He treats her hysterical behavior with calm authority, “like a father commanding her”. When Moses himself announces that he wants to leave, she breaks down to sob in front of him and begs him to stay.
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Mary, little by little, loses her balance. She feels she must do something to restore her poise she asks Dick to dismiss this boy too but Dick, tired of the endless dismissing of the servants because Mary could get along with none of them, insists that Moses should stay. The man Mary sees in Moses threatens both her sexual and cultural identity. Yet as the narrator details for us, she knows this colonial rule that: “when a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which is his chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip.” The formal patterns of black-and-white, mistress-and-servant has been broken “by the personal relation”, because Mary, who has seen the natives so far as inferior beings “no better than a dog”, now sees in Moses a man. His powerful, broad-built body fascinates Mary. Yet most notably, there is an element of sexual attraction in her towards Moses. The fear of being attacked or revenged has remained in Mary from that time. Moses is the same worker whom Mary struck with a whip two years ago. The culmination of Mary’s despair and vulnerability is when Moses, the new servant, enters her life. Mary Turner is a woman who is trapped in colonial and racial preconceptions and she is unable to understand the structure of her community.
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She seemed to have been so lonely and lost living day and night in the middle of the veldt that she inevitably fell in love with her only companion: the black servant. The white woman was well aware of the fact that something unusual and immoral was going on between them but it was all beyond her control. The white community considered natives no more important than animals, and a love affair between races would be considered a crime. Mary’s initial attitudes towards blacks are microcosm of the whole attitude in apartheid Africa. The theme of racism is thoroughly explored in The Grass is Singing through the relationship between Mary Turner and their houseboy, Moses.