Summary
On the drive back, July expresses his irritation with the foolishness of his chief. “African people are funny,” he says, and proceeds to ridicule the fact that the chief doesn’t want blacks to unite and rise up against whites (122). Bam and Maureen agree with this, though they don’t want to ridicule the chief. Back in their hut, they talk about July. Maureen says that he was actually ridiculing himself when he was speaking about the chief. She says that he’s the one who saved his white masters and abandoned his people. Bam is amazed by this suggestion. He says that July saved them because they are like family. She says that July runs the risk of getting himself killed by keeping them here. Bam says then they’d better go. They stand in the hut staring at each other, feeling the urgency of this. They ask each other where they’ll go. Outside they hear the voices of their children returning to the hut. They ask each other how.
July’s wife Martha asks him if the white people will be going to the chief’s house. July resists her questions. He says that when the fighting is over he’ll bring her back to the city with him. She laughs at this and asks if he can imagine her there. She tries to imagine it. He explains that their people are taking over. It will be their city. She asks him where his last wages are. He tells her that he wasn’t able to get his money out of the bank – one hundred pounds.
All day, Bam tries to get news on the radio, but there’s nothing. Maureen is sitting outside her hut when she sees a man coming through the fields carrying a big red music box. It’s bright and striking in the landscape. Everybody comes out to see. He brings it up to the settlement and begins to make music. The people start drinking. The kids are entertained. People are getting lewd and neither Maureen nor Bam want to stick around. They go back to the hut and it’s then that they realize that the gun is missing.
They would’ve thought it was their cheeky son Victor who’d taken it if he hadn’t been dancing around the music box. They search through everything. They can’t figure out when it would’ve been taken. July was with everyone listening to the music and watching the dancing. The kids come back and they start to dig in the hut to look for the gun; they’re joking around. They don’t realize how panicked their parents are until Bam throws himself face down on the bed “as the father had never done before his sons” (145). Maureen, bereft, looks “down on this man who had nothing now” (145).
Maureen runs out to find July, but he’s not in his hut. She goes down to the river and finds him in the moonlight, writing something in an old notebook. She demands to know where the gun is, accusing him of taking it. She sees in his face right away that he has no idea what she’s talking about. She argues with him until she realizes that Daniel is the one person not around. July says that Daniel left to join the fighters the other day. She says that he took the gun then. July shrugs it off. She accuses July of stealing small things from her. He sits up and begins to speak to her in his own language. He’s angry. She doesn’t understand him. He says that it must’ve been Daniel who took the gun. He doesn’t seem to care. He’s insulted by her.
She goes back through the night to the settlement. She finds Bam feeding their children. She tells him that it was Daniel who took the gun. They have nothing now. They listen to the sounds of the night, smell the smells, and feel the discomfort. She asks if this is how July felt in their home. Bam doesn’t need her to explain her meaning. She’s asking if July felt this claustrophobic, this foreign, this trapped.
Some time passes. Maureen is sitting sewing a button back onto Victor’s pants in the middle of a hot day when she hears the noise of helicopter overhead. She goes out. Everyone goes out. July’s people have never seen a helicopter so close. Some scream in fright. The helicopter dips down then rises up and dips down again somewhere on the other side of the river. Maureen walks toward the sound, knowing where it is. She hears the voices of her family behind her. She begins to run. She reaches the river and staggers through it, “trusting herself with all the suppressed trust of a lifetime, alert, like a solitary animal at the season when animals neither seek a mate nor take care of young, existing only for their lone survival” (160). She runs.
Analysis
Why did July take the white people into safety? This is the question that arises in the final section of the novel, after he takes them to see the chief and they return, uncertain of their future. Maureen’s idea, or accusation that July was speaking about himself when he ridiculed the chief, is echoed lightly in July’s conversation with his wife, about how he will bring her back to the city. But his fantasy feels like an idle one, not actually a desire and certainly nothing ideological. He’s distracted by the immediate problem of putting new grass on the Smales family hut. Maureen’s accusation then comes to sound like the paranoid projection of someone who feels vulnerable, at the mercy of another.
Bam shares her paranoia and it’s this sentiment that causes them to feel that they must flee, even though it still makes no sense, and even though they don’t know where they’d go or how. This drive to leave is what in turn causes them to look for the gun after a moment in which they’re both away from the hut. It causes them to panic when they realize it’s not there.
The gun is to them a lifeline, even though they have both agreed that Bam is not a killer of people, and even though they both know that it’s a useless gun. They have come to depend on the gun and associate it with their potential freedom. When it goes missing, it’s the opportunity of freedom that they feel is lost. This is what causes Maureen to find July and accuse him of stealing not only the gun, but other small things as well.
At this point, her fears have taken the better of her judgment. July is disgusted by her accusations and while at first he’s confused about who took the gun, he ultimately feels little concern for the fact that it’s missing. It’s of little consequence, making no difference to the present situation. In his view, they’re all doing fine. He has no plan to turn the family in. He’s protecting them. But Maureen can’t see this. A deep fear impulse has been triggered in her and she says words to make the rift she feels between her and July real.
Paranoia alienates the trapped white woman not only from July, but from her entire family. She insults July and forecloses any opportunity for harmony with the place she’s in. In the end, it’s self-interest that drives her as she runs toward the sound of an unknown helicopter to meet whatever fate it offers, abandoning her family.
