Hum If You Don't Know the Words

Robin and Edith return to Robin’s home to collect her belongings. Robin nearly cries but doesn’t let herself. She takes her mother’s mascara and packs all her belongings. She’s forced to leave the bike behind because it doesn’t fit in the car. She sees Piet, the leader of the group of Afrikaner children in their neighborhood, waiting at their gate. He speaks in broken English as he says that he was sorry to hear what happened and that his mother cooked a dish for them. They accept it and Robin wonders why it couldn’t have been his parents who died.

Beauty attends a covert meeting in her brother’s home to exchange information. Only men attend, but she’s allowed because she’s a guest and her daughter is missing. Some men tell her to be proud of her daughter for doing what must be done and fighting back, but Beauty privately thinks that none of them have lost a child in all of this. She hears that some captured children are being hidden until they can cross a border into exile, and she prays that her daughter is one of them. She believes in nonviolence, because if they use violence, they become the people they despise and continue the cycle, but she wonders if she should just let the younger generation take the lead.

Beauty sits in a Catholic church where three days ago the police chased a group of children inside and opened fire on them. She looks at the carnage, sits at a pew, and prays to God to release her from the poison of her anger. A woman asks her if she lost a child and, after hearing her situation, tells her to go talk to her neighbor, who has a daughter the same age and in the same school as Nomsa.

Robin is out of school for now and wants a book from the library. Edith says she has plenty, but Robin says she wants a book about orphans, not one of Edith’s travel books. Robin wants to go look for clues at her parents’ crime scene like in a novel, but Edith sternly tells her that they can’t. A benefit society is covering the cost of her parents’ funerals and wants the event to be conservative and Christian, meaning that Robin wouldn’t be allowed to attend, but Edith insists on bringing Robin and wants to defy their wishes by wearing yellow.

Beauty arrives at the home of Nothando Ndlovu and hears the wails of a boy in the corner who was shot at the protest. His twin brother sits next to him, feeling ashamed that he let his brother go alone to the protest. Beauty remembers speaking to the boy as he lay in the street after being shot on the day of the protest. His twin begins to cry, and Beauty tells them that the boy must go to the hospital and risk the doctors turning him in, because his wound is infected and he’ll die without medical attention. His mother blames Nomsa and Beauty. The woman’s daughter, Phumla, is friends with Nomsa and they’ve been seen spending time with a man.

Robin is tasked with returning the clothes she borrowed from Edith’s neighbors, the Goldmans, who have an 11-year-old child named Morris (Morrie). She meets him in the stairwell, where he’s trying to muster the strength to eat his chopped liver and onion lunch. Robin asks if he wants to be her friend, and he explains that he has no other friends; he’s homeschooled because the boys in his class made fun of him for being Jewish. Robin offers him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Once he throws away his lunch, he uses an instant camera to take a photo of it in the trash, which confuses Robin.

On Nomsa’s 18th birthday, Beauty and Andile wait outside the morgue to identify her body. Andile mentions a new piece of information about a man whom Nomsa and Phumla were often seen with. The white men working at the morgue call the names of the terrified families and treat them unsympathetically. Beauty describes Nomsa, and the men say a girl meets the description, but when she sees the body, she knows it isn’t her daughter.

Dressed in bright yellow, Robin and Edith attend Keith and Jolene’s funeral. Robin meets Edith’s friend Victor and notices she’s the only kid there. She asks about the boxes, and Edith explains that they’re coffins. Based on a radio program in which a man got buried alive, Robin asks Edith if she has actually seen her parents’ bodies and ensured that they were dead. She admits that she hasn’t, and Robin won’t let it go, so Edith interrupts the service and looks into the coffin to make sure they’re dead.

After the funeral, Victor takes Robin home because Edith says she has to run an errand. Robin sees her driving away in tears. Robin and Victor play games at Edith’s apartment until she returns home, and then Robin eavesdrops from the bedroom. She hears Edith say that she never wanted the life that a child requires and she doesn’t know what to do. Edith is Robin’s only living relative, so she has no choice but to be responsible for her.

A woman with an Afrikaner accent arrives at the door and asks Robin how she likes living with Edith. Robin says it’s okay: Edith let her drink a brandy and coke last Christmas and will teach her to stuff her bra when she’s 13. At that moment, Edith arrives home, and the woman explains that she’s from Child Welfare Services. Edith tells her to leave and make an appointment next time. After she leaves, Edith frantically cleans up the wine bottles around the apartment and Cat says the woman scared her.

Beauty makes her way through a rich, white neighborhood to the house of a woman called the White Angel, who helps Black people hide from the government. She dresses like she works in the neighborhood, but a yellow police car stops her as she approaches the house’s gate. They ask for her passbook, but she doesn’t have permission to be in this territory, so she says she forgot it inside the home. A Black guard approaches from the house to corroborate her story. The police continue to bother them until a car pulls into the driveway and two white people confirm that she works for them, charming the cops with racist comments and inviting them inside. Once they’re in the home, Beauty feels safe despite being in the heart of enemy territory.