Many must have snipped out the paragraph, put it among old letters, or between the pages of a book, keeping it perhaps as an omen or a warning, glancing at the yellowing piece of paper with closed, secretive faces. When natives steal, murder or rape, that is the feeling white people have.Īnd then they turned the page to something else.īut the people in “the district” who knew the Turners, either by sight, or from gossiping about them for so many years, did not turn the page so quickly. People all over the country must have glanced at the paragraph with its sensational heading and felt a little spurt of anger mingled with what was almost satisfaction, as if some belief had been confirmed, as if something had happened which could only have been expected. It is thought he was in search of valuables. The houseboy, who has been arrested, has confessed to the crime. Mary Turner, wife of Richard Turner, a farmer at Ngesi, was found murdered on the front veranda of their home-stead yesterday morning. 187)It is difficult therefore to reconcile this image of Moses and Mary together in some kind of peace or at least a kind of truce on the one hand, and the contrary image of a plotting Moses killing his master not out of some premeditated way but in a sudden rush of temporary madness.It is by the failures and misfits of a civilization that one can best judge its weaknesses. It is time for the boss to come.' (Lessing, 1950, p. Then she turned and said intimately: 'You had better go now. 'Thank you, Moses,' she said in a high commanding voice. When he had finished the buttoning, he stood back and watched the woman brushing her hair. The attitude of the native was of an indulgent luxuriousness. 187):Moses was buttoning up the dress she was looking in the mirror. Tony was even witnessed to this closeness and easy access of Moses to his master in an intimate scene (Lessing, 1950, p. It is true, after all, that for a long time he was cooperative in the main, and attended to Mary, even though Mary treated him badly. Yet the circumstances too in the novel point to the murder not being planned, but something that was the result of Moses losing his mind for a moment in the heat of passion and in a blind rage so to speak. There is a case to be made, in other words, in the buildup of the tension from the maltreatment and the many years of abuse, for Moses to have planned for revenge and the murder in a calculating way. 22).On the other hand, the arrangements that led to the murder seemed one where Moses could have had all the motivation and the opportunity to commit premeditated murder, seeing that Moses had to endure the humiliations and the maltreatment for an extended period of time, and had the access to Mary and his physical body to the degree that, acting out of spite and a premeditated way, he could have murdered the woman. This phrase, moreover, pertained to Tony, and his moral and intellectual scruples relating to the whole affair of Moses and his destiny with the courts and the looming death sentence (Lessing, 1950, p. It is curious that it is in Lessing that the phrase “fighting in the dark for the sake of a principle” occurs. On the other hand, there is something to this act of surrender that may have something to do with the man not having planned the murder at all but did it in a spur of the moment, in the heat of passion so to speak. Moses himself knew, by admitting to the killing of Mary Turner and presenting himself before the law, choosing that over trying to run away and escape, that he was to face further horrors and no justice from a system that had robbed him for the life of his freedoms and his basic dignity as a man. In Lessing’s ‘The Grass is Singing’ it is easy to see Moses as the representation of the repressed black man, who, in spite of the white man’s need for him, nevertheless is the object of despising and distancing, and much hatred and the systematic repression of his basic human rights, for the economic and social gain of the white man.
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