![2007 literature nobelist; the grass is singing 2007 literature nobelist; the grass is singing](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51D295kzFsL._SX326_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg)
It was not right to seclude themselves like that it was a slap in the face of everyone else what had they got to be so stuck-up about? What, indeed! Living the way they did! That little box of a house – it was forgivable as a temporary dwelling, but not to live in permanently. They must have had something to be ashamed of that was the feeling. They were never seen at district dances, or fêtes, or gymkhanas. Yet what was there to dislike? They simply ‘kept themselves to themselves’ that was all. The Turners were disliked, though few of their neighbours had ever met them, or even seen them in the distance. Long before the murder marked them out, people spoke of the Turners in the hard, careless voices reserved for misfits, outlaws, and the self-exiled. Everyone behaved like a flock of birds who communicate – or so it seems – by means of a kind of telepathy. The most interesting thing about the whole affair was this silent, unconscious agreement. The steps he took (and he made not one mistake) were taken apparently instinctively and without conscious planning. To an outsider it would seem perhaps as if the energetic Charlie Slatter had travelled from farm to farm over the district telling people to keep quiet but that was something that would never have occurred to him. Normally that murder would have been discussed for months people would have been positively grateful for something to talk about. Yet it was a farming district, where those isolated white families met only very occasionally, hungry for contact with their own kind, to talk and discuss and pull to pieces, all speaking at once, making the most of an hour or so’s companionship before returning to their farms, where they saw only their own faces and the faces of their black servants for weeks on end.
![2007 literature nobelist; the grass is singing 2007 literature nobelist; the grass is singing](https://media.scholieren.net/media/31324/1279620441.jpg)
There was, it seemed, a tacit agreement that the Turner case should not be given undue publicity by gossip. ‘A very bad business,’ came the reply – and that was the end of it. ‘A bad business,’ someone would remark and the faces of the people round about would put on that reserved and guarded look. It was as if they had a sixth sense which told them everything there was to be known, although the three people in a position to explain the facts said nothing.
![2007 literature nobelist; the grass is singing 2007 literature nobelist; the grass is singing](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2007/10/11/books/lessing.ms.650.jpg)
For they did not discuss the murder that was the most extraordinary thing about it. Many must have snipped out the paragraph, put it among old letters or between the pages of a book, keeping it perhaps as an omen or a warning, glancing at the yellowing piece of paper with closed, secretive faces. When natives steal, murder, or rape, that is the feeling white people have.Īnd then they turned the page to something else.īut the people in the ‘district’ who knew the Turners, either by sight or from gossiping about them for so many years, did not turn the page so quickly. People all over the country must have glanced at the paragraph with its sensational heading and felt a little spurt of anger mingled with what was almost satisfaction, as if some belief had been confirmed, as if something had happened which could only have been expected. It is thought he was in search of valuables. The houseboy, who has been arrested, has confessed to the crime. Mary Turner, wife of Richard Turner, a farmer at Ngesi, was found murdered on the front veranda of their homestead yesterday morning. Swedish Excerpt from The Grass is Singing