The seeds of the syrigna tree.

• Author: Gien, Pamela
• Position: Brief Article

It was in 1996, an early spring night, that the events of 1967 came flooding back to me. I was 10 years old then, growing up in South Africa.

And almost 30 years later, the incidents of a terrible night, so carefully tucked away for so long, were full blown in my mind, like an old ghost, stepping forward from the shadows, not to whisper but to shout and shout and shout. ...

The tragedy was the murder of my grandfather on his farm, Clova, five hours by car north of Johannesburg. At that young age, my response was to hide it away like a bad dream. Clova was lost to us forever, the idyllic playground of my childhood holidays, a simple but beloved place.

My last moment at Clova was spent rolling down the back windows of the car, waving goodbye to my grandparents standing on the porch of their simple farmhouse, my loved picaninni friends running in the clouds of gravel kicked up by the wheels and jumping on to the big wire gate to swing it closed. Slowly we drove away toward the Soutpansberg mountains, always magically blue.

Home to Ferndale, Johannesburg. A few months later, I ran into the house to find it shrouded in silence and grief. There had been an attack at Clova. At first, all the details were murky, whispered, contained in the closed circle of the adults. The snippets of it that I overheard, the bits and pieces that fell into place over the weeks that followed, I would banish from my everyday and move forward into the rest of my life, never allowing it in.

But almost three decades later, the events of that night would return unexpectedly as a gift, opening a door to a new journey of healing. I came to live in America at 26, with a broken heart about the place I grew up in, and didn't know it until I met a supremely gifted teacher named Larry Moss. In 1996, I was attending a class given by Larry who was widely regarded as the finest acting teacher of our time. It was a night much like any other until Larry said to the class: "Turn to the person next to you, and tell them a story ..." Clova roared into my mind. Trying to ignore it, I heard Larry say to the class, "don't censor whatever just came up. Tell that story."

Slowly, I began to mouth the thoughts I had had as we drove home from burying my grandfather on a dusty, hot, sad day. As I told the story, I began to realize how I had tried at 10 to make sense of the unimaginable. My grandfather was an immensely kind and humane man, beloved by the black families he allowed to live on his...