She represents the negative rejection of one's own identity, and rejects her own true and inclusive path in life, as she rejects Xuma who loves her beauty, mind, and poise, and would offer her those things, but in terms that Eliza is emotionally incapable of recognizing. At the house where he lives Xuma also meets a woman named Maisy, who loves him but whom he rejects. Maisy's plight inspires a great deal of affection in the heart of the reader, as she genuinely loves Xuma, and states that to love a man who loves another is painful, as she looks at him and he is thinking of another woman and feels pain. But Xuma sees in Maisy an older and outdated way of being Black in contemporary society, and despite the fact that Maisy, according to her own admission is pleasant and merely likes to be happy, to dance and to laugh, Xuma's consciousness as a Black man has been raised to the point that neither the money he works in the mine, the false construction of white identity represented by Eliza, nor the acceptance of injustice in South African society represented by Maisy is acceptable to him.

This dual romantic rejection, of Xuma's rejection by the pseudo-White Eliza and then rejecting Maisy symbolizes his developing attitude to his race. Initially, he enters the novel with little sense of the political polarization of Johannesburg. Then he comes to realize this polarization, and reject whiteness as a social construct and as something held up as superior to his own sense of self.

He can outwork many of the men of all races and classes in the mine, yet he is unfairly treated. But after this initial feeling of hatred directed against white society, and exacerbated by Eliza's treatment of him, however, finally, he comes to both accept the divided nature of society as an evil he must ameliorate, but without hatred directed against all white people. What matter, Xuma realizes, is not if a person is black or white, but if they are willing to struggle...

For instance, Eliza is black but wishes to be white and lacks compassion. Maisy is good but lacks a needed sense of outrage against the world of hatred that surrounds all South African blacks.
Thus, Xuma begins as a prototypical innocent, but he is given a rude awakening to race relations in the city and witnesses first-hand the brutality of the Johannesburg police force, but uses this recognition in a psychologically constructive fashion, to motivate himself to do good in the world. Xuma sees the brutality of the bosses of the mines and the squalor with which Blacks, unlike white South Africans are forced to live in. In the city, white people lead privileged lives, unimaginable to Xuma as a black man, and also as a man from the country. When Xuma begins to question the racial injustices surrounding him, he also begins to question the class structures of South Africa that allow such inequalities to exist. While Xuma's great physical strength makes him a successful mine boy, he remains a second-class citizen under the apartheid regime.

As the novel closes, Xuma's boss and friend Paddy O'Shea, a white man from Ireland "over the seas" helps him finally come to the realization that blacks and whites can be brothers after all. Thematically, the novel stresses that when black or white South Africans view their racially different neighbors as another species, no social mobility or equality is possible, and not change is possible. One cannot wish one's skin or soul to be different, nor polarize one's identity against others of different skins. The book underlines the fact that despite the brutality of the regime, all individuals are fundamentally human, and to wish one were white is foolish, as it is to hate whites. Unity of those who experience oppression, and compassion towards all is what one must strive for.

Works Cited

Abrams, Peter. Mine Boy. New York: Heinemann Press, 1946.