Boundaries

In his play The Road to Mecca, Athol Fugard tells the true story of Helen Martins, an elderly Afrikaner, widow of a farmer, and inhabitant of the isolated Karroo village of New Bethesda. Late in life, she was struck with a vision, and began to construct elaborate statues of concrete, covered with glitter, in her backyard. These ecumenical monuments are religious in character, though not especially Christian, and they mark a road to her personal Mecca. Marius Byleveld, the local dominee (reverend), who secretly loves Helen but must preserve community standards, wants to remove her to a nursing home, more for reasons of kindness and genuine fear for her sanity than for simple reactionary motives of the Dutch Reformed Church. In a stirring scene, Helen confronts him: How can anyone claim that she is mad? A madman has lost contact with reality. But she, to build her beloved statues, had to learn to mix cement, and to grind beer cans in a coffee mill to produce bits of glitter.

lames Hampton (1909–1964), a black man from Elloree, South Carolina, worked the evening shift as a janitor in various public buildings of Washington, D.C. Beginning in 1931, and recurring often thereafter, God and his angels visited Hampton in physical form and instructed him to build the throne room for Christ's

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