovered during my brief obsession with serial killers as a teenager, got lots of violent men started?
There was the wider insanity of a country in which a white child was encouraged to believe that however badly he behaved, he was intrinsically more valuable than an entire race of people. As a pathology, it might have been designed to create psychopaths. But both boys were subject to that. The most there is in the memoir is a suggestion of favoritism. Cornelius, older than his cousin Jimmy by a few years, was a teacher’s pet. He was good at Latin. The boys’ grandfather, the dominant influence in their early lives, loved him very much and vested in him the hope of the family. Jimmy’s father, Johannes, seems also to have been very fond of Cornelius. From much smaller things great resentments have prospered.
The family came to South Africa sometime in the 1890s. Gold had been discovered there in 1886 and the country started rapidly to modernize; there were good job opportunities for young men from Europe. Arie, Cornelius’s father, had first considered going to Latin America, but there was the problem of language, and so he settled on South Africa.
For a few years he made good money, working on construction of the railroad to Mozambique. When the Boer War broke out, his loyalty to the new place was so strong that he fought for Paul Kruger against the British. He was captured and escaped at the same time as Winston Churchill was going through the same experience on the other side. After that, wrote Cornelius, his father looked on Churchill as a sort of inverted twin, fortune’s favorite. He was very bitter about the divergent routes their lives took.
Arie’s family was part of the problem, particularly his father, a notoriously difficult man. They lived on the island of Texel, off the coast of Holland and part of an archipelago extending all the way to Denmark. They had been fishermen historically and were now builders and laborers. When peace was declared at Vereeniging, Arie called on his family to join him, and the entire clan—his brother, Johannes, his three sisters, their husbands, and his parents—took the three-week voyage to Cape Town. Arie was an adventurer, but what the rest of the family thought they were doing, these Low Country people, transplanting themselves from Holland to a ramshackle frontier town in the southern hemisphere is anyone’s guess. They were devout Lutherans, so perhaps there was a masochistic need to be tested. In the case of Arie’s parents, the journey itself was a sign of election: these elderly people left home at a time when they had already exceeded their own life expectancy. (That Arie had failed to make his fortune in the new country doesn’t seem to have deterred them. This is the root of all catastrophe in the family: no one ever knows when to call it a day.)
To read of Arie’s parents is to travel at warp speed from modern times to medieval. His father, Cornelius and Jimmy’s grandfather, believed that if you dug up a field there was a chance you might dig up a devil with it. Like the Dutch who went to America two centuries earlier, the grandfather had a concept of “freedom” that valued one freedom only: the freedom to be a religious maniac. He was a fanatic whose fanaticism cost him every job he’d ever held. When he tried to be a grocer, he would serve only those he had seen in church, dismissing all others with the words “You were not at the service in church yesterday. Today I cannot be of any service to you.”
When he was a carpenter and a builder, he was fired from every work site for arguing with the foreman.
“Having known Grandfather,” wrote Cornelius, “I know that swearing only comes into its own in the Dutch language. Grandfather’s swearing had grandeur; it had the quality of a thunderous sermon in a New England pulpit, blasting the congregation with its own sins. He swore indeed as he prayed, with the same intensity and earnestness.” (I looked up some Dutch swearing recently to see what kind of health it’s in. Translations don’t do it justice, I’m told, but “prick-biscuit,” “buddy-fucker,” “get cholera,” “ass-beetle,” and “Your mother’s ass has its own union” are all happy locutions in the Dutch language.)
Cornelius remembered his grandmother as a tiny, hunchbacked creature with an almost epic ability to endure. She was from a family called Haring—the Dutch for herring—and didn’t want to emigrate, but her husband’s will was greater. She had been a midwife who had seen twelve of her seventeen children die in infancy. She had a strong satirical streak, and long before her husband’s death, took to wearing a black widow’s cap around the house, to her children’s delight. She shrank from her husband’s fanaticism, a personality trait that long after his death would resurface repeatedly in his descendants.
Those three weeks at sea must have passed for the grandfather like an exercise in spiritual cleansing. What he took to be his soul thrilled to the open water with a force that in a different man might have been called lascivious. The only book he read was the Calvinist version of the Bible in high Dutch, and he sat on deck, taking it literally.
His wife sat elsewhere on the ship. She was at a serene stage in her endurance. She thought of her grandchildren and concocted scenarios in which her husband fell overboard and she returned to Holland, alone.
At some point, the grandfather opened his mouth to reassure her and for the briefest of moments saw something in his wife that frightened him, something that implied resources in this small woman that were not only withheld from him, but that were in some sly way pitched against him. He dismissed the thought instantly. The ship sailed on. In the rare moments he gave to considering her feelings, the grandfather rationalized that no matter how difficult the new country might be, it would at least dislodge the thing they didn’t talk about—the twelve coffins borne one after the other to the cemetery. The babies’ caskets were small enough for him to carry in his arms. The larger ones he balanced on a wheelbarrow.
The country they found on arrival was still smoldering amid the ruins of the Boer War. Arie met them on the dock at Cape Town and escorted them to the train on which they would make the three-day journey across country to the city in the east, one of the newest and highest cities in the world, 6,000 feet above sea level.
“Arie, my boy!” The grandfather clapped his younger son on the shoulder. “And here we all are, together again!”
“Father.”
Arie suffered a moment’s panic. On the platform beneath the blazing Cape sky were his hunched mother, his wan sisters, and their husbands in their northern hemisphere clothes. His father’s cheer did nothing to reassure him; the old man was at his most ebullient when facing down doubt.
Then he saw his elder brother in a brown suit and with a mild expression, and his spirit surged.
“Johannes!”
“Arie. Meet my wife.”
A woman stepped forward, and Arie laughed and put a hand to her belly. “Congratulations! He’ll be the first African child in the family!” (The grandfather took leave of barking at the porter to suffer his own, fleeting moment of panic.) Somehow they boarded the train.
• • •
THIS IS HOW I IMAGINE it went, although there is no eyewitness account. Cornelius was a baby and my grandfather not yet born—although he was the first in the family to be a native South African. What is known is that Johannes, his father, was a thoughtful, gentle man; my grandfather was not brutalized as a child. (The tyrant was his uncle, Arie, who, like some deranged emperor, banned his wife and children from referring to him as “he” and, on dark winter nights, forbade them from lighting the oil lamps until he got home. They sat, recalled his son, shivering in the dark.)
Outside the house was a different matter. Gold-rush Johannesburg, like its American counterparts, was a place of casual violence and endemic alcoholism. In Holland they had been living in a painting by Whistler; now they were in a Hieronymus Bosch. The fires of the mine dumps burned day and night. The rhythmic shudder of the drilling sent dust up from the floor. They moved into a complex of wood-and-iron shacks to the north of the city, arranged around the focal point of the grandparents’ two-room home, a corrugated-iron structure that the grandfather painted bright red, daubing the name of the family on the outside wall.
It was in these two rooms that communal family life took place. The floor was compacted earth, with a coal stove in the middle that burned all day to keep off mosquitoes. The roof was galvanized iron, which made life inside hot. Water collected in a rain barrel outside in the yard.
Slowly a life came together. The grandfather wouldn’t learn English on a point of principle and Afrikaans seemed to him an absurd invention, but he was forced to acquire some basic Zulu to deal with the human traffic at his gate. Despite his lofty religious principles, his position on the black man was that he was unthreatening but essentially useless. His wife’s fear annoyed him. It undermined his illusion of government in the house.
As best she could, the grandmother eked out a routine, sweeping and going to the market, where she conversed in Dutch and never learned a word of any of the languages of the country she now lived in. In the morning, she made Mazawattee tea. At noon, she switched to coffee. There was barley and brown sugar for breakfast, and brown beans and black molasses for lunch. Tapioca on Sunday. She made toffee out of condensed milk and unrefined black sugar. For birthdays there was coconut ice or flan.
Once a month she deposited a penny in a stocking behind the sugar tin; she was saving for her own funeral.
When her family congratulated her on the occasion of her fiftieth wedding anniversary, she said merely, “It is long.” Her air, wrote Cornelius, was one of “complete sadness.”
He did not feel this way about his childhood. It was poor, he wrote, but “to be a child in a family of generations, where welcome is taken for granted, is the supreme advantage of poor people: they communicate elbow to elbow.” There was sadness there, too, however. Cornelius was conscious of living in a family of ghosts; when he looked around the table, he thought of his father’s twelve dead siblings in the cemetery in Holland.
It was into this world that my grandfather Jimmy was born. His father worked as a blaster in the mines. Johannes always smelled faintly of dynamite, recalled his nephew, looking back on those scenes of his childhood some fifty years later, from the comfort of upstate New York.
• • •
WHEN A BOY in the family turned six, it was the tradition to give him an air gun. One day, a man came to the gate, begging for work. He was bolder than most, and putting his hand on the gate, opened it and started to walk up the path. The grandfather, standing in the doorway, shouted, “Voetsek!”—a ruder version of “Piss off”—and Cornelius shot the man in the backside. It was only an air-gun pellet, but the man whipped around, stunned, and started back for the house. Cornelius ran and hid behind his grandfather, who at lunch that day gave a sermon about the sin of injuring one’s neighbor. “Lord, thou hast seen the act of a sinner.”
There was moral order in the house, but it was very confused. The grandfather’s moralizing did not stop him from endorsing the racial pecking order as it appeared in the country at large: white northern European, white Afrikaans, white southern European, black African, and, at the bottom of the heap, the Chinese, who took the most dangerous jobs in the mines. At school, Afrikaans was despised and the African languages completely ignored, as was the history of the country prior to colonization. In America, children might play Cowboys and Indians and consider it an honor to be the Indian. Not so here.
The children spoke Dutch at home and English at school. J. M. Coetzee has written about the terrors of South African schooling, and although his experiences were several decades later, nothing much seemed to have changed. Cornelius recalled two types of teachers: young women from England out looking for adventure or a husband, and sadistic ex–British Army officers who continued to fight the Boer War in the classroom, dividing pupils into the conquered and the conquerors. When white South Africans were officially made subjects of the British Empire, Cornelius wrote in his diary, “I am now a British object.” With delight, he recounted how one day the Afrikaner boys who filled the back row and were always being beaten by the teacher got up, en masse, and sauntered down the aisle. The teacher fled. They left the classroom and were never seen again. By the end of high school, not a single Afrikaner pupil remained.
Looking back, Cornelius put his success down to two things; one was, indeed, a sympathetic teacher, a gentle Welshman who encouraged him to go to university. Cornelius went first to Witwatersrand University, then to the University of London, and from there on to America and Cornell. The other pivotal moment in his young life was something he witnessed as a child. The children weren’t allowed out after dark, when the streets were full of drunken miners, staggering from the pub to pass out in the street. One night, Cornelius watched through the window as a drunk white miner beat a black man almost to death. The thing that stayed with him wasn’t the violence itself so much as the fact that the man didn’t fight back. The next day, all that remained was a bloodstain in the dirt. His education, said Cornelius, began when he saw it.
The greatest influence, however, was unavoidably his and Jimmy’s grandfather, the old tyrant who, when he fell ill, told his family, “This is not a sickbed, it is a deathbed and leave me alone.” He was taken to the hospital, where his loud and unstoppable orations from the Bible annoyed the staff so much they called his wife to come and collect him. She arrived just as they were pulling the sheet over his head. The grandmother returned to the shack and wept until she was blue in the face. Nothing her children said could console her. The old man’s last act of spite had been to die first, forcing her to spend all she’d saved on his funeral. By way of estate, he left his family the cigars in his vest pocket, a pouch of tobacco, a copy of the Bible, and a pamphlet entitled “The Speedy Spaniard.” But Cornelius remembered him fondly. “My boy, what have you done today?” he would ask his grandson every evening, and Cornelius, in fine detail, would tell him.
• • •
MY GRANDFATHER JIMMY did not go to university. Perhaps the Welsh teacher had left by the time he came along five years later. My mother said he boasted of having been a medical student and dropping out, but who knows if this was true. In adulthood, he had little to do with his family. In the paperwork from his murder trial I noticed that his mother had testified as a character witness. And he had maintained vague contact with his sister Cornelia, known as Nelly, who had the misfortune of thirteen children and a husband who gambled, and thanks to whom my mother had thirty-two first cousins. “Shame, auntie Nelly,” she would say. Beyond that, my mother knew nothing of her father’s family, although she was, in a general way, proud of her Dutch origins. She thought the Dutch were, by and large, sensible people, her father being the exception.
I wouldn’t have found out about any of this myself if, in the 1990s, I hadn’t written a piece in the newspaper about ancestry software. It was when tracing your origins was all the rage and you could, I wrote, decide on any line of descent for yourself if you sifted the dirt skillfully enough. To illustrate the point, I fed my mother’s maiden name into a family-tree database and within five minutes established that we were descendants of Rousseau. After the piece came out, a man with my mother’s maiden name e-mailed from America to say he was a distant cousin and did I know we had family in England? It was through him I met Caroline, Cornelius’s granddaughter.
I thought my mother would be uninterested. Every few years or so, retired Canadians would pop up via e-mail, asking if I could shed light on the mysterious branch of my mother’s family that seemed to end with my grandfather. It made my mother and me laugh—the idea of going around the world looking for people you are related to. But when the piece came out, illustrated with photos of her mother as a young woman and her father as a young man, she took a copy next door to show off to the neighbors. She was furious about a spelling error in the picture caption. She was a proud person, but I had never seen this before: pride in where she had come from.
The relative in England was an elderly lady called Theodora, who turned out to be Cornelius’s sister—a first cousin, then, of my grandfather’s. She was living in the East Midlands, and my parents and I drove up to meet her. My mother was nervous and excited. Forty years earlier, she had got up the nerve to write to Cornelius, and he had replied kindly, owning to the connection and expressing a desire to meet her so he could tell her about “a very interesting group of people”—her father’s family. She kept the letter all her life. It was a source of great regret to her that they never managed to meet up.
And now here was Theodora, framed by her front door, built like a little bull and with her hair up in a bun. She looked at us with sharp blue eyes, and we followed her through to her living room.
She had grown up, she said, in a mining district in northern Johannesburg, a very rough-and-ready sort of place in those days. She had been very close to her older brother Cornelius, who had been her great champion and who, in the face of wider opposition, had campaigned for her right to apply to university—although he had disapproved of her chosen subject. Chemistry, he said, was too hard for girls. Nonetheless, Theodora had applied to university in England, and in 1930, won a scholarship to read chemistry at Oxford. She had stayed on to do postgraduate studies under the tutelage of her mentor, Sir Robert Robinson, who in 1947 was awarded the Nobel Prize for discovering the molecular structure of morphine and penicillin.
My mother had almost to be physically restrained on receipt of this news. When I went to Oxford, a work colleague of my dad’s had said unthinkingly to her, “She must get it from her father.” Now here was this woman, elegant, articulate, sober, confirming my mother’s lifelong fantasy that beyond the swampy genes and terrible scenes and hints at some public disgrace there was something else: scholarships to Oxford, houses filled with art, a woman with mettle equal to her own who had pulled herself out of the dust and the darkness. Finally—finally!—some external evidence of what it had been necessary for her to believe all this time: that it was not fluke but, as my mother always said, it was Who We Were.
It was an extraordinary scene; my motherless mother, no family, no history, whom I had never seen defer to anyone, bowing in an almost courtly fashion to this elder of the family. Theodora put on a green hat with a feather in it and we went out to lunch.
“No,” said my mother, on the way home in the car. Her eyes zipped this way and that. “No, she is a very impressive woman. Not a barrel of laughs, but impressive.” Whatever internal dialogue was taking place my father and I let proceed uninterrupted; it didn’t require our input. My mother wondered how different her life might have been if, in those early years in London, she’d known Theodora had been living a mere fifty miles away in Oxford. It made me think of that scene in The African Queen when Bogart and Hepburn, at the end of their tether and still stuck in the swamp, finally give up, whereupon the camera cranes upward and with a jolt you see how close to open water and safety they are.
“But of course,” said my mother quickly, “then I might not have made my own way.”
• • •
I SAW THEODORA AGAIN, for the last time, in that period between my mother’s death and my trip to South Africa. She was in a nursing home by then and was well into her nineties. Still the same fierce look, but furious with frustration at her dependency. Something else had changed, too. Floating at the rim of the crocheted blanket was the broad face, bumpy nose, and wide, penetrating eyes of the woman my mother became in the last two months of her life, when cancer accelerated her aging. There was something almost Mongolian about the planes of that face. “God, she looked like Mum,” said my dad, on the way home in the car.
Theodora hated the nursing home. “They’re all mad,” she said. She kept to her room and read texts on alternative medicine. When her eyesight went, she got what she could on audiotape from the mobile library. My dad went out for a walk and left us to talk. While her brother, in his memoir, had remembered his grandfather, it was the grandmother Theodora remembered. She would put duck eggs in her cleavage to hatch them, she said. Although she was illiterate, she was a great storyteller and would entertain her grandchildren with stories from European history; she was very good on the Napoleonic Wars. “She was a clever woman,” said her granddaughter, “not that she got any credit for it.”
Of the grandfather she recalled only meanness. There was an incident she had never forgotten. When Theodora was a very young child she had dropped a penny in the yard, and a chicken had eaten it. Giggling, she’d run into the shack to tell her grandfather, and without saying a word he had picked up a knife, raced out into the yard, and without further ado slit the chicken down the middle to retrieve the penny. At almost ninety years’ distance, Theodora looked horrified anew.
Did she remember Jimmy, I asked, her cousin, my grandfather? “Yes,” she said. “He was younger than us, and of course I was in England from my early twenties and rather lost touch with the wider family.” She looked at me curiously for a moment. “There was some trouble there, I think?”
Theodora dissolved once more into the middle distance. “I expect he was quite bright. We all were. But, of course, you never know which way a person will go.”