Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Noughts and Crosses, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Racism, Division, and Tragedy
Awareness and Privilege
Love, Lust, Power, and Violence
Friendship
Youth, Innocence, and Growing Up
Family
Summary
Analysis
Once Sephy and Mother are back home (Mr. Hadley went back to work), Sephy screams at her mother to not trick her like that again. Mother insists it was their duty to go and support Mr. Hadley, but Sephy spits that it was barbaric. As Mother pours wine, she says she wasn’t even watching. Sephy snatches the bottle from her and throws it across the kitchen. It doesn’t break, but it does spill wine on the floor. Mother tells Sephy to go to her room, but Sephy says that Mother would’ve cared more if they’d hung a wine bottle. Mother slaps Sephy, but Sephy doesn’t react—she tells Mother to go lick the spilled wine off the floor.
Part of the reason that Sephy is so angry is because being forced to attend the execution made her face up to her family’s and her own complicity in a racist society. Sephy resents Mother for going and not speaking up and saying that it’s wrong to kill an innocent man—and for stopping Sephy from leaving the execution in protest. But Sephy is too angry and immature to formulate these thoughts coherently, so instead, she attacks Mother for her drinking.
Themes
Mother hisses that Sephy knows nothing—Meggie and Ryan were her friends, and she didn’t want to see them hang. Sephy asks why Mother even went then, and Mother says you don’t get to do everything you want in life. As Sephy continues to berate her mother, Mother reveals that she paid the McGregors’ legal fees. Sephy is to keep that secret. Sephy insists that Mother just did it because she has a guilty conscience and runs to her room. She lies on her bed and sobs.
It's interesting that Mother maintains that Meggie and Ryan were her friends, especially since Meggie said previously that she and Mother were never real friends. Mother may, like Sephy, be blind to the power dynamics inherent in the Hadley family’s relationship with the McGregors. But this does solve the mystery of who paid the McGregors’ legal fees, whatever Mother’s motives may have been.
Themes
