Nadine Gordimer’s “Once Upon a Time” takes place during South African apartheid—a term that literally means “apartness” and that represented the legalization of white South Africans geographically separating themselves from those who were black or “coloured” (mixed-race). During apartheid, large areas of South Africa were designated as spaces for white-only cities, and the government would force any nonwhite citizens out into other areas. The bulk of Gordimer’s short story takes place inside a white-designated city, and the white suburban characters appear obsessed with maintaining the separation-based logic of apartheid. Gordimer shows, though, that separating the nation on racial lines tore South Africa apart, and she symbolizes this devastation when the white couple loses their only son: he dies in the very barbed wire that the couple installed to keep away those of another race. Gordimer thus makes it clear that the sense of protection white people seem to enjoy under segregation is a fragile illusion, arguing that the desire for security and prosperity through separation is harmful for all groups.
Gordimer takes care to show that this is a world of separation based on race, and that wealthy, white South Africans believe this separation will make their lives better. In the suburb in the bedtime story that the (presumably white) narrator tells, the wife is frightened when she hears of violence and looting happening against white South Africans. Her husband is quick to assure her that there are “police and soldiers and teargas and guns” working to keep any non-white South Africans (people “of another colour”) away from the suburb. He says this to cheer his wife up, showing that the couple feels safer and more comfortable knowing that black South Africans are being kept “outside the city.” Still, Gordimer emphasizes how the white couple in the suburb wants even more separation between races; all the white suburban families install some sort of security system—alarms, bars, gates—to keep others away. In order to live their most prosperous, happy lives, the white families clearly feel that they must be separated from other races.
However, this separation is much less useful than white South Africans would like to believe, since security systems prove ineffective and geographical segregation doesn’t end up keeping the different races apart. First, Gordimer shows that the physical security measures just don’t work. When the unnamed couple buys an alarm, not robbers but “pet cats and nibbling mice” frequently trip the system. This happens so often—and to so many of the other white families in the neighborhood—that noise from all the alarms unnecessarily going off provides cover for thieves to saw through bars and steal things. Additionally, Gordimer shows how the geographical separation that the white couple craves is unsustainable. The suburb is clearly wealthier than the space where “people of another colour are quartered,” and eventually black South Africans make their way into the suburb to seek money or a job. The white inhabitants feel the suburb is “spoilt” by the “presence” of black South Africans, who now line the streets and sleep leaning against the gates of the white families’ homes. The suburban couple also hires black South Africans as housekeepers and gardeners, proving that white South Africans will negate their own logic of separation when it benefits them. With this, the story shows that white people don’t actually want to be totally segregated—white people want to have black people come and go on their terms, which means serving white people in their homes but otherwise not being around. So not only does segregation not work, it’s not really intended to work, in that the families want trusted gardeners and housekeepers to come do all of their housework.
Of course, beyond just being ineffective, this forced separation is devastating. The white suburbanites suffer from their own preoccupation with separation since they imprison themselves in the fortresses they build to keep others out. Gordimer makes this clear when she has the unnamed couple admire the pure, “concentration-camp style” of the razor wire they choose to adorn their wall. More critically, the non-white South Africans clearly suffer on account of this separation because they have little or no access to wealth or prosperity. The black South Africans who populate the streets of the suburb in the bedtime story are jobless and likely homeless, contrasting sharply with the abundance of the suburb. Moreover, before the bedtime story even begins Gordimer includes the fact that “migrant miners” (indigenous Africans) are working in terrible conditions in the ground far below these wealthy neighborhoods. This underscores the spatial divisions between races in “Once Upon a Time” and how this separation is designed to put one race above all others. However, when the couple’s son dies in the razor wire at the end of the story, Gordimer makes a conclusive statement that all these systems, measures, and precautions designed to separate races in South Africa are absolutely destructive and will ultimately ruin all parts of society.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Separation and the Illusion of Security ThemeTracker
Separation and the Illusion of Security Quotes in Once Upon a Time
I have no burglar bars, no gun under the pillow, but I have the same fears as people who do take these precautions, and my windowpanes are thin as rime, could shatter like a wineglass. A woman was murdered (how do they put it) in broad daylight in a house two blocks away, last year, and the fierce dogs who guarded an old widower and his collection of antique clocks were strangled before he was knifed by a casual labourer he had dismissed without pay.
The misbeats of my heart tailed off like the last muffled flourishes on one of the wooden xylophones made by the Chopi and Tsonga migrant miners who might have been down there, under me in the earth at that moment. The stope where the fall was could have been disused, dripping water from its ruptured veins; or men might now be interred there in the most profound of tombs.
In a house, in a suburb, in a city, there were a man and his wife who loved each other very much and were living happily ever after. They had a little boy, and they loved him very much. They had a cat and a dog that the little boy loved very much. They had a car and a caravan trailer for holidays, and a swimming pool which was fenced so that the little boy and his playmates would not fall in and drown. They had a housemaid who was absolutely trustworthy and an itinerant gardener who was highly recommended by the neighbours.
They were […] subscribed to the local Neighbourhood Watch, which supplied them with a plaque for their gates lettered YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED over the silhouette of a would-be intruder. He was masked; it could not be said if he was black or white, and therefore proved the property owner was no racist.
[…] [The housemaid] implored her employers to have burglar bars attached to the doors and windows of the house, and an alarm system installed. The wife said, She is right, let us take heed of her advice. So from every window and door in the house where they were living happily ever after they now saw the trees and sky through bars, and when the little boy’s pet cat tried to climb in by the fanlight to keep him company in his little bed at night, as it customarily had done, it set off the alarm keening through the house.
The alarms called to one another across the gardens in shrills and bleats and wails that everyone soon became accustomed to, so that the din roused the inhabitants of the suburb no more than the croak of frogs and musical grating of cicadas’ legs. Under cover of the electronic harpies’ discourse intruders sawed the iron bars and broke into homes, taking away hi-fi equipment,
television sets, cassette players, cameras and radios, jewellery and clothing, and sometimes were hungry enough to devour everything in the refrigerator or paused audaciously to drink the whisky in the cabinets or patio bars.
When the man and wife and little boy took the pet dog for its walk round the neighbourhood streets they no longer paused to admire this show of roses or that perfect lawn; these were hidden behind an array of different varieties of security fences, walls and devices. […] While the little boy and the pet dog raced ahead, the husband and wife found themselves comparing the possible effectiveness of each style against its appearance […].
One evening, the mother read the little boy to sleep with a fairy story from the book the wise old witch had given him at Christmas. Next day he pretended to be the Prince who braves the terrible thicket of thorns to enter the palace and kiss the Sleeping Beauty back to life: he dragged a ladder to the wall, the shining coiled tunnel was just wide enough for his little body to creep in, and with the first fixing of its razor-teeth in his knees and hands and head he screamed and struggled deeper into its tangle.
[…] the alarm set up wailing against the screams while the bleeding mass of the little boy was hacked out of the security coil with saws, wire-cutters, choppers, and they carried it—the man, the wife, the hysterical trusted housemaid and the weeping gardener—into the house.
