July's People by Nadine Gordimer

First published: 1981

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of plot: Soon after 1980

Locale: Rural South Africa

Principal characters

• Maureen Smales, a Johannesburg wife and mother, a political liberal
• Bamford “Bam” Smales, her husband, an architect, also a liberal
• July, their male servant

The Story:

July, incongruously both servant and host, brings morning tea to Maureen and Bamford Smales where they are sleeping with their three children in a one-room mud hut with only a piece of sack cloth for a door. A small truck, bought for hunting holidays for Bam’s fortieth birthday, brought the Smales family six hundred kilometers across the veld in a journey that took three days and nights. The revolutionary forces trying to wrest power from the whites in South Africa caused the family to flee Johannesburg with their servant July to his rural settlement, which is populated only by his relatives. Maureen and Bam’s feelings about the revolution are mixed. It brings danger to them as privileged whites, but on the other hand it represents a possible end to the racist system they do not endorse.

Noticing one of the huts contains mining artifacts, Maureen thinks about her childhood as the daughter of a shift boss for the mines. A photographer once snapped a picture of Maureen and Lydia, her family’s servant. Years later she saw the photograph in a book. The photograph captured their social relationship, one that Maureen was too young at the time to discern herself: the black servant carrying the white girl’s school bag.

One day, without asking, July rides off in the truck, with his friend Daniel driving. Upset, not knowing where July went or why, Maureen and Bam begin bickering about why they failed to leave South Africa while there was still time, about whether their attitude toward the politics of South Africa is realistic, and about each other’s character. That night, after the children and Bam fall asleep, Maureen goes outside in the dark to shower in the rain. Before returning to the hut, she notices the lights of the truck returning. July returns with supplies and reports of shortages at the store and fighting at the mines not far from the settlement. Daniel teaches July to drive the truck, and July explains its presence to people in nearby villages by saying he took it from his Johannesburg employers. There is no longer any white authority in the area to worry July.

Maureen and July argue about who should keep the truck’s keys, but the argument reveals deeper conflicts. July makes it clear he was always their “boy,” and Maureen, angered at his representation of their fifteen-year relationship, strikes back by asking how he could leave Ellen, the woman he lived with in Johannesburg, in the midst of the fighting. The reversal of roles between July and the Smales family is complete. July walks away, with the keys, his head moving “from side to side like a foreman’s inspecting his workshop or a farmer’s noting work to be done on the lands.” July has the power to make the Smales family leave the settlement or to allow them to stay.

Bamford helps July mend farm tools and install a water tank for the settlement, whose water supply is the river. He shoots warthogs and fishes to help supply his and July’s family with food. Maureen and Bam are dependent, however, on July for nearly everything. They are able to pay with the notes they brought from the bank. During their stay, they listen to a radio, hearing reports of martial law, fighting, and closed airports. Maureen and Bam’s children get along fine with the other children of the village, playing with them, picking up their habits and some of their language.

After they were living in the settlement for more than three weeks, a representative from the chief tells July to bring the Smales family to see him. The chief asks about the fighting in the cities and wants Bam to show him how to use his gun and to help him fight any who come to take over the surrounding villages. Bam responds that the chief should not fight against the black revolutionaries. One day the Smales family joins the rest of July’s relatives as a music box is set up for entertainment; when they return to the hut, Bam’s gun and ammunition are missing. Bam is devastated by the loss of the second of his two possessions—first the truck, then the gun. Maureen goes to July to tell him to get the gun back. July tells her Daniel might have taken the gun because he went off to join the revolutionaries. One afternoon, when Bam and the children are fishing at the river, Maureen hears a helicopter land nearby; she runs toward it, leaving behind the sounds of her husband and children.

Bibliography

Bodenheimer, Rosemarie. “The Interregnum of Ownership in July’s People.” In The Later Fiction of Nadine Gordimer, edited by Bruce King. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. Sees the novel as revealing the hollowness of a materialistic life. Removed from their privileged society, detached from their material possessions, Bamford and Maureen lose their selfhood.

Caminero-Santangelo, Byron. “Subjects in History: Disruptions of the Colonial in Heart of Darkness and July’s People.” In African Fiction and Joseph Conrad: Reading Postcolonial Intertextuality. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. Examines the relationship between Gordimer’s novel and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Clingman, Stephen. The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside. Winchester, Mass.: Allen and Unwin, 1986. Places Gordimer’s first eight novels in the context of South African society and politics. Clingman sees the major themes of July’s People as racial and class revolution and also a revolution in language and sexual roles.

Dojka, Stephanie. “July’s People: She Knew No Word.” In Joinings and Disjoinings: The Significance of Marital Status in Literature, edited by JoAnna Stephens Mink and Janet Doubler Ward. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1991. Sees the deterioration of the marriage of the Smaleses as an indication that white institutions based on exploitation must be dismantled; the marriage is successful at July’s expense.

Neill, Michael. “Translating the Present: Language, Knowledge, and Identity in Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 25, no. 1 (1990): 71-97. Sees the novel as being not so much about the revolutionary future as about the difficulties of the South Africa of the novel’s present. Analyzes how language, knowledge, and identity break down with a change of culture.

Roberts, Ronald Suresh. No Cold Kitchen: A Biography of Nadine Gordimer. Johannesburg: STE, 2005. Examines Gordimer’s life and work, placing them within the context of South African history and the many authors and other people she has known.

Smith, Roland. “Masters and Servants: Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People and the Themes of Her Fiction.” In Critical Essays on Nadine Gordimer, edited by Roland Smith. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990. Centers on Maureen’s recognition of the flaws of her liberalism. Sees a main theme of the novel as the inability of whites and blacks to communicate.

Temple-Thurston, Barbara. Nadine Gordimer Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1999. Examines all of Gordimer’s novels, finding common themes of revolution, sexuality, gender, Africanness, race, and other issues and charting the development of her narrative form and technique. Chapter 4 focuses on an analysis of July’s People and Burger’s Daughter.

Uledi Kamanga, Brighton J. “Cracks in the Wall: The Decline of Apartheid in July’s People and My Son’s Story.” In Cracks in the Wall: Nadine Gordimer’s Fiction and the Irony of Apartheid. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2002. Focuses on Gordimer’s depiction of apartheid in South Africa in her short stories and novels published before 1994. Traces how her fiction chronicles apartheid from its introduction in the late 1940’s to its abolition in the early 1990’s.