in prison. Since they’d left prison, they hadn’t had a penny to their names. The Biehls bought four tickets to an IMAX film about water, and then the group wandered around the adjacent BMW dealership, admiring the shiny cars until showtime. After that, the Biehls bought four tickets to Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. Linda fell asleep during the movie. It was too late for the men to catch a taxi, so the Biehls drove into the township at night and deposited the men at their homes.
The next morning, Easy called Linda at her hotel to inform her that, in a rare turn of events, a small tornado had swept through the township in the early morning hours, flattening shacks. He was checking to see that the Biehls had gotten back safely. He also wished to tell the Biehls that his family was furious at him, since Ntobeko had returned home with leftover nachos to share, while Easy had returned empty-handed. The legend of the doggie bag had then been disseminated through the families and has endured. Years later, while dining with Easy and Ntobeko and their relatives, Linda once excused herself to go to the restroom; when she returned, her meal, which she had not finished, was boxed up and sitting in front of one of the guests.
The Biehls developed a warm relationship with Easy and Ntobeko, which they maintained felt entirely natural. They took them to dozens of restaurants, taught them how to tip, introduced them to wine. Soon, they employed the two men to work at the foundation they had established in Amy’s name.
The Amy Biehl Foundation, initially funded largely by the American government, was supposed to work to prevent violence, create jobs, develop the area, provide food, and offer recreation opportunities within Cape Town’s townships. But these days, the foundation focused on after-school classes for local kids. The staff taught dance and reading and music, and handed out jam sandwiches.
Over time, Ntobeko rose in the ranks at the foundation. Without a high school degree, he began as a security guard on a bakery truck, but by 2013, Ntobeko was an office manager who lorded over the employees (most of them black), despairing at their lack of ambition, reading The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and idolizing Henry Ford. His old socialist days were long gone, and he was a capitalist now. He even had a couple of sidelines: school transport, wholesale chicken distribution, soft-serve ice cream, and a little wash-and-fold laundromat run from his garage. Easy, meanwhile, had risen from security guard to sports coordinator, and then had been dubbed unreliable and demoted to driver, a position he had accepted with resignation and relief.
The two men had grown up together. Ntobeko was a friend of Easy’s younger brother and had spent many nights at the Nofemela house. They had grown closer in prison and, bonded by the experience, spent a great deal of time together upon their release. But these days, with Ntobeko acting as Easy’s boss, the two only saw each other at work.
“We’re just colleagues, not friends,” Easy said. “If a person choose his own direction, I don’t blame him.”
The men visited the Biehls in America, and were invited to speak at conferences across the country. They were disappointed that they did not meet many of “the Black Americans,” whom Easy expected—as per a lifetime of watching TV shows and movies, particularly Big Momma’s House, starring the “great actor and great guy” Martin Lawrence—to say things like, “Yeah, mah maaannn, wussup, mah maaannn!” and “Mudderfucker!” Easy and Ntobeko preferred the New Jersey suburbs to the towering New York buildings, and once looked upon a swath of untamed Massachusetts land and noted that they could build an African village there. They were pleased to stay near a Manhattan police station, which they referred to as “NYPD Blue” and had their snapshots taken with mustachioed cops. Easy discovered that his favorite cuisine was the American buffet, which allowed a person to eat as much meat as desired for no additional fee. The men were impressed by hotels, and in particular, hotel bathrooms, which were the polar opposite of Gugulethu outhouses. During one trip, they took a series of photographs of each other dressed in color-coordinated b-boy outfits, lounging on the marble sink and striking a pose by the glass-encased shower. Easy kept these pictures, along with several stand-alone portraits of toilets and bathtubs, in a photo album.
After Peter died of aggressive colon cancer at age fifty-nine in 2002, Ntobeko and Easy helped arrange a Gugulethu memorial service in his honor. The two marched Linda around the township, one man on each arm, trailed by a crowd of mourners. As they had done before Peter’s death, the men continued to accompany Linda to paid engagements in Europe and the United States, where their relationship was held up as an example of the power of forgiveness, reconciliation, and redemption.
At least—with the exception of some blogs run by disapproving white-power enthusiasts who, upon relating Amy’s story, gleefully claimed, “liberalism can get you killed!”—that was how the story had always gone, repeated ad infinitum in over a thousand national and international newspaper and magazine articles, in award-winning documentaries, on talk shows, on radio shows, on TV shows. And why wouldn’t it? Its stars played their parts, and confirmed the arc and breadth of the distinct narrative: black South Africans, loving by nature but distorted into rampage by apartheid, who had been reformed and redeemed through the grace of an inspirational if puzzling pair of good-looking white Americans.
Now it was the twentieth anniversary of Amy’s death. Press interest had waned years ago. Before, the top journalists at major international papers had covered the ongoing story, but now the only foreign press was a reporter from Linda’s hometown paper, The Orange County Register, jotting down notes. During this trip, Linda had one radio interview, which was in turn picked up by a single website. The press had largely forgotten about Amy and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and were busy looking into the more immediate potty protests, during which angry township residents who wanted to relieve themselves in flush toilets instead of the communal sludge buckets they currently employed, had taken to throwing human feces at the mayor’s vehicle and dumping the contents of their latrines near Parliament. CAPE TOWN POO WARS, the BBC headline shouted.
Regardless, the people in St. Columba’s church that day were focusing on Amy’s too-brief life. The foundation loyalists, women who had known and worked for Linda for fifteen years, snuck into the church late, one with her hair tied into knots so tight that her scalp was pulled and red, one intently applying lip gloss with a wand. Ntobeko’s wife, wearing a pale gray skirt and top with her hair in ringlets, and their two older daughters in freshly pressed dresses, sat to the back. Ntobeko himself was not there. A haze of incense settled near the ceiling; I could feel the perfume spreading through my lungs.
“Jesus was a teacher, Jesus was a rector, Jesus was everything!” a lady preacher in colorful patterned Xhosa garb began.
“Yes!” said the congregants. They were mostly women, ranging in age from thirty to ninety, in African-print dresses, cardigans, shawls, blazers. A minority of men and children were scattered few and far between.
“Whom do I trust?” the preacher asked rhetorically. “Jesus!”
“Mmmm hmmm,” the ladies said.
The preacher launched into Xhosa, then reverted to English. She introduced Linda as “Amy Biehl’s mother.”
“Hiiii,” the ladies said in unison. In these parts, for the older generation, the name Amy Biehl required no explanation.
The preacher said she’d organized a speaker on the occasion of American guests but the speaker had disappointed her by bailing, so she herself would be speaking today. Don’t we all know about disappointment? Everyone nodded vigorously.
“Amy was a hero,” the preacher said uncertainly. She was winging it. “That was the plan of God. That she must die the way she did.” The preacher turned to Linda. “Thank you for having heart to show peace and love.”
“Amen,” the ladies said solemnly. Linda bowed her head slightly.
