Six feet of the country

Six Feet of the Country (1956) by Nadine Gordimer This short story concerns the death of a native of Rhodesia (modern Zimbabwe). When the young man’s family wants to give him a burial, the white mortuary staff’s incompetence thwarts those attempts and ultimately deprives the man of a grave—thus denying him a mere “six feet of the country.

Quotes

• to change something in [themselves]
  • Page 7
• feudal. Wrong, I suppose, obsolete, but more comfortable all around
  • Page 9
• And when I flared up and told [the police] that so long as my natives did their work, I didn’t think it my right or concern to poke my nose into their private lives, I got from the coarse, dull-witted police sergeant one of those looks that come not from any thinking process going on in the brain but from that faculty common to all who are possessed by the master-race theory—a look of insanely inane certainty. He grinned at me with a mixture of scorn and delight at my stupidity
  • Page 12.
• at the waste, the uselessness of this sacrifice by people so poor. Just like the poor everywhere, I thought, who stint themselves the decencies of life in order to ensure themselves the decencies of death”
  • Page 15
• I had the feeling that they were shocked, in a laconic fashion, by their own mistake, but that in the confusion of their anonymous dead they were helpless to put it right”
  • Page 18
• It’s a matter of principle. It’s time these officials had a jolt from someone who’ll bother to take the trouble”
  • Page 19
• I continued to pass on assurances to Petrus every evening, but every evening, it sounded weaker. At last, it became clear that we would never get Petrus’s brother back, because nobody really knew where he was. Somewhere in a graveyard as uniform as a housing scheme, somewhere under a number that didn’t belong to him, or in the medical school, perhaps, laboriously reduced to layers of muscle and strings of nerve? Goodness knows. He had no identity in this world anyway
  • Page 19
• So the whole thing was a complete waste, even more of a waste for the poor devils than I thought it would be”
  • Page 20
• The farm hasn’t managed that for us, of course, but it has done other things, unexpected, illogical.
  • Page 7
• And for a moment I accept the triumph as I had managed it.
  • Page 8
• When Johannesburg people speak of ‘tension,’ they don’t mean hurrying people in crowded streets, the struggle for money, or the general competitive character of city life. They mean the guns under the white men’s pillows and the burglar bars on the white men’s windows. They mean those strange moments on city pavements when a [B]lack man won’t stand aside for a white man.
  • Pages 8-9
• the baas is seeing to it for you”
  • Page 19

External links

• super summary