Each night, without fail, she prayed for blue eyes.

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary
The Bluest Eye is a tale of longing and desire, love and hate, pain and beauty, all rolled together into one. It has one ostensible narrative which follows a young black girl, Pecola, as she navigates a difficult coming of age and ends up pregnant with her father's child. Another line follows Claudia, our narrator, who is close to Pecola in age, and her sister, Frieda, as they, too, adolesce in ways both trying and amusing. Still other arcs trace backward in the history of several characters, like Cholly Breedlove, Pecola's father, and Mrs. Breedlove, Pecola's mother. We see not only what happens to each person, but why it came to be, and why, in fact, we should have sympathy or understanding for each character, particularly in exploring the ways that their blackness (and/or a white definition of blackness) impacts their sense of self. In the end, the actual events feel immaterial. What one leaves the book with is a sense of fulfillment and emptiness in equal measure, which echoes the complex, contradictory, and nearly impossible childhoods of our three female leads.
Spoiler Over: Continue Here

If you haven't read this one, I highly recommend. It's definitely not what I would call a light read, but it's a must read, for sure. It's also quite short, so you really don't have any excuse, blobbers. ;)
My thoughts, in no specific order...

On being a phenom
I guess I knew that Toni Morrison had been around and on the literary scene for quite some time, but did you know that this book will be 50 years old next year? Beloved was my first introduction to Toni Morrison's work, and in my head I think I thought that book was newer, too, but it was actually published a year after I was born, so it's over 30 years old, too. Toni Morrison is a gift to the world. Here's a passage to give you a flavor of her prose: 

Their conversation is like a gently wicked dance: sound meets sound, curtsies, shimmies and retires. Another sound enters but is upstaged by still another: the two circle each other and stop. Sometimes their words move in lofty spirals; other times they take strident leaps, and all of it is punctuated with warm-pulsed laughter - like the throb of a heart made of jelly...We do not, cannot, know the meanings of all their words, for we are nine and ten years old. So we watch their faces, their hands, their feet, and listen for truth in timbre.

On white dolls
Much of this novel centers on the concept of a desire for transformation, to escape the confines of blackness and be what seems to be America's definition of beautiful (blue eyes, blond-haired). I loved the way that Claudia broke this down for us, and how she was simultaneously revolutionary in her thinking and so obviously valid in her feelings. Here's her on white baby dolls: 

I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me. Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs - all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what what every girl child treasured.

And then later, comparing themselves to Maureen Peal, a white girl from school: 

If [Maureen] was cute - and if anything could be believed, if she was then we were not. And what did that mean? We were lesser. Nicer, brighter, but still lesser.

How often do we as children define ourselves in opposites like this? How damaging is this to our psyche? Can we avoid it? I'm not sure that we can, and certainly it's a habit that persists well through adulthood. I think it's worth cultivating an active resistance to.

On no one asking you what you want for Christmas
I loved Claudia as a character, and I loved both her pointing out that no one had asked her what she wanted for Christmas (which was not a white baby doll, to be quite clear) and what she said she would want if they had. 

I want to sit on the low stool in Big Mama's kitchen with my lap full of lilacs and listen to Big Papa play his violin for me alone. I have mentioned this before, but I, too, love lilacs, and wouldn't mind someone playing the violin or viola or cello for me alone.

On her mother being in 'a singing mood'
This is one of my favorite lines.

Misery colored by the greens and blues in my mother's voice took all of the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet.

On Being Mary Jane
One of my best friends put me on to the show Being Mary Jane (which is excellent, btw) and when I read this line, I immediately wondered if this was the inspiration for the title. It's a scene where Pecola takes a few pennies to the store to buy candy, and she buys three Mary Janes.

Each pale yellow wrapper has a picture on it. A picture of little Mary Jane, for whom the candy is named. Smiling white face. Blond hair in gentle disarray, blue eyes looking at her out of a world of clean comfort. The eyes are petulant, mischievous. To Pecola they are simply pretty. She eats the candy, and its sweetness is good. To eat the candy is somehow to eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane. Be Mary Jane.

Maureen Peal
I loved the way Maureen was depicted and villainized and just so clearly painted into my mind. 

A high-yellow dream child with long brown hair braided into two lynch ropes that hung down her back.

On candy dances
Claudia and Frieda make reference to their 'candy dances' when they come home and taunt the neighbor (whom they hate) and I just loved this line. 

We hurried back home to sit under the lilac bushes on the side of the house. We always did our Candy Dance there so Rosemary could see us and get jealous.

On black women
So I'm sure that I'm thinking of this in reverse, but reading this book at this point in my life made it feel like it was an epilogue to Beyoncé's Lemonade. In fact, Beyoncé's Lemonade is a culmination of years and decades and centuries of experience and art and revelations like this one. In any case, here are some lines that stood out, and captured this idea of black female personhood, and its unique burdens and boons. 

Edging into life from the back door. Becoming. Everybody in the world was in a position to give them orders. White women said, "Do this." White children said, "Give me that." White men said, "Come here." Black men said, "Lay down." The only people they need not take orders from were black children and each other. But they took all of that and re-created it in their own image.

And on comparing blackness against other blackness - All of us - all who knew her - felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her.We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness.

A little black girl yearns for the blue eyes of a little white girl, and the horror at the heart of her yearning is exceeded only by the evil of fulfillment.

On Pecola's baby - I thought about the baby that everybody wanted dead, and saw it very clearly. More strongly than my fondness for Pecola, I felt a need for someone to want the black baby to live - just to counteract the universal love of white baby dolls, Shirley Temples, and Maureen Peals.

Cholly, on children
I mention in my opening that Morrison has a way of informing all of her characters so that we see not just their motivations, but the ways in which race and poverty and happenstance define their view of the world. I feel like the best way to describe is that there's no easy depiction of 'good' or 'bad' characters, because they are all layered by and influenced by the systemic and personal moments in their lives. Here's an example of why Cholly could do something like have sex with his eleven-year-old daughter, but also why that act, while feeling heinous to the reader, is not imbued with hate or evil intent: 

Had he not been alone in the world since he was thirteen, knowing only a dying old woman who felt responsible for him, but whose age, sex, and interests were so remote from his own, he might have felt a stable connection between himself and the children. As it was, he reacted to them, and his reactions were based on what he felt at the moment.

So much of who we are and who we will be is defined well before we have a real say in it. This is not to sanction any act under the sun, or to nullify Pecola's very real trauma here, but rather, to highlight the nuance embedded in the scene.

On being more alike than unalike
Again, what struck me as I read this novel was that, as Maya Angelou put it, in the end, we are more alike than we are unalike. Here are a few moments of alikeness I found with Claudia:

• It takes a long time for my body to heat its place in the bed. I was literally JUST trying to get my feet warm in the bed as I read this.

• Mom rubbing Vicks on her chest - I, too, have vivid memories of my mother rubbing Vicks on my chest, and the 'hurts so good' feeling associated with it. 

• Mason jars - okay, so I know every hipster has them, but I have them all over not just because I'm a hipster, but because each one reminds me that it used to hold my mother's applesauce, or her jam, or her canned tomatoes, or her peaches. 

• Don't nobody never want nothing till they see me at the sink. Then everybody got to drink water... Claudia's mom says this when Claudia comes to get a glass of water, and I laughed because it reminded me of my mom and I having the exact same argument. We keep the trash under the kitchen sink, and no one EVER needs to throw anything out until Just that moment when Mom was standing in front of the sink. ;)

• I just get tired of having everything last. This is what Claudia says when she's annoyed her sister got touched inappropriately. It's obviously a complicated scene for many reasons, but I love that Claudia's first impression is to be jealous and annoyed. It reminded me of my experience as a third daughter, and often feeling like whatever the thing was, I was tired of getting it last! (Amusingly, Frieda points out that Claudia had scarlet fever first. lolz.)

Marvelous turns of phrase (There are so many - please read it yourself so you can find all of them. But just in case, here are a few I've curated for you.)

• But the unquarreled evening hung like the first note of a dirge in sullenly expectant air.

• From deep inside, her laughter came like the sound of many rivers, freely, deeply, muddily, heading for the room of an open sea. God, I love this line.

• Her light-green words restored color to the day.

• Black people were not allowed in [Lake Shore Park], and so it filled our dreams.

• Over her shoulder she spit out words to us like rotten pieces of apple.

• We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life.

• Evening came. The dark, the warmth, the quiet, enclosed Cholly like the skin and flesh of an elderberry protecting its own seed.

Referents and Reverberations

This line - Adults do not talk to us. They give us directions. reminded me of Le Petit Prince and his dedication: 

I will dedicate the book to the child from whom this grown-up grew.

And this line:
There is somethin' in this house that loves brassieres, said by one of the prostitutes who befriends Pecola, reminded me of these telegrams from Hotel New Hampshire, from Freud to Winslow:

• GOOD YOU COMING! BRING ALL KIDS AND PETS! LOTS OF ROOM. YOU'LL LIKE THE BEAR.

• On the political dissidents: Their typewriters bother the bear.

• EVERYONE IS LOOKING FORWARD TO YOU COMING. EVEN PROSTITUTES!

New Words/Concepts
asafetida - the dried latex exuded from the rhizome or tap root of several species of Ferula, a perennial herb that is part of the celery family Apiaceae. In the African American Hoodoo tradition, asafoetida is used in magic spells, as it is believed to have the power both to protect and to curse. Also used in traditional Pennsylvania Dutch folk magic, among many other uses!

harridan - a strict, bossy, or belligerent old woman

Moirai - The Moirai (Moirae) were the three goddesses of fate who personified the inescapable destiny of man. They assigned to every person his or her fate or share in the scheme of things.

threnody - a lament

This book is full of many things, but in case you're left feeling a little on the dark side of life, I'll close us out with two of my favorite moments that are on the lighter side. 

First, this one, on girlhood: 

Guileless and without vanity, we were still in love with ourselves then.

And this one, when Mrs. Breedlove first meets Cholly: 

She had not known there was so much laughter in the world.

So, dear blobbists, when you wake tomorrow, remember the time when you were guileless and without vanity, when you were still in love with yourself. Inhabit that space, and rest easy in the knowledge that even in years like these, there is so much laughter in the world. 

Keep each other safe. Keep faith. Good night. 

Of all the people in all the world, the Clutters were the least likely to be murdered.

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary

There is a story to be spoiled here, but it is not a fictional one. In Cold Blood is a 'true crime' novel written about the murder of four members of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, in November 1959. It is based on interviews conducted by Truman Capote and his friend, Harper Lee, which took place after the murders, but before the culprits had been caught. The murders were ostensibly part of a robbery gone wrong, perpetrated by Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, ex-cons who were perhaps not on the stablest mental footing. They chose the Clutters based on a tip from a fellow convict, who claimed the Clutters had a safe full of money on hand. The victims were Herb Clutter (48), Bonnie Clutter (45), Nancy Clutter (16), and Kenyon Clutter (15). Two daughters survived who were not living at home at the time (Eveanna and Beverly Clutter). Dick and Perry were tried and convicted of the murders. After roughly 5 years on Death Row, they were hanged on April 14, 1965. The killers got a radio, a pair of binoculars, and less than fifty dollars. 

Spoiler Over: Continue Here

How would you feel? 
I had never read this book, despite it being a fairly established 'classic'. It was certainly gripping, and compelling, and frightening. But all that being said, I have questions. As with any kind of 'true crime' story (podcast, documentary, novel), I wonder if the story is Capote's to tell. Sure, technically anything that happens in the public domain is fodder for literature. But I think the question is not can he tell the story, but rather, should he? I didn't read much about the family or Capote, since I generally like to stick to the original source material (in this case, the novel), but I did see that the Clutters felt betrayed by this book, and by the profit that Capote and others claimed from it. 

So I suppose my question to you is this, readers. How would you feel? If you were a Clutter, would you want this story to be told, and in this fashion? A little food for thought. 

Z is for Zeugma
If you know me at all, you know my favorite literary device is zeugma, which is when you tie literal and metaphorical objects together in the same sentence. Clearly Capote was also a fan. Here are a few zeugmas I found: 

Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there.

Boy, when they finally hit Vegas, they needed good whiskey and good news.

Behind the mask of murderers
Much of what makes this book compelling (and also deeply troubling) is that the murders feel almost random, and not rooted in any extreme malice. Dick and Perry are both a little unhinged, and Capote informs both of their characters as we dive deeper into the mystery. Here's a snapshot of each: 

Dick

• Envy was constantly with him; the Enemy was anyone who was someone he wanted to be or who had anything he wanted to have.

Perry

• You think I like myself? Oh, the man I could have been! But that bastard (referencing his father) never gave me a chance.

• A psychiatrist's write-up on Perry - He has had few close emotional relationships with other people, and these have not been able to stand small crises. He has little feeling for others outside a very small circle of friends, and attaches little real value to human life. 

I don't think we ever like to think of a human's capacity to murder, but at the very least, we like to rationalize such acts with meaning of some sort. Likely what makes In Cold Blood so harrowing is that no such meaning is really to be found here. 

Lines in the running for title of this post...

• There's blood on the walls. 

• Of all the people in all the world, the Clutters were the least likely to be murdered.

• The next time they go slaughtering it may be your family.

• Imagination, of course, can open any door - turn the key and let terror walk right in.

Murderers in our midst
For a fairly significant period of time after the murders, everyone in Holcomb assumes that the killers are locals. This seems like a fair assumption, since it is only discovered much later that the killers drove over 400 miles to target the Clutters, and closed the same distance in the next day. 

• One old man put his finger right on it, the reason nobody can sleep; 'All we've got out here are our friends. There isn't anything else.

Don't say disinterested
We follow Dick and Perry all the way through to their eventual deaths. On Death Row, they're joined by a very smart and bookish boy named Lawrence Lee Andrews, who happens to have murdered his whole family in their home. Perry doesn't like Andrews because Perry is used to being the bright one and lording it over the people around him. This particular exchange made me laugh because my thesis advisor, a 60-year-old petite female Russian professor at Bryn Mawr, had a similar passion for preserving the word disinterested. 

Andrews: Don't say disinterested. What you mean is uninterested. Andrews meant well, he was without malice, but Perry could have boiled him in oil. 

Lines I Liked

• The quietness of his tone italicized the malice of his reply.

• The garden was white with sea-fog; it might have been an assembly of spirits: Mama and Jimmy and Fern. When Mrs. Johnson bolted the door, she had in mind the dead as well as the living.

Words, Wonderful Words
dyspathy - lack of sympathy; antipathy

hegira - an exodus or migration; from the Arabic, a reference to Muhammad's departure from Mecca to Medina in AD 622

venire - the panel of prospective jurors from which a jury is selected

I'm off from work and off to another literary adventure. Time for The Bluest Eye. Keep yourselves safe, and hold your dear ones tight tonight. 

What is freedom to a nation, but freedom to the individuals in it?

Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary
Uncle Tom's Cabin is a novel that centers around two slaves: Tom and Eliza. One finds her way to Canada and freedom, one, to put it simply, does not. When we pick up the story, Tom and Eliza both work on a plantation in Kentucky, where they are (as far as being enslaved goes) happy. Their own, Mr. Shelby, has been a little loose with his money, though, and so he's forced to sell some of his slaves to cover his debt. Tom is selected for both his hardiness and his gentle demeanor, and Eliza's young son, Harry, also catches the eye of the trader. Eliza gets word of the plan to sell her son and makes an escape the night before he is to be taken, and after many death-defying moments, they eventually get reunited with her husband, George, who was a slave on a nearby (not great) plantation and also ran. They all go to Canada (and then Liberia) and things are generally less awful for them. Tom is sold progressively farther and farther south, and the plantations shift in sentiment from decent to devilish. Tom's family (both his actual family and his master's family) do search for him, but are only able to locate him after he has fallen victim to the brutality of Simon Legree, who is to be his last master.
Spoiler Over: Continue Here

This was an interesting read. I had read it once before, in college, for a course called Portraits in Black. Many of my reactions were similar (and I was amused to see that I wrote in my books as long ago as 15 years back) and I read a good portion of the book with my mouth curled into a disgusted sneer. There are caricatures of a great variety of people, both white and POC, and not all are positive, to say the least. That being said, I finished the book feeling quite moved, only to read some vituperative comments in an essay by James Baldwin. I'm not unaware of the negative stereotypes that spiraled from this work, but I was deeply affronted when he said it was awful, and on par with other awful books like Little Women. 

I respect you deeply, Mr. Baldwin, but we will have to Agree to Disagree. I know that your identity as an author, a POC writer, a queer writer, all the above and more, likely informed your reading (and/or reading for filth) of Uncle Tom's Cabin, but I would be remiss if I didn't say that I felt pretty impressed at the intensity of Stowe's work and the fact that she captured the public attention as a woman in that day and time. If you know me, you also know that I'm generally very big on connecting (or not connecting) with the work directly, and criticism isn't really my jam. So anyway, that's my two cents! I do still think the book is worth a read, if for no other reason than to form your own opinion. It was, after all, the best-selling novel of the 19th century. 

Run, Eliza, Run from Simon; Run Eliza Run!
I remember reading about the "feedback loop" in a book recently, and how echoes of characters and reflections in various media can, in turn, change or color our perception of the original (ex: Harry Potter now looks like Daniel Radcliffe in our heads). It took me most of the book to remember where I was remembering "Run, Eliza, Run! Run, Eliza, Run!" from, and it finally hit me after I finished that it's from the play-within-a-play (I think it's actually a ballet-within-a-play, if we're being picky) in The King and I. Since the internet has everything, I immediately found a version of the ballet and watched all of it. (NOTE: The ballet changes quite a bit of the plot. OK, mostly all of it. Don't rely on it for a book report ;)

I promise I'm getting back to the point about the feedback loop. What I wanted to say was that, because of that ballet, I, (a) thought that Eliza was Simon's slave, which she is not, and (b) thought Simon Legree looked something like this picture. 

Simon Legree
Simon Legree is a great name for a villain, and he definitely fits the bill. One of my favorite lines is from Sam, a fellow slave who helps Eliza evade capture, after she has just launched herself (and her son) across a mostly frozen river by bounding from ice berg to ice berg. 

"Wal, now," said Sam, scratching his head, "I hope Mas'r'll 'scuse us tryin' dat ar road. Don't think I feel spry enough for dat ar, no way!"

Gandalf
I'm not sure why, but the scene where Eliza and George and Harry hide in a cave next to a chasm and then end up pushing one of the slave catchers into the deep reminded me very much of Gandalf and the Balrog. Maybe it was the whole chasm thing. ;) Here's my favorite line from a friend of the Quakers, as he sends Tom Loker down into the chasm:

'Friend', said Phineas, suddenly stepping to the front, and meeting him with a push from his long arms, "thee isn't wanted here."

Speaking for others/Writing across difference
Certainly, no one can tell a story of the slave experience better than a slave themself. That being said, I did think there were some great lines that Stowe gave to her characters.

• "My master! and who made him my master? That's what I think of - what right has he to me?"

• "My country! What country have I, but the grave, -and I wish to God that I was laid there... No! If it comes to that, I can earn myself at least six feet of free soil, -the first and last I shall ever own in Kentucky!"

• (paraphrased) "If heaven is for white people, I'd rather go to hell."

I can see why the book was so meaningful to the nation, and particularly to white folks. What I really loved about this book, though, was that the characters who really shone brightly, in a moral sense and in an all-around-awesomeness sense, were women, and in a few cases, children. Here are a few portraits.

Mrs. Shelby, wife of Mr. Shelby and original mistress to Eliza and Tom, among others

• on slavery - I was a fool to think I could make anything good out of such a deadly evil.

• When her husband says he'll go to town when Tom and Harry find out they have been sold, so he can avoid a scene, and she says she will go and tell them directly - They shall see, at any rate, that their mistress can feel for and with them.

Mrs. Bird, a Senator's wife, who eventually shelters Eliza and Harry for a night

• on the Fugitive Slave Law - "It's a shameful, wicked, abominable law, and I'll break it, for one, the first time I get a chance; and I hope I shall have a chance, I do!"

Eva St. Clare, young daughter of Tom's second master, Augustine St. Clare

• when horrible things happen to slaves and she is accused of having a 'nervous' disposition when they upset her - "I'm not nervous, but these things sink into my heart."

George Shelby, the young son of Mr. and Mrs. Shelby, who eventually comes for Tom

"I should think you'd be ashamed to spend all your life buying men and women, and chaining them, like cattle! I should think you'd feel mean!"

Humor
I also thought that this book was pretty hilarious in quite a few places. It was originally serialized, so it has a kind of dark Dickensian wit that I really enjoyed. Here are a few moments: 

• Augustine, to his wife, who constantly complains of her nonexistent ailments - "If it's particularly agreeable to you to have heart disease, why, I'll try and maintain you have it," said St. Clare; "I didn't know it was." lololololzzzz

Dinah, the St. Clare's cook

• to Aunt Vermont, who keeps trying to organize Dinah's kitchen - "I wish Missis wouldn't touch dem ar. I likes to keep my things where I knows whar to go to 'em," said Dinah, rather decidedly." This reminded me of when my grandma would come to town and we'd spend weeks finding things in the wrong places afterwards. ;)

Reality made real
Stowe writes a lot like a speechwriter, making lots of direct appeals to the reader and to pathos and ethos. Here are two examples that struck me: 

• on the Senator meeting a 'fugitive' IRL - "His idea of a fugitive was only an idea of the letters that spell the word, - or, at the most, the image of a little newspaper picture of a man with a stick and a bundle..."

• If it were your Harry, mother, or your Willie, that were going to be torn from you by a brutal trader, to-morrow morning, -if you had seen the man, and heard that the papers were signed and delivered, and you had only from twelve o'clock till morning to make good your escape, -how fast could you walk?

Problematical parts
As mentioned before, this book is by no means perfect. Feel free to examine the existing body of work out there (it's substantial) if you're curious to read more. A few things that bugged me...

- "The African Race" is like ____________. This is a sentence that comes up a lot. Race is a construct. There is no such thing as "the African race" and there aren't overall characteristics we can ascribe to them. 

- Christianity equated with Americanism - The big selling point for Stowe is that slavery is unChristian. As an agnostic/borderline atheist, I think it's really important that we recognize that slavery was inhumane, immoral, evil, and just all around unconscionable. I don't think we need to be Christian to own that. 

- Everyone leaves and goes to Liberia? There's a little bit of a 'back to Africa' thing that happens at the end, where all the slaves who make it out go to Liberia, which felt a convenient. Like, don't make these people your slaves, but let them go have their own land far away from us. I don't think that's her whole argument, since she talks about the role and responsibility of white people in helping to undo the ramifications of slavery, but it did feel a little off to me.

Lines in the running for blog title

• I must go onward. I dare not stop.

• In real life we do not die when all that makes life bright dies to us.

• What does he want of liberty? It's no favor to set them free.

• What use will freedom be to me? Can it give me back my children, or make me what I used to be?

South vs North
Stowe spends a pretty significant amount of time exploring the Northern sentiment vs. the Southern sentiment, and I think she does a good job of calling out certain subgroups for being problematic contributors to a greater evil. Here are two snippets. 

Augustine, to his sister, on the way Northerners treat black people - You loathe them as you would a snake or a toad, yet you are indignant at their wrongs. You would not have them abused; but you don't want to have anything to do with them yourselves.

On why there's no such thing as a 'good' slave master - In my opinion, it is you considerate, humane men, that are responsible for all the brutality and outrage wrought by these wretches; because, if it were not for your sanction and influence, the whole system could not keep foot-hold for an hour. If there were no planters except such as that one, the whole thing would go down like a mill-stone. It is your respectability and humanity that licenses and protects his brutality.

Wondrously New Words for Me
eldrich - strange or unnatural, especially in a way that inspires fear : weird, eerie

inkhorn - a small portable container for ink; alt., denoting pedantic words or expressions used only in academic writing



obstreperous - noisy and difficult to control

pellucid - translucently clear; lucid in style or meaning; easily understood; (of music or other sound) clear and pure in tone.

I'll leave you with a few parting thoughts on this snow squall of a day. Stay warm, wherever you are! I hear it's colder in Des Moines than Antarctica today!

The Quakers, on why they intervene to help slaves escape:
"If we would not meet trouble for a good cause, we were not worthy of our name."

On how good people are still generally the minority: 
"Are the honorable, the just, the high-minded and compassionate, the majority anywhere in this world?"

Stowe's recommendation to all: 
"What can any one individual do? They can see to it that they feel right."

So, dear blobbists, be honorable, be just, be high-minded and compassionate. Let's make it a majority in this dark world of ours, and let's make sure that when we lay our heads on our pillows to sleep at night, we do it knowing that, in our hearts, we feel right.