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Chapter 4
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
Sephy is in the backseat of her family’s car, smiling because she’s so excited to see Callum at school today. She asks the nought driver, Harry, to drop her off around the corner. He insists Mother will be mad, but Sephy can’t stand being teased. Harry grudgingly drops Sephy off a few streets from school, and Sephy makes sure he’s not going to follow her before walking to school.
Sephy seems to think of Harry as a friend, rather than Mrs. Hadley’s employee: all she can think of is her embarrassment, not the fact that Harry could get in trouble for not getting Sephy all the way to school. This also speaks to Sephy’s youth.
Themes
Sephy hears a rumbling sound and figures out what it is when she turns the corner. There’s a mob in front of the school shouting, “no blankers in our school.” Sephy watches police officers escort Callum and three other noughts through the crowd. She elbows through the crowd to the school steps and sees her good friends—and Minnie—in the crowd. As the crowd surges forward, one of the noughts falls and is injured. Crosses cheer. Sephy has never been so angry. Mr. Corsa, the headmaster, comes out of the school to stand beside Sephy. He does nothing when she says they have to help the injured nought girl. But then, Sephy screams that her classmates are behaving like “blankers.” The crowd stops shouting, but Callum gives Sephy a strange look. Sephy hopes he doesn’t think she directed the slur at him.
To Sephy, what she sees is totally wrong, and new—it seems like she’s never thought of her friends, Minnie, and her classmates as being so racist as to shout horrible slurs at the nought students. This challenges her view of the world, especially when Mr. Corsa is unwilling to help the injured nought girl. So Sephy takes it upon herself to fix things by screaming at the mob to stop, and using this slur in the process. The fact that Sephy uses the slur without thinking speaks to how ingrained racism is in her society—even though she doesn’t think of herself as racist, she unwittingly says things that are harmful.
Themes
