Kaffir Boy Race Quotes

I was walking along a street one afternoon when I saw a piece of magazine impaled against a fence of cacti. I freed it and found that it contained pictures of big beautiful houses, white people's houses. I took the magazine home and there told my mother that someday I would amass hordes of money and build her a house similar to the ones in the magazine.

"What makes you think you can build a house like that?" my mother asked me gently but in a tone touched with sarcasm.

"I'll have lots of money, so it will be easy," I said naively.

"Even if you had all the money in the world, my child," she said, "you wouldn't build that house."

"Why not? Money can buy everything, can't it?"

"Because it's against the law for black people to own houses," my mother said matter-of-factly.

"What law is that?" I asked. "White people build nice houses, don't they? So why can't we?"…

"It's a law for black people only," my mother said, and added that such a law had long stripped black people of the right to buy land and own homes.

"Who makes such unfair laws?" I asked. The fact that white people made all the laws, ran the country alone, had not yet entered my mind. My encounters with whites in the movies had revealed none of the politics of the country.

"White people," my mother said.

"Why?"

"That's a stupid question to ask," my mother said. "White people make laws because they've been making all the laws since they took over our country."

"Can't we black people make our own laws? Alexandra is our world, isn't it? And white people have their own world." My conception of the world, of life, was wholly in racial terms; and that conception was not mine alone. It was echoed by all the black people I had come across. There were two worlds as far as we were concerned, separated absolutely in every sense. But somehow, in my knowing about these two worlds, it had never occurred to me that thought the two were as different as night and day, as separate as east and west, they had everything to do with each other; that one could not be without the other, and that their dependency was that of master and slave. (16.9-21)

When my mother ended her story, the white woman, almost in tears, stormed into the office, fuming. We stood ourselves by the door and heard a brief altercation take place inside the office. In a matter of minutes, my mother was called to the window, where an irate young black man, who earlier had ordered that my mother be towed away, shoved apiece of paper in her face. We finally had the birth certificate. My mother fortressed it in her bosom, as if it were a golden nugget. I had never seen a happier mother than the one who, as we trotted home, kept on singing songs of praise about the white "sister." She even proudly said: "You see, child, not all white people are bad; remember that."(20.116)

The teacher chuckled. He clasped the lapels of his faded, tight-fitting jacket and said, "Did I just hear you say that they give them to her? White people, my boy? Are you mad? What kind of white people would give books to a black man?"

"Nice white people, sir."

As if I had just uttered the joke of the century, the teacher burst into peals of maniacal laughter. (29.28-30)