The next day he was back at Independence Hall. He admired the style of the ground-floor rooms which he now knew to be in the English Renaissance style, with graceful pilasters proceeding heavenwards in strict proprietorial order, Doric on the first floor, Ionic on the stair landing, Corinthian cornice beneath the tower ceiling. When the guide asked the tourists whether anyone could identify the rather skinny-looking chairs crowding the Declaration Chamber, Looksmart said right out loud that they were Windsor chairs, adding in his slow and rather baffling tones, that legend had it several of the chairs had been borrowed to accommodate the delegates who crowded into the Chamber on those heady days in July, 1776. The guide stared back at him, thunderstruck.
In the Liberty Bell Pavilion across the road, a plump lady in furs and dark glasses asked why the bell was cracked.
‘It cracked when they rang it,’ said the guide, an innocent girl staring with big eyes at the huge brassy bell.
Looksmart stepped forward. ‘The bell has always been cracked,’ he said, rejoicing that his tongue obeyed him. ‘It’s been cracked from the day it was born. Since 1752 when it arrived from England and they hung it up on trusses in State House Yard. It cracked on the first bang. Pass and Stow cast it again. But this time it didn’t sound right. Too much copper. The third time —’ Looksmart held up three fingers ‘— they got it right. The bell rang for the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and for another fifty-nine years until, in its eighty-second year of service it rang out for the death of Chief Justice Marshall in 1835, and cracked for the last time…’ He leaned over and with his knuckle knocked on the bell. It gave off a dim and distant echo. His audience stared. It’s doubtful they understood much of this explanation, for though he pronounced quite perfectly the words came out a trifle rough and slurred and sluggish perhaps. The tourists backed away from him. The guide and the plump lady in furs beckoned frantically to the two heavy gents in green standing at the door, doubtless the guardians of the bell, and up they came and very firmly requested Looksmart to leave the Pavilion.
Looksmart sat on a bench in Independence Square and read a copy of the Declaration of Independence and I saw in my dream how the scales fell from his eyes, poor fellow. America appeared to Looksmart rather in the way that the Angel of the Lord appeared to the Virgin Mary. In Philadelphia, the cradle of revolution, an idea of an African redeemer was born.
Of course he quickly realised that the American Declaration of Independence was a document so advanced in its political thinking that, had it been promulgated on that day in his own country as the manifesto of some new party or movement, it would have been shredded on the spot and its adherents exiled or arrested, banned, imprisoned, or tortured as wild men beyond the civilised pale. It rang with phrases, any one of which would have brought blood to the eyes of the followers of the Regime; it spoke of equality, of inalienable rights, of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. It spoke of Just Powers, and, most startlingly, of the ‘Consent of the Governed’.
It must have been likely that in the years that followed the Revolution some news of its occurrence would have travelled abroad, even as far as Southern Africa. But to judge from all the evidence no such thing occurred. Of course it was not unusual nowadays to claim kinship in retrospect. It was put out by the Regime that they too had fought for their freedom against the Imperialists, to say that ‘we were fighting for our freedom from the British at about the same time as the Yanks, you know.’
In fact they hadn’t stayed to fight at all, they had not been set afire with a light of freedom. Instead, deeply unhappy about the loss of their slaves and chafing at the English overlordship, though they had settled the country with their first colonists at about the same time as the Americans, they put up with successive overlords for years — until damn busybodies got between them and their slaves, and the disgruntled Boers migrated northward with God as their guide and their guns loaded, set the whips cracking over the backs of oxen, and the covered wagons rolling north into the interior in search of fresh grazing, uninterrupted privacy, and plenty of servants, in search of a heaven in the middle of nowhere. A Garden of Eden free of English and full of garden boys. Over half a century had passed since the time the Massachusetts militiamen shot it out with the British at Lexington. But no news of these great events appeared to have reached the Boers. Or if it had, Looksmart suspected, they wouldn’t have liked what they heard. The early Americans wanted a nation free and independent among the nations of the world. The Boers had no nation, distrusted freedom and cared nothing for the world. The very idea would have had your average Boer choking into his brandy. What he wanted was to be left alone and to put as much distance between himself and the English enemy as possible, to trek until he reached that magic land, the land of Beulah, where the game was limitless, grazing good and armies of black slaves kept him in clover. That was the cloud-capped summit of the dream towards which they had trekked. Trekked once more. And Uncle Paul had trekked yet again.
In the end they had to stand and fight. They found you could never go far enough. It wasn’t just that the English were following them, it was history that stalked them down and chased them and in time overtook them and ran them to earth. They fought and lost. But when the Dutch farmers lost the war to the English rednecks at the turn of the century, and Uncle Paul Kruger fled into exile, it was the end of the Boers forever. Those who replaced them, that is to say those who remained, and never took the one-way ticket to the remote Paradise on the Swiss mountains set aside by Uncle Paul for his dispersed people, those who remained got wise. If you couldn’t out-gun the English, you could out-vote the bastards. And they did. And scooped the board and so in exchange for the two Boer republics they had lost, they gained the whole damn southern subcontinent and as many servants as any reasonable man could wish to flog in a lifetime.
On through Philadelphia Looksmart trekked, to Betsy Ross House with its spinning wheel and its first American flag; then to Franklin’s Tomb in Christ Church, to Carpenters Hall and to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier of the Revolution where Looksmart laid a dozen red roses. And towards evening he set off back down Walnut Street, forgetting, as Isobel had prophesied he would, where home really was, to Penn’s Landing where he fell on his knees to the amusement of a man selling pretzels and gave thanks for his salvation. And he began to plan in his mind his ‘holy experiment’, his own Pennsylvania, his own Philadelphia, City of Brotherly Love, which was to absorb him utterly from then on and dreamt in Franklin’s words that he might one day set foot on its surface and say, ‘This is my country.’
It was Isobel who remained loving and true even when he fell so deeply into these reveries that he forgot who he was or where he lived and spent the winter nights in the streets crouched over the iron gratings from which the hot wind blew, like any other bum. And of course it was Isobel who, when the invitation came to present himself at the Barclay Hotel where ‘he would hear something to his advantage’ encouraged him to go at once.
‘You’ve heard of the wandering Jew, well you’re the wandering African. Finding ways to go home.’