After his twin dies, Douglas doesn't know how to cope with the ensuing upheaval. He is so staggered by it that he can't even describe it to the reader. In fact, he blocks it out of his memory. He and his mother move alone, without his father, to a small town in the Karoo region of South Africa. His mother quits her job as a teacher and decides to start painting.
The Cape has always enjoyed a reputation for being "progressive" and Douglas's parents were clearly whites who didn't buy the political rhetoric fed to the country by the National Party, the party in power and the architects of apartheid. In Douglas's memory, the one time his father beat him was when he teased the gardener by calling him "nigger." He was made to understand that the n-word was just as offensive as "kaffir," a racially offensive word often used by whites for Africans. As the plot progresses, we learn that Douglas's mother is also not afraid to break the law if she considers a law racist.
In the Karoo, Douglas must learn how to conduct relationships with Afrikaners who are almost stereotypically racist. He has to ward off the cruel pranks of Afrikaner schoolboys. He meets a young girl who sets his heart aflame but whose rebellious antics against her parents' vicious bigotry leads to her father's death.
However, the most interesting interaction in the book is between Douglas and an elderly black man named Moses. Douglas meets Moses one day when he goes to the nearby gas station to buy some soda pop. He feels compelled to offer Moses a sip, despite the fact that he has never drank out of the same cup that a black person has used. Moses declines the offer but, after observing Douglas's sadness and discovering it is due to Marsden's death and his father's absence, Moses begins to tell a couple of long tales about his own childhood. He relates, in great detail, the ceremony in which he became a man, from being painted white to the cutting of his foreskin to the period of healing and learning known as "bundu."
