Mary turner the grass is singing11/10/2022 While at first Mary was a fashionable bon vivant, by the end of the book many years later, she's a zombielike scarecrow the kind of “poor whites” that Mary's mother had insisted they never were (because to descend that far, you're barely better than the natives). Installed as the new mistress of the house, Mary is equally distrustful of and disgusted by the presence of black servants and she becomes a mean and harsh taskmaster, unable to command the loyalty of any houseboy for very long.Īt first willing to make the best of her situation by sewing curtains and running a small-scale chicken operation of her own, Mary is eventually beaten down by the heat of the countryside, the poverty that results from her husband's pie-in-the-sky farming practises, and the uneasy relationship she forms with Moses: the final kitchenboy her husband won't allow Mary to dismiss. When Mary learns, however, that her singleness is a topic of gossip and ridicule amongst her friends – and when a farmer rashly proposes marriage after their second meeting – Mary allows herself to be carried off to a remote and unprofitable farm. Her parents' marriage was not a happy one, and as Mary is now a self-sufficient town dweller, she has no intention of subverting her own needs to those of some man. The question of how Mary came to meet her grisly end becomes the story of this book, and along the way, author Doris Lessing exposes all the ugliness that propped up the Southern Rhodesia of her youth.Īfter this beginning chapter, we meet Mary as a young woman, reflecting on her childhood of poverty in dusty trackside “dorps”. The Grass is Singing opens with this news report, and by the locals' disgusted reaction to Mary Turner's dead body, the reader understands that there is something shameful in the way that Mary had allowed herself to be murdered by a native some weakness that others might recognise and seek to exploit. It is thought he was in search of valuables. The houseboy, who has been arrested, has confessed to the crime. Mary Turner, wife of Richard Turner, a farmer at Ngesi, was found murdered on the front veranda of their homestead yesterday morning.
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