her feisty reputation.
At tea the following morning, a cool spring day in May 2005, she found a Southerner’s preference for iced tea a wholly mysterious process but not in the slightest tempting. As conversation soon revealed, she was just as impatient with her nation’s shortcomings as she had been in the thirteen years when she was the only opposition member of Parliament, calling for division which sent Afrikaner colleagues stomping on tree-limb legs across the aisle to vote “Aye” on some travesty against human rights. A slight woman, alone in a sea of green benches, she was a burning splinter in the body of South Africa’s ruling National Party. But those days were long past. She was now nearing her eighty-eighth birthday, still energetic, capable of outrage but a caged tiger. She didn’t hide her frustration. “I don’t have the access that Parliament gave me,” adding, as if it had just occurred to her, “I think access may be the most important word in the English language.”
When we first met in Cape Town in 1977, she had already used her Parliamentary privileges to mount a hectoring campaign that so nettled the Justice Minister that he relented and allowed her to visit Robben Island. It is a barren spot of land in the bay about thirty rough minutes by jet boat from Cape Town where political prisoners were kept in cells that can only be described as cement boxes. It was she who introduced her country—and the world—to Nelson Mandela. And it was she who made it possible for books and writing paper to be brought to the tall man in Cell No. 5. Visitors to that desolate place today get an informed view of the rhythms of life on that barren rock because your guide will be a former inmate. They seem strangely detached, without resentment or visible emotion when describing, for instance, the stinking latrine dug out of a lime-pit wall as the only place prisoners could speak privately, because the guards would not enter. In the same passionless voice, guides speak of how Mandela would teach them about the moral power of nonviolence and advise his fellow prisoners to purge their hearts of hatred.
Only one other name is spoken of there: Helen Suzman.
On the day of our first meeting, freedom was years away for Mandela, and she was to speak in the morning as shadow Justice Minister for her minority party, the Progressive Party. I had just been introduced to her on the veranda of U.S. Ambassador William C. Bowdler’s residence. She had been talking with the ruling National Party Justice Minister, a hulking tree of a man, who had been mocking her forthcoming speech, which the formality of introductions had interrupted. As I stood there, he resumed the disparaging remarks about his tiny opposite number. Helen had had enough; she did a smart left turn and kicked the Justice Minister in the shin. If there is such a thing as a tree in pain, the minister was one. I was a little shocked but curious about the tiny woman I’d just met.
At dinner, I asked Mrs. Bowdler, the ambassador’s wife, about Helen and other mysteries of South African society that I had encountered in my few days there. I was midway in a month-long speaking tour, sponsored by the Institute of Race Relations, then South Africa’s only legal civil rights organization. It had been a disconcerting journey, like flying into my own past, Alabama in the 1940s and ’50s. Our societies had crossed in time; we had begun shedding legal segregation in the 1960s, while South Africa was tightening the divisions of apartheid. “Colored” and “White” signs were everywhere. I had a lot to learn, which must have been obvious to Mrs. Bowdler. She inquired about how I had come to know Vice President Mondale, who had briefed me before the trip, and I told her about becoming friends with Jimmy Carter and his family when I headed a New South organization with the preposterous, antique name of the Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar Society.
After dinner, the ambassador sent the conversation on a surprising turn. “How are things at the Calhoun County Courthouse?” he inquired. I confessed my surprise and asked how he happened to be in the county seat town of Anniston. He explained that he had been stationed at Anniston’s adjacent Fort McClellan during World War II and had gone to the courthouse to have repatriation papers signed by the probate judge. Having grown up in Latin America where his family was in international business, they had given him the Spanish name for William, “Guillermo.” He went on, “The judge looked at the paper with my full legal name, Guillermo C. Bowdler, looked up at me and said, ‘Hay, buddy, you know you don’t have to go through the rest of yo’ liiif bein’ called Gill-er-mo.’” Spontaneous laughter greeted the near-perfect Southern country pronunciation of his name.
Not only had the ambassador linked with my hometown, the whole Republic of South Africa was an echo of a former life. I found that I was comfortable with South African blacks, I knew them from birth, and with Afrikaners, whose loyalties, prejudices and good-ole-boy hospitality reminded me of friends, neighbors and family in the segregated South of my childhood. South Africans with a British background I equated with New Englanders whose high-minded morality blinded them to the subtle interplay of hating and loving, of the shades of light and dark in a Manichean society.
How did it all begin, the locked-down loneliness of a Southern liberal who cared about but was fated to live out his life at times far apart from most of the people in his hometown? There was no illuminating moment, no Saul of Tarsus lightning revelation. If I had to choose a place to start, it would be at the end of my parents’ long journey from Anniston to Danbury, Connecticut, on the single-lane, pre-interstate roads. Eli Wilkins drove them in the family’s black Chrysler in his smart, gray chauffeur’s hat and uniform (which he hated and Mother insisted upon). The occasion was my graduation from the New England prep school to which they had sent me, and where Dad had been asked to do the principal address. It was a journey that would begin and end in the last year of normal sameness for the Old South. It was May of 1953, and I listened with mingled embarrassment and pride as Dad, the late Colonel Harry M. Ayers, gave his address at the Wooster School in Danbury. It was entitled, “Come South, Young Man,” and seemed to have been well received by our popular headmaster, the Reverend John D. Verdery, and other adults. I guess it must have been pretty good, because Time magazine wrote about it, comparing it to the advice of another newspaper publisher, Horace Greeley’s, “Go West, Young Man.”
As we were packing the car for the trip home, the Head happened by and in the course of a brief conversation asked what I thought of a case then before the U.S. Supreme Court. The case was heavy with portent, but I didn’t know anything about it—much less recognize its significance. Embarrassing. I liked the Head a lot and wanted to impress him, but I was clueless. He gave me an understanding smile, wished us a good trip and drove off. This failed legal quiz came after my roommates and I did something that turned out to be small-scale historic. We integrated Wooster. Adolescent hair-trigger justice inspired our breach of the social barrier, which came about this way: I had made reservations for Mother and Dad at the best local hotel, the Green, and tried to make one for Eli, too, but my Southern intuition moved me to explain, “He’s colored.” The reservations clerk explained that they did not allow coloreds to sleep there. It was understood Eli would have to make other arrangements, but before he took them to the hotel I wanted everybody to see our East Cottage senior suite, Eli wasn’t impressed, “Lord,” he said, “this looks like a prison,” not knowing it would become his home for an evening. My two roommates and I were offended by his being refused lodging at the less than grand Green Hotel. So we provided a cot in the suite, where Eli spent an uncomfortable night “in prison” with three white teenagers. He was the first Negro to do so on campus.
The outside world seldom penetrated the monkish precincts of a New England preparatory school, which explains my ignorance about the case the Head asked me about, Brown v. Topeka Board of Education. The Court’s unanimous decision was handed down the next year, my freshman year at the University of Alabama. The decision and what followed presented Southerners with a choice about which it was impossible to be ambivalent: Reason or Resistance. I ultimately chose the liberal course.
What is it like to be liberal-minded in the Deep South? It is to be pulled this way and that by complex, contradictory feelings about your own people—about yourself. It is to feel inescapably, even willfully one with a people who disappoint and hurt you, who make you laugh and bite your lip in frustration, whose charm and generosity live side by side
