July's People

The next morning, Bam regards Maureen’s semi-nudity with disgust, and she chooses not to tell him about the bakkie’s return. He tries the radio but finds only the usual news of isolated skirmishes and bombings, and the two of them wonder if they would even want to go back to a “white society they didn’t believe in” if order were restored (51). Suddenly, they hear July at the door. With his usual deference, he offers them firewood since it’s too rainy to light a fire outdoors. However, instead of greeting him, Bam demands “sardonically” to know where he has been, shocking Maureen. After lighting the fire, July says that he has been to the shops for necessary supplies. Since he doesn’t know how to drive yet, he had a friend drive him the 40 kilometers to the general store. He pats the keys in his pocket, as if intending to keep them.

Maureen realizes that people will have seen him, a Black man, with the bright yellow bakkie: an unusual sight. Nevertheless, they—white people—could never have driven the truck there themselves. July describes the unrest he saw, the raids by Black soldiers, and says that the store is short of stock now and that everything is expensive. He tells them to help him fetch the supplies from the truck once the rain lets up. Before leaving, he hands them new batteries for the radio. Maureen is placated by this thoughtfulness and by the salt and other foodstuffs he has bought, which will make her cooking much easier. Bam, however, blurts out his suspicions, saying that July acts as if the “millennium” has already come.

During the long rain, the Smaleses, to their surprise, learn to savor the primal allure of a simple fire, which satisfies “all wants.” When it clears, Bam and Maureen sit and watch as July, tutored by his friend, learns to drive their bakkie. They feel that they’ve missed their chance to politely ask for the keys back. Together, they share their disillusionment with July, who in Johannesburg had always seemed so “correct” despite the inequalities of the larger (white) society that they’ve always deplored. Acknowledging that they owe him “everything,” they still feel festering resentment over his liberties with their truck. Bam tries, without much conviction, to reassure Maureen that they’ll soon be out of the village and on their way back to civilization.

When July delivers their supply of wood, he enthuses about his progress in learning to drive the car, but Maureen reminds him that he has no driver’s license and might be arrested; she also worries that his use of the bakkie might betray their presence in the village to the Black insurgents. July laughs that, like the passbooks he once needed to travel, white policemen are now a thing of the past. As for the bakkie, he has been telling everyone that it’s his. Hearing this, Bam reddens with anger. The conversation turns to the children’s coughing fits, and July, with feeling, tells them not to trust in local herbal remedies, even though his wife uses them on his children.

Maureen reflects that they’ve never been able to read July, something she used to chalk up to his “dependency” on them. On the pretense of fetching a rubber mat from the bakkie to help keep the children dry, Maureen casually holds out her hand for the keys. Instead of obliging, July testily reminds her that only he can safely use the truck to get supplies. Maureen senses, in his eyes and in the grim set of his mouth, an age-old “contempt and humiliation that came from their blood and his” (62). The faceoff is interrupted by Victor, who runs in with the furious complaint that villagers are stealing water from the tank that Bam set up. As Bam and Maureen scold him, saying that the water is for everyone, July laughs, telling Victor how clever and generous his father is.

Contemplating July’s “moodiness,” Maureen ponders the challenges of fully understanding someone in a different place on the power scale from herself. Race, economics, and culture affect much of an individual’s experience, especially in an asymmetrical society like hers, such that an “absolute” sense of relatability might be forever elusive. Nevertheless, Victor has learned to play the village children’s games, and Maureen, who neglected to bring tampons, has accustomed herself to a wad of rags and a dip in the river, like the village women.

After getting the rubber mat from the bakkie, Maureen intends to return the keys, which July eventually relinquished to her. Bam has gone hunting for warthogs to provide some meat for dinner. Not wanting to be alone with July at his hut, which he shares with no one, not even his wife, Maureen sends children to fetch him, but he sends them back to tell her that she can come to him. After she sends the kids back, he comes out of his hut and casually accepts the keys. However, he earnestly defends his use of the bakkie and his right to hold the keys: “Me, I’m your boy, always I’m have keys of your house” (69). Maureen recoils at the word “boy,” which they never used in her household; she often scolded other white people who used it to refer to Black people. Using the word repeatedly, July reiterates what a good, trustworthy “boy” he was back in Johannesburg and how she was always kind to him—though her demands sometimes crossed the line, as when she told him once to dust out the bookcases when she was away.

Shocked and hurt, Maureen protests that if her request offended him, he should have complained then. She says that all people get on each other’s nerves sometimes but that she and Bam never saw him as anything but a “grown man”—implying as an equal. Besides, she adds, he’s no longer their servant. However, July refuses to accept this shift in their relationship, snapping that Africans “like money” and that he worked for her for 15 years because his family needed the money. Provoked by his reference to “family,” Maureen scornfully mentions Ellen, his “town woman” (whose whereabouts are now unknown), asking what his wife thinks about her. Instantly, she knows from his angry “convulsion” that he’ll never forgive her. Assiduously polite, he puts the keys in his pocket and walks off to join the young man who’s teaching him to drive and is now his constant companion.

Before leaving for the warthog hunt, Bam shows the villagers his 12-gauge shotgun, unaware that they know about it and know that he hides it in the thatch roof. July’s driving teacher, a young ex-milkman named Daniel, shows special interest in the gun, so Bam teaches him how to fire it. Accompanied by a 14-year-old boy from the village, Bam stakes out the hog wallow and shoots two piglets, the death agonies of which disturb him: Previously, he only shot gamebirds, which don’t have proper faces. He senses, for the first time, that he’s a “killer.” When he and the boy lug the piglets home, Maureen says to give the larger one to the villagers, whispering that the smaller one will be more tender. The Smaleses, who have never before gone two weeks without meat, are intoxicated by the feast of fresh pork. Bam sings a song in Afrikaans for Royce, his youngest, and shortly after this, oblivious to his children sprawled around him, he makes love to Maureen for the first time since their arrival in the hut. In the morning, finding (menstrual) blood on his penis, he shudders with “hallucinatory horror” that it’s the pig’s.