The Grass is Singing

MURDER MYSTERY

By Special Correspondent

Mary Turner, wife of Richard Turner, a farmer at Ngesi, was found murdered on the front veranda of their homestead yesterday morning. The houseboy, who has been arrested, has confessed to the crime. No motive has been discovered. It is thought he was in search of valuables.

The Grass is Singing opens with this news report, and by the locals' disgusted reaction to Mary Turner's dead body, the reader understands that there is something shameful in the way that Mary had allowed herself to be murdered by a native; some weakness that others might recognise and seek to exploit. The question of how Mary came to meet her grisly end becomes the story of this book, and along the way, author Doris Lessing exposes all the ugliness that propped up the Southern Rhodesia of her youth. 

After this beginning chapter, we meet Mary as a young woman, reflecting on her childhood of poverty in dusty trackside “dorps”. Her parents' marriage was not a happy one, and as Mary is now a self-sufficient town dweller, she has no intention of subverting her own needs to those of some man. When Mary learns, however, that her singleness is a topic of gossip and ridicule amongst her friends – and when a farmer rashly proposes marriage after their second meeting – Mary allows herself to be carried off to a remote and unprofitable farm. Installed as the new mistress of the house, Mary is equally distrustful of and disgusted by the presence of black servants and she becomes a mean and harsh taskmaster, unable to command the loyalty of any houseboy for very long.

At first willing to make the best of her situation by sewing curtains and running a small-scale chicken operation of her own, Mary is eventually beaten down by the heat of the countryside, the poverty that results from her husband's pie-in-the-sky farming practises, and the uneasy relationship she forms with Moses: the final kitchenboy her husband won't allow Mary to dismiss. While at first Mary was a fashionable bon vivant, by the end of the book many years later, she's a zombielike scarecrow; the kind of “poor whites” that Mary's mother had insisted they never were (because to descend that far, you're barely better than the natives).

The stinting poverty in which they lived was unbearable; it was destroying them. It did not mean that there was not enough to eat: it meant that every penny must be watched, new clothes foregone, amusements abandoned, holidays kept in the never-never-land of the future. A poverty that allows a tiny margin for spending, but which is shadowed always by a weight of debt that nags like a conscience, is worse than starvation itself. That was how she had come to feel. And it was bitter because it was a self imposed poverty.

Meanwhile on the farm, Dick Turner, while a kind and fair employer, can't get ahead because of his shiftless labour force; a problem common amongst all the white landowners.

They talk about their laborers with a persistent irritation sounding in their voices: individual natives they might like, but as a genus, they loathe them. They loathe them to the point of neurosis. They never cease complaining about their unhappy lot, having to deal with natives who are so exasperatingly indifferent to the welfare of the white man, working only to please themselves. They had no idea of the dignity of labor, no idea of improving themselves by hard work.

This is obviously meant to be ironic to the reader, but there's no doubt that this is how these farmers actually thought about a labour force which were little more than slaves. It is explained that press gangs would capture work-seekers as they headed into towns from their villages – even chasing them into the bush if they tried to get away – and then sold individuals to farmers for a five pound year's contract: these kidnapped men were obliged to work off the payment with a year's labour, after which they were offered a small wage to stay on; “improving themselves by hard work” indeed. White power seems to be a precarious thing, so when a wealthy neighbour witnesses Mary's loss of control over Moses, he rushes in to intervene: one uppity houseboy could undermine the whole system.

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.

I learned much about the history of modern day Zimbabwe from The Grass is Singing, I enjoyed the descriptive yet not florid scene setting, and I thought that the narration of Mary's descent into indifferent madness was really masterfully told. What I never understood is why Moses would kill Mary, other than that he was inexorably drawn into playing his part in her unhappy fate. In a book that exposes the powerlessness of the black majority in Southern Rhodesia in the post WWII era, the lack of insight into Moses' motivations felt nearly like an act of racism itself; as though he was no more in control of his actions than a beast of the fields. My uneasiness over this cost the book a star.