The Power of One Chapter 3 Summary

  • The narrator is called before the Judge and jury right after his stitches are out, and they pull down his pants to show his hatless snake and make him march around with no pants as a punishment for being English.
  • He is sentenced to marching around the playground for five thousand steps every afternoon, which is better for him than getting beaten up.
  • He realizes that the Judge is failing arithmetic and will be held back another year if he doesn't pass. This will mean another year of torture, so the narrator offers to do the Judge's homework for him to help him pass. The Judge agrees, and also promises not to tell Adolf Hitler that Pisskop is a rooinek until after the term is over.
  • Twice a week the older boys captured the narrator and took him to their war councils for torture sessions. They made him hold an iron bar out in front of him, and if he couldn't hold it up longer than the day before they would beat him. They would also make him hold jam jars on his hands for slingshot target practice, which was painful if they didn't have good aim. Also, the best shots earned the right to beat him up the next time it was necessary.
  • Whenever the narrator is being tortured, he goes back to the waterfalls that Inkosi-Inkosikazi showed him, and cries there, to keep from crying on the outside.
  • On the last day of school, the Judge has passed arithmetic and will therefore be out of the narrator's life. However, he has one more torture session for Pisskop.
  • The torture du jour is to make Pisskop eat human feces. He is blindfolded, and the poop is placed in his hands, and he is given to the count of three to lick his fingers. Since he doesn't react, the Judge smashes the narrator's face into his hands.
  • Granpa Chook, who is perched in the tree above the torture session, places a perfectly aimed turd in the Judge's mouth just as he's screaming Heil Hitler.
  • This infuriates the Judge, who captures Granpa Chook and hangs him from a tree. The rest of the boys shoot him with their slingshots, killing him.
  • The narrator buries Granpa Chook in his chicken coop. We would make a joke, but this is such a terrible turn of events, we just can't.