The Grass Is Singing

by Doris Lessing

Dedication To MRS. GLADYS MAASDORP OF SOUTHERN RHODESIA FOR WHOM I FEEL THE GREATEST AFFECTION AND ADMIRATION

It is by the failures and misfits of a civilization that one can best judge its weaknesses. AUTHOR UNKNOWN

MURDER MYSTERY By Special Correspondent Mary Turner, wife of Richard Turner, a farmer at Ngesi, was found murdered on the front veranda of their home-stead yesterday morning. The houseboy, who has been arrested,

the energetic Charlie Slatter had traveled from farm to farm over the district telling people

Long before the murder marked them out, people spoke of the Turners in the hard, careless voices reserved for misfits, outlaws and the self-exiled. The Turners were

disliked,

That little box of a house—it was forgivable as a temporary dwelling,

“Poor whites” were Afrikaners, never British.

people would still not think of them as poor whites. To do that would be letting the side down. The Turners were British, after all.

the way people felt about it, the way they pitied Dick Turner with a fine fierce indignation against Mary, as if she were something unpleasant and unclean, and it served her right to get murdered. But they did not ask questions.

who that “Special Correspondent” was. Someone in the district sent in the news, for the paragraph was not in newspaper language. But who? Marston, the assistant, left the district immediately after the murder. Denham, the policeman, might have written to the paper in a personal capacity, but it was not likely. There remained Charlie Slatter, who knew more about the Turners than anyone else, and was there on the day of the murder.

when Dick Turner’s farm boys came to him with the news, did he sit down to write a note to the Sergeant at the police camp? He did not use the telephone. Everyone who has lived in the country knows what a branch telephone is like. You lift the receiver after you have turned the handle the required number of times, and then, click, click, click, you can hear the receivers coming off all over the district, and soft noises like breathing, a whisper, a subdued cough.

And though it was an urgent matter, he ignored the telephone, but sent a personal letter by a native bearer on a bicycle to Denham at the police camp, twelve miles away.

Who was Charlie Slatter?

Slatter had been a grocer’s assistant in London. He was fond of telling his children that if it had not been for his energy and enterprise they would be running round the slums in rags.

twenty years in Africa.

He was a crude, brutal, ruthless, yet ki...

Moses, who was a great powerful man, black as polished linoleum,

In the front room stood Marston, his hands in his pockets, in a pose that seemed negligently calm. But his face was pale and strained. “Where were you?” asked Charlie at once, accusingly. “Normally Mr. Turner wakes me,” said the youth calmly. “This morning I slept late. When I came into the house I found Mrs. Turner on the veranda.

When old settlers say “One had to understand the country,” what they mean is, “You have to get used to our ideas about the native.” They are saying, in effect, “Learn our ideas, or otherwise get out: we

don’t want you.” Most of these young men were brought up with vague ideas about equality. They were shocked, for the first week or so, by the way natives were treated. They were revolted a hundred times a day by the casual way they were spoken of, as if they were so many cattle; or by a blow, or a look. They had been prepared to treat them as human beings. But they could not stand out against the society they were joining. It did not take them long to change. It was hard, of course, becoming as bad oneself. But it was not very long that they thought of it as

If Tony Marston had been even a few more months in the country it would have been easy.

Turners’ household with its atmosphere of tragedy

“A few questions, if you don’t mind,” he said. Tony nodded. “How long have you been here?” “About three weeks.” “Living in this house?” “No, in a hut down the path.” “You were going to run this place while they were away?”

it was Charlie who had literally turned Dick off his farm; and in previous interviews, at which Tony had been present, he had shown none of this sentimental pity.

Tony laughed. The two men looked at him sharply. “You know as well as I do this case is not something that can be explained straight off like that. You know that. It’s not something that can be said in black and white, straight off.”

For Moses would be hanged in any case; he had committed a murder, that fact remained. Did he intend to go on fighting in the dark for the sake of a principle? And if so, which principle?

the key to the whole thing: the look on the Sergeant’s and Slatter’s faces when they looked down at the body; that almost hysterical look of hate and fear.

He could not even begin to imagine the mind of a native. Passing his

After that the Turners’ farm was run as an overflow for Charlie’s cattle. They grazed all over it, even up to the hill where the house stood. It was left empty: it soon fell down.

At the trial, which was as Sergeant Denham had said it would be, a mere formality, he said what was expected of him.

He met a man from Northern Rhodesia, who told him about the copper mines and the wonderfully high salaries. They sounded fantastic to Tony. He took the next train to the copper belt, intending to save some money and start some business on his own account. But the salaries, once there, did not seem so good as they had from a distance. The cost of living was high, and then, everyone drank so much. .

If one was looking for a symbol to express South Africa, the South Africa that was created by financiers and mine magnates, the South Africa which the old missionaries and explorers who chartered the Dark Continent would be horrified to see, one would find it in the store. The store is everywhere.

the unmistakable smell, a smell compounded of varnish, dried blood from the killing yards behind, dried hides, dried fruit and strong yellow soap. Behind the counter is a Greek, or a Jew, or an Indian. Some-times the children of this man, who is invariably hated by the whole district as a profiteer and an alien, are playing among the vegetables because the living quarters are just behind the shop. For thousands of people up and down Southern Africa the store is the background to their childhood. So many things centered round it.

her mother complained for the sake of making a scene and parading her sorrows: that she really enjoyed the luxury of standing there in the bar while the casual drinkers looked on, sympathetically; she enjoyed complaining in a hard sorrowful voice about her husband. “Every night he comes home from here,” she would say, “every night! And I am expected to bring up three children on the money that is left over when he chooses to come home.

which was rightly hers to spend for the children. But he would say at the end, “But what can I do? I can’t refuse to sell him drink, now can I?” And at last, having played out her scene and taken her fill of sympathy, she would slowly walk away across the expanse of red dust to her house, holding Mary by the hand—a tall, scrawny woman with angry, unhealthy brilliant eyes. She made a confidante of Mary early.

he was on the railway, working as a pumpman. And then, as

They could never be fully paid: her mother was always appealing to the owner for just another month’s grace. Her father and mother fought over these bills twelve times a year. They never quarreled over anything but money; sometimes, in fact, her mother

her brother and sister both died of dysentery

one very dusty year.

Then she was sent to boarding school and her life changed. She was extremely happy, so happy that she dreaded going home at holiday times to her fuddled father, her bitter mother, and the fly-away little house that was like a small wooden box on stilts.

Then her mother died and she was virtually alone in the world, for her father was five hundred miles away, having been

Being alone in the world had no terrors for her at all, she liked it. And by dropping her father she

for she was leading the comfortable carefree existence of a single woman in South Africa, and she did not know how fortunate she was. How could she know?

It had never occurred to her to think, for instance, that she, the daughter of a petty railway official and a woman whose life had been so unhappy because of economic pressure that she had literally

“Class” is not a South African word; and its equivalent, “race,” meant to her the office boy in the firm where she worked, other women’s servants, and the amorphous mass of natives in the streets, whom she hardly noticed.

Till she was twenty-five nothing happened to break the smooth and comfortable life she led. Then her father died. That removed the last link that bound her to a childhood she hated to remember.

She was free. And when the funeral was over, and she had returned to the office, she looked forward to a life that would continue as it had so far been. She was very happy:

At thirty nothing had changed. On her thirtieth birthday she felt a vague surprise that did not even amount to discomfort—for she did not feel any different—that the

years had gone past so quickly. Thirty! It sounded a great age. But it had nothing to do with her. At the same time she did not celebrate this birthday; she allowed it to be forgotten. She felt almost outraged that such a thing could happen to her, who was no different from the Mary of sixteen.