through a sometimes patchy mobile network, his cheap, battered cellphone, and my old-model BlackBerry. We both spoke too fast. Easy’s English wasn’t great, and my Xhosa was nonexistent. When we hung up, I suspected neither of us had the first idea of what had just happened. Sometimes, he raised and dashed my hopes in a matter of seconds.
“I cannot meet today, but let’s make a plan,” he said one Friday.
“Great! What’s the plan?”
“The plan is, you call me Monday. Then we see what’s happening.”
I tracked him doggedly, finding him a few times only by pure luck. He was at once the best-natured and most unreliable person I’d ever dealt with. We would arrange to meet at noon on any given day, and I would arrive at the spot, usually near his office in town. In the best-case scenario, Easy showed up two hours late. In the usual scenario, he did not show up at all. In the worst-case scenario, he not only did not show up, but his phone would be off for the next week. There were excuses, delivered kindly: His boss sent him to Main Street in a suburb, but this particular suburb had a “Main Street” and a “Main Street Road,” and he could not figure out which was which, and for that reason, he’d been AWOL for three hours. His daughter had “fever”—later I’d find that the majority of township illnesses were referred to in English, generically, either as “fever” or “high blood”—and needed the doctor immediately. He was under stress from work. He was under stress from his family. He would be there in ten minutes. In another ten minutes. Just ten more minutes. But ten minutes never meant ten minutes. It meant, “Wait there,” or “Don’t be mad, buddy,” or “I can’t deal with you now.”
Easy called this “African time.” It derived from ancestral rituals, he explained, in which Africans welcomed their ancestors to traditional ceremonies. You couldn’t very well rush an ancestor, he said, so you had to just wait around until the ancestor showed up. Also, consider transportation issues.
“There can be problems, there can face obstacles.” Your horse could collapse, for example. And if your horse collapsed, you’d be pretty late.
“Easy, I don’t see you riding around on a horse.”
He tried a more timeless and convenient explanation: “African time is, you’re not guilty. If we invite you at one, we can also start at two or three. When you arrive, we’re not mad. You are there.”
So when the opportunity to see Easy—better yet, to hold him captive in my car so he could not escape and would have to talk to me—presented itself, I did my best to push aside any nagging doubts. I drove in the shadow of Lion’s Head peak, veered left to stay on the N2, past the stinky old power plant and the trash-strewn fields, past Cape Town’s first township, Langa, and the shacks on its outskirts, past the Joe Slovo Village of cement apartment blocks overlooking the highway beneath a faded billboard offering affordable housing that the advertisement promised would provide that ever-elusive “DIGNITY,” past the broken-down horses grazing highway-side on the outskirts of Bonteheuwel. I turned off the N2 as directed and veered left along a barren strip of dry field. People were crossing the road at a clip, clutching each other’s arms, as cars sped through. My palms were moist now, my back damp. Everything looked foreign and incomprehensible. An otherworldly junk dealer with dreadlocks, blue eyes, and gigantic silver hoop earrings rode atop old bed frames and scrap metal piled high on a horse-drawn cart. A newspaper vendor at the stoplight held up the Daily Sun, an English-language tabloid with a multimillion-strong, almost entirely black readership. Today’s headline: PROPHET BURNT TO DEATH.
An ancient man with a dent in his head limped to the car window, hands out, eyes vacant. I shook my head, as though I could do nothing for him despite my most sincere wishes to help. The light changed to green and I turned into Gugulethu. Here was the Shoprite Center Amy had once passed. It contained a liquor store owned by Chinese immigrants, a KFC, a hardware store that advertised an array of gun safes, and a halal butchery, the slogan of which was “Where the Rainbow Nation Meat.” Inside the actual Shoprite supermarket, where guards armed with machine guns stood at the doors to stem the tide of perpetual stickups, a bulletin board was plastered with signs offering “cash in a flash :-) … forward ID number, income, and name,” as well as a “mobile fridge for hire … for weddings, funeral, church event and much more,” and pleas for work:
My name is Thelma Ima Zimbabwe Im looking for a job any job household to look after children Im 24 years old.
My name is vuyadwethu. I’m xhosa girl. I’m 32 years old. I’m looking for kind of job like clean house or looking after children. The language I understand is English and Afrikaans. But I’m not perfect. I will be glad when you call me. I really need a job Thanks
Looking for a job trainee cook book keeper c work house maid
I knew Easy, I reminded myself. But then I started to wonder: do we really know anybody at all? Perhaps this was a game, and I was the all-too-willing pawn, lured straight into a bloody setup. Witnesses in Gugulethu kept their traps shut. There is very little worse than to be considered an impimpi, or snitch. In the old days—and still, in the far unseen reaches of the vigilante-controlled settlements where cops dare not set foot—groups would “necklace” a suspected impimpi or a thief or anyone tried and convicted in the local kangaroo courts. The grimly euphemistic necklace is, in fact, a gasoline-soaked tire that is secured around a victim’s neck and set alight.
Nobody knew me in this part of the woods. I thought of all the terrible rumors I’d heard about the townships; I had dismissed them, though I also had evidently absorbed them. Wasn’t this the Wild West? Was anyone safe here? And didn’t Easy once get sentenced to eighteen years in prison for the stoning and stabbing death of a young white woman?
Then I saw Easy standing at the bus stop, waving at me, and I slowed. He was wearing a pressed teal and navy striped button-down shirt tucked into gray trousers. There were some folks waiting for the bus, mostly heavyset grandmas in long skirts, laden with grocery bags. There were a few kids holding hands with each other, a baby tied on his mom’s back with a bath towel, a woman reading a book, some teenage boys kicking a soccer ball down the street. An elderly man in a newsboy cap was selling fruit beneath a ragged umbrella. A wave of pedestrians, some in high heels and some in slippers, passed back and forth from the Shoprite and over the bridge into Gugulethu. A few girls had clay smeared over their faces to protect their skin from the sun. Nobody noticed me, as far as I could tell.
Easy got in. He slumped in the seat and sneezed loudly. His nose was stuffy, his eyes puffy.
“I have flu,” he announced, sniffling. “When you have flu, you need your mom to help, to listen your cough.”
A young couple walked by, arms wrapped around each other, eating ice cream. I felt a tear of salty sweat trickle down my chest and settle in my belly button.
When I first arrived in Cape Town, I wore a sapphire-and-rose-gold engagement ring on my left ring finger, and when I passed black men on the street, I unconsciously turned the ring inward, so that the stone pointed at my palm. I tried to change the behavior, but even when I left the ring just as it was, I still felt that hot urge, as involuntary as a reflex. Soon, I took the ring off and put it in the safe in our seaside rental apartment, since almost every South African home has a safe welded into the back of a closet. But no matter. Today, I didn’t need a circle of precious metal to expose me, if only to myself; the drive to Gugulethu had done the trick. I offered Easy a tissue and we turned back toward town.
That day, Easy and I sat on a café patio across from the ocean. The clientele at lunch hour was mostly rich moms in yoga pants; their
