SMALES FAMILY

July's People by Nadine Gordimer



July's People by Nadine Gordimer

Introduction

Renowned South African writer and Nobel Literature Prize winner Nadine Gordimer wrote July's People (published by Penguin) at a time when her country was still firmly under Apartheid rule. Set in the early 1980s, the book portrays a country undergoing a revolution with the writer predicting what happens when the black majority overthrows their white rulers. Gordimer imagines a South Africa, where the blacks have revolted against the white minority, with help from neighboring African countries like Zimbabwe, Botswana, and Mozambique (Petri, 2009, pp 89).

The Story

  July, incongruously both servant and host, brings morning tea to Maureen and Bamford Smales where they are sleeping with their three children in a one-room mud hut with only a piece of sack cloth for a door. A small truck, bought for hunting holidays for Bam's fortieth birthday, brought the Smales family six hundred kilometers across the veld in a journey that took three days and nights. The revolutionary forces trying to wrest power from the whites in South Africa caused the family to flee Johannesburg with their servant July to his rural settlement, which is populated only by his relatives. Maureen and Bam's feelings about the revolution are mixed. It brings danger to them as privileged whites, but on the other hand it represents a possible end to the racist system they do not endorse. 

Noticing one of the huts contains mining artifacts, Maureen thinks about her childhood as the daughter of a shift boss for the mines. A photographer once snapped a picture of Maureen and Lydia, her family's servant. Years later she saw the photograph in a book. The photograph captured their social relationship; one that Maureen was too young at the time to discern herself: the black servant carrying the white girl's school bag.

One day, without asking, July rides off in the truck, with his friend Daniel driving. Upset, not knowing where July went or why, Maureen and Bam begin bickering about why they failed to leave South Africa while there was still time, about whether their attitude toward the politics of South Africa is realistic, and about each other's character. That night, after the children and Bam fall asleep, Maureen goes outside in the dark to shower in the rain. Before returning to the hut, she notices the lights of the truck returning. July returns with supplies and reports of shortages at the store and fighting at the mines not far from the settlement. Daniel teaches July to drive the truck, and July explains its presence to people in nearby villages by saying he took it from his Johannesburg employers. There is no longer any white authority in the area to worry July.

Maureen and July argue about who should keep the truck's keys, but the argument reveals deeper conflicts. July makes it clear he was always their “boy,” and Maureen, angered at his representation of their fifteen-year relationship, strikes back by asking how he could leave Ellen, the woman he ...