Boy by Peter Abrams What

¶ … Boy by Peter Abrams

What does it mean to be a man without a color, in a nation where one's social status and formal social power are completely determined by one's racial status? At the beginning of Peter Abraham's 1946 novel Mine Boy, the protagonist Xuma first sees himself as primarily defined as a black man from the country, in other words by his racial and geographic status. He lives in a land divided into sharply defined racial, class, linguistic, and geographic social structures. Who one is, what one looks like, the national origins of one's first tongue, and if one is urban or rural -- all of these create a polarized South Africa. But the end of the novel strips these trappings of identity stripped away from Xuma's consciousness, although these trappings are not similarly stripped away from the politics of the society around him. This new sense of Xuma's self and identity is the real gold that Xuma finds in Johannesburg, where he goes at the novel's beginning, looking for work. But economics begins to take on a less prominent position in his sense of purpose in life, than his need for a collective solidarity with his fellow miners, regardless of their color. Compassion is the dividing line according to the novel -- those who have compassion for others are good, regardless of their color, and those who lack this value are not good, regardless of their color.

One of the seminal moments of the novel is when the protagonist is lead to shout that he and his fellow workers are men, not cattle, men regardless of their color of skin. Identity means more to Xuma than the money he once coveted, once he has a sense of self as a human being as well as a more complete sense of what it means to be a Black worker in the mines of South Africa. He realizes that without respect, all of his physical strength and the money he is able to earn as a worker means nothing.

The novel is not Afro centric in its depiction of class warfare, as both red and white people go to jail for the miner's cause. In fact, at the end of the novel, Xuma goes forth to try to free a fellow freedom fighter from prison that is not Black. Thus, the novel shows tremendous compassion for those who fight against oppression, regardless of color. The novel also shows tremendous compassion for those who are in a state of transgression against state and societal laws, and those who violate the supposedly inviolate laws of the state regarding race and economics.

For instance, upon his arrival in town, from the Black North of South Africa from a town called Vrededorp Xuma finds a home with a blunt but giving woman named Leah. She almost immediately takes him into her bootlegging household and extends him great affection, despite her flexible attitude towards her own personal morality and the morality of the rest of her borders. She also introduces him to Eliza, the girl Xuma grows to love. Eliza, unlike Leah, however, has a rigid and unyielding sense of morality and identity.

Initially, Eliza seems to defy racial divides. But because of her poignant desire to be white, not simply to be educated and cultured, this sense of racial identity is shown to be hollow and self-destroying, rather than self-sustaining. Ultimately, Eliza's character represents many of the inner and outer divisions South African Black in the novel experience in a negative fashion. Eliza is described as beautiful, clean and neat in her appearance. Externally, she is lovely. But her soul hollow inside, as one character notes, calling her, although she likes Xuma, a complete fool when it comes to romance. Because Eliza longs to be white, because she has been to school and is educated, she refuses to love Black men. Eliza not only admittedly wants a man who can also read and write and but who dresses, speaks, and thinks like white people. Eliza even says that inside she is not black and doesn't want to be black. 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 against injustice with compassion in their hearts. 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.