ABSTRACT
Bessie Head was born on July 6, 1937, in the Fort Napier Mental Institution in South Africa. Her mother was white and her father black, and at the time of her birth, extramarital sexual relations between blacks and whites had been punishable in South Africa for a decade. Her mother was incarcerated by her family, according to biographer Gillian Stead Eilersen (1), in her seventh month of pregnancy. Nothing is known of the father, though Bessie liked to say that he had worked in the family’s stables and taken care of their racehorses, but they did not have horses. The family was upper-class in South African white society and dealt with the problem of their daughter violating their racial and class taboos by putting her and her child far away. But Bessie Amelia, née Birch Emery, named her daughter Bessie Amelia Emery and left her a little money. Bessie Emery, senior, died in 1943 in the mental hospital. Her surname came from her Australian-South African husband, with whom, before the marriage ended, she had had a son, Ronald.
