We Are Not Such Things Read Online Free

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