July's People

For the first time, Maureen and Bam meet with a figure of authority (the chief) and find him even more ignorant about the country’s fortunes than themselves. The chief’s plans for them not only put them in an unconscionable position but also remind them of the danger they pose to July, who (Maureen thinks) has already begun to regret his loyalty to them. They agree that they must leave the village, but these are only words, like the chief’s about fighting: They still have no idea where or how they’ll go. Maureen persists in trying to help the village women in the fields but knows nothing of their language or rustic lore, and her well-meaning efforts to assimilate only alienate them further. July’s wife wants her gone and challenges her husband to finally be the “big man” of his aspirations by cutting off all contact with white people and opening a shop near their home. However, July’s years in Johannesburg have irreversibly changed him, giving him an outlook and sense of possibilities much different from hers. In a sense, he’s still living in the white world. In fact, he still keeps a vestige of apartheid (his passbook) in a safe place, reluctant to destroy it.

Ironically, July’s prewar memories appear more stable and empowering than Maureen’s, which are disjointed and confused. Her lack of belonging to a present that won’t accept her or to a privileged past that is constantly being morally revised has dissolved much of her sense of self: “The suburb did not come before or after the mine. […] A brick picked up might be Lydia’s loaf” (139). Her deepening alienation from both her family and her past life, like the sequestration of prophets and saints, has sharpened her insight into hidden things, like the arrival of the bakkie in the rain. However, Maureen knows “from the suffering of saints [that] miracles are horror” (11), and after the meeting with the chief, portents of doom begin to swarm around her. From out of the wilds, a ragged, uncanny figure approaches her, carrying a red box on his head. This evokes Lydia, who bore Maureen’s books on her head; the red box signifies Maureen’s blood guilt, just as her blood on her husband’s penis symbolized Bam’s. The mysterious man, a “grotesque ceremonial presence” who represents the “fear of death” (141), has come to play music for an ad-hoc festival.

During the festival, the Smaleses’ shotgun is stolen, apparently by Daniel, who intends to join the freedom fighters. This is an instance of biblical analogy: Earlier, Daniel told Martha that the white people’s authority would soon be a thing of the past, echoing the prophet Daniel, who prophesized the imminent death of the Babylonian tyrant Belshazzar at a feast. Just before his hunting trip with Bam, Daniel stared down the barrels of Bam’s gun, looking “death […] in the eye” (76), just as his biblical namesake stared down the hungry lions in Daniel 6, after which his enemies and their families were thrown to the lions in his place. The power shift of this miracle replays itself when Daniel steals the Smaleses’ gun to help the Black revolution.

Feeling the last of her family’s power slip away with the gun’s theft, Maureen searches for July to confront him. Retracing the route taken by the man with the red box, she feels a sudden premonition of erasure: “[S]he would be ingested, disappeared in this state of being that needed no witnesses” (148). However, these omens don’t necessarily signify a literal death for Maureen, perhaps only that she has no viable future or purpose among July’s people and must embrace her destiny (for good or ill) elsewhere. Finding July, Maureen accuses him of complicity in the theft of the gun, of which he claims ignorance. Exasperated by his evasions, she violates another boundary, scolding him for stealing small items from her in Johannesburg. The irony of Maureen’s situation is that she nominally desires equality with July and other Black people, but her loss of personal power drives her to pull rank on July by shaming him with her knowledge of his past: his affair with Ellen and his pilfering of small things from her house. This pettiness, from a once-wealthy woman whose life he has saved, pushes July to the breaking point, and he finally drops his English, exploding at her in his own language. Nonetheless, his visceral meaning is clear to her: Despite all her sensitive gestures of “understanding” him throughout his long servitude, she knew nothing about him as a person, and there’s no possibility of a deeper relationship between them or even real communication. This further develops The Complexities of Benevolence and Dependency as a theme. In response, Maureen “lurches” onto the hood of the car in a spastic parody of a seductive pose. In this, she mocks the sexual tension that she has long felt between herself and July, bitterly acknowledging her uselessness to him in any capacity but the cliché of a crude seduction. However, this communication, too, fails: July, unfamiliar with the salacious “motor shows” that she’s aping, just stares at her uncomprehendingly. The cultural and racial divide of apartheid has left her isolated, once again, in a self-loathing prison.

Facing July’s final, annihilating disregard, Maureen resorts to a desperate lunge for escape from the limbo that her life has become when, the next day, a helicopter sweeps low over the settlement, exhilarating the villagers. She bolts after it as if by instinct, “like a solitary animal at the season when animals neither seek a mate nor take care of young” (160). Pursuing it, she ignores her husband and children, abdicating her roles of wife and mother. The helicopter’s markings are unclear, and the novel ends before she discovers her fate: salvation by a friendly (white) militia or death at the hands of Black insurgents. In any case, her spontaneous dash for freedom suggests that she has finally sloughed off all her social roles and constraints, all her artifice and sense of belonging. By throwing herself on the mercy of this mysterious deus ex machina, she has pared herself down to her purest need, finally leaving her past behind.

Critical opinion is divided on Maureen’s ultimate fate, which the novel deliberately leaves ambiguous. She “trust[s] herself” and is “alert,” but the homey smells of river vines deceive her, and the “fantasies of the bush delude more inventively than the romantic forests of Grimm and Disney” (160). Regardless, Maureen has surrendered herself, instinctively and virtually without choice, to her destiny, whatever it may be. Her leap of faith echoes Gordimer’s belief that, post-apartheid, white people would (for once) lack the power to choose the South Africa they’d live in; it would be out of their hands. Opting to remain in the country would necessitate abandoning their former roles and accepting their destiny. Likewise, the novel’s ambiguous ending, which not only leaves Maureen’s fate up in the air but also offers no indication of what form of rule will follow the interregnum, hints that it isn’t for Gordimer, Maureen, or any other white person to decide what comes next.