40 pages • 1 hour read
Athol FugardMaster Harold and the Boys
Fiction | Play | YA | Published in 1982A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaPages 1-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 1-16 Summary
The year is 1950. Sam and Willie are both Black men. They are working as waiters at the St. George’s Park Tea Room in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. It is a quiet, rainy afternoon. Sam reads a comic book while Willie cleans and sings. Willie shows Sam how his quickstep has improved; he and Sam are both preparing for a ballroom dance competition. Sam tells him to relax his body more, though Willie struggles with Sam’s instructions. Sam thinks that Willie is trying too hard; he should make his steps look easy and imbue them with romance. Willie laments that he cannot be more romantic because he has lost romantic feelings for his dance partner, Hilda. He wants to practice with music, but he has enough money only for the bus fare home and so cannot use the jukebox.
Sam presses Willie about Hilda, and Willie accuses Hilda of sleeping around and skipping their last three dance practices. Sam asks Willie if he has hit Hilda recently. When Willie admits that he has, Sam suggests that Hilda has stopped coming to their practices because of Willie’s poor treatment of her. He says that “[b]eating her up every time she makes a mistake in the waltz” (5) will take all the fun out of ballroom dancing and will make her want to leave him. Sam and Willie argue about Hilda while Sam coaches Willie through the quickstep. He demonstrates the steps for Willie and is obviously a much more accomplished dancer. Hally, the 17-year-old white son of the tea room’s owner, enters the tea room and watches Sam dance. Hally applauds Sam’s dancing, saying that he is sure to win his competition. Sam greets him as “Hally,” but Willie calls him “Master Harold.”
Sam is not nervous for the competition, but Willie is. Hally asks why, and Sam implies that Willie is having trouble with his girlfriend. Hally does not understand what Sam means and claims he is not interested in girls. Sam tells Hally that his mother is at the hospital; he believes, based on what he overheard when she was on the phone, that she is bringing Hally’s father home. Hally is perturbed to hear this. He notices the comics that Sam was reading earlier, which are meant to be for his father when he returns home. He chastises Sam for reading them, calling them “mental pollution.”
Hally asks Willie about his place in the competition. Willie admits that he is having trouble with Hilda. Sam overhears and makes a joke about Hilda that angers Willie. Willie throws a wet rag at Sam but misses and hits Hally instead. Hally immediately loses his temper and furiously tells Willie to act his age. He insists that Sam tell him exactly what his mom said about his dad. Sam did not hear any details, just that Hally’s mother had gone to the hospital and would call Hally later. Hally decides that Sam is wrong about his father’s return; his mother must have been called to the hospital because his father has taken a turn for the worse, as he is not supposed to come home for weeks yet.
Hally tells Sam about school: His teacher beat him for an infraction by giving him six lashings on his backside. Sam tells Hally that in prison, men are beaten the same way, but with their trousers down. Hally is both intrigued and disturbed by Sam’s description. He tells Sam that people do not have to be so barbaric and that progress changes things. Sam is unconvinced, and Hally concedes that he does worry about the state of the world. He believes they need a great man, like Winston Churchill, to enact social reform. Sam reads from Hally’s textbook, and Hally corrects some of his pronunciation. He tells him the definition of “magnitude” and “scalars” (14-15). Hally does not think he will pass his mathematics exam but believes he will do well in English and scrape by in history. He reminds Sam that Churchill did not do well in school, either.
Pages 1-16 Analysis
This play introduces the three characters and their complex relationships. The Racial Dynamics in South Africa under the apartheid system are already clear. Sam and Willie are servants, and Hally is the son of the tea room’s owners. Although Hally is friendly with Sam and Willie, he has power over them. Even as a teenager he effectively holds Sam’s and Willie’s livelihoods in his hands, and they know it. They might like him on a personal level, but whether they do or not, they are obligated to be friendly. When he asks them questions, including asking Sam if he read the comic books, they must be careful about how they respond. He might react badly to anything he perceives as a transgression, such as when Willie accidentally hits him with the rag.
When the characters discuss social reform, none of them provides a full description of what a better world might look like. Hally suggests that social reform is a good thing, but he seems comfortable with the dynamic between himself, Sam, and Willie. Whatever Hally imagines a better future to be, he is likely not imagining an end to apartheid, which would liberate him from his shame and from becoming like his father, whom he despises, and Sam and Willie from the structures that disempower and oppress them. Sam and Willie also keep quiet about their hopes for liberation at this point in the story. All three characters are currently too caught up in Shame and Systems of Power to build a better world. When the characters feel that they are experiencing injustice, they find others with less power and externalize their feelings of shame onto them. Willie is ashamed of his poor dancing skills, and he takes that shame out on Hilda by beating her when she makes a mistake. Willie must reckon with poverty and racism, but Hilda must reckon with poverty, racism, and misogynistic violence. Similarly, Hally, ashamed of his father’s disability and alcohol addiction, is afraid of him, and he takes those feelings out on Willie.
Hally is also ashamed of doing badly in school, though he pretends not to be. Teaching Sam about the world (however condescendingly) makes him feel knowledgeable and powerful and helps him cope with his shame. For Hally, Education and Coming of Age are immediate concerns. Hally is a poor student, but unlike Sam and Willie, he has had the opportunity to get a good education. He is on the cusp of adulthood, but his adulthood will look very different from Sam’s and Willie’s: The text strongly implies that Sam has been incarcerated before, and both men have so little money that they cannot even use the jukebox. Even Hally’s failing grades will not jeopardize his future; he readily compares himself to Churchill. While his grades might cause him shame, they do not endanger his prospects.
Hally is not accustomed to taking responsibility for his actions, but Sam and Willie have no such luxury. It is one thing for a child to fail to recognize how their actions affect others, but such ignorance is far less acceptable in an older adolescent or an adult. For Hally, taking responsibility is a choice, not a requirement. He can live a perfectly happy life without acknowledging his complicity in Sam and Willie’s oppression. If he chose to, he could instead recognize the humanity of the Black people around him. At this point in the narrative, it has not even occurred to him that he has such a choice.
There is little detail provided about Hally’s father’s hospitalization. He has an alcohol addiction and has had a leg amputated, and there are ongoing complications with the injury, but no more is known. The narrative implies that he lost his leg in a war. Some sources that analyze “Master Harold”…and the boys claim that he lost his leg fighting in World War I. Given Hally’s age, the fact that the play is set in 1950, and the ongoing complications that the injury is causing, it is much more plausible that the injury occurred during World War II. During WWII, South Africa supported Britain, but some Afrikaner Nationalists pushed for neutrality and even based their platform on Nazism. Of the 334,000 South African men who served in the war (36% of whom were nonwhite), just over 11,000 were killed. Many more, like Hally’s father (and Athol Fugard’s), were severely injured.
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