July's People

“[B]elow her, beneath the iron bed on whose rusty springs they had spread the vehicle’s tarpaulin, a stamped mud and dung floor, above her, cobwebs stringy with dirt dangling from the rough wattle steeple that supported the frayed grey thatch. Stalks of light poked through.”

Both Maureen and Bam have lived “rough” before, but only on vacation, when they slept in rondavels—thatch-roofed, concrete-floored hovels that Bam’s Boer ancestors adapted from native huts. However, the hut’s dung floor and general untidiness indicate that it’s no holiday home, and the objects repurposed from a vehicle (seats, a tarpaulin) suggest desperate necessity rather than leisure.

“The vehicle was bought for pleasure, as some women are said to be made for pleasure. His wife pulled the face of tasting something that set her teeth on edge, when he brought it home. But he defended the dyed-blonde jauntiness; yellow was cheerful, it repelled heat.”

The Smaleses purchased their bakkie (pickup truck), their second car, for use on camping/hunting trips, signifying the couple’s (relative) wealth. Additionally, its “dyed-blonde” color, an analogy to pleasure-giving “women,” insinuates that for Bam, it embodies masculine, singularly sexual freedom. Significantly, its appropriation by another man (July) leads Bam to a crisis of emasculation.

“No uniform here (he wore an illegibly faded T-shirt and dusty trousers, clothes he left to come back to on his two-yearly leave), but he went in and out of the hut with the bearing he had had for fifteen years in their home; of service, not servile, understanding their needs and likings, allying himself discreetly with their standards and even the disciplining and indulgence of their children.”

The annihilation of the white power structure and the Smaleses’ fall from grace hasn’t disrupted July’s service to them: As a domestic servant long devoted to the family’s most intimate needs, July was much more than a mere factotum and still seems committed to service, whether from altruism, affection, or simply habit. During his 15 years with the family, July partly assumed a parental role in raising and disciplining the Smales children, and “allying” suggests that his sympathies may lie more with the Smaleses than with his own people’s revolutionary hopes or with his own family. His “illegibly faded” T-shirt symbolizes the ambiguity of his new role, which (for now) may be as indecipherable to him as to the Smaleses.

“White people must have their own people somewhere. Aren’t they living everywhere in this world? Germiston, Cape Town—you’ve been to many places, my son. Don’t they go anywhere they want to go? They’ve got money.”

July’s wife shares her reservations about sheltering the Smaleses, which could put her family in danger if the Black revolutionaries find out. She has trouble understanding how white people, who always seemed globally powerful and resourceful and are typically oppressive, can be so friendless and powerless that they need her family’s help. This rare glimpse into July’s private life and marital relationship reveals the familial pressures on him to let the Smaleses fend for themselves, which he resists.

“She was already not what she was. No fiction could compete with what she was finding she did not know, could not have imagined or discovered through imagination. […] They had nothing.”

Maureen can find no crevice of escape from her abject new reality, not even through imagination: The novel she brought along, a romance set in Renaissance Italy, fails to transport her because the culture shock of her surroundings overtaxes her imaginative faculties. Thus, it echoes the difference between Maureen and Bam’s brief camping trips and the new life of destitution that has supplanted their comfortable existence in Johannesburg.

“One afternoon a photographer took a picture of Maureen and Lydia. […] Lydia was in command; she put her hands on her hips, without disturbing the balance of the burden on her head.—But you must send us a picture.”

One of Maureen’s closest companions growing up was a Black servant named Lydia, who happily carried Maureen’s satchel of books and clothes on her head while walking her home from school. A Life photographer captured this and later framed it as a pernicious example of herrenvolk: the master-race mentality. However, Maureen recalls Lydia as self-assured and a friend, not a servile victim: “Lydia was in command.” Life is more complex than the photographer realized.

“These things were once hers, back there; he must have filched them long ago. What else, over the years? Yet he was perfectly honest. […] so honesty is how much you know about anybody, that’s all.”

Hiding out in July’s village under his protection, Maureen recognizes small, almost worthless objects that were once among her belongings in her luxurious Johannesburg life. She feels disillusioned with her former servant and cynically decrees that no one truly deserves the label of “honesty.” This recalibration of her esteem for July, however petty, later feeds her and Bam’s suspicions that July covets their most prized possessions: the bakkie and shotgun.

“Gina was called but paid no attention; finally she walked in with the old woman’s sciatic gait of black children who carry brothers and sisters almost as big as they are. She had a baby on her small back and wore an expression of importance.”

Gina, the Smaleses’ youngest child, has assimilated to their new circumstances more avidly and generously than her brothers or parents. Here, with no thought of remuneration or reward, she takes on one of the village children’s habitual tasks, the care of babies. Gina’s self-assurance while carrying a baby mirrors that of Lydia, who proudly carried Maureen’s parcels on her head, and suggests that white people’s role in the new South Africa may differ significantly from what they were used to. Gina’s happy adaptability, so different from her parents’ selfishness and sense of grievance, signals optimism for the coming generations.

“And when someone asked who your candidates were, you couldn’t answer. Had to fluff. Because what really happened was you simply enjoyed the importance of being there, being a judge, you just supported the candidates somebody else chose. And so you gave that away, too. You were caught out.”

July has driven off in their truck without asking permission, so the Smaleses feel newly vulnerable, even somewhat betrayed, and turn on each other. Bam casts blame on Maureen, accusing her of quashing his idea of moving to Canada when they had time—ignoring that plan’s financial impediments—and she, in turn, accuses him of vanity and being a shallow pseudo-intellectual in his dealings with colleagues and friends. The pressures of their fugitive existence have begun to fray their relationship as they endlessly dissect the failings of the past.

“Holding her clothing out of the mud, she let the rain pit her lightly, face, breasts and back, then stream over her. She turned as if she were under a shower faucet. Soon her body was the same temperature as the water. She became aware of being able to see; and what she saw was like the reflection of a candle-flame behind a window-pane flowing with rain, far off.”

After quarreling with Bam, Maureen escapes the heat and closeness of the mud hut, baring her body to the cooling rain. Her action, which suggests a baptism, marks a step in her assimilation to a new, pastoral existence as she sheds some of her suburban squeamishness and sense of propriety. As her body becomes the “same temperature” as the rain, her new intimacy with her wild surroundings allows her to “see” in a new way: On an almost subliminal level, she traces the return of the bakkie through the rain’s heavy curtain. Significantly, she keeps this information from Bam, who doesn’t share her epiphany.

“Bam had not greeted him. Maureen was unbelieving to see on the white man’s face the old, sardonic, controlled challenge of the patron.—And where were you yesterday? What’s the story?”

Bam continues to bridle at his new, almost total dependence on his former servant, to whom he arguably owes his life. Having believed that their master-servant dynamic would continue much the same as in Johannesburg, with July scrupulously asking permission for each and every liberty, Bam interrogates July about his use of the bakkie like an angry father reprimanding a teen who stayed out too late. Behind this peevishness lurks Bam’s deeper frustrations over his general loss of control and—on a sexually subconscious level—his fears of emasculation, of another man having a tryst with his “dyed-blonde” trophy. Here, Maureen labeling her husband as “the white man” rather than calling him by name signifies her growing estrangement from him.

“Everybody’s taking water! They’ve found it comes out of the tap! Everybody’s taking it! I told them they’re going to get hell, but they don’t understand. Come quick, dad!”

Bam has set up a water tank (a found object, not his own) to collect rainwater for his family and their hosts. His son Victor’s reflexive sense of entitlement, however, suggests that even the children of the white ruling class have been corrupted by its long history of ruthless exploitation and appropriating the country’s resources for its own material benefit. Victor’s contrast with the charitable Gina, the youngest of the Smales children, hints that racism and greed are learned behaviors.

“Your boy who work for you. There in town you are trusting your boy for fifteen years.—His nostrils were stiff dark holes. The absurd ‘boy’ fell upon her in strokes neither appropriate nor to be dodged. Where had he picked up the weapon?”

July intuits the Smaleses’ resentment over his use of the bakkie and, for the first time, shows a flash of anger. For 15 years, he has proved his trustworthiness, and now, because the power dynamic between them has shifted—or reversed—the couple he’s sheltering regards him almost as a thief, as if he has taken their supremacy rather than borrowing a car. Sardonically, he lashes out at Maureen using the phrase “your boy.” The Smaleses never used that phrase; their prim use of language was among the largely cosmetic ways they convinced themselves that their employment of July was less exploitative than the norm.

“He shuddered in affront and temptation; she saw the convulsion in his neck and understood he would never forgive her the moment. Her victory burned in her as a flame blackens within a hollow tree.”

Stung by July’s refusal to relate to her as anything but an employer, Maureen gets under his skin by mentioning Ellen, his “town woman” (mistress), whom he abandoned, presumably so that he could lead the Smaleses to safety. In effect, Maureen scorns him for saving his white employers (including herself) rather than his own kind, and the “temptation” in July’s convulsed face is the urge to strike her (or worse). Maureen knows that, out of pettiness and the urge to reclaim some sort of power over him, she has said the unforgivable. Her triumph is “hollow,” another step in her deepening alienation from both July and her own people.

“Most of the women of childbearing age had husbands who spent their lives in those cities the women had never seen.”

Martha, July’s wife, has seen him only every two years over the last decade and a half, a sad reality for much of the country’s impoverished and/or disenfranchised Black population, whose breadwinners often lived many miles away from their families to look after white families. July’s children were all born during his long absences, and he knows the Smaleses’ children far better than his own. The vast racial disparities in wealth in South Africa have had a corrosive effect on the family unit, and the sheer unnaturalness of this arrangement is evident in how it has disrupted even the timeless cycles of the pastoral seasons, which no longer unite neighbors with a continuity of experience: The absence of husbands “overlaid sowing and harvesting, rainy summers and dry winters” (83).

“Did you find someone to take the kittens?—They were no longer in the hut. […] She got up sluggishly from the bed; she certainly had been taking a nap. […]—I drowned them in a bucket of water.”

Maureen tells Bam that she has just drowned a litter of kittens to spare them from starving, an action that would have been unthinkable to her just weeks earlier. By necessity, she has rapidly developed a hard shell. However, the act has clearly taken a psychic toll on her: She’s taking a daytime nap on the flea-covered bed. Her belief in the “reduction of suffering,” she adds, previously only encompassed “spaying” the cats (90). Then, like a factory worker or inmate, she mechanically pulls off her top, symbolically spaying her own sex life: “a castration of his sexuality and hers” (90). This echoes her earlier (sexless) stripping in the rain, which also repulsed her husband but was a symbolic baptism in her new life. It also foreshadows the novel’s last scene, when Maureen immerses herself in water to reach the mysterious helicopter, seeking release from her suffering.

“But they could assume comprehension between them only if she kept away from even the most commonplace of abstractions; his was the English learned in kitchens, factories and mines. It was based on orders and responses, not the exchange of ideas and feelings.”

The intrinsic, inequitable nature of Maureen and July’s longtime relationship makes true communication between them almost impossible because July has only the English of service: a contrived, systemic feature of South Africa’s racial divide. To some degree, July takes advantage of this to maintain the distance between them and keep Maureen in the niche that he has designated for her. Ironically, a system of diction devised to enforce the power divide now reinforces July’s supremacy over his former boss.

“The presence in the mud hut, mute with an activity of being, of sense of self he could not follow because here there were no familiar areas in which it could be visualized moving, no familiar entities that could be shaping it. With ‘her’ there was no undersurface of recognition; only moments of finding each other out.”

In their harsh new surroundings, Bam’s growing estrangement from his wife suggests that many relationships, even the most intimate, are rooted in convenience, artifice, and agreed-upon illusions, not true closeness: Once the arbitrary contexts and quid pro quos that frame a marriage shift and partners stop constructing a careful persona for each other, they may become strangers. Bam and Maureen no longer recognize each other; they’re trapped in a toxic game of “finding out” the other’s weaknesses. This epiphany echoes Maureen’s earlier remark that “honesty is how much you know about anybody, that’s all” (36).

“It seemed always to amuse July to be the mentor, as if he didn’t take too seriously a white’s wish to comprehend or faculty of comprehension for what he had never needed to know as a black had the necessity to understand, take on, the white people’s laws and ways.”

July and many others of his race have long been compelled to learn white people’s language, laws, and customs, in all their minutiae, to make a living in their own country. As July knows, white people have never felt this necessity—to learn Black people’s ways—and it amuses him now to see the situation reversed.

“When those Soweto and Russians, what-you-call-it come, you shoot with us. You help us.”

When the local chief summons Maureen and Bam to explain their presence in the village, they expect him to send them away as enemies of the Black revolution. They’re stunned to learn that the chief feels no solidarity with the freedom fighters, particularly the foreign ones, and wants Bam to help return his territory to its (white-ruled) status quo through violent opposition. As a result, Bam ironically and comically lectures the chief on his moral responsibility to side with his fellow Black people against white people. The chief’s “reactionary” request is a variation on the truism that “all politics is local”: The chief doesn’t trust outsiders, whatever their race or intentions, except those who (like Bam and Maureen) he thinks can help keep his local power structure intact, safe from meddlers and their big ideas.

“She blinked slowly two or three times.—I think July was talking about himself. […] He always did what whites told him. The pass office. The police.”

Maureen, more attuned to their new circumstances than Bam, has an insight about July’s contempt for the old chief, who stubbornly clings to his allegiance to the white government. July, she thinks, sees his own past submissiveness to white apartheid (and his harboring of the Smaleses) mirrored in the chief’s continued loyalty to the fallen white regime. July’s pity for the doomed chief, then, is actually anxiety about his own future once Black soldiers come to the village.

“While her daughter-in-law tried to satisfy the questions of this white woman who had had to be taught the difference between a plant that even a cow knew better than to chew, and the leaves that would make her children strong, the old woman had the chance to look at her closely in the satisfying, analytical way she didn’t often get without the woman disguising herself by trying, with her smile and gestures, to convey respect etc. as she thought this was done by black people.”

Despite Maureen’s efforts to cleanse herself of her former life in Johannesburg and its pretensions, she can’t gain entry into the hardscrabble life of July’s village. Trying to bond with the women and join in their daily tasks, she’s hopelessly out of her depth, more of a hindrance than a help. Moreover, July’s wife and mother find her attempts to ape their gestures of “respect” artificial and condescending, which causes more friction between them and July. The women’s close, “analytical” look at the hapless Maureen, who is more useless to them than one of their animals, dispels much of the mystique they once felt for the once-magisterial white race.

“Suddenly he began to talk at her in his own language, his face flickering powerfully. […] She understood although she knew no word. Understood everything: what he had had to be, how she had covered up to herself for him, in order for him to be her idea of him. […] his measure as a man was taken elsewhere and by others.”

Angered by the missing shotgun, Maureen demands that July retrieve it. When he refuses, she accuses him of stealing small items from her Johannesburg household. Enraged, he bursts into his own language; his crude servant English can’t convey his blistering scorn. By rejecting the language of servitude, July refutes any claims that Maureen has on him. She has never been his friend, he suggests, or even seen him for what he is: His “measure as a man” was never hers to take. Ironically, only when he discards his English does Maureen realize that her supposedly magnanimous bond with him was a self-serving illusion.