In the coffin was someone no one had ever seen before: a heavily built, rather light-skinned native with a neatly stitched car on his forehead—perhaps from a blow in a brawl that had also dealt him some other, slower-working injury, which had killed him.
This story is narrated in the first person by a white farmer who informs us he and his wife have a piece of property about ten miles outside Johannesburg. The farm employs members of a black family as laborers and one day they are joined by another family member who has walked all the way from Rhodesia to South Africa looking for work. Almost immediately, he thereupon becomes sick and dies. The story is not really about the farm or even the labor situation requiring such desperate measures. The real focus and tension of this short tale is the bureaucratic ineptitude and incompetence involved in what should be the simple act of preparing a dead body for burial. The ultimate indignity and revelation of the full scale of the white bureaucracy’s inattentiveness to the death of just another anonymous black man is made clear when the body that is returned is not even the right one. This is one of Gordimer’s stories that focuses on a singular event as commentary about a systemic problem that is far broader in scope.
She put up an arm round each neck, the rough pile of an army haircut on one side, the soft negro on the other, and kissed them both on the cheek. The embrace broke.
The “she” is a white woman of the liberal mindset who has been holding out hope for years that the oppressed black minority in her country would one day rise to power. In the process, the thinking went, racial equality would be established and white supremacy annihilated forever. Those two concepts are inextricably linked within this mindset which, whether consciously or not, determines an organic connection between repressive regimes and authoritarian denial of the right to racial desegregation. This quote provides a snapshot of moment in time and that moment is at the very highest point of long-held expectations of the collapse of white minority dominion over black majority subjugation being the key to a cultural renaissance and evolution drawing closer to utopian dreams. It is the night of victory when the passage of rule from minority interlopers to the indigenous majority begins.
Because Nadine Gordimer excels in painting the full portrait of the Apartheid mindset, it is also—not just unbeknownst to but, sadly, completely unconsidered to the white woman who is the story’s protagonist—the beginning of the end of the life she’s lived. A goodhearted woman who truly supported with all her emotional and intellect the desire to see the rule of her own race toppled and replaced by majority blacks, she is about to learn that is there nothing absolutely reserved solely to the domain of whites when it comes to a preference for racial segregation and a rejection of racial equality. The quote is really the story in microcosm.
That night our mother went to the shop and she didn’t come back. Ever. What happened? I don’t know. My father also had gone away one day and never come back, but he was fighting in the war. We were in the war, too, but we were children, we were like our grandmother and grandfather, we didn’t have any guns.
These are the opening lines to the story and they are important as examples of Gordimer’s mastery of language. The cold, stark, matter-of-fact quality belies the emotional devastation of the content: the narrator is essentially informing the reader that she is not just an orphan, but an orphan without a clue as to the ultimate fate of her parents. The narration also provides the important information that this is being narrated by a child. It is the information that is not presented explicitly here that will prove of essential interest later, however. Not because the information lacking isn’t presented explicitly, but because of the lack of context which allows the reader to glean that information implicitly through inference and connotative clues. It is only on the final page that the narrator is revealed to be a young black girl refugee from Mozambique.
This may seem inconsequential to American readers—and, indeed, it basically is—but in 1989 when originally published, Apartheid still had half a decade left to cling to life and racial divides were still firmly in place. Thus, the absence of literary “cues” to the racial identity of the narrator—slang, idioms, speech patterns—that would immediately identify her as black instead of seeming to purposely construct the deception that she is white would have had significant consequences. Most intense among the consequences would be the ease with which the “white” diction of the narration allows white readers to identity with what turns out to be a perspective from the other side of the deep racial divide.
