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| WORKING WITH MICHENER The Making of The Covenant ©2007 Errol Lincoln Uys
an online literary archive The Assignment|The Plotting|The Research|The Manuscript
The Assignment I A Day in St. Michaels
On a fall morning in 1979, I sat dreaming beside Broad Creek near St. Michaels on Chesapeake Bay. A pair of white swans drifted in and out of my line of vision. In my mind's eye I saw a young girl walk to a pool where ranks of ghostly warriors rose from the waters. Some were black like the child's people; some specters were white and ashen-faced.
The scene I pictured took place far from the shores of Maryland. The girl's name was Nongqause and her people were the Xhosa of South Africa. The pool visited by Nongqause on a morning in May 1856 was on a tributary of the Great Fish River that marked the Eastern Frontier of the Cape Colony, where for a century the Xhosa resisted the incursion of Dutch and English settlers.
Nongqause fled the apparition, a pied hornbill's roars filling the forest behind her. She ran to the hut of her uncle, Mhlakaza, a seer who read the bones.
“I s—saw more warriors than I can count.”
“Coming here?”
“No, uncle. Warriors in the mists.”
Mhlakaza listened intently as Nongqause described her vision, and then spoke gently to his niece. “Return to your family but tell no one of what you saw.”
Two days and two nights, the seer sat in his hut, burning pots of herbs and chanting to his sacred patrons. On the third day, Mhlakaza picked up an assegai and walked to the cattle kraal. He chose the finest animal from his own herd, slashed its hide and made the blood run. Through the bellows of the dying beast, the spirits let their commands be known.
At first light on the fourth day, Mhlakaza went to the pool. A brother who died fighting the Redcoats was in the front row of ghost-warriors. White soldiers stood shoulder to shoulder with the Xhosa.
Mhlakaza and his protégé traveled the lands of the Xhosa carrying word of a ghostly legion coming to take the field against the settlers. The white allies of the Xhosa were Russians from the Crimea, enemies of the English.
Nongqause revealed what must be done on the day of deliverance: “Kill your cattle, every beast in every kraal. Empty your grain baskets and burn every field.”
The peace on Broad Creek, the drifting swans — nothing lay further from the horror I saw unfold in the valleys of the Xhosa.
No Xhosa regiments streamed over the frontier, no Russian gun carriages trundled across the veld.
The time of starving began. Hundreds of bodies lay in fields of bleached bones. At distant kraals, fires were lit and pots brought to boil for the flesh of humans.
Fifty thousand Xhosa perished in the national suicide. Mhlakaza died of hunger. Nongqause lived until 1898. She never forgot holding the Xhosa in thrall. She told her coterie to call her Victoria Regina.
I
left the dock on Broad Creek and walked up to a modest white cottage.
I opened the door to the front porch and let myself in quietly. The
room was bright and airy and furnished with a worktable where I spent
most of my days in the fall of 1979. The view of the creek was idyllic,
more enchanting when flights of Canada geese patterned the sky. Flocks
of
I sat in front of my typewriter, my back to the windows overlooking the glories of Chesapeake Bay. There were moments when I enjoyed the passage of the birds and the lovely sunsets but such reveries were rare. I was working twelve to fifteen-hour days to meet a fast-approaching deadline.
I took three pages from a manuscript on the table. The heading – XI. The Englishmen – appeared on the first page. In the third paragraph stood a reference to Nongqause: “a short, frail girl of fourteen went to a pool in a stream east of the Great Fish River and saw ghosts who spoke with her.” What followed was a shallow telling of the story that had Mhlakaza plotting to make himself paramount chief of the Xhosa, identifying the white specters as Russians from ‘newspaper clippings' and needing just over a month to scour “Xhosaland” and hoodwink an entire nation.
CLICK to enlarge and read pages I drew a line through the manuscript and started from scratch. I began my first draft by hand on the back of the rejected pages. Sometimes when a stream of ideas comes, I dash them off in an ungodly scrawl. On this occasion I printed every word in carefully spaced lines and edited my writing in the same neat hand. Looking over the pages today, the meticulous penmanship is striking. Was it a burden of enormous tragedy evoking the reverential?
I later knew the same awe when writing about an apocalypse in the backlands of Brazil, where the prophet Anthony the Counselor promised paradise and delivered his followers to perdition. You imagine yourself in the shoes of the faithful and join thousands of believers who rejoice in a new life beckoning them. You lift your pen and move on. They remain behind forever.
I sat alone on the porch but as I worked I heard another typewriter. Tap-tap, tap, tap, tap. When I was pecking away furiously with two fingers – Fifteen years in editorial offices, I'd yet to master touch-typing and never would. – I ignored the clacking sounds. Tap-tap, tap, tap, tap. Sometimes I was goaded to type faster and faster, slamming back the return carriage. There'd be moments when I paused to mull over ideas. Tap-tap, tap, tap, tap. If I let the noise in, I would picture the man at the other machine and wonder what he was working on.
On that day in November 1979, I finished my draft and made some final corrections. Satisfied I'd caught the tragedy of the Xhosa, I picked up the pages and went to offer them to the man behind the other typewriter.
The room he worked in was just off a small dining room. The smaller of the cottage's two bedrooms, it had been turned into a study. A heavy oak desk was placed next to the only window, standing sideways in the narrow space. The room was at the back of the house, the view from the window offering few distractions. Loblolly pines lined a long gravel driveway from a road where the little traffic passed unseen and unheard. Bookshelves covered one wall of the room, other volumes stood stacked on the floor. A stereo player and pile of records occupied one shelf. The room was not bright, usually only a single desk lamp turned on beside the typewriter, an old, heavy and noisy Royal manual.
Its owner had stopped typing, the door slightly ajar. I pushed it open slowly to ensure I wasn't intruding. No, it was OK to go in, and I did, stepping quickly over to the desk.
I can see him now, sitting in the shadows cast by the single lamp. He was wearing a red plaid shirt that hung loosely over a baggy pair of khaki trousers. His shoulders were slightly sloped. His hair was thinning and receded far back from a high forehead. His mouth was small and thin-lipped. He had large hands with long fingers, expressive of strength rather than sensitivity.
His eyes were his strongest and most enigmatic feature. They were eyes that literally gazed out across the world, for with the exception of Antarctica, there was no continent he hadn't visited. (Later he added the ice-bound south to his wanderings.) His gaze was sphinx-like, seeing everything, revealing nothing. I saw rare merriment, melancholy sometimes and secrecy often. Some moments I glimpsed a sharp, calculating look, like an old lion sizing up a young male in the pride.
I handed over the story of Nongqause and Mhlakaza. “A Xhosa Jim Jones without the Kool-Aid.” The mass suicide of Jones and his followers took place in Guyana the previous November.
My quip went ignored. “Let's see what we have,” James A. Michener said.
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At four-thirty that November day, Michener and I downed tools to take a walk as we did every afternoon. Our workday started around seven in the morning, neither of us interested in breakfast or small talk. I was staying in a studio apartment on the property and grabbed a coffee and cigarette before going over to the house. We put in five hours before lunch at twelve-thirty. On some days, Jim's wife, Mari, made sandwiches for us but several times a week we drove four miles to the town of St. Michaels, where we dropped into a café on Talbot Street. Michener had been going there for three years since settling on Broad Creek to work on his novel, Chesapeake, and was greeted like a regular. He could be one of the watermen he'd got to know well, perhaps a crusty old crabber come in from the Choptank. After lunch, we went back to the house, Jim snatching half an hour for a nap before returning to work until late afternoon.
Before we stepped out, Jim selected one of several handsome wood canes given him by friends. I picked up one, too, the pair of us heading up between the loblolly pines like a couple of country squires out for a stroll. Jim needed the cane because of a deteriorating hip that racked him with pain. He could be in agony as he started out but drove himself forward, until there was a rhythm to his stride and the pain receded. I favored a gnarled hickory cane of menacing appearance, for I was at heart a city boy and none too happy about the dogs that rocketed off neighbors' grounds. They were old pals of Jim and I was never bitten but still glad to be armed.
We were an hour coming and going that November evening walking on into the dusk. This was worrying to Mari Michener, who never let us leave the cottage without wearing clothing easily picked up in headlights. Most drivers knew Michener and gave us a friendly wave. Once or twice a week an idiot came tearing along oblivious to the two figures at the side of the road and forcing us to scramble onto the verge. I didn't want to think of the headlines in Post or any other paper were we slain in a hit-and-run crash. Jim's only concern was that Mari not be told.
The cars and pick-ups came and went and we tramped on. Rarely did we meet another person out for a walk on that country road. I remarked about this to Michener, how back in South Africa one could be driving a hundred miles from the nearest dorp. “Not a house in sight, not a hut, not a living thing moving out there, and then just over a rise, this African comes jogging down the road. He's not carrying a gas can, nothing like that, just walking along, only God knows where he's coming from or headed for.”
We stepped away from our typewriters with the idea of taking a break but they followed us out between the loblolly pines, Nongqause and Mhlakaza and witnesses to their danse macabre. Men like dashing Major Richard Saltwood, one of the main protagonists of The Englishmen. Well bred, courageous, Richard was the quintessential officer and gentleman, who served six campaigns in India before immigrating to the Cape Colony in 1820, four decades before the cattle killing. The major did everything in his power to stop the madness and when the dying began, he led the relief effort to save the Xhosa, his enemy in three bloody frontier wars.
I knew Richard Saltwood and his three brothers intimately, for I plotted many of their exploits, when Michener and I were putting our heads together to people The Covenant. The Saltwoods hailed from the ancient bishopric of Old Sarum near Salisbury, where their ancestor Nicholas Saltwood, captain of the Acorn, put down roots after making a fortune on a voyage to the Spice Islands in the seventeenth century. Peter, oldest of Richard's brothers, was a respected Member of Parliament, despite holding the seat of Sarum, “rottenest of the rotten boroughs,” where voters were as invisible as ghost-warriors of the Xhosa. David, youngest of the Saltwoods, was a rebel who turned his back on John Bull and went to America founding a branch of the family. Hilary was four years older than Richard and reached the Cape a decade before him, a godly son of England serving the London Missionary Society. He was a darling of the Hottentots and ardent defender of the Xhosa against depredations by Dutch Boers. Reverend Saltwood's path was studded with thorns that lacerated and finally killed him and his wife Emma, a Madagascan convert with whom Hilary found sweet redemption.
Uys Plotting Notes for Saltwoods CLICK to enlarge and read pages On our walks, Michener often chided me for incessant chatter. “You're not getting any benefit, all this talking while you walk. You're not putting air into your lungs.” Jim pumped up his long stride and surged forward. He never stopped me talking and I never held back for I knew we'd a vast and empty veld to populate.
Even I couldn't have dreamed up the circumstances that saw me on that Maryland road in 1979 or the coincidences that drew Michener and I together. Jim was a very private person, who was happy to parade a cast of thousands in front of the world but kept his own universe under wraps. I, by contrast, was known to stay up until the cows came home gabbing with anyone who would hear my stories or share their own adventures. I could never see Michener in one of the smoky dens on Cape Town's waterfront or a Johannesburg dive like my uncle Henry's “Rendezvous.” Of course, more than three decades earlier, Jim sat for hours with the Quinn's Bar gang on Tahiti and at Aggie Grey's, where the goddesses of the South Seas danced siva-siva and nights were enchanted.
There were no juke joints on Broad Creek and besides I was there to wrestle with big ideas, not sit gossiping with one of the great minds of America. Still, there were times when the talk turned to two characters only, ourselves. On my first visit to St. Michaels in May 1978, I told Michener how I happened to bear the name of a proud Afrikaner family, having been adopted as a baby.
“I was adopted,” Jim said.
“I never knew my birth parents.”
Nor did he, said Jim. Mabel Michener, a widow, took him in. There was no man in the house.
“When I was six, Uys left my mother. I wasn't told I was adopted until I was twelve. I'd had some idea, nothing specific, just a feeling I wasn't Joey Uys's child.”
“How did you find out?”
“My mother and I fought like cat and dog. One day she screamed at me. ‘You're not my son. You're trash picked up in the gutter.' I told her I knew I was adopted. That made her angrier. ‘Who told you?' No one, I said. I just knew.”
Jim told me about a member of the Michener clan, who started sending him letters after he began to win recognition. Jim wasn't a real Michener, the anonymous writer said, but a bastard and a disgrace unfit to bear the name. Year after year, the letters kept coming, their poison more and more vitriolic. Every advance Jim made, there'd be a missive filled with rage and vituperation.
“I've not the slightest idea who he is.” Jim had a notion that the writer was a man. Where were the letters from? I asked. Philadelphia, but that meant little to Jim. One thing that his detractor wrote rang true for him: “‘Just who the hell do you think you are, trying to be better than you are?'”
“He got that right,” Jim said. “I've always tried to be better than I was.”
Dark
and dismal memories for Michener and me but there were happier recollections
of two boys growing up decades and continents apart yet remarkably
alike. Our mothers both lived from hand to mouth, with never a penny
to spare. At nine, Jim was scouring the Doylestown woods for chestnuts
to sell to neighbors; my first enterprise was selling peaches in the
street outside our house when I was six. From the age of eleven until
he was a young man, Jim worked at many jobs from paper carrier to
ticket taker at the famous Willow Grove amusement park outside Philadelphia.
I was eleven when I started a mini-career as salesman in a Johannesburg
toy store, hawking hula-hoops on Eloff Street, the city's
We walked back to the cottage and put in another hour before dinner. It's a fact that when I returned home to Westchester, New York that Christmas, my family stood aghast at the scrawny creature that greeted them. No one was more solicitous than Mari Michener when it came to caring for the welfare of her man, keeping the cottage squeaky clean, running errands for Jim, answering phones and fending off callers who could interrupt his writing. Michener had a heart attack twelve years earlier and Mari kept tabs on his health, making him take a nap each afternoon and watching his diet.
And there was the rub, for when Mari made meals for the three of us, she served her guest the same lean fare. The portions were beautifully presented, as one might expect from a hostess of American-Japanese heritage, but very small even for a thin man like myself. I was far too polite to ask for more, and besides, Mari had no real interest in cooking. It was fortuitous that one of Jim's close friends was Edward “The Big Fishcake” Piszek, owner of Mrs. Paul's Kitchens. Ed shipped boxes of frozen fish sticks to Broad Creek, as well as more exotic dishes from his test kitchens. Mari had a freezer stuffed with Mrs. Paul's largesse which she could've dispensed bountifully but stuck to her frugal meal plans. Packets of Heinz ketchup that Mari garnered from restaurants complemented Ed's fish sticks, a thriftiness that also kept their table supplied with mustard, soy sauce and a variety of sugars and sweeteners.
The three of us ate dinner in the kitchen, not much there to linger over but we passed the time pleasantly enough. Michener and I never spoke about work in Mari's company beyond scheduling issues, when he had to leave St. Michaels to fulfill other obligations. Some trips were to Cape Canaveral for he was already thinking of his next venture, which would be into space.
On days when Jim and Mari were both away, I was given the keys to a storage room and a freezer stuffed with frozen fish sticks and other provender. Mari kept the larder locked against long-fingered workers suspected of raiding her supplies. I was encouraged to take as much food as I wanted. Knowing how carefully my hostess portioned out her dishes, I gave myself the same sparse rations. Besides, if I got desperate, I could drive to a greasy spoon in St. Michaels. In 1979, the place was still a working watermen's town with a few upscale spots like Longfellows, not today's bivouac of boutiques and bistros where Washington warhorses make camp.
Alone in my quarters that November night, I returned to The Englishmen.
I heard a distant honking, as a flight of geese passed over Broad Creek and drove forward beneath the stars. The sound quickly faded far into the night. I waited expectantly for the coming and going of another flock of birds but there was only silence.
I was back beside Richard Saltwood, who helped the Xhosa in their national agony. In Michener's fictional story of The Englishmen, the major's aid to the stricken tribe brings him to the attention of Queen Victoria, who seeks his help with a settlement of Germans at the Cape, ex-mercenaries serving England in the Crimea. The major goes to London, where his royal commission makes him the darling of Punch magazine. He orchestrates the marriage of two hundred and forty legionnaires to brides scooped up in Portsmouth days before their ship sails for Africa. He lines them up on deck, men facing women, not a few of either sex listing to starboard. Starting at the top of each row, he pairs them off, for better, for worse, and sees them married on the spot. A Punch caricaturist strips Saltwood of his clothing, throws a diaper around his loins, and christens him “Cupid.”
I
had a special interest in the Great Hunt, for just over a century
later I stood on the same plains in the Eastern Free State. I pictured
the waves of rooigras sweeping across the veld and caught the thunder
of galloping herds of game, an echo from the past that soon slid into
the depths of my imagination. All I saw was the scarred earth with
a canyon-like donga tearing through the desolation. I was a reporter
for the
For the fictional Saltwood, there was a final royal commission that would earn him a knighthood. It was this mission that kept me working until the small hours that November night, after scrapping Michener's ideas for the section and composing a totally new narrative.
In Michener's version, Saltwood traveled as Queen Victoria's goodwill ambassador to Mzilikazi in Matabeleland, part of the country known today as Zimbabwe. Saltwood's journey north of the Limpopo River did nothing to advance the story or foreshadow major developments in the book. I chose instead to send Richard Saltwood back to British India where he served as a young man. He arrives at Madras eighteen months after the bloody Indian Mutiny. His commission is to contract laborers for the cane fields of Natal, a delicate negotiation in a crown colony still smoldering from the fires of insurrection...
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Introducing the Desai family fixed the Asian element in the South African crucible. There was another compelling reason for the story that went to the core of the work Jim and I did in our initial plotting sessions at St. Michaels in May 1978.
To depict contemporary apartheid, I came up with the idea of six vignettes involving people linked to past generations of families in the novel. In this manner, we would show how apartheid affected the lives of all citizens from the day you were born to the day you died.
Each section would deal with effects of a particular law, such as the Immorality Act that forbade sex between the races – Craig Saltwood, a descendant of Sir Richard, and a beautiful Coloured woman are trapped in bed by the Immorality Squad and punished for making love. – There was the Group Areas Act that determined where you could live. The law applied to all races but was mostly used to clean up so-called “black spots” that were a blot on areas mapped out for white occupation.
My rough notes from those early sessions show Michener and I discussing a notorious mass removal at Sophiatown in 1955, a black slum knocked down to make way for a housing tract for white Afrikaners that would be called Triomf, Triumph.
On the day the bulldozers move in, two Indians watch the destruction from a hill. Barney Patel and Peter Desai, later re-named “Woodrow” by Jim, live in nearby Pageview, a “Coolie location” granted to Indians seventy years earlier by President Paul Kruger of the Boer republic.
In showing how the Desais got to South Africa, I provided the ideal antecedent for Woodrow, grandson of one of the brothers, who came to work on the Natal cane fields. Woodrow's father moves to Johannesburg, where the family establishes a thriving grocery store and builds a fine house in Pageview. Woodrow is apprehensive as he witnesses the destruction of Sophiatown. He fears that the same blow will fall on the Indian community. He's right, for not long after this, Pageview's five thousand residents are ordered to pack up and move to Lenasia, a ghetto twenty-two miles away.
My Saltwood-Desai story appears here as I wrote it. Michener edited my words before he typed them up and pasted them into his manuscript. I kept my notes and drafts for the Desais, as well as other major writing I did for the novel. – The title came to me as I was compiling notes from our first planning session. – I held on to every scrap of paper in the sure knowledge that one day I would sit down and tell the story of my collaboration with Jim Michener on The Covenant II The Assignment
I arrived in the United States nine months before meeting James Michener, my passage to these shores paid by Reader's Digest. I joined the Digest in London in 1969 after working on newspapers in Johannesburg, Cape Town and London. In 1972 I was appointed the first editor-in-chief of the Digest's South African edition and held the post for five years before being offered a position as senior international editor at the magazine's headquarters in Chappaqua, New York.
At noon one day, five months after putting down roots at the Digest's head office, I stood outside the main entrance of the handsome red brick Georgian building waiting for a fellow editor who invited me to stroll through the grounds with him.
Fulton Oursler, Jr., the magazine's managing editor, liked to exercise between a miniature orchard that appeared overnight on the grounds years earlier, full-grown and bearing fruit. God's little apple trees, one editor called the miraculous plantings, only one small corner of a glorious landscape with oaks and dogwoods and fields of blooms, a veritable Eden with eighty rolling acres of lawns, gardens and orchards. Another wag suggested that this paradise showed “what God could do if He had money.”
Illustrations from Pictures from Pleasantville, An Armchair Visit to The Reader's Digest, 1976 It was an honor to be invited to join Oursler on his lunchtime walk. Since arriving I'd spent time with other occupants of Murderers' Row, where editors made final cuts to “thirty-one articles of enduring value and interest” that filled the magazine every month. Practiced hands like Roy Herbert, a nimble-witted poet who came directly to the Digest from Princeton twenty years before. I recall Herbert bent over the desk in his office, editing a twenty-page manuscript. He sucked an empty pipe as he worked, a crutch against his cravings, battling an evil second only to communism in Digest demonology. Roy was condensing an art-of-living piece, Make Way for Minnows, delivering one masterstroke after another, casting out entire paragraphs, scattering minnows in every direction until twenty manuscript pages were reduced to three. “A nice little one-pager,” Roy said and took a great pull on the pot-bellied briar.
The
bells in the cupola were still ringing, when Fulton Oursler Jr. met
me outside the entrance, wearing a pair of ancient plimsolls stained
“Tony,” he was called to distinguish him from Fulton Oursler Sr., who'd been an editor and writer for the magazine in the 1940s. Tony's father reached Murderers' Row with blood on his hands having written About The Murder of the Clergyman's Mistress and seven other wildly popular detective novels under the pen name “Anthony Abbot.” He battled his way up from Baltimore's slums as a reporter and became the right-hand of Bernarr Macfadden, an early twentieth-century health guru whose quest for “the most perfectly developed man in America” was the father of all bodybuilding contests. Macfadden's Physical Culture magazine – Motto: “Weakness is a Crime; Don't Be a Criminal”—“Postpone Your Own Funeral” – read by hundreds of thousands of muscle-flexing males was launch-pad for a publishing empire that included True Story and True Romance and a newspaper, New York Evening Graphic.(“I Murdered My Wife Because She Cooked Fish Balls for Dinner;” “Three Women Lashed in Nude Orgy!” “He Beat Me–I Love Him.”) With Macfadden's acquisition of Liberty, Fulton Sr. ran the third-biggest magazine in the country, the high-water mark of his editing career. Self-educated, his most profound learning experience was as a simple pilgrim in Palestine. Almost literally on the road to Damascus, Fulton Sr. had an epiphany that turned him from religious skeptic to a believer who found in the passion of Christ, his own lifework, The Greatest Story Ever Told. He wrote what he called “an elevator boy's life of Jesus,” a popular telling of the story that sold millions of copies.
Tony was in his mid-forties and had the appearance of a well-scrubbed choirboy, despite the grimy shoes. There was zeal in Tony's dedication to the ideals of DeWitt Wallace and Lila Acheson Wallace, founders of Reader's Digest. Since 1922, when the first issue asked, “Can We Have A Beautiful Race?” – An article that agonized over ugly women in America, “especially the type built like draft horses and arriving in the millions at Ellis Island.” – the Wallaces strove to make the world a better and more beautiful place. Tony carried on the good fight, especially in thwarting communists, a cold war editor whose writers cast a wide net for Soviet spies and plotters with the same ardor as Fulton Sr.'s Liberty men exposed Nazis in Brazil and Argentina.
As we walked between the apple trees, Tony quizzed me about Reds in South Africa. Was there a Party? Blacks? Whites? Was Moscow involved?
I said the Communist Party was banned in the early Fifties. The South African government severed ties with the U.S.S.R and kicked out the Russian embassy.
“Pretoria still sees a communist behind every bush. They blame Moscow for stirring up blacks across the continent.”
“Is there going to be a revolution?”
For as long as I could remember, I said, there was talk of a bloodbath. It hadn't happened yet.
“What's preventing it?”
A simple answer was the might of South Africa's security forces, its army was the most powerful in Africa, its secret police the most dreaded.
“It's more than the iron fist,” I added. “The Afrikaner believes apartheid is God's plan for South Africa. Go to any Dutch Reformed Church on a Sunday. You'll find it packed with worshippers. Their families have been in Africa for three hundred years. They rejoice in a promised land.”
I sensed Tony's mounting interest as we roamed the orchard, where not long before a flock of local geese had come to forage on apples that fell from the trees. A Digest executive responsible for the grounds tore out of his office and rushed around pell-mell sending geese flying. Bird lovers on the staff expressed outrage at the man's attacks. This inspired some editors to write a fictitious letter of complaint from a woman said to live at a pond where the geese made their home. “I was so mad at your Mr. So-and-So that I wished those birds would peck him on his you know what,” said the dame. The missive ruffled the feathers of higher-ups who took pains to maintain pleasant relations with Digest neighbors. Down came an order that the geese were to be allowed as many apples as they were tempted to take. – Experience taught Tony to exchange his Florsheims for battered plimsolls before venturing between God's little apple trees.
Time passed quickly as I spoke about the history of the Afrikaners. Their forbears shared much in common with American pioneers. They trekked into the wilderness with their wagons, their guns and their Bibles, and a messianic faith in the destiny of their people. Again and again, their God forsook them and they were hammered in bloody battles with Xhosa and Zulu. They gathered the remnants of their volk and moved on until a day when they were victorious. Their struggling republics were just getting on their feet when the Anglo-Boer War broke out. Their armies battled the British Empire to the bitter end and when all was lost their commandos stayed in the field, the first guerillas of modern time.
When our walk ended, Tony wanted to hear more about South Africa. “Let's have lunch next week.”
Lunch
at the Digest ran the full gamut from a dash for the cafeteria
when the doors swung open at eleven-thirty to a command performance
at
If the Guest House was booked, a Digester could take a visitor to the White Horse Tap Room or other local restaurant. I remember how surprised I was when first I stepped from broad daylight into the perpetual midnight of Mario's Trattoria, in the Seventies healthy living having yet to take its toll on the three-martini lunch. At Mario's or some such name, the décor was red plush, the walls rimmed with a trompe d'oeil of Roman urns and pilasters. Some patrons were already beginning to sip watered-down wine spritzers, but my Digest colleagues clung to their old habits. No sooner did we sink into the banquettes than our drinks came, Bloody Marys in goblets the size of flower vases.
I lunched with Tony at a Chinese restaurant in Mt. Kisco, sitting over a flaming hibachi heaped with egg rolls and chicken wings, spare ribs and pork strips. Tony was no stranger to the Café des Artistes and other glories of France in expense account Manhattan but confessed that he liked nothing better than to chew the fat over a pu-pu platter.
“The timing is perfect for a book on South Africa,” he said immediately.
I couldn't agree more. I'd been brooding over a South African novel for a long time and had brought a bulging file of notes with me to America. In the months before leaving Cape Town, I haunted bookstores and scoured market stalls on the Grand Parade for hundreds of works. – The shelves in Michener's study at St. Michaels would come to be filled with this eclectic collection of Africana.
It was an exciting lunch as we tossed around ideas for a novel that would appeal to American readers. I saw a different Tony from the quintessential Digest man who would be keeper of the kingdom of DeWitt Wallace. He was after all the son of Anthony Abbot who weaved complex plots around his hero Thatcher Colt, police commissioner of New York City, a super sleuth hunting the villains who slew the Clergyman's Mistress. It wasn't beyond Fulton Oursler Sr. to bring a tribe of “Ubangis” from Darkest Africa to shed light on the evils men did in the heart of the Big Apple.
A sparkle came to Tony's eye as we spoke of diamonds and gold and thunder on the veld, and all the other possibilities we saw in the story of South Africa. There were man-apes and battles between Australopithecus and Pithecanthropus; Bushmen, Hottentots, Strandlopers and Bantu migrants; Phoenician voyagers, Arab slavers and Portuguese navigators; Dutch East India Company men, French Huguenots and English settlers; Griquas, Xhosas, Zulus and Matabele.
We began 65,000,000 years ago and moved through the eons when the living veld was still a paradise uninhabited by man, and on to the 1970s when time was running out for the white tribe of Africa.
How to tie all this together? The answer lay in the soft, waxy kimberlite, a blue-colored volcanic rock that flowed to the surface at the end of the Cretaceous period. Trapped in the kimberlitic pipes was the richest diamond ever found, which Tony and I called “Star of Man.” From its creation to its discovery and sale – to the Shah of Iran! – the diamond served as link to stories of men and women whose lives were touched by the gem.
“I'll put my thoughts on paper,” I told Tony. I leapt at the chance to begin work on a novel I'd been dreaming about for years, but there was a catch and I was aware of it. The magazine hadn't brought me to America to write books. I was to experience life at the hub of the Digest universe. I was to know the agony of the ladies of “Laughter, the Best Medicine,” their days spent delving through thousands of letters for one sweet bon mot. I would work in the New York aerie of the Digest's hawk-eyed fact-checkers. I was to hone my skills with the great pencil men of Pleasantville who could cut anything down to size, even the most holy of books in Christendom. “Do all this, young man, and you'll be ready for the supreme test.” I would serve as issue editor choosing the Table of Contents for eighteen million Americans who read the magazine every month. Win the hearts and minds of this vast multitude and I would be ready to take on the world. Literally, for I was being groomed for a role as an international editor, a post on which the sun never set with one hundred and seventy countries then penetrated by the Digest .
I
Tony liked my notes for the South African book.
“Who can we get to write this?”
When Tony asked this question, I remained mum. Like many journalists who would be authors, I had my share of unpublished manuscripts hammered out while working at newspaper jobs. I said nothing about my hopes of becoming a novelist knowing what the answer would be.
Instead I heard Tony say: “It's a subject that could interest Jim Michener.”
Michener was among a galaxy of writers edited by Oursler, including Alex Haley, whose quest for Roots was backed by the Digest, Lowell Thomas, Theodore H. White, Henry Hurt, and Edward J. Epstein. Jim had been writing for the magazine since the early Fifties, handpicked by DeWitt Wallace who wanted him to join the staff. He opted to remain independent but contributed dozens of articles as a Digest roving editor and wrote several Digest-sponsored books. Tony was instrumental in Michener's Kent State, which investigated the May 1970 shootings at the university in Kent, Ohio.
Michener was seventy-one in April 1978 at the apex of a writing career that won him millions of readers worldwide. I'd run magazine articles by Jim in the Digest's South African edition and like millions had picked up his books. I'd read The Source, his novel about Israel, and his American epic, Centennial. I found The Source a marvelous book. I especially admired the way Michener unfolded a story of biblical proportions, layer by layer as his fictional archaeologists excavated Tell Makor in the Holy Land. The dig provides the structure and timeline from Level I that yields a bullet fired from a British rifle around 1950 to Level XV where twelve thousand years earlier the son of Ur the hunter fashions the first sickle with five flints wedged in a curved bone, four of the razor-sharp stones found at Tell Makor.
It was mid-March before Tony sat down with Michener and broached the idea of a South African book. They met in New York, where Jim and his editors at Random House were correcting final proofs for Chesapeake. Tony told Michener how our idea for The Star of Man was born and offered some background about me.
I can picture Jim studying Tony as he spoke, an expression I would often see, a far, far away look that told you the mills of James A. Michener's mind were grinding away, stripping the waste, sifting the detritus, picking out the lodestone.
“I've been thinking casually about such a project for several years,” Michener said. “I'd like to meet your man and learn what's on his mind.”
A week later Tony hosted a second lunch with Michener which I attended, the three of us getting together in the wood-paneled elegance of the University Club, a Renaissance palazzo on the sunny corner of 54th Street and Fifth Avenue. We sat in the great red and gold lounge where New York's finest clubmen gathered, the news of the world spread out across their laps, an older member nodding off here and there. Here and there, too, a dress or skirt might be spotted. Women were admitted as guests and allowed to eat off the club's plates and drink its highballs but forbidden membership, a ban that would survive for another decade.
Jim and I hit it off immediately, just how well I would find out as our working relationship grew but within minutes of sitting down, we were away and running. Or, I should say I was, for Jim did the listening and I, the talking. He'd been thinking casually about a South African book since meeting the country's warring tribes seven years earlier. I was ten years old when I wrote Revenge, a forty-page settler saga penned on the back of worthless share certificates tossed out by my mother.
I look at this grim tale in the pencil strokes of a child's hand (and a lot grimmer it gets, too, as vengeful Jan de Cilliers leads a murderous attack on the Xhosa) and I think of the boy who would come to share a thousand stories with Jim Michener a quarter-century later. The setting of Revenge and The Englishmen are the same but to get from one to the other was more than a journey in time and place. I had to leave the laager and seek a path beyond a dry stony veld that hardened the hearts of many in South Africa.
From the time I saw my first article in print – Happiness is an Unprejudiced Mind – to this day, I've considered one attribute paramount for a writer: enthusiasm, to have passion, the entheos of the Greeks, to be possessed by a god. At the University Club that day, I raced from one topic to the next and leapt from century to century with seven league boots and nine muses flying along with me.
Michener
had spent a month in South Africa in October 1971 and earlier made
short trips to Mozambique and Angola. Out of his South African sojourn
had come a ten-page New York Times Magazine article, “The
Five the world, Herman and Ann Silverman. The first the Silvermans, who were friends for fifty years, knew of Mari Yoriko Sabusawa was when they picked up a copy of Life magazine in a Rome hotel in the fall of 1955 and saw pictures of the couple's wedding in Chicago. Jim had driven them to the airport three weeks earlier without saying a word about Mari and their impending nuptials.
Michener's trip to South Africa in 1971 left him with as good a picture of the country as any visiting writer, including his exposure to irrationalities of so-called “petty” apartheid, as opposed to the grand plan for separating the different tribes. He encountered bizarre rules such as one that permitted whites and blacks to play tennis together on private property, provided the court wasn't visible from the street where passersby might glimpse the match. But our first meeting revealed that Jim also had a long trek to make across that stony veld before he came to know the people living there.
There was, for example, his perception of the Zulus. On his 1971 visit, he toured Kwazulu in Natal province, the tribal homeland created under grand apartheid. The New York Times feature has a photo of Jim on a gold mine outside Johannesburg watching Zulu miners perform traditional dances, their work clothes exchanged for furs and skins. The dances delighted tourists though not nearly as much as the Zulus themselves, for like today's hip-hop generation, the songs of the foot-stomping miners jabbed at the belly of umLungu, the white man.
“My thinking is to bypass Natal and the Zulus,” Michener said at lunch. He wanted to do justice to the black tribes and planned to focus on the Xhosas. “I can get all the value I want out of them.” The only interest he had in the Zulus lay in the fact that they'd driven the Xhosas south to the Cape frontier, where his readers would find them.
I remember telling Jim about my heritage, adopted and raised by an Afrikaner family whose roots went back to the Voortrekkers and long before the Boer migration. My line of Uys's were related by marriage to the Voortrekker commander at the Battle of Blood River. My mother, Hester Johanna Maria Uys, was seven when the British invaded the Boer republics: she survived two years in concentration camps at Bloemfontein and in the Cape Colony.
Hester Johanna Maria "Joey" Uys, age 4
A decade after penning my childhood Revenge, I was sitting with Joey Uys taking notes as I listened to my mother's stories of the African veld. “Dammit, Errol, must you ask me all these questions?” Joey would complain. “Yes, mother.” Whether we spoke about an Orange Free State farm in the nineteenth century or the English prison camps, the notes I kept show just how persistent I was.
“So many questions, my boy," my mother said. "Why are you asking me all these things?” Today I know the answer. So did James Michener, who never met the child of the veld, though her story came to mean so much to him.
Michener, Oursler and I left the University Club that March day with a loose plan on what to do next. Jim was going to give serious attention to a South African epic. Tony's mission was to find a modus operandi between Reader's Digest and Jim's publisher, Random House. I was to continue polishing my outline.
I'd no part in talks between the Digest, Random House and Michener's agent at William Morris Inc. They agreed that Michener would engage my services as editor/researcher and pick up my Digest salary and expenses for as long as he needed me. No monies would pass hands, the fee to be written-off against future payments by the magazine for rights to Michener's book.
The negotiations were still underway when I finished my outline and sent it to Jim at St. Michaels in late April 1978. He replied immediately:
It was the beginning of my covenant with James A. Michener.
|
“We've
chosen Nongqause to be Voice of the Spirits. You, my brother, will
guide the child.” 
raucous, honking birds dropped down to the marshes. Some bands landed
on the lawn below the cottage, where pickings were few and disappointing
and the geese had a way of showing their disgust.
Fifth Avenue. Every year I joined the pitchmen at the Rand Easter
Show, the country's premier exposition, pushing anything from teddy
bears to “miracle” bottle openers. As teenagers, Michener and I both
hit the road and stuck out our thumbs hitchhiking thousands of miles
around our countries, beginning the journeys that would see us walking
together that November evening in 1979. 
When
Queen Victoria sends sixteen-year-old Alfred, the Sailor Prince, on
the first royal visit to the Cape in 1860, Her Majesty asks Saltwood
to keep an eye on Affie. The major escorts the prince on a grand battue
that took place on a plain east of Bloemfontein. A thousand beaters
drove tens of thousands of animals across the veld, black and blue
wildebeest, Burchell's zebras, quaggas, ostriches, blesbok, hartebeest
and springbok, herd after herd charging toward the guns of the prince's
party. Six thousand animals died in the slaughter, the only regret
for the huntsmen being Affie's failure to bag a single lion. 
Johannesburg 
The
bells of a Flemish carillon in a cupola began a medley of inspirational
music. I looked up and beheld four winged horses poised to take flight
to the four corners of the earth. I felt a thrill gazing up at Pegasus,
symbol of Reader's Digest, spirit of the Muses and war-horse
on whose back Bellerophon rode against the Chimaera. 
with dirt. Before we took one step, a cigarette was in his mouth and
he continued to chain-smoke as we roamed between God's little apple
trees. 
the
Guest House, an eighteenth-century farmhouse beyond the orchard. A
Guest House lunch was no picnic, as I discovered years before when
making my first visit to Pleasantville as an overseas editor.
I sat at a handsome Hepplewhite dining table with five senior Digesters,
who quizzed me about everything under the African sun, an inquisition
that lasted an hour with so many questions to answer I could eat but
few mouthfuls and sip one drink. I'd been warned that asking for a
refill was hazardous to the health of a fledgling editor. 
used the working title The Star of Man and planned a novel
with ten major characters linked to the diamond, their multi-generational
story coming down through the ages to a dramatic finale with the sale
of the precious stone at Christies in New York. I spent the Christmas
holidays drafting an outline, which I readied early in the New Year
and took to Tony. I went back to my office far down the corridor from
Murderer's Row and eagerly awaited his reaction. 
Warring
Tribes of Africa.” (New York Times, Jan 23,1972.) I was not
to know of the existence of this article until I began work on these
notes about The Covenant. Jim never mentioned it to me, a
curious omission but not out of character. He held things so close
to his chest that when he was courting Mari, he kept his love a secret
from his two best pals in 
I
can't recall exactly how I put it, for I was after all a minnow swimming
in waters deep as the ocean sea. I told Jim that it was impossible
to write a book such as we had in mind without the Zulus. What of
Shaka, the black Napoleon who forged a warrior nation out of a patchwork
of Nguni clans? And Dingane, his treacherous half-brother, a bloodthirsty
tyrant who murdered Shaka and sat on the throne when the Voortrekkers,
the Boer pioneers, crossed into Natal? What of Blood River where the
Boers made a vow of obedience to God on the eve of battle, four hundred
and sixty four against twelve and a half thousand Zulus? What took
place on the morning of December 16, 1838 was the defining moment
for the Afrikaner people, a victory that determined their future in
a land they believed God set apart for them. 
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