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Looksmart (Phiwayinkosi Ndlovu)
Beauty, the third of The Dream House’s main characters, is a plain-looking Black South African woman in her late thirties who works for Patricia Wiley and Richard Wiley. Her family lives on the Wileys’ farm, where she grew up. Her older, prettier sister Grace died after Richard’s dog mauled her when Beauty was a child. Beauty, who knows Richard set the dog on Grace, fears him. Yet she also cares for him as he descends into dementia and tries to protect him by hiding him from Grace’s former suitor Looksmart when Looksmart returns to the farm after a long absence. Beauty is in love with Bheki, Patricia’s driver. Though she knows he doesn’t love her back, she isn’t interested in a romantic relationship with anyone else and has reconciled herself to being alone. When Looksmart reappears the night before the Wileys are supposed to move away from the farm, both he and Patricia demand Beauty recount what she knows about Grace’s death. Looksmart—whom Beauty dislikes and finds arrogant—takes the fragmented, ambiguous story Beauty tells as confirmation of his own belief that Richard killed Grace because she ran away while he was raping her. When Patricia asks Beauty for the whole truth after Looksmart has left, however, Beauty says Grace had been having consensual sex with Richard for money and Richard killed her because she was pregnant and refused to have an abortion. When Patricia asks why Beauty didn’t leave the farm after Richard killed Grace, Beauty replies that her family lived on the farm and her job there was good. Since Beauty’s account of Grace’s murder is the last word on the subject, the novel seems to suggest that Beauty, who lacks all social privilege due to her race, gender, and socioeconomic status, can see the truth more clearly than Patricia and Looksmart, whose privileges blind them. At the novel’s end, Beauty moves with the Wileys to continue working for them in their retirement.
Beauty (Togo) Quotes in The Dream House
The The Dream House quotes below are all either spoken by Beauty (Togo) or refer to Beauty (Togo). For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 1
Quotes
“Are we dead yet?”
“No.”
“You will tell me when we’re dead?”
“If I can, Roo, I will.”
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The problem of what to do with the past would have to carry on in the future.
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Chapter 2
Quotes
But it is a nascent anger he is beginning to feel concerning Beauty—not pity. What did the girl expect by staying on in this place, especially after what happened to Grace? To remain on the farm was to condone what had happened here—and that was one thing he himself was never prepared to do. At the time, of course, Beauty can’t have been older than thirteen, but she has had a good twenty-five years since that moment to develop some self-respect.
Chapter 3
Quotes
Each time, the house is less built. Is it that he is going further back in time? Is he going backwards the more he runs? If so then when will he stop? What is he aimed at? He stands on the large concrete slab in the middle of nowhere and ponders this, and eventually he sits.
It is not so much that he is dead. It is more that no one appears to have been born. They still have their whole lives ahead of them. Nothing that needs to be undone has yet been done.
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“The first thing I saw on getting back from boarding school,” he says, “was a black puppy, playing in the garden, chewing a rubber ball to bits. The second was Grace, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. As our love grew, that dog in the garden was growing too. My love and your fear, they grew together. And now, I can no longer separate them. When I think of one, I see the other. I see that double thing, that creature—the beast. Circling the garden, dripping blood.”
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“No one knows what I saw.”
Beauty seems to say this with the knowledge that this statement, for the first time, is no longer true: two others now know what she saw. What she saw no longer belongs to her: it will become a part of the general story that is used to define her sister.
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She had come to think of Beauty as her friend and she thought she knew everything there was to know about her—but, of course, that was only vanity, or laziness, or wishful thinking.
Chapter 5
Quotes
Looksmart has promised him a job and he has said he will send Bongani to a special school, so that his disabilities will not hold him back. Looksmart said it was time for black people to help each other. That the time of getting help from the whites is finished. And he agrees with this. He thinks it is time he walked away from this distasteful dance he has been engaged in for so long: where he has to disturb the grave of a child just because the Madam has decided it.
“Beauty – please. You have to tell me the truth.”
“But he said they loved each other desperately,” she says. “He said she was good.”
“Good?”
The world hangs in the air like the word ‘truth’: simply as another way of presenting oneself to the world.
“She had nothing,” Beauty continues, “and uBass—he paid her. Sis’ Grace did not think about good or not good. Ubezama ukuphila.”
“She was trying to survive?”
Patricia has to repeat the phrase in English in order to accept it fully.
“Mesis,” she says, “you must find the truth for yourself.”
Get the entire The Dream House LitChart as a printable PDF.
Beauty (Togo) Quotes in The Dream House
The The Dream House quotes below are all either spoken by Beauty (Togo) or refer to Beauty (Togo). For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 1
Quotes
“Are we dead yet?”
“No.”
“You will tell me when we’re dead?”
“If I can, Roo, I will.”
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
The problem of what to do with the past would have to carry on in the future.
Related Characters:
Related Symbols:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2
Quotes
But it is a nascent anger he is beginning to feel concerning Beauty—not pity. What did the girl expect by staying on in this place, especially after what happened to Grace? To remain on the farm was to condone what had happened here—and that was one thing he himself was never prepared to do. At the time, of course, Beauty can’t have been older than thirteen, but she has had a good twenty-five years since that moment to develop some self-respect.
Chapter 3
Quotes
Each time, the house is less built. Is it that he is going further back in time? Is he going backwards the more he runs? If so then when will he stop? What is he aimed at? He stands on the large concrete slab in the middle of nowhere and ponders this, and eventually he sits.
It is not so much that he is dead. It is more that no one appears to have been born. They still have their whole lives ahead of them. Nothing that needs to be undone has yet been done.
Related Characters:
Related Symbols:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
“The first thing I saw on getting back from boarding school,” he says, “was a black puppy, playing in the garden, chewing a rubber ball to bits. The second was Grace, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. As our love grew, that dog in the garden was growing too. My love and your fear, they grew together. And now, I can no longer separate them. When I think of one, I see the other. I see that double thing, that creature—the beast. Circling the garden, dripping blood.”
Related Characters:
Related Symbols:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
“No one knows what I saw.”
Beauty seems to say this with the knowledge that this statement, for the first time, is no longer true: two others now know what she saw. What she saw no longer belongs to her: it will become a part of the general story that is used to define her sister.
Related Characters:
Related Symbols:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
She had come to think of Beauty as her friend and she thought she knew everything there was to know about her—but, of course, that was only vanity, or laziness, or wishful thinking.
Chapter 5
Quotes
Looksmart has promised him a job and he has said he will send Bongani to a special school, so that his disabilities will not hold him back. Looksmart said it was time for black people to help each other. That the time of getting help from the whites is finished. And he agrees with this. He thinks it is time he walked away from this distasteful dance he has been engaged in for so long: where he has to disturb the grave of a child just because the Madam has decided it.
“Beauty – please. You have to tell me the truth.”
“But he said they loved each other desperately,” she says. “He said she was good.”
“Good?”
The world hangs in the air like the word ‘truth’: simply as another way of presenting oneself to the world.
“She had nothing,” Beauty continues, “and uBass—he paid her. Sis’ Grace did not think about good or not good. Ubezama ukuphila.”
“She was trying to survive?”
Patricia has to repeat the phrase in English in order to accept it fully.
“Mesis,” she says, “you must find the truth for yourself.”
