green. “You can break the rules.” Then he thought for a moment. “In fact, is not breaking the rules. You can teach.”
We also began to have regular lunches together. Our joints included the Darling Street KFC, the Shoprite KFC, the Sea Point KFC, or the lower level of the Hungry Lion fried chicken establishment at the downtown Cape Town mall. Chicken, barbecued or fried, with nary a fancy sauce, was guaranteed to please Easy. If he acquired a three-piece meal, he had a habit of tucking one piece away to later give to his mother, to his daughter, Aphiwe, or to a friend or colleague. But twice, for his birthday, when I presented him with what he referred to as a “birthday chicken,” an entire roasted bird, he ate it all by himself in under thirty minutes, very neatly. Years later, I emailed him a “Happy Birthday” message, and promised to maintain our tradition when I next came to Cape Town. I cant wait to have my birthday chicken when you are back in South Africa chickens are few now and thanks so much to remember my birthday chicken, he replied.
After some time in Cape Town, I had made a smattering of friends, a portion of them black. My black friends, for the most part, had been born into families of modest means in the homelands. One woman, an investment banker with an MBA, had attended school beneath a tree. One man, a successful quantity surveyor, had believed as a child that any newly purchased item “smelled white.” Another man, an international rugby coach, had grown up without electricity. But they had been blessed with raw intelligence, luck, and determined parents who, though they may never have attended college themselves, believed in education with the extreme reverence of those for whom proper schooling had never been a given. These parents labored and pushed and persevered, with remarkable fortitude, in the single-minded determination that their children would attend university—and then, if the dream were to be expanded upon, postgraduate studies.
These friends were “black diamonds,” as upwardly mobile black professionals in South Africa are called. They earned good money, invested, leased Audis, bought condos, built up designer shoe collections, and traveled to Dubai and Paris. When we socialized, I didn’t notice many strange looks. The black diamonds emitted a specific, if invisible, aura of success and sophistication that allowed onlookers to comfortably, if disapprovingly, make sense of me plus them. This is a brave new world: that person sort of matches that other person.
But when I was with Easy, people stared. He was branded by the township, with scars and ballpoint pen tattoos and all of the other markings of place: a McDonald’s promotional polo shirt, a heavy Xhosa accent, the barely perceptible jitters when milling around fancy stores. More than once in Easy’s life, he had stood in the vicinity of a pile of newspapers on a corner, only to have an elderly white woman approach and hand him a few rand in coins. Meanwhile, I bear the markings of a comfortable white upbringing, in particular that pervasive and inbuilt sense of entitlement that radiates from the privileged. To make matters more unusual for curious onlookers, I stand five-ten and Easy stands five-five.
White people gawked; black people spoke up. At one point, near Christmas, I found myself standing in a store in Cape Town’s most expensive shopping center, holding Easy’s young baby, an infant so pale that he looked as if he might be mixed-race and whom Easy jokingly referred to as his “umlungu” baby—or white baby. The two Xhosa saleswomen looked at me and then at Easy and then back at me, and one finally approached me to ask, “Is that your baby?”
Once, when Easy stopped to buy a peach for himself from a sidewalk vendor, an old black man admonished me. “Why you have him pick your fruit for you?” the man, sitting on a stoop, grumbled, assuming that Easy was performing some menial task for me. “Just reach in yourself!”
Easy and I spent a lot of time in Gugulethu, riding aimlessly around his area, the streets surrounding NY111. We drove past barbecue stands that specialized in sheep’s head, a local delicacy, and the herbalist who could help with “weak erection, early ejaculation, court cases, lost lovers, blood pressure, ETC.” We passed a man who stood on his front lawn dressed as a sensei.
“You get the energy, and that gives you the power,” he orated in the direction of a dirt patch.
“He is training his students in karate,” Easy told me.
“Where are they?”
“He can see them,” Easy said, “but we cannot.”
NY111 was our main drag. What had seemed so foreign on my first trips to the townships, I learned by heart. That slender woman, with gray hair cropped close to the scalp, who liked to dance up and down the street, was drunk first thing in the morning. Whenever she saw me, she sauntered up and asked, without any conviction, “Can you get a job for me, chummy?” She had once been the mother of six living children: five sons and one daughter. But one by one, her sons were taken down by the township: a police shooting, a shebeen shooting, HIV, a poorly treated illness of mysterious origin, and a stabbing-and-stoning incident. Only her girl remained.
“She lose her mind because she think deep thing about how other people have boys but she don’t have boys now,” Easy explained, and the woman didn’t unnerve me anymore.
On NY111, a pile of garbage rose on a corner, a sort of open-air market for a clientele of junk dealers and junkies, who picked through it halfheartedly. Goats nibbled on diapers and moldy bread. There had been metal dumpsters here, but thieves kept carting them away in the night and selling them to scrap dealers, and so the municipality had apparently given up. Apart from the community trash heap, the street was decent enough: chipped, single-level brick-and-mortar government-issue homes running down one side of the block, a patchy field and a three-room community center on the other. Inside the community center was a bulletin board covered with photocopied pictures of African slaves taken from history books and old magazines: the severed head of a young woman, displayed on a metal platter, her eyes rolled back and her mouth hanging open; emaciated men and small boys in traditional dress chained together by their necks; a handcuffed man sitting upright inside a net, staring out; a white general commanding shirtless black men to perform push-ups; a man with a dog’s muzzle tied around his mouth and a metal collar around his neck. A colorful rendering of a rosy-cheeked white Jesus with green eyes and flowing blond hair had been tacked up below the words THIS IS NOT GOD. Nearby were pasted black-and-white pictures of three African kings: King Hintsa, King Shaka Zulu, and King Sekhukhune. Scattered throughout were images of the raised, clenched fist made famous by Mandela, above the Xhosa and Zulu word for power: AMANDLA.
During these sessions, Easy talked just a little about his murder trial, and even less about his years in prison. He focused on recent times. He’d met the Biehls, gotten a job at their foundation, fallen in love with a pretty girl, had Aphiwe. Aphiwe’s mom, nineteen when she gave birth, left Easy and took the baby to go live in a shack. One morning before work, Easy went to visit his daughter, whom he found alone but for an eight-year-old cousin to look after her. He bundled Aphiwe in a blanket and spirited her to his mother’s house. He held her naked to his chest, “like the kangaroo.”
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