Summary

Chapter 9 continues the pattern in which every other chapter is narrated in the first-person plural point of view by “The Children” (the chapter’s title). The chapter begins with the five village boys remaining in the group greeting Thula as she returns to Kosawa, a decade after leaving. The collective narrator, no longer children but teenage village boys, describe the Pexton property they destroy.

Six years before Thula’s return to Kosawa, a new Pexton representative named Mr. Fish explains to the villagers, alongside the two Restoration Movement representatives that the villagers refer to as the Cute One and the Sweet One, that a new proposal has been made to give the villagers a percentage of Pexton’s earnings. The villagers see through this as simply another ploy to buy their way to complete control of the land, but end up making an...