Summary
July's wife and mother interrogate him over bringing the white people to their home. They ask why he needed to do it, being that he has told them over the years of how rich they are, living in a house with many rooms, including a room for books. He tells them that they would’ve been killed, that all the whites were being killed by their people. The wife asks why they couldn’t go to their people. He explains that all over the country, in Cape Town and everywhere else, it was the same. They couldn’t fly or their people would shoot them from the sky. The wife and her mother-in-law are worried that their people will come after them. They speak about the gun. The white father brought a gun. They know this. Their children know it too. It’s in the thatched roof of the white family’s hut. But July says that there’s no need for the gun - besides, one gun will be no use against the many guns of their people. Their people have risen up and they have all the power.
The wife is amazed by how the white people look. She laughs about it to July. She thought they would be fancy and pretty. The woman is not even pretty, she jokes. Then she thinks to herself about how she’d never touched white skin before until she shook the white woman’s hand. She remembers that moment. She thinks about how there won’t be money coming anymore from July. No letters—which she can read. She reflects on her literacy and on the fact that July wouldn’t have married a woman who hadn’t gone to school.
The chapter shows the scene inside their home. July has wrung the neck of a chicken and his wife cleans it. She finds eggs inside of it and admonishes July for killing the wrong foul. Her small baby picks up a chicken dropping from the floor and puts it in her mouth. She picks up the baby and swiftly scoops the dropping out of her mouth and flings it away.
Bam considers the limits of the farm equipment. It’s all very meager and could be better. He sees ways he could help. There’s the metal tank of a reservoir sitting unused. He wants to put it together, but July laughs. Nonetheless July helps him, obediently, as he always has helped Bam with repairs around the house in the city. They build the reservoir. Bam listens to a radio. Maureen comes out every hour to hear the news bulletin. They hear that all the airports are shut down and the ports have been bombed and blockaded. There’s fierce fighting in all the cities. The gasworks has been attacked. A fire has spread through the suburbs of Johannesburg, right up to the edge of the freeway across from their home. They’re amazed to hear this though they say nothing to each other. Maureen thinks that they’re alive.
Maureen wants to wash clothes (the few they’ve brought). July says his wife and mother will do it. She argues with him, but he insists. She insists on paying.
She has brought one book, Manzoni’s The Betrothed. She snatched it on her way out. Now she’s afraid to read it because she doesn’t want it to be finished and to be left with nothing else to read. She gets superstitious about the idea of not reading it; then sits down to read. But she’s unable to be transported by the fiction. She is already transported. The fiction is weaker than her reality.
Maureen recalls a phase of her childhood in the gold mining town when she would return home from school every day with an older black woman named Lydia. Lydia would carry her book-bag on her head. She and Lydia held hands as they walked. Lydia reprimanded her for letting her friends play with her pillows outside in the grass, saying that she (Lydia) would be yelled at by Maureen’s mother for letting them get dirty. One day, she and Lydia were chewing gum outside some shops when they saw a man taking pictures of them. The man came up to them and asked if he could take another. Lydia took charge and said only if he sent it to them. He said he would and took a shot of them together—a white girl and a black woman with the girl’s school bag on her head—with their heads cocked toward each other. The man never took their address. Years later a friend of Maureen showed her the photo in a Life book of images of South African apartheid. Maureen stared at the image but couldn’t understand its meaning—not to herself, or not within the Life narrative.
Bam drinks beer with July and his friends on Saturday afternoon. Later he lies beside Maureen. They talk about the challenge of their situation. She brought malaria pills with them. She tells him she looted them from the pharmacy when it was being ransacked before they left. She thinks of all the strange things she grabbed in haste. She has noticed that July has some small things that came from her home. Scissors with a crane head and other things. But he’s not dishonest, she thinks.
Bam and Maureen sleep in the afternoon and wake to the sound of a vehicle engine. Bam leaps out of bed and staggers around, confused. He runs out and sees the yellow bakkie lurching away as it shifts gears. The backs of two black heads are in the front seats. He goes to the other men and tries to ask them if July took the bakkie. The men are drinking and drumming. They come to understand his question. Yes, they tell him. July went off.
He goes back into the hut where he and Maureen wait. The radio that they depend on has been shut down for the past day. They discuss the fact that Bam gave July the key. July doesn’t know how to drive so the other person must be driving. They both try not to argue with each other, but it arises internally. We hear Bam’s thoughts as he questions the compromise he’s made with Maureen to not get out of South Africa earlier. He thinks they could be in Canada now. He wants to accept the decisions they’ve made, but he feels how she tied them to South Africa. She plays with the radio, but the English channel is gone. There’s nothing but the native language. He tells her to stop wasting the battery and the argument breaks from here. In the stifling intimacy of the hut, with their children asleep on the floor around them, the tension of their situation manifests in words. Indirectly and passively, she accuses him of being spineless, letting on that she sees through his liberalness. She comes from a racist family and she faces that now—not proudly, but not wanting to bury the fact. He indirectly accuses of her of being weak. It gets dark and begins to rain heavily. Bam falls asleep. Maureen takes off her clothes and goes outside into the torrential rain. It pours over her body. In the distance she sees two pins of light. The bakkie is returning.
The next day they talk to July, asking him where he went and why. They’re nervous; they don’t want to blame him. He says he drove into town to the shops. “The shops! As if he’d been sent around the corner for a pint of milk,” Maureen thinks. “The distance to the nearest general store must be forty kilometers” (53). But he bought jam, tea, paraffin, salt, “everything” he says (53). His friend drove. His friends knows how to drive well, he says. They ask if there’s any fighting in town. He laughs. But then he says that there’s some trouble at the mines nearby. And he says there are food and paraffin shortages. They ask how much they owe him. He gives the amount, including cents. Then he tosses them batteries for the radio and smiles.
Analysis
Tension begins to rise in these sections, as we hear July’s wife and mother’s views of the white people. July doesn’t know what his mother and wife are thinking, whether they are accepting his view of the situation and the need to help them, or whether they’re against it. They have a way of holding back from him.
July’s wife imagines the wealth of the white people and she thinks about the things that July has told her about their many rooms and cupboards full of dishes and glasses, including wine glasses that they use only for guests. Her meditations on this wealth reveal her awareness of one of the main differences between her people and the white people.
The tensions continue to rise indirectly as we get Bam’s view of the meager farm equipment. His reflections on the limited equipment comes right after July’s wife’s thought about their wealth. While Bam thinks that they could do much better, the question arises as to why he and his wife didn’t share more of their wealth with July. Why did they need all the extra rooms and servants? What accounts for the discrepancy? We’re reminded here of the liberal good intentions of the couple, their commiserating with the struggle of the blacks.
Inevitable tension comes from the news they hear on the radio of how widespread the war is, how even the American foreign service is unable to fly out. The main tension however is around the question of whether or not July is still the family’s servant. When Bam wants to build the water reservoir, neither he nor July question that July will help him and “they work together more or less as they did when Bam expected July to help him with the occasional building or repair jobs that had to be done to maintain the seven roomed house and swimming pool” (25). Bam has an easier time maintaining his role than Maureen does. She wants to wash her own clothes, but July insists that his wife and mother will do it. The feeling that arises when she considers her dwindling soap, and insists on giving banknotes in return for the washing, is that her privileges and position as a white woman will not be sustainable forever in this place where they are so trapped.
Maureen’s reflection on the photograph of her and her childhood nanny-servant, Lydia, points to an aspect of her present experience. In the same way as she can’t objectively understand her relation to the people who are helping her now, she couldn’t get any perspective on it back then.
When the bakkie drives away, the central fears of the family’s situation emerge. They feel themselves trapped. Even though they can’t use it, the vehicle is their means of freedom. This tense state of purgatory brings up the questions of why they are where they are, and with those questions come questions of who they are.
When Bam and Maureen argue, the ambiguous nature of Maureen’s loyalty to her childhood emerges. It starts around a discussion of language. It’s revealed that Maureen’s people were gold mine bosses who spoke a derogatory language of a “vocabulary that was limited to orders given by whites and responses made by blacks” (45). She considers her shame of that, in the face of her liberal husband, and now feels “ashamed of that shame” (45). As they argue about whether or not they made a mistake by not fleeing, she accuses him of having no backbone and of liberal compromise. She brings up instances in which he performed falsely, for appearance's sake. He then accuses her of being weak. We see, in this incredibly tense and claustrophobic scene, the scaffolding of their relationship. We see more of who they are, the small lies they’ve told themselves, and the personal history they’ve suppressed. As they break down and voice their criticisms of each other, we see the small compromises that have held them together. We also see a couple in the tense situation of being trapped in close quarters.
The scaffolding of the Smales’ relationship with July is also becoming revealed as we see them negotiate money and the bakkie with him. He has power over them now – the power to take the bakkie, as well as the power to expose them. While this new dynamic is becoming apparent, it’s clearly not his intention to harm them. It seems rather that he’s enjoying the ability to protect them and to help them. His loyalty feels sincere. He’s also an optimistic character. He has no doubt that they’re safe in his home. Whether or not this is the case remains to be seen.
