Peter Abrahams

Peter Henry Abrahams Deras (3 March 1919 – 18 January 2017), commonly known as Peter Abrahams, was a South African-born novelist, journalist and political commentator who in 1956 settled in Jamaica, where he lived for the rest of his life.

Quotes

Mine Boy (1946)

Mine Boy

• A strange group of people, these, he thought. Nothing tied them down. They seem to believe in nothing. But well, they had given him a bed. She had given it to him. She who was the strangest of them all.
  • Narrator, p.6

• An unbelievable thing happened. The second colored man knocked the first one down and ran down the street waving to Xuma.
  • Narrator, p.16

• Leah left him and he collapsed in a heap. She looked down and spat. The she raised her heel and brought it down on his face.
  • Narrator, p.29

• I am no good and I cannot help myself. It will be right if you hate me. You should beat me. But inside me there is something wrong. And it is because I want the things of the white people. I want to be like the white people and go where they go and do the things they do and I am black. I cannot help it.
  • Eliza p.60

• Out of your feeling and out of your pain it must come. Others have found it. You can too. But first you must think and not be afraid of your thoughts. And if you have questions and you look around you will find those who will answer them. But first you must know what you are going to fight and why and what you want.
  • Paddy, page 171.

• Hoopvlei was another of the white man's ventures to get the natives and coloreds out of the towns. The natives did not like the locations, and besides, they were all full, so the white man had started townships in the outlying district of Johannesburg in the hope of killing Vrededorp and Malay Camp. Many other places had been killed thus.
  • Narrator, page 95.

• No! I don't want you to touch me.
  • Eliza, page 89.

• He did not want to go there for fear he should meet Eliza. And she was like a devil in his blood. He could not forget her.
  • Narrator, page 61.

• He sat on the bed and held his head in his hands. Eliza had gone out with that sickly monkey dressed in the clothes of a white man. Why, even his hands were soft.
  • Narrator, page 57.

• Johannes drunk and Johannes sober were two different people.
  • Narrator, page 32.

• I am no good and I cannot help myself. It will be right if you hate me. You should beat me. But inside me there is something wrong. And it is because I want the things of the white people. I want to be like the white people and go where they go and do the things they do and I am black. I cannot help it. Inside I am not black and I do not want to be a black person.
  • Page 60.

• The only place where he was completely free was underground in the mines. There he was a master and knew his way. There he did not even fear his white man, for his white man depended on him. He was the boss boy. He gave the orders to the other mine boys. They would do for him what they would not do for his white man or any other white man.
  • Page 61

• His white man had even tried to make friends with him because the other mine boys respected him so much. But a white man and a black man cannot be friends. They work together. That's all.
  • Page 61.

• He's just a mine boy ... Yes. Grand, but not a human being yet. Just a mine boy.
  • Page 67

• A man's a man to the extent that he asserts himself. There's no assertion in your mine boy. There is confusion and bewilderment and acceptance. Nothing more.
  • Page 68.

• So many people who consider themselves progressives have their own weird notions about the native, but they all have one thing in common. They want to decide who the good native is and they want to do good things for him. [...] They want to think for him and he must accept their thoughts. And they like him to depend on them.
  • Page 68.

• It is not enough to destroy, you must build as well. Build up a stock of faith in your breast in native Zuma, mine boy, who has no social conscience, who cannot read or write and cannot understand his wanting what you want. **Page 69.

• The natives did not like locations, and besides, they were all full, so the white man had started townships in the outlying district of Johannesburg in the hope of killing Vrededorp and Malay Camp.
  • Page 95

• If a man loves a woman he loves her. That is all. There is no bad and there is no good. There is only love. The only thing that is bad is if a man loves a woman and she loves him not.
  • Page 119.

• A woman finds a man and the whole world is a new place. And the fighting stiffness that was ever in her body, goes. And the hardness of her head stops and she does not think any more with her head but feels with her heart. Yes, it is ever so. And with a man it is so too. His shoulders square and a smile is not far from his lips and there is a new certainty in him. Yes. It has ever been so and it will ever be so when a man and a woman love. **Page 123

• If a woman loves a man she does that which is good for him.
  • Page 124.

Tell Freedom (1954)

• I pushed my nose and lip...I was inside the raindrop away from the misery of the cold damp room. I was in a place of warmth and sunshine, inside my raindrop world.
  • Page 7

• I remember the many people who suddenly invaded the house, making me feel stranger in my own home...With his (father’s) going, the order and stability that had been in my life dissolved. There was no breadwinner. So we had to leave the place that had been our home.
  • Page 10

• You are Colored. There are three kinds of people: white people, Colored people, and black people. The white people come first, then the Colored people, then the black people. Lee asks “Why?” but Aunt’s answer is, “Because it is so.
  • Page 44

• Twenty-second Street, the street where we lived, was strange and alien. The noise was frightening after the quiet of Elsburg.
  • Page 62

• It seemed to me there was no sense in life. Things happened and no one seemed to know why.
  • Page 79

• All the years of his life had been spent walking through the land; from east to west, then back; from north to south, then back.
  • Page 80

• Dressed in an orange sack. Three holes in the sack allowed for his head and arms to come through. About his waist was a piece of rope that gathered the sack in and made it hang like some monkish garb. He was barefooted.
  • Page 89

• It was difficult for the Africans most of whom had taken European education and embraced Christian religion, to revert to the rapidly dying, outdated traditions and customs of their forefathers
  • Page 170

• Dear God! Has earth a fairer land? Can there be one as fair? And if there can, can I feel for it as for this? And can my heart ever ache for the people of another with the purity it does for the people of this? The whites here sing a love song to the land, from within. Would they have me sing it from without? A little self-conscious and ashamed at the intensity of my emotions. New feelings, elusive and uncontrollable, played on my heart and mind. A need different from all the other needs I had ever known moved me to longing. And I did not know what I longed for.
  • Page 240

• Light is white: dark is black.
  • Page 239

• Really these streets and trees, almost the clean air I breathed here were: RESERVED FOR EUROPEANS ONLY. I was the intruder. And like the intruder, I walked carefully lest I be discovered. I longed for what the white folk had. I envied them their superior European lot
  • Page 193

• In that time I had been accused of theft, I had been called all the pet names of abuse reserved by whites for blacks; I had carried heavy loads to the tram stop, and women had conveniently forgotten to pay.
  • Page 202

• I turned and looked at the city. A sea of twinkling, multi-colored lights leaped to the eye. They threw up the outlines of buildings. They made the wide streets shine. They spelled out advertisements. I could map the city by its lights.
  • Page 239

• That was the heart of it there, where it was almost as light as day. I could see cars and trams clearly. And the outlines of people moving. White people. To the left, and a little towards me, was Malay Camp, an inky black spot in the sea of light. Couldn't see anything there. Dark folk move in darkness: white folk move in light. Well, Malay Camp wouldn’t be a slum if it were as light as the city. Slum is darkness. Dark folk live in darkness.
  • Page 239

• Oh––isn’t it lovely? That’s the one I want when we are rich!’ Her eyes were bright, her lips parted
  • Page 248

• In the name of civilization, the dignity and worth of the African people has been grossly underrated, their progress retarded and aspirations frustrated, and the whole life undermined. They are compelled to live in appalling conditions of squalor, filth and isolation...
  • Page 254

• You write in English and already you are touching things that should not be mentioned.
  • Page 273

• Who had given him the scholarship? The Bantu Welfare Trust? No one I asked seemed sure. I put out feelers. The Welfare Trust was only for pure-blooded Africans. And though the Africans might accept me as one of themselves, the whites who administered the trust would not. Those to whom I spoke thought it crazy, but there you are.
  • Page 274

• The concerts and theatres, the libraries and the parks, the bookshops and the clean, fresh looking tearooms, the buses and departmental stores.
  • Page 275

• On a different mental and emotional level my friend Jonathan had gone through the same process. Christianity and the knowledge it brought had made the tribal past inadequate. So he had turned to the Christian present and future. These working men had found the tribal economy inadequate when the new taxes, the new offerings, and new prices of the white men came. So they had turned to city...
  • Page 308

• Found that the good things of this present are RESERVED FOR EUROPEANS ONLY
  • Page 309

• Entering is stepping into a new Dark Age. The sea had once been here. In its retreat it had left a white, unyielding sand, grown dirty with time. It had left almost a desert.
  • Page 341

• He (Roderiques) was hungry and homeless. So I fed him. He told me something had gone wrong and he had to leave the Roman school. He said he had no people.
  • Page 345 -346

A Wreath for Udomo (1956)

• She's vain about her hair.
  • Chapter 2, Pg 11

• It's because I creep up on people, I creep up on them while their backs are turned. Then suddenly without knowing how they realise, I'm there and they want what's there. Only they can't have it.
  • Chapter 2, Pg 24