male preacher, dressed in a heavy robe, took over.
“You are here for a reason, Amy was here for a reason,” he said to Linda. “We wish you a good day and we will always remember you in our prayers.”
“Amen,” said the ladies.
I looked around for Easy, then recalled that he was allergic to churches, and so probably would not make an appearance after all. Then again, he sometimes, without great enthusiasm, talked about how Jesus died for his sins, which usually signaled that his evangelical uncle had succeeded in dragging him to a service. So perhaps Easy was, more accurately, allergic not to churches but to the annual memorials to Amy that were held in churches. A year earlier, to the day, at a Catholic church nearby, I had also looked up from the service to find Easy missing. I’d slipped out of the pew and found him pacing nervously on the lawn. He took me into a back room and showed me a bare wall, where local kids used to watch projector movies; he was a sentimentalist, and he remembered, with characteristic nostalgia, not having the five-cent admission fee and sneaking in through a bathroom window.
Now, as the women sang hymns, I went outside to look for Easy, but he was gone, and he had taken the van. I stood in the sunlight, trying to get warm. August is chilly in Cape Town, winter in the Southern Hemisphere. A gray-haired white lady was cutting hearts out of fabric on a bench nearby, assisted by a pretty black teenage girl who called her Grandma. They offered me a heart and a safety pin decorated with colorful beads.
“They symbolize love over violence,” the girl explained as I stuck the pin to my sweater.
Some months earlier, the country had been in an uproar about Anene Booysen, a plain-looking brown-skinned seventeen-year-old from a poor Western Cape town who was gang-raped and disemboweled on an abandoned construction site. An even more newsworthy victim, and one who would captivate the nation’s attention for years to come, was Reeva Steenkamp, the radiant blond thirty-year-old model and reality TV star shot to death through a bathroom door by her boyfriend, the Olympian and double-amputee Oscar Pistorius. These fabric hearts, the lady said, honored Anene and Reeva and Amy, too, and all the thousands of women injured, murdered, and violated by men each year.
I wandered down NY1 to Amy’s memorial statue, by the Caltex gas station and garage where she was killed. From across the street, I could see the dry grass, the old cars piled up for repair, the low stone wall that had long ago replaced the white fence that Amy had leaned on during the attack. The memorial statue was a slick gray marble cross erected in 2010 by the Fulbright Foundation, unveiled to vague fanfare by the U.S. ambassador at the time. On the base of the memorial, carved into stone in elegant capitals, were the words:
AMY BIEHL
26 APRIL 1967 - 25 AUGUST 1993
KILLED IN AN ACT OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE.
AMY WAS A FULBRIGHT SCHOLAR AND TIRELESS HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST.
A disheveled old man usually spent his days leaning against the cross, sleeping rough with his three dogs, but the man had been temporarily relocated to a nearby field. I spotted Ntobeko standing on the pavement above, by the gas pumps. His childhood nickname was Blacks, for he was so dark-skinned that from afar his features were hard to make out. Up close, he was a rotund, somber-looking man in his late thirties, with a narrow face and a weak chin. His head was shaved and rubbed with lotion. His small, glistening eyes were intelligent and suspicious, his nose long and Roman. He was neither tall nor short, and he wore his black Amy Biehl Foundation logo polo shirt stretched tight over his expansive belly.
Ntobeko used to be the scrawniest kid, a pencil neck sticking out of an oversized T-shirt, often borrowed. Now he owned a home, the chicken wholesale business, and two minivans that he used to transport upwardly mobile township children to schools in the city or the suburbs. He was married to his childhood sweetheart and had three daughters. He was a manager, which in Gugulethu held a grand allure—no longer was he merely bossed around, no, finally he got to do the bossing. Ntobeko ate meat nearly every day. His old friends to whom he no longer spoke remembered that he had been a naughty kid who ran around the streets and lived in a tiny house full of extended family. He would miss his household curfew and supper, and find himself locked out for the night. “He was a wild boy who slept in the trees,” one such friend once told me. Ntobeko saw me from across the road and, as always, averted his gaze.
Ntobeko was helping two other foundation staffers arrange a group of children before two marimbas. Marimbas are wooden xylophone-like instruments that originated in Africa and were introduced by sixteenth-century slaves to Latin America, where they were redesigned and spread around the world. A few kids were expertly hitting the bars with mallets, the chimes whipped up into the wind. A chorus swayed behind them, biding their time, singing halfheartedly. I turned back and went to wait outside the church.
Soon, the doors opened and Linda followed the stream of churchgoers. She wore a black pleated skirt, just above the knee, a black top, black pumps, a coral blazer, and a silk coral scarf. Her hair was, as always, perfect: short, angular, gleaming white-blond, and stick-straight.
A ragtag group of people gathered around her, comprised of a couple of academics Amy had known when she studied in Cape Town; the ambulance driver who had tried unsuccessfully to treat Amy as she died; the fabric-heart-making lady and girl; the reporter for Linda’s hometown paper and the photographer who accompanied her; some Los Angeles–based college graduates making a short film starring black South Africans whose hope against all odds would stun and inspire any audience; several people involved in some form of media; and Nancy Scheper-Hughes, the anthropologist who had introduced Easy and Ntobeko to the Biehls.
Nancy was an elfin sixty-something woman with a pert nose and short gray hair; she radiated a nervous intellectual energy. She was a woman molded by the 1960s free love movement, who tended toward all views radically left-wing and, “being an old Wobbly socialist,” actually celebrated Labor Day. Nancy had been working at the University of Cape Town when Amy was killed, though she’d left the country soon after. Back then, Nancy had joined a band of furious women of all different races and marched the streets of Gugulethu in protest, waving placards demanding that the brutality cease. Now Nancy and her husband had flown out from California, carrying the old cardboard signs from that 1993 peace march, which Nancy had saved for all these years and handed out to anyone who wanted one. Nancy was the director of the Program of Medical Anthropology at UC Berkeley, and had published three books significant in her field, but she appeared not to mind bad spelling: a couple of the handwritten signs read STOP THE SENCELESS VIOLENCE and AMY BIEHL, OUR COMERADE.
The small group walked down the street toward the marimba music. Linda wore her sunglasses; she would have made a great first lady, at once regal and Midwestern, warm but removed, with the looks of an aging, corn-fed beauty queen. Everyone followed. Locals, sitting on low walls and smoking on milk crates, watched with little interest. A young man in long shorts stood outside the TyreMan Tyre Shop and clapped without knowing why.
Ntobeko, who saw the group coming, walked slowly away, expertly disappearing into the township. His daughter, the little girl in purple, grabbed Linda’s hand tightly. She wasn’t even in kindergarten, but she knew the drill. The full-color image promptly appeared in The Orange County Register, accompanying a story on love and reconciliation in South Africa:
Linda Biehl, front left, walks with Avile Peni, 3, the daughter of one of the four men convicted and imprisoned for her daughter Amy Biehl’s death on August 25, 1993.
The group arrived at the marble cross, the kids stopped playing, and everyone briefly grappled with what to do next. Somebody had placed upon the memorial a blown-up old photo of the late Peter Biehl, a smiling, white-haired man with the chunked-out build of a retired college football player, flanked by a young
