Assignment

The second portion of Bessie Head's "Looking for a Rain God."

It was really the two women who caused the death of the little girls. Each night they started a weird, high-pitched wailing that began on a low, mournful note and whipped up to frenzy. Then they would stamp their feet and shout as though they had lost their heads. The men sat quiet and self-controlled; it was important for men to maintain their self-control at all times but their nerve was breaking too. They knew the women were haunted by the starvation of the coming year.

Finally, an ancient memory stirred in the old man, Mokgobja. When he was very young and the customs of the ancestors still ruled the land, he had been a witness to a rainmaking ceremony. And he came alive a little, struggling to recall the details, which had been buried by years and years of prayer in a Christian church. As soon as the mists cleared a little, he began consulting in whispers with his youngest son, Ramadi. There was, he said, a certain rain god who accepted only the sacrifice of the bodies of children. Then the rain would fall; then the crops would grow, he said. He explained the ritual and as he talked, his memory became a conviction and he began to talk with unshakable authority. Ramadi's nerves were smashed by the nightly wailing of the women and soon the two men began whispering with the two women. The children continued their game: "You stupid thing! How could you have lost the money on the way to the shop! You must have been playing again!"

After it was all over and the bodies of the two little girls had been spread across the land, the rain did not fall. Instead, there was a deathly silence at night and the devouring heat of the sun by day. A terror, extreme and deep, overwhelmed the whole family. They packed, rolled up their skin blankets and pots, and fled back to the village.

People in the village soon noted the absence of the two little girls. They had died at the lands and were buried there, the family said. But people noted their ashen, terror-stricken faces and a murmur arose. What had killed the children, they wanted to know? And the family replied that they had just died. And people said amongst themselves that it was strange that the two deaths had occurred at the same time. And there was a feeling of great unease at the unnatural looks of the family. Soon the police came around. The family told them the same story of death and burial at the lands. They did not know what the children had died of. So the police asked to see the graves. At this, the mother of the children broke down and told everything.

Throughout that terrible summer, the story of the children hung like a dark cloud of sorrow over the village, and the sorrow was not assuaged when the old man and Ramadi were sentenced to death for ritual murder. All they had on the statute books was that ritual murder was against the law and must be stamped out with the death penalty. The subtle story of strain and starvation and breakdown was inadmissible evidence at court; but all the people who lived off crops knew in their hearts that only a hair's breadth had saved them from sharing a fate similar to that of the Mokgobja family. They could have killed something to make the rainfall.

Now that you have the full story, read this ending several times.

Get a good sense of what is happening on the level of plot-the way events develop into a story. I will ask you to do an initial freewrite in class on your first reaction to this portion of the piece. With your free write in hand, tonight, write in response to the following prompts.

1. How does this ending match your expectations for the story's conclusion? How do you feel about the ending? Do you think it works?How does this ending change your understanding of the first portion of the story? Would you have preferred another ending, or does this ending work? How was you initial response to this ending influenced by your associational response?

2. Reread the story as a whole. Do you notice any significant changes in tone, in focus, in the way the events are described, in the voice of the speaker? Indicate where these changes take place, and explain their rationale. Pay close attention to the final lines of the story. What meaning do you make from those lines? Do they match the tone and attitude of the rest of the story? Make sure to provide evidence from the original story to help substantiate your conclusions.

3. Now, make a case for the effectiveness of Head's ending. Why does it work? What is inherent in the character, the moment, or the speaker's voice that make this ending plausible? What elements of tone and diction make this ending plausible?

Make sure to indicate in a full paragraph how this change affects the impact of the text.