July's People

A white South African of British heritage, Maureen is the main protagonist of July’s People, and the third-person narration largely centers on her thoughts and impressions. The daughter of a gold mine “shift boss,” Maureen had a childhood of white privilege and middle-class comforts and was vaguely familiar with the hardscrabble lives of the miners. As a schoolgirl, one of her closest companions was Lydia, a Black house servant in her twenties or thirties (significantly, despite their apparent friendship, Maureen never knew her age). Now a housewife of 39, Maureen, with her husband and three children, is cast out of her life of luxury by a Black uprising and quickly begins to lose her bearings.

Increasingly dependent on her Black house servant (July) and his family for survival, she’s forced to reexamine her cherished self-image as a racially sensitive, egalitarian employer and finds it to be mostly convenient fiction. Confronting the ugliest of her long-buried feelings in a climactic quarrel with July, Maureen feels that she has burned all her bridges with him, her family, and her new, fugitive life and flees like an “animal” toward a mysterious helicopter that ambiguously seems to offer escape, whether back to white “civilization” or to a violent death.