Town and country lovers
Town and Country Lovers (1980) by Nadine Gordimer is a two-part story about interracial lovers who suffer the consequences of breaking the rules forbidding such relationships. In the first story, solitary geologist Dr. von Leinsdorf meets a young, colored (mixed-race) African girl who is a cashier at the grocery store across the street from his apartment. When the store is out of the razors he likes, she makes an effort to get some for him. He asks her to bring them to his apartment, and she soon begins to deliver his groceries for him a few times a week. Before long, the two become sexually involved. He enjoys her company and her sexual availability to him, and he tries to help her by teaching her to swim, type, and improve her grammar.
Quotes
edit- We got the blades in now. I didn’t see you in the shop this week, but I kept some for when you come. So.
- Part one
- But if you want I can run in and get it for you quickly. If you want.
- Part one
- I live just across there—Atlantis—that flat building. Could you drop them by for me, number seven-hundred-and-eighteen, seventh floor.
- Part one
- My brother used to collect. Miniatures. With brandy and whisky and that, in them. From all over. Different countries.
- Part one
- Oh it’s just I’m not used to it. We buy it ready—you know, it’s in a bottle, you just add a bit to the milk or water.
- Part one.
- That’s not coffee, that’s a synthetic flavouring. In my country we drink only real coffee, fresh, from the beans—you smell how good it is as it’s being ground?
- Part one
- I won’t let my daughter work as a servant for a white man again.
- Part one
- Even in my own country it’s difficult for a person from a higher class to marry one from a lower class.
- Part one
- Don’t take it out. Stay inside. Can’t you take it away somewhere. You must give it to someone
- part two
- The milk comes from me.
- Part two
- even provided clothes for the unfortunate infant out of his slender means.
- Part two
- I will try and carry on as best I can to hold up my head in the district.
- Part two
- It was a thing of our childhood, we don’t see each other anymore.
- Part two
- The trouble was Paulus Eysendych did not seem to realize that Thebedi was now simply one of the crowd of farm children down at the kraal (village).
- Part two
- stayed together whole nights—almost; she had to get away before the house servants, who knew her, came in at dawn.
- Part two
- There was no disgrace in that; among her people it is customary for a young man to make sure, before marriage, that the chosen girl is not barren.
- Part two
- They were not afraid of one another, they had known one another always: he did with her what he had done that time in the storeroom at the wedding, and this time it was so lovely, so lovely, he was surprised.... and she was surprised by it, to
- Part ll. Page 69-72
- She put up an arm round each neck, the rough pile of an army haircut on one side, the soft negro on the other, and kissed them both on the cheek. The embrace broke.
- Narrator, “A Soldier’s Embrace
- a bus and train ride away to the west of the city, but this side of the black townships, in atownship for people of her tint.
- (Town,481)
- West of the city […] for people her tint ** page 76.
- had never made him feel what he felt now, when the girl came up to the bank and sat beside him, the drops of water beading off her dark legs the only points of light in the earth-smelling, deep shade.
- Page 88.
- surprise, yet “they were not afraid of one another; they had known one another always”
- Page 88
- told her, each time, when they would meet again”
- Page 88.
- was very light” and had “a quantity of straight, fine floss, like that which carries the seeds of certain weeds in the veld
- Page 90
- there was no disgrace in that, among her people it is customary for a young man to make sure […] the chosen girl is not barren”
- Page 90.
- women turned away, each not wanting to be the one approached to point out where Thebedi lived
- Page 90.
- someone – one of the other labourers? Their women? – had reported that the baby was almost white, that strong and healthy, it had died suddenly after a visit by the farmer’s son
- Page 92.
- wandered far from the kraal and her companions”
- Page 87
- The farm children play together when they are small; but once the white children go away to school they soon don't play together any more, even in the holidays. Although most of the black children get some sort of schooling, they drop every year farther behind the grades passed by the white children; the childish vocabulary, the child's exploration of the adventurous possibilities [the white children's] vocabulary of boarding school and the possibilities of inter-school sports matches and the kind of adventures seen at the cinema.This usefully coincides with the age of twelve or thirteen...
- Page 86