Six Feet of the Country

Lerice and her husband, the protagonist, have moved to the countryside for reasons the narrative never fully explains. The protagonist clarifies only that the move was “to change something in ourselves, I suppose” (7), and that he would like their marriage to emit “nothing but a deep satisfying silence” instead of “rattl[ing] about so much” (7). The couple presumably hoped the rural serenity would have some therapeutic effect on their marriage; there are indeed hints toward a longstanding friction between the two of them, though that friction isn’t outright antipathy.

At least some of the marital conflict involves the protagonist’s frequent annoyance with his wife, and this annoyance often relates to how deeply she cares about things. Lerice is thus a foil to her husband, who initially resists much emotional expenditure for his employees. Because it is Lerice who urges the protagonist to exercise his authority on the employees’ behalf, she drives the plot as much as he does, despite her seemingly subordinate role in the story. Of the white characters, she is the most sympathetic to the employees, and she even cares for their children when they fall ill—but she, like the protagonist, is a nuanced character and has her own moments of naiveté. For instance, when she’s upset that the employees hesitated to tell them of Petrus’s brother, her dismay stems from her desire for the employees to feel safe with her, but it also suggests she does not fully appreciate the Black population’s disenfranchisement and experience of political violence and intimidation within apartheid.

Petrus is one of the protagonist’s employees, the brother of the young man who died. A young man himself, Petrus seems to hold a certain leadership over the other employees. He also perseveres in maintaining his cultural burial customs when he asks to retrieve the body, though he appears not to understand how the white authorities in the medical field operate. The protagonist feels that Petrus believes "white men can have everything, can do anything, [and] if they don’t it is because they won’t” (13). If this truly is what Petrus believes, that mindset is shattered by the end of the story, when the white protagonist can do nothing.

Petrus symbolizes the Black population’s desire for autonomy and dignity during apartheid. Because the story takes place from the viewpoint of the white protagonist, Petrus is a secondary character, but his changes in mindset—as he realizes even his white employer is powerless against apartheid bureaucracy—demonstrate how apartheid crushes the spirit of those it subjugates. His spirit is likewise crushed when he eventually recognizes the futility of trying to maintain custom or retrieve his brother’s body; instead, Petrus tries to retrieve his livelihood—the £20 exhumation fee that was charged, absurdly, for a botched exhumation.