Doris Lessing - The Grass is Singing

It was at this time, when any influence would have directed her into a new path, when her whole being was poised, as it were, waiting for something to propel her one way or the other,.that her servant, once again, gave notice. This time there was no row over a broken dish or a badly washed plate: quite simply, he wanted to go home; and Mary was too indifferent to fight. He left, having brought in his place a native whom Mary found so intolerable that she discharged him after an hour's work. She was left servant-less for a while. Now she did not attempt to do more than was essential. Floors were left un-swept, and they ate tinned food. And.a new boy did not present himself. Mary had earned such a bad name among them as a mistress that it became increasingly difficult as time went on to replace those who left.

Dick, unable to stand the dirt and bad food any longer, said he would bring up one of the farm natives for training as a houseboy. When the man presented himself at the door, Mary recognized him as the one she had struck with the whip over the face two years before. She saw the scar on his cheek, a thin, darker weal across the black skin. She stood irresolute in the doorway, while he waited outside, his eyes bent down. But the thought of sending him back to the lands and waiting for somebody else to be sent up; even this postponement tired her. She told him to come in.

That morning, because of some inward prohibition she did not try to explain, she could not work with him as was usually her custom on these occasions. She left him alone in the kitchen; and when Dick came up, said, `Isn't there another boy that will do?'

Dick, without looking at her, and eating as he always did these days, in great gulps, as if there was no time, said: `He's the best I could find. Why?' He sounded hostile.

She had never told him about the incident of the whip, for fear of his anger. She said: `He doesn't seem a very good type to me.' As she spoke she saw that look of exasperation grow on his face, and added hastily, `But he will do; I suppose.'

Dick said: `He is clean and willing. He's one of the best boys I have ever had. What more do you want?' He spoke brusquely, almost with brutality. Without speaking again he went out. And so the native stayed.

She began on the usual routine of instruction, as cold-voiced and methodical as always, but with a difference. She was unable to treat this boy as she had treated all the others, for always, at the back of her mind, was that moment of fear she had known just after she had hit him and thought he would attack her. She felt uneasy in his presence. Yet his demeanour was the same as in all the others, there was nothing in his attitude to suggest that he remembered the incident. He was silent, dogged and patient under her stream of explanations and orders. His eyes he always kept lowered, as if afraid to look at her. But she could not forget it, even if he had; and there was a subtle difference in the way she spoke to him. She was as impersonal as she knew how to be; so impersonal that her voice was free, for a while even of the usual undertone of irritation.

She used to sit quite still, watching him work. The powerful, broad-built body fascinated her. She had given him white shorts and shirts to wear in the house, that had been used by her former servants. They were too small for him; as he swept or scrubbed or bent to the stove, his muscles bulged and filled out the thin material of the sleeves until it seemed they would split. He appeared even taller and broader than he was because of the littleness of the house.

He was a good worker, one of the best she had had. She used to go round after him trying to find things that he had left undone, but she seldom did. So, after a while, she became used to him, and the memory of that whip slashing across his face faded. She treated him as it was natural to her to treat natives, and her voice grew sharp and irritated. But he did not answer back, and accepted her often unjust rebukes without even lifting his eyes off the ground. He might have made up his mind to be as neutral as he knew how.

And so they proceeded, with everything apparently as it should be, a good routine established, that left her free to do nothing. But she was not quite as indifferent as she had been.

By ten in the morning, after he had brought her tea, he would go out back, behind the chicken-runs under a big tree, carrying a tin of hot water; and from the house she sometimes caught a glimpse of him bending over it, sluicing himself, naked from the waist up. But she tried not to be around when it was time for his bath. After this was over, he came back to the kitchen and remained quite still, leaning against the back wall in the sun, apparently thinking of nothing. He might have been asleep. Not until it was time to prepare lunch did he start work again, It annoyed her to think of him standing idly there, immobile and silent for hours, under the un-shaded force of the sun which seemed not to affect him. There was nothing she could do about it, though instead of sinking into a dreary lethargy that was almost sleep, she would rack her brains to think of work she could give him.

One morning she went out to the fowl-runs, which she often forgot to do these days; and when she had finished a perfunctory inspection of the nesting-boxes, and her basket was filled with eggs, she was arrested by the sight of the native under the trees a few yards off. He was rubbing his thick neck with soap, and the white lather was startlingly white against the black skin. He had his back to her. As she looked, he turned, by some chance, or because he sensed her presence, and saw her. She had forgotten it was his time to wash.

A white person may look at a native, who is no better than a dog. Therefore she was annoyed when he stopped and stood upright, waiting for her to go, his body expressing his resentment of her presence there. She was furious that perhaps he believed she was there on purpose; this thought, of course, was not conscious; it would be too much presumption, such unspeakable cheek for him to imagine such a thing, that she would not allow it to enter her mind; but the attitude of his still body as he watched her across the bushes between them, the expression or his face, filled her with anger. She felt the same impulse that had once made her bring down the lash across his face. Deliberately

she turned away, loitered round the chicken-runs, and threw out handfuls of grain; and then slowly stooped out through the low wire door. She did not look at him again; but knew he was standing there, a dark shape, quite motionless, seen out of the comer of her eye. She went back to the house, for the first time in many months jerked clean out of her apathy, for the first time in months seeing the ground she walked over, and feeling the pressure of the sun against the back of her bare neck, the sharp hot stones pressing up under her soles.

She heard a orange angry muttering, and realized she was talking to herself, out aloud, as she walked. She clapped her band over her mouth, and shook her head to clear it; but, by the time that Moses had come back into the kitchen, and she heard his footsteps, she was sitting in the front room rigid with an hysterical emotion; when she remembered the dark resentful look of that native as he stood waiting for her to leave, she felt as if she had put her hand on a snake. Impelled by a violent nervous reaction she went to the kitchen, where he stood in clean clothes, putting away his washing things. Remembering that thick black neck with the lather frothing whitely on it, the powerful back stooping over the bucket, was like a goad to her. And she was beyond reflecting that her anger, her hysteria, was over nothing, nothing that she could explain. What had happened was that the formal pattern of black-andwhite, mistress-and-servant, had been broken by the personal relation; and when a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is his chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip. She felt that she must do something, and at once, to restore her poise. Her eyes happened to fall on a candle-box under the table, where the scrubbing brushes and soap were kept, and she said to the boy: 'Scrub this floor.' She was shocked when she heard her own voice, for she had not known she was going to speak. As one feels when in an ordinary social conversation, kept tranquil by banalities, some person makes a remark that strikes below the surface, perhaps in error letting slip what he really thinks of you, and the shock sweeps one off one's balance, causing a nervous giggle or some stupid sentence that makes everyone present uncomfortable, so she felt: she had lost her balance-, she had no control over her actions.