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| WORKING WITH MICHENER The Making of The Covenant
an online literary archive The Assignment|The Plotting|The Research|The Manuscript A week later Tony hosted a second lunch with Michener which I attended, the three of us getting together in the wood-paneled elegance of the University Club, a Renaissance palazzo on the sunny corner of 54th Street and Fifth Avenue. We sat in the great red and gold lounge where New York's finest clubmen gathered, the news of the world spread out across their laps, an older member nodding off here and there. Here and there, too, a dress or skirt might be spotted. Women were admitted as guests and allowed to eat off the club's plates and drink its highballs but forbidden membership, a ban that would survive for another decade.
Jim and I hit it off immediately, just how well I would find out as our working relationship grew but within minutes of sitting down, we were away and running. Or, I should say I was, for Jim did the listening and I, the talking. He'd been thinking casually about a South African book since meeting the country's warring tribes seven years earlier. I was ten years old when I wrote Revenge, a forty-page settler saga penned on the back of worthless share certificates tossed out by my mother.
I look at this grim tale in the pencil strokes of a child's hand (and a lot grimmer it gets, too, as vengeful Jan de Cilliers leads a murderous attack on the Xhosa) and I think of the boy who would come to share a thousand stories with Jim Michener a quarter-century later. The setting of Revenge and The Englishmen are the same but to get from one to the other was more than a journey in time and place. I had to leave the laager and seek a path beyond a dry stony veld that hardened the hearts of many in South Africa.
From the time I saw my first article in print - Happiness is an Unprejudiced Mind - to this day, I've considered one attribute paramount for a writer: enthusiasm, to have passion, the entheos of the Greeks, to be possessed by a god. At the University Club that day, I raced from one topic to the next and leapt from century to century with seven league boots and nine muses flying along with me.
Michener
had spent a month in South Africa in October 1971 and earlier made
short trips to Mozambique and Angola. Out of his South African sojourn
had come a ten-page New York Times Magazine article, "The
Five the world, Herman and Ann Silverman. The first the Silvermans, who were friends for fifty years, knew of Mari Yoriko Sabusawa was when they picked up a copy of Life magazine in a Rome hotel in the fall of 1955 and saw pictures of the couple's wedding in Chicago. Jim had driven them to the airport three weeks earlier without saying a word about Mari and their impending nuptials.
Michener's trip to South Africa in 1971 left him with as good a picture of the country as any visiting writer, including his exposure to irrationalities of so-called "petty" apartheid, as opposed to the grand plan for separating the different tribes. He encountered bizarre rules such as one that permitted whites and blacks to play tennis together on private property, provided the court wasn't visible from the street where passersby might glimpse the match. But our first meeting revealed that Jim also had a long trek to make across that stony veld before he came to know the people living there.
There was, for example, his perception of the Zulus. On his 1971 visit, he toured Kwazulu in Natal province, the tribal homeland created under grand apartheid. The New York Times feature has a photo of Jim on a gold mine outside Johannesburg watching Zulu miners perform traditional dances, their work clothes exchanged for furs and skins. The dances delighted tourists though not nearly as much as the Zulus themselves, for like today's hip-hop generation, the songs of the foot-stomping miners jabbed at the belly of umLungu, the white man.
"My thinking is to bypass Natal and the Zulus," Michener said at lunch. He wanted to do justice to the black tribes and planned to focus on the Xhosas. "I can get all the value I want out of them." The only interest he had in the Zulus lay in the fact that they'd driven the Xhosas south to the Cape frontier, where his readers would find them.
I remember telling Jim about my heritage, adopted and raised by an Afrikaner family whose roots went back to the Voortrekkers and long before the Boer migration. My line of Uys's were related by marriage to the Voortrekker commander at the Battle of Blood River. My mother, Hester Johanna Maria Uys, was seven when the British invaded the Boer republics: she survived two years in concentration camps at Bloemfontein and in the Cape Colony.
Hester Johanna Maria "Joey" Uys, age 4
A decade after penning my childhood Revenge, I was sitting with Joey Uys taking notes as I listened to my mother's stories of the African veld. "Dammit, Errol, must you ask me all these questions?" Joey would complain. "Yes, mother." Whether we spoke about an Orange Free State farm in the nineteenth century or the English prison camps, the notes I kept show just how persistent I was.
"So many questions, my boy," my mother said. "Why are you asking me all these things?" Today I know the answer. So did James Michener, who never met the child of the veld, though her story came to mean so much to him.
Michener, Oursler and I left the University Club that March day with a loose plan on what to do next. Jim was going to give serious attention to a South African epic. Tony's mission was to find a modus operandi between Reader's Digest and Jim's publisher, Random House. I was to continue polishing my outline.
I'd no part in talks between the Digest, Random House and Michener's agent at William Morris Inc. They agreed that Michener would engage my services as editor/researcher and pick up my Digest salary and expenses for as long as he needed me. No monies would pass hands, the fee to be written-off against future payments by the magazine for rights to Michener's book.
The negotiations were still underway when I finished my outline and sent it to Jim at St. Michaels in late April 1978. He replied immediately:
It was the beginning of my covenant with James A. Michener.
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Errol Lincoln Uys
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|
Warring
Tribes of Africa." (New York Times, Jan 23,1972.) I was not
to know of the existence of this article until I began work on these
notes about The Covenant. Jim never mentioned it to me, a
curious omission but not out of character. He held things so close
to his chest that when he was courting Mari, he kept his love a secret
from his two best pals in 
I
can't recall exactly how I put it, for I was after all a minnow swimming
in waters deep as the ocean sea. I told Jim that it was impossible
to write a book such as we had in mind without the Zulus. What of
Shaka, the black Napoleon who forged a warrior nation out of a patchwork
of Nguni clans? And Dingane, his treacherous half-brother, a bloodthirsty
tyrant who murdered Shaka and sat on the throne when the Voortrekkers,
the Boer pioneers, crossed into Natal? What of Blood River where the
Boers made a vow of obedience to God on the eve of battle, four hundred
and sixty four against twelve and a half thousand Zulus? What took
place on the morning of December 16, 1838 was the defining moment
for the Afrikaner people, a victory that determined their future in
a land they believed God set apart for them. 
