Doris Lessing

The Grass Is Singing

Marion

And then it was that someone used the phrase 'poor whites.' It caused disquiet. There was no great money-cleavage in those days (that was before the era of the tobacco barons), but there was certainly a race division.

The small community of Afrikaners had their own lives, and the Britishers ignored them. 'Poor whites' were Afrikaners, never British. But the person who said the Turners were poor whites stuck to it defiantly.

What was the difference? What was a poor white? It was the way one lived, a question of standards. All the Turners needed were a drove of children to make them poor whites.

What happened was that the formal pattern of black and white, 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 poise.

It was not even pity for Dick that moved him. He was obeying the dictate of the first law of white South Africa, which is:

'Thou shalt not let your fellow whites sink lower than a certain point; because if you do, the nigger will see he is as good as you are.' The strongest emotion of a strongly organized society spoke in his voice, and it took the backbone out of Dick's resistance.

In the minds of all three of them the word 'charity' was written in big black letters, obscuring everything else. And they were all wrong. It was an instinctive self-preservation. Charlie was fighting to prevent another recruit to the growing army of poor whites, who seem to respectable white people so much more shocking (though not pathetic, for they are despised and hated for their betrayal of white standards, rather than pitied) than all the millions of black people who are crowded into the slums or on to the dwindling land reserves of their own country.

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