River Anker

The River Anker is the setting for a private conversation that follows a public display of racism. Sunday Small leads Mickey away from the cattle market to its quieter banks, where his account of his family and childhood makes the prejudice he faces more than an abstract injustice: it is bound to abandonment, bereavement, and his upbringing in the workhouse.

Setting and Plot Context

In late July, Sunday accompanies Mickey to the cattle market to choose a small pony for Mrs Spooner. There she sees people move away from him as though contact might taint them, while others sneer; one of Albert Pinnegar’s hangers-on spits at Mickey’s feet. Sunday responds by putting her arm through his and glaring at those who look askance. Mickey lowers his head, explaining that people dislike him because his skin is dark.

The Conversation by the River

When Mickey does not answer Sunday’s rebuke, she takes his arm and hustles him out of town toward the River Anker. She chooses the riverside because it will be quieter, then pulls him down beside her on a bench. There she tells him to stand up for himself, drawing on her own experience of learning that people perceived as weak are more likely to be picked on.

Mickey says he feels different, neither one thing nor the other, and explains why. His mother lived in London and fell in love with a black African docker; when she became pregnant, the man disappeared. She returned to her mother, and died giving birth to Mickey. He wonders whether people considered his birth an illegitimate child’s punishment, compounded by his being black. His grandmother cared for him until her death, when he was still very young; he remembers her clearly, before describing his subsequent arrival at the workhouse.

Narrative Significance

The move from the market to the riverside changes the scene from exposure to disclosure. At the market, prejudice is enacted through avoidance, sneering, and the spit at Mickey’s feet; beside the river, Sunday offers companionship and a quieter place for him to explain the history those public gestures carry. Her arm through his and her insistence that he is a person counter the crowd’s treatment of him as an outsider, while Mickey’s account reveals how racial prejudice intersects with his mother’s abandonment by his father, her death, and his own orphanhood. The River Anker thus marks a moment of solidarity and trust, without resolving the discrimination he has described.