Kaffir Boy Chapter 12 Summary

Every morning, Mama would take her rent receipts, their marriage license, and her passbooks, and would go seek a job at the superintendent's office.
But she never had any luck.
Demoralized, she would come home and face the many chores of a poor housewife – cooking, cleaning, and fixing the "rags" that the children wore.
Yet she still found time to share folklore from her people, the Tsonga, enthralling Mark, Florah, George, and Maria with her stories.
She was teaching them that "memory to us black folks is like a book that one can read over and over again for an entire lifetime" (12.7).
They would dance, sing, and listen to the stories.
Mark calls those stories a sort of library, a time when he learned the values and virtues that he needed to last him a lifetime.