A brief note on Doris Lessing’s short story The Antheap The short story "The Antheap," which was first released in 1953 as part of Doris Lessing's second collection of short fiction titled "Five," chronicles Tommy, the son of white settlers in southern Africa, from his youth through his transition into young manhood. As she does elsewhere in her short fiction (for example, "The Old Chief Mshlanga"), Lessing examines the processes of both enculturation into racist ideology and resistance to such acculturation from the perspective of a kid. The "antheap" of the title alludes to the location where Tommy meets secretly with Dirk, the son of the white mine owner Mr. Macintosh and a black woman who lives in the African compound on the mine. Tommy and Dirk meet there in order to discuss the situation that has arisen between their parents. When young Tommy asks his mother why Dirk is a different colour from the other African children, Mrs. Clarke responds angrily, "why do you ask?," revealing that the fact that Dirk is Macintosh's kid is common knowledge on the mine despite the fact that no one is willing to accept it. Why, she appeared to be asking me, do you violate the rule of silence? Tommy is unable to forget that he is a changeling who has usurped the place of the real son, who is abandoned to a life of poverty and dangerous toil on the mine. Although the ostensibly childless Mr. Macintosh takes an increasingly paternal interest in Tommy, paying for the education that will provide him with a promising future, Tommy cannot forget that he is a changeling who has usurped the place of the real son. Tommy becomes the conduit through which some of the father's wealth is directed to their appropriate destination, passing on to Dirk the education that he is now receiving in a city school. This occurs as a result of the intense friendship that develops between the two boys. The narrative delves into topics such as freedom, friendship, and justice, with the overarching goal of demonstrating that one should never minimise the challenges that come with having a relationship that violates conventional norms. Tommy is instilled with the knowledge that maturing into a man will need him to participate in the racial discrimination that is the foundation of his culture from a young age. His mother informs him, "You're too big now to play with a lot of nasty kaffirs," when he is older. And young Tommy himself gets a kick out of the sense of superiority he gets when Dirk tries to sell him a duiker, saying things like, "'Damned cheek, too much' " (309). Despite the fact that the older Tommy recognises the unfairness of Dirk's circumstance, the two boys frequently find themselves in a state of conflict over a privilege that Tommy can't help but believe he has a right to: "Slowly [Tommy] understood that his emotion was that belief in his right to freedom which Dirk always felt immediately." In one of the sculptures of Dirk that the aspiring artist Tommy creates, the question of Tommy's conviction in his own freedom, as well as the prospect of his accepting as natural Dirk's lack of freedom, becomes an issue. "Why haven't I any hands or feet? Surely it needn't be wood. Dirk insists that Tommy "could do the same thing if he put handcuffs on my wrists" (346–347) as a response to the disempowerment that he detects in Tommy's image of him. This is in response to the fact that Dirk believes that Tommy has misrepresented him. In what may be a moment of deliberate selfreflexivity, Lessing's text touches here on the politics of representation, on the way that producing a representation of someone—whether in visual art or fiction—involves the exercise of a certain power. This is true whether the representation is of the person in question or of a fictional character. However, in the end, both of the boys come to the realisation that they are connected to one another in a bond that goes further than loving one another or having similarities and is "closer than brothers". At the end of the narrative, the two young men have prevailed in their efforts to convince Macintosh to pay for their higher education: "The triumph was totally theirs, but now they had to begin again, in the long and tough struggle to grasp what they had achieved and how they would use it" (349). This conclusion, which refers to Tommy and Dirk collectively as "they," marks not the finish but rather the beginning for the boys. Their role is comparable to that of the reader in that they are tasked with interpreting what has occurred and determining what its implications will be for the future.