The Man Between

Under South Africa's racist laws, the country's 12 1/2 million citizens are being inscribed as white, colored (mixed blood) or native in a vast racial register known as the Book of Life. The government's eventual goal is to shuffle them into separate communities. Last month, as offi cials began enforcement of a 1950 law forbidding members of one race to move into quarters formerly occupied by another race, the first of what may be thousands of little neighborhood tragedies unfolded in a Johannesburg court.

Broken Window. The bewildered victim was Fred Nicholas, a swarthy little cabinetmaker who moved into the predominantly poor-white Bertrams district of Johannesburg shortly after the law was passed. Dark as he was (he explained that his father was of Portuguese origin), he had long passed as white and been so classified. His wife worked with other white women at a nearby factory, one of his sons went to the all-white Athlone high school. But one day Nicholas quarreled with John Fillis, a colored school master who lived around the corner.

"Your kids broke my window with a slingshot," he said, and struck the schoolmaster. Smarting, Neighbor Fillis vowed vengeance, and knew how to get it. Informing the authorities that he himself had taught two of Nicholas' brothers when they were living in a native quarter, he got the authorities to reopen Nicholas' listing for the Book of Life this year and change it to colored. That meant Nicholas was unlawfully occupying his corrugated iron and brick house in Bertrams. The government hauled him into court.

An array of friendly white neighbors took the stand to testify that Nicholas was accepted as a white in the neighborhood. But a more dramatic witness, a tan woman, took the stand, and carefully avoiding Nicholas' eyes, said: "My name is Susan Jacobs. I am the sister of the accused. I am colored and married to a colored. The accused is a colored." Crossexamined, she then blurted that two other brothers live as Europeans. Evidence piled up: colored, colored, colored.

Nicholas testified: "I admit I sent two of my children to a colored school because they are dark, and I didn't want to hurt them." When Nicholas desperately produced two tickets to a 1955 rugby game to prove that he sat in the European section, the magistrate looked at the stubs, barked: "Actually, you used Gate Five? Would you deny that the gate you used was the one used to admit colored and Indians?" "III don't know," stammered Nicholas, cringing.

Broken Up. Under the Group Areas Act, Fred Nicholas was one of the first helpless figures caught by the searchlights as he shuffled uncertainly across the shadowy border that divides black from untrusting white in South Africa. To be reclassified as colored means that he will have to leave his home, move into a colored neighborhood, lose his vote, his job. No one knows how many other little neighborhood tragedies are likely to follow, some, like that of Fred Nicholas, starting with a slingshot's rock through the window.

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