Iwant to just come back to you, Archbishop, for our final question before
tea,” I said. “Often the people that we have the hardest time forgiving
are the people who are closest to us.”
“Yes, yes.”
“You have told me that forgiving your father for some of the things
that he did to your mother was very difficult for you and very painful for
you. And I wonder, if he were here with us, how you would tell him how
that affected you, and how you would tell him that you forgave him.
What would you say?”
“Well, I would certainly tell him that I was deeply hurt by how he
treated my mother when he was drunk.” The Archbishop then closed his
eyes and spoke very quietly and slowly as he traveled back in time. “I
was very angry with myself for being too small to beat him up. I mean,
when he was sober, he was a wonderful person. But my mother was—I
just adored my mother—she was just such an incredible human being, a
very gentle person. And that just made it worse. And there was a son too
small to intervene when she was being roughed up.
“I should tell you one great regret I have. We used to take the children
to boarding school in Swaziland, about three hundred miles each way, and
we would overnight on the way at our parents’ because there were no
motels where blacks could stay.
“On this particular time when we were returning from Swaziland, we
were going to put up at Leah’s home with her mother, which was not in
the same township where my parents lived. We had come to say good
night and goodbye to my parents, because we were going to leave early to
go down to the Cape, where I was working. And on this particular
occasion, I was dead exhausted when my father said he wanted to talk to
me. There was something he wanted to tell me.
“I was too tired and I was headachy and I said, ‘No. Can we talk
tomorrow?’ And we left to go to Leah’s home. And, as sometimes
happens only in novels, we were awoken early in the morning by my
niece telling us that my father had died the previous evening. And so, I’ve
never known what it was he wanted to tell me. I have a very deep regret. I