We Are Not Such Things (30 page)

“It’s not low GI,” one woman said dismissively. “Low GI is the newest thing.”

“Do you have white bread?” another woman asked.

“You want white wine?” the staffer said, and the two of them raced to the wine section, where a bottle of Amy’s Wine was displayed.

“No, I said white bread!” the woman said, and they raced back to the bread section.

Another woman passed by. “Sure, I remember that girl, Amy,” she said, and took a package.

The staffer had sold two loaves in forty-five minutes, and he wasn’t planning on sticking around for another hour. He cut out early and we went to lunch. I accompanied several other employees—none trained in sales, all with experience working with children—on similar promotions, and the same story played out. A few years earlier, Easy had stood awkwardly by while a staffer had been confronted by a shopper who asked, “What is this forgiveness you’re talking about? I don’t even want to look at you! What is this woman doing, hiring the killers of her daughter? For her own benefit! I would never buy the bread.”

More troublingly, despite Amy’s obsession with helping poor black women rise up, black women were not represented in management positions—to Linda’s dismay. The officious ex-British-military woman worked as a volunteer human resources executive, while two colored women occupied positions below Kevin, but the black women at the foundation worked in relatively lowly capacities: as secretaries and program facilitators. Ntobeko, who managed the staff, told me that he had been especially bereft after Peter’s death, convinced that Linda could never manage as Peter had because she was female.

“All the bigger deals were made by Peter,” Ntobeko said. “I just did not think Linda would be able to shoulder it. She will spend time with you talking nonsense in a man’s world.”

No matter what, Ntobeko was still Linda’s favored son, and one of the reasons she kept coming back to South Africa. Linda sent me emails calling him “fabulous” and “brilliant.” She spoke of his “incredible intuition.”

“If he had any kind of normal childhood, he could be a huge leader,” she said. He knew “when to talk.” He was “a strategist.” She was convinced that she knew him to the core, and vice versa. “We were doing an interview at a restorative justice conference in Milwaukee, and the man wanted to know if Ntobeko had ever looked me in the eye and said ‘I’m sorry,’ and his answer was, ‘I don’t have to tell her,’ ” she told me. “He feels it is there without talking about it.”

Later, I began to suspect that there was another reason Ntobeko never said sorry.

Ntobeko usually held a small dinner in Linda’s honor when she came to Cape Town. She sent me pictures of the spread, of Champagne flutes, platters of roasted chicken and ears of grilled corn.

This dinner party is amazing as Ntobeko was released from prison 13 years ago this month,
she wrote after one gathering.
How could we have imagined this ever happening???

After another such gathering, she sent me photos of them drinking Champagne together, and of clothing piled high at the fledgling wash-and-fold laundry business he and his wife were running from their garage.

Linda loved Easy, but his struggles were a disappointment to her. He was, she said, “the child you worry about more,” the “foot soldier,” while Ntobeko was a “colonel.” Ntobeko’s triumphs were Linda’s triumphs. Ntobeko was living proof that Linda’s efforts mattered, that her mercy could propel a neglected young man to a meaningful adult life. Once a prisoner with neither a high school diploma nor any significant job prospects, he was now supporting three daughters and a wife. Linda had, for many years, rented a loft in downtown Cape Town, and when she gave the place up, she donated her sleigh bed to Ntobeko. He kept the bed in a guest room, which he told her was “Makhulu’s room”—a place for her in case she ever wished to live with him in her old age.

But their relationship was tangled up in the foundation. Soon after one dinner party, at the urging of Kevin and his team, Ntobeko wrote Linda to rally her support for some changes. In one instance, the foundation wanted Linda’s blessing on a revamped logo and website. But Linda did not want to change the logo, a rudimentary pair of black and white hands, intertwined above a retro font spelling out the foundation’s name. She and Peter had helped design it long ago. Ntobeko, Kevin, and their team, however, preferred a more modern take: sleek handprints, one black and one white, their thumbs overlapped, above more contemporary lettering.

Ntobeko was dispatched to try to convince Linda. He had recently enjoyed the services of a life coach, hired by Kevin, whose specialty was helping people “find their gifts.” Ntobeko had found his gift as a businessman. On a practical level he was still “lining things up,” he said. But he was learning about American tycoons, and was saying things like, “I can only coach those who want to be coached!” And “I don’t count mistakes, I count efforts!” In his new role as a businessman, he had begun to study the concept of brand building. In his email to Linda, he argued that redesigns had boosted the profiles of a variety of South African corporations.

Vodacom has changed colours from blue & white to red & white (many people were so interested to find out what’s going on, they are now Vodacom clients),
he wrote.
Standard Bank…slogan has changed from STANDARD BANK Simpler Better Faster to SATNDARD BANK moving forward
[
sic
].

Linda received the email with sorrow. Amy’s name was now the equivalent of a bank or a phone company. Linda reasoned that Ntobeko just wanted a man to “nurture” him, and Kevin—who was already “authoritarian”—took advantage of that.

Still, after reading Ntobeko’s email, Linda decided that though she would remain close with Ntobeko on a personal level, she wanted to remove Amy’s name from the foundation. She would do so on the twentieth anniversary of Amy’s death, on August 25, 2013. The foundation, Linda felt, could adopt a new Xhosa name, and continue its work without her. She worried that if she were to die, her children would be saddled with some unforeseen scandal or controversy. A few years earlier, some colored kids had accused a black facilitator of sexual abuse—a charge, it was discovered, that they had made up, stoked by racial tensions. Linda wanted to protect her own children from such a mess, and she also wanted to move on, she said. She wanted a second act. She was thinking of going back to school to study art history, as Amy had once urged her to do.

We cannot afford to part ways with a winning brand,
Ntobeko wrote.

“Amy was not a brand,” Linda told me, her voice raised. “She was my daughter, she was a
person
.”

But here was a contradiction: at Linda’s behest, Amy’s name had been strewn across wine bottles and bread bags, on charity bracelets and on the sides of vans, on business cards and mailers, before a dot-org in email addresses, on the glass door and the metal sign, on the T-shirts of the kids, on pamphlets and newsletters. By now, the simple truth was that Amy Biehl
was
a brand.

And for all Linda’s talk of second chapters, she kept coming back. She would claim to be done with the mess once and for all, and then she’d book a flight and return to the office. In South Africa, Linda was able to hold on to Amy. And if you looked at how Linda conducted her life, you could see that Linda, for all her talk of moving forward, had devoted herself to never letting Amy go.

At first I was shaken, not only by Linda’s closeness with the men, but by how casually the three conducted their relationship. When Linda’s friends came to town Easy drove the group around Gugulethu, pointing out relevant spots. I sat in the front, in between Easy and Linda. We passed a group of boys running laps by the highway.

“When Easy and Ntobeko were little, they were training like this, but they were also training to be part of military activities,” Linda announced to the car. “Isn’t that right, Easy?”

Linda’s friends—a Midwestern family of three kids, two parents, and two grandparents—were recording each moment, with a variety of digital devices. They had come to administer charity, see how the poor lived, and take a little safari, too.

“Yes, Makhulu,” Easy said.

“You had to be fit!” Linda said.

“Yes, Makhulu.”

Later, Linda asked Easy to talk about Xhosa omens. She found the “beneath the surface” beliefs in black magic and ancestors fascinating.

“The ancestors come in different forms,” Easy explained. He loved telling white people fantastical tales of African belief systems and did so with great flair. “Clean water is positive. A dog is good. Ancestors can come as a bee. Also, when the little child go to the neighbor’s house, to the neighbor’s toilet, to do a number two, that means that visitors will be coming.”

“What? Your kid poops at your neighbor’s house, and it means people are coming to visit?” I asked.

“Yah.” Easy nodded.

“That just shows how earthy they are,” Linda said to me.

We pulled up to a field and stood in the sunshine and watched the Amy Biehl Foundation kids play soccer, Ntobeko coaching and Easy making a quick play. Linda stood to the side, with so many little hands reaching for her. The smallest of the visiting children was spirited away by five girls from the townships, who placed her on the ground and started fussing with her hair.

“Ow!” she whined. “Ow, that hurts!” But the local girls didn’t care and took to fashioning pigtails.

During these moments, I usually wondered: Why shouldn’t Easy have a second chance? Why shouldn’t Aphiwe be born? Why shouldn’t Ntobeko own a beautiful home and support three daughters? Why shouldn’t Linda find some modicum of purpose, if not peace, here? Even if the process was flawed, this seemed to be the best possible post-apartheid outcome: on the small scale, these personal relationships helped everyone thrive. I could understand Linda’s approach of radical forgiveness: If you stood face-to-face with the person who had wronged you, and spoke with him, and looked in his eyes, it was hard not to see him as a human being; this, I suppose, was one of the hopes of the Truth Commission. When the enemy turns from an abstract notion or a caricature or a symbol into a person—and in the case of Easy and Ntobeko, a young and confused person—it is difficult to maintain your anger at him. And when he asks for forgiveness, it is hard to withhold it. On a good day, in a good moment, I knew why Linda loved Easy and Ntobeko, and their relationship made sense. If they grew into nonviolent members of society who did more good than bad, that was another sign that Amy’s death and the process that unfolded beyond it wasn’t in vain, and that Amy’s principles had been worth holding to. In its small way, it meant that with the Truth Commission, the country had made strides forward, and that Amy had helped.

But many months later, I stared at crime scene photographs of Amy’s brutalized body. She had been healthy, young, and small. She was one female against a throbbing male mob, and she couldn’t explain away her skin color. I thought of how Linda complained that some staffers, Ntobeko included, ignored her emails. I thought of how Easy so often came late to work. I thought of everyone caught up in this odd web, always congratulating themselves and receiving congratulations on their own enlightenment. And I felt like the whole thing was one big fat joke.

After Linda left Cape Town, Easy and I resumed our days together, wandering the townships. He brought me to meet his old friends. We drove by the cemetery, so full of bodies that they were now burying family members atop one another. Easy could divide the cemetery into time periods that corresponded to sociopolitical crises: here were the people who died of the ravages of poverty; here were those who died in riots and gang violence; here were the victims of AIDS. We drove by a smashed rat as big as a cat. We went to eat barbecued meat at Mzoli’s—the famous eponymous barbecue joint owned by a former butcher who had sold meat from the back of his truck and had built the business into a township empire. Ragged street entrepreneurs controlled various parking spaces, which they guarded from vagrants for a fee, and in some instances you were essentially paying a drug addict to not break into your car.