Abolition of slavery

The abolition of slavery is a historical turning point whose promise remains sharply limited: although slavery was formally ended more than half a century before the events described, the social and institutional order that subordinated Noughts persists. Through Callum McGregor’s anger at the inequalities around him and the recurring evidence of exclusion in schools, media, healthcare, and public life, the novel distinguishes emancipation in law from equality in lived experience.

Historical Change and Its Limits

Callum recalls that Crosses had moved across northern and eastern Pangaea from the south, acquiring the knowledge to make guns and weapons that forced others to submit. Slavery had been formally abolished over half a century earlier, yet he sees little improvement in Noughts’ position. Their entry into Cross schools is only beginning, and he argues that the number of Noughts in positions of authority could be counted on one hand. The contrast between the end of legal enslavement and the scarcity of power makes abolition a threshold, not a resolution: formal status has changed, while the hierarchy built over centuries remains visible in who governs, who is admitted, and who is expected to feel grateful.

Callum’s response is not gratitude but indignation. After Mr Jason challenges him and orders him out of the classroom, Callum insists to himself that the history he has been taught about Cross power does not make what was done right. He rejects the idea that access to one of their schools should settle the question of fairness. The scene gives abolition a personal and educational consequence: for a Nought student newly allowed through the school door, inclusion can coexist with a curriculum and authority structure that still make the old imbalance tangible.

Education and Everyday Exclusion

The opening of Heathcroft to Nought students exposes the distance between admission and acceptance. Callum arrives at a school entrance amid a crowd chanting against Noughts, while police try to push through to the entrance and hold back the Cross crowd. The students’ presence in the school is therefore accompanied by public hostility and intimidation rather than treated as an ordinary exercise of equal access.

The broadcast account further narrows what the public is allowed to see. Callum recalls that the cameras did not show police letting the crowd reach the Nought students to poke, pinch, and punch them, or the Cross spit covering the back of his jacket. The reporter described the reception as “some hostility,” a phrase Callum recognizes as euphemistic understatement. Against the official language of a limited disturbance, the unseen details expose how an institution can admit Nought students while the violence surrounding that admission is softened or omitted from public view.

At school, Mrs Paxton tells Mr Costa that Nought students are constantly being picked on and warns that one of them may retaliate. His answer is that if they find it difficult, they can go elsewhere. The exchange makes the terms of inclusion explicit: the students suffering hostility are treated as the ones responsible for leaving, while the school’s authority dismisses the conditions that make their presence dangerous. Abolition’s promise of freedom thus sits beside a social expectation that Noughts should accept exclusion rather than challenge it.

Institutions and Persistent Hierarchy

The same inequality appears beyond education. At the hospital, Nurse Carter says that the government requires patient identity cards to be checked and registered before any medical care can be administered, presenting the policy as an effort to prevent benefit fraud. The rule is framed as administrative procedure, yet the scene shows how access to care is made conditional on state identification. In the wider pattern of the novel, the existence of a formally post-slavery society does not prevent routine systems from subjecting Noughts to scrutiny and control.

Public authority and criminal justice also preserve the stark division between the groups. At Hewmett Prison, Crosses are seated in front of the scaffold while the Noughts stand; some look toward the scaffold, some weep, and others look at the Cross spectators with hatred. The execution is announced as the hanging of Ryan Callum McGregor, found guilty of seven counts of murder and political terrorism after his appeal was denied. This scene does not establish a direct legal connection between slavery’s abolition and the sentence, but its arrangement makes the broader hierarchy physically visible: the groups occupy different positions as the state carries out its ultimate punishment.

Personal Memory and Social Distance

Callum’s family history offers a smaller, intimate counterpart to the wider change. He remembers that his mother, Meggie McGregor, had once been close to Mrs Hadley, working as a nanny and helper from the time Minerva was born. Callum and Persephone Hadley were also close as children: he remembers helping care for the baby Persephone and later playing with her on the Hadley grounds. Then the McGregors were no longer welcome near the Hadley house. The family’s lost intimacy does not explain the full history of abolition, but it gives social separation a personal form: closeness existed, and its disappearance was neither chosen by the children nor repaired by the formal change in the law.

The contrast between earlier friendship and later exclusion recurs in the adults’ accounts. Meggie denies that she and Mrs Hadley were ever friends, describing their relationship as one of necessity, while Callum remembers a friendship that included shared work, conversation, and laughter. His recollection preserves a more complicated past than the hardened division represented by the present. In this way, abolition marks a change in legal time without guaranteeing the restoration of relationships or the removal of boundaries that keep Nought and Cross families apart.