The main character, Sarah, was employed as a servant by the white narrator and her family before her legs got too bad. The narrator portrays her as having yellow brown skin and glasses, and she tells that Sarah is a good cook, but very fat. The obesity and years of hard work might be the reasons for her bad legs. The narrator knows Sarah quite well when you think of the fact that she was only an employee. She tells that Sarah wants her children to be brought up religiously, and that she doesn’t let naiveté and hope ruin their expectations for life.
“Ah, Woe is me, she said; and that was her comment on life” (lines 12-13) Sarah’s religious upbringing is distinctly shown in the story. With the comment from the quote above, she illustrates the religious belief of only being sat on earth to complete a mission, and that one should accept both the good and the bad in life: “They must learn – and she was hard now – they got to live in this world the way it is” (lines 70-71). In spite of strict and tactful upbringing, Sarah is very perceptive towards her children. She lives more than sparingly herself while all her money goes to the education of her kids.
The narrator’s attitude towards Sarah, her kids and the society in general is very naïve. She doesn’t really understand why Sarah is sending the children away for boarding school, and she is almost surprised that the children behave submissively when she lets them stay for Christmas, as if she thinks they would be wild animals.
Sarah’s dream of giving her children a good education falls through when she has to stop working. Her family can no longer afford paying for school, and Sarah’s kids have to start working. At the end, Sarah’s legs are so bad, and she gets really sick. It seems that her children obviously want to help their mother, and Janet, the brightest of her kids, goes to the narrator for help. Asking for help is actually the main problem for Janet, because her mother has taught her that you cannot expect life and others to have mercy. Finally when she gets the courage to tell the narrator what’s wrong, she comes to see the inequality between blacks and whites.
What could I do for her? What could I do?”(Line 196) These are the words of the narrator. She knows Sarah is very sick, but all she can do is to comfort the kid. She doesn’t have the strength to go against the system, and therefore it is impossible for her to do something. The handkerchief resembles a sign of surrender; even though the white woman knows there is something to fight against and something to do, the costs would be too big for her, if she were to try to fight it.
Besides showing the hardships of the blacks in South Africa during the Apartheid, this story illustrates that some white people had quandaries from time to time too, because they knew the wrongful injustice going on against the blacks. Nevertheless most of the white people only helped the black people on small basis by giving them clothing etc like the narrator does, because they didn’t want to go against their “own kind” and be appointed as “traitors”.