Katherine Mansfield
SUN AND MOON
(1920)
In the afternoon the chairs came, a whole big cart full of little gold ones with their
legs in the air. And then the flowers came. When you stared down from the balcony at
the people carrying them the flower pots looked like funny awfully nice hats nodding up
the path.
Moon thought they were hats. She said: "Look. There's a man wearing a palm on his
head." But she never knew the difference between real things and not real ones.
There was nobody to look after Sun and Moon. Nurse was helping Annie alter
Mother's dress which was much-too-long-and-tight-under-the-arms and Mother was
running all over the house and telephoning Father to be sure not to forget things. She
only had time to say: "Out of my way, children!"
They kept out of her way – at any rate Sun did. He did so hate being sent stumping
back to the nursery. It didn't matter about Moon. If she got tangled in people's legs they
only threw her up and shook her till she squeaked. But Sun was too heavy for that. He
was so heavy that the fat man who came to dinner on Sundays used to say: "Now,
young man, let's try to lift you." And then he'd put his thumbs under Sun's arms and
groan and try and give it up at last saying: "He's a perfect little ton of bricks!”
[...]
Peter Carey
Jack Maggs
(1997)
It was a Saturday night when the man with the red waistcoat arrived in London. It
was, to be precise, six of the clock on the fifteenth of April in the year of 1837 that
those hooded eyes looked out the window of the Dover coach and beheld, in the bright
aura of gas light, a golden bull and an overgrown mouth opening to devour him--the
sign of his inn, the Golden Ox.
The Rocket (as his coach was aptly named) rattled in through the archway to the
inn's yard and the passengers, who had hitherto found the stranger so taciturn, now
noted the silver-capped cane which had begun to tap the floor at Westminster Bridge-commence a veritable tattoo.
He was a tall man in his forties, so big in the chest and broad in the shoulder that his
fellows on the bench seat had felt the strain of his presence, but what his occupation
was, or what he planned to do in London, they had not the least idea. One privately
imagined him a book-maker, another a gentleman farmer and a third, seeing the
excellent quality of his waistcoat, imagined him an upper servant wearing his master's
cast-off clothing.
[...]
Doris Lessing
The Old Chief Mshlanga
(1979)
[...]
Then, one day, something new happened. Working in our house as servants were
always three natives: cook, houseboy, garden boy. They used to change as farm natives
changed: staying for a few months, then moving on to a new job, or back home to their
kraals. They were thought of as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ natives; which meant: how did they
behave as servants? Were they lazy, efficient, obedient, or disrespectful? If the family
felt good-humoured, the phrase was: “What can you expect from raw black savages?” If
we were angry, we said: “These damned niggers, we would be much better off without
them.”
One day a white policeman was on his rounds of the district and he said laughingly:
“Did you know you have an important man in your kitchen?”
“What!” exclaimed my mother sharply. “What do you mean?”
“A Chief’s son.” The policeman seemed amused. “He’ll boss the tribe when the old
man dies.”
“He’d better not put on a Chief’s son act with me,” said my mother.
When the policeman left, we looked with different eyes at our cook: he was a good
worker, but he drank too much at week-ends – that was how we knew him.
He was a tall youth, with very black skin, like black polished metal, his tightly
growing black hair parted white man’s fashion at one side, with a metal comb from the
store stuck into it; very polite, very distant, very quick to obey an order. Now it had
been pointed out, we said: “Of course, you can see. Blood always tells.”
[...]