A Story to Pass On

The next few entries will be based around quotes from a book I have just finished enjoying. This book is titled Beloved and it's written by Toni Morrison. It's about North American slavery (because there were so many more varieties) and the aftermath of the American Civil War. It's powerful, complex, so well written and I highly recommend it.

The first chosen passage is descriptive of the contemporary USA but also South Africa, Canada, Australia, India, Israel/Palestine and probably every other state on earth. In all these places, governed by fear and inequality, ultimately, even if it takes lifetimes, you reap what you sow. It also reveals certain truths that all minorities must struggle against, every single day. The passage is so insightful, I feel I would do it a disservice to continue to type:

". . . he believed the indecipherable language clamouring around the house was the mumbling of the black and angry dead. Very few had died in bed, like Baby Suggs, and none that he knew of, including Baby, had lived a livable life. Even the educated coloured: the long-school people, the doctors, the teachers, the paper-writers and businessmen had a hard row to hoe. In addition to having to use their heads to get ahead, they had the weight of the whole race sitting there. You needed two heads for that. Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, he thought, they were right. The more coloured people spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn't the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle white-folks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own."