He would no sooner shoot a buck than a man; and he did not keep any revolver under his pillow to defend his wife, his children or his property in their suburban house.
At the opening of the novel, Maureen thinks about the gun that they've bought, which Bam used to shoot birds. She considers the uselessness of the gun itself and then meditates here on Bam's inability to use guns at all.
For the twentieth, the hundredth time, since the pass-burnings of the Fifties, since Sharpeville, since Soweto '76 since Elsie's River 1980, it seemed that all was quieting down.
Analyzing the events that lead to the Smales family's flight from Johannesburg, Maureen puts the recent uprising in the context of other historical events in South Africa.
It was early morning but in their hut the women were dreamy, as at the end of the day... Perhaps they had been out since first light gathering wood or working in their fields--Maureen was aware, among them in the hut, of not knowing where she was, in time, in the order of a day as she had always known it.
Maureen, on one of her first mornings in the settlement, observes the women of July's family at work in their hut. She is out of place there, unfamiliar with the patterns of their days. She feels her foreignness in this moment.
White people here! Didn't you tell us many times how they live, there. A room to sleep in, another room to eat in, another room to sit in, a room with books...
After the Smales family arrives on the settlement, July's wife Martha expresses her anxiety to July. She doesn't understand what she can provide to people who have so much. All she has ever known about the white family is the extent of their great wealth, with so many extra rooms and glasses in the cupboards that they only use for guests.
But the transport of a novel, the false awareness of being within another time, place and life that was the pleasure of reading, for her, was not possible. She was in another time, place, consciousness; it was pressed in upon her and filled her as someone's breath fills a balloon's shape. She was already not what she was.
This extensive analysis of disorientation comes after Maureen sits down and attempts to read the one novel she brought to the settlement.
Bam and Maureen had longed for cigarettes, for a drink of wine or spirits, their children had craved for sweet things; but in the days of rain, the small fire they never let die satisfied all wants.
This quote captures the atmosphere during the days of rain at a point when the family has begun to adjust to life on the settlement.
If I offended you, if I hurt your dignity, if what I thought was my friendliness, the feeling I had for you--if that hurt your feelings... I know I didn't know and I should have known.
Speaking to July in a heated argument, Maureen apologizes for not recognizing his feelings during the time when she was his boss. Yet while she acknowledges her ignorance to how he may have felt, her apology is not entirely sincere. Rather then being truly sorry for the fact that her condescension may have offended him, she becomes offended herself for the fact that he had never let on that he found her condescending.
In the morning he had a moment of hallucinatory horror when he saw the blood of the pig on his penis--then understood it was hers.
After killing and butchering the pigs, and after feasting on meat, Bam and Maureen make love for the first time since they've arrived. The night marks a moment in which they abandon their worries and indulge themselves. Maureen happens to be menstruating; when Bam sees her blood in the morning, his horror suggests the regret of someone who has indulged in something hedonistic.
The chief had the sharp, impatient, skeptical voice of a man quicker than the people he keeps around him, but knew no white man's language. Why should he? It was not for him to work as a servant or go down the mines.
This analysis of the chief's demeanor and lack of English or Afrikaans does not only reflect the chief's status; it also says that the only reason for black people to learn the languages of white people is to be able to work as their servants.
The mists of the night left a vivid freshness that dispels the sickly ammoniacal odour of fowl droppings, the fetid cloying of old thatch, the stinks of rotting garbage--rags, the jaw-bone of a calf, scaly with big glistening flies--that collect wherever the rains have hollowed the ground between huts.
Among the many lengthy sensory descriptions throughout the novel, this quote captures the nature of smell on the settlement in its variety and particularity after a rain.
