Crosses closer to God

Crosses closer to God is the claim that dark-skinned Crosses possess a special religious closeness to God, a belief that helps frame and legitimize the society’s racial hierarchy. The novel tests that claim against both Christian teachings and the everyday exclusion of Noughts, making religious language part of the conflict over who is considered fully human and worthy of equal treatment.

The Claim and Its Contradictions

Lynette, a Nought who has come to believe she is a Cross, looks at her dark skin and calls its colour beautiful, rich, and wonderful. She says she is lucky to be a Cross and describes Crosses as closer to God. Her expression is genuinely happy, but the moment unsettles the family: Jude mutters an insult, and their father sharply intervenes. The scene presents the belief not as an abstract doctrine alone, but as a conviction entangled with Lynette’s identity and her family’s response to it.

Callum later considers the claim through the religious reasoning he has absorbed. He notes that the Good Book describes the son of God as dark-skinned, with features like those of Crosses, and also teaches love of one’s neighbour and reciprocity. Those teachings, in his view, sit uneasily beside the idea that Crosses are God’s chosen and the way they treat Noughts. His father’s account of slavery sharpens the contradiction: although Noughts are no longer enslaved, the name has changed while much else has not. Callum also recognizes that the word Nought suggests nothingness, a designation imposed on the group rather than chosen by its members.

Belief Made Social Practice

The hierarchy associated with the claim appears in school, where a crowd gathers to chant that Noughts do not belong. Callum and three other Nought students are surrounded by police as officers try to move through the crowd; police also form a line to push the Cross demonstrators back. The episode shows exclusion as a public performance, not merely a private prejudice.

The same disparity shapes how the event reaches the wider public. On television, Callum sees Heathcroft School shown without the attacks on the Nought students or the spit covering his jacket. The reporter describes the response as some hostility, a phrase Callum regards as an extreme understatement. The account therefore links the belief in Cross superiority to both hostility at school and the language through which that hostility is minimized.

Institutional responses further reveal how the hierarchy is maintained. At Heathcroft, Mr Costa suggests that Noughts who find school difficult should go elsewhere, while Mrs Paxton warns that they are repeatedly being targeted and that retaliation is only a matter of time. At a hospital, staff require patients to present identity cards for checking and registration before medical care, under a new government ruling. These separate settings show racial inequality operating through access to education, administrative scrutiny, and the interpretation of conflict, rather than only through overt declarations of religious superiority.

Conflict, Power, and Significance

The claim’s effects are not confined to public institutions. When Sephy is blamed for her connection to Callum and his family, her mother invokes the saying that lying down with dogs brings fleas. In this context, the proverb casts association across the racial boundary as contamination and treats the consequences as Sephy’s fault. Its ordinary, familiar form helps show how prejudice can be reinforced through family speech as well as political or religious argument.

Other family scenes complicate any simple division between privilege and vulnerability. Sephy is a Cross, yet her father physically strikes her after she says she is pregnant and orders her to have an abortion, disowning her when she resists his authority. Elsewhere, she acts decisively to protect Minerva during Jude’s threat. These moments do not erase Sephy’s racial advantage, but they show that Cross status does not shield her from patriarchal control or danger within her family and political world.

By setting a claim of divine favour against Christian obligations, discriminatory institutions, and intimate family conflict, the novel exposes the gap between asserted moral authority and lived conduct. The phrase offers a religious explanation for Cross dominance, while the experiences of Callum, other Nought students, and their families reveal its human and institutional costs.