She wanted something to happen - something, anything; she did not know what.

 The Awakening by Kate Chopin

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary

The Awakening is a story of love lost, regained, and lost again. But more than that, it is a story of self-exploration, an examination of the female experience, and a warrior's battle cry. It chronicles a brief period of time in the life of Edna Pontellier, a relatively young woman and mother of two, first at Grand Isle, Louisiana, and later in New Orleans, in the early 20th century. As the novel begins, we're joining a group of wealthy families (self-designated as Creole, but in a sense that mostly refers to them having been descended from French folk and living in the American South, which I found a bit confusing, thinking that Creole had a racial aspect/designation) as they summer by the Gulf of Mexico. Edna is followed at every turn by Robert Lebrun, a young single man and son of another family staying there. The summer is full of lightness and affection, but when they return for the season to New Orleans, Robert announces his intention to move to Mexico to seek job prospects. Edna is dismayed, but can't convince Robert to stay. 

After Robert leaves, Edna begins to 'awaken', so to speak. She sends her children to be with her mother-in-law, she decides she does not wish to be tethered to anyone, and she tells her husband she intends to close their large home (he is away for work) and move into a small house adjacent to live by herself. Her husband is confused and displeased, but manages to smooth things over socially by claiming they are doing 'major repairs' on their home, and assumes/hopes she will eventually return to 'normal'. Edna develops a new friendship with another single man, Alcée Arobin, who falls completely in love with Edna. She enjoys his affections, but her heart is still longing for Robert, so poor Arobin slots into a sort of sad second place. Robert unexpectedly returns, but he spurns Edna, and she is bereft. She accidentally stumbles upon him and tries to rekindle their flame. It seems like they might be getting back together, but Robert leaves in the night and says he can't accept this limited version of Edna's affection (she would stay married, be his mistress but not his wife, etc.). Edna travels back to Grand Isle to "see the sights" in the off-season, and goes for a solo swim in the Gulf from which she does not return.

Spoiler Over: Continue Here

Dear blobbies, 

Do you like my new name for you? Blobbies? Ah well, I like it, so that's all that matters. ;) Anyway, I thought I'd continue my latest phase of actually reading books in a timely fashion and so I've already finished The Awakening and I'm ready to blob on it. 

General reflections: I liked this novel a lot. I remember that I once had the opportunity to read it in high school - I think it was a choice between this book and Portrait of a Lady and I kind of wish I'd read this book instead (sorry, Henry James). This book had tons of flavor and nuance to it, and I always LOVE reading books by women or female-identifying authors, especially when they're from a time when almost no women were getting published. Apparently this book was not well received when she wrote it, and lots of folks were like, "ladies don't/shouldn't act this way" which makes me feel like they really missed the point. So anyway, just want it to go down in the record that I see you, Kate Chopin, and I loved this book. I think it's gotten a fair amount of acclaim in later years post-publication, but I'm sure it's frustrating to not have your work feel seen when you're alive and there to stand by it. 

My thoughts!

On sunshades (and how we should bring them back)

Mr. Pontellier uses a sunshade and several people reference them, and I was like, UM hello can we please bring these back? I walked around the bird refuge with an open umbrella in the middle of the summer to protect my oh-so-pale skin from the sun and everyone looked at me like I was a nutbar.

Connection points

As I've mentioned in many of my last posts, I'm always amazed at how connected I feel to books, regardless of when they're written or by whom. This book was no exception. Here are a few of those links I saw in this one. 

• Am I reading a book or taking a French exam? Amusingly, the copy of the book I bought was an inexpensive version from Amazon, and there is a ton of French in the novel, but it was all missing accents. So as I was reading, I kept trying to add in accents where I thought they were missing (an accent aigu here, accent grave there, circonflexe there) but it ultimately felt like I was taking a French exam. This reminded me of the fact that my mother used to write letters to her grandmother in French, but instead of responding in French, my great-grandmother would return the letters or notes with corrections. I must say that I was, on the whole, quite glad that I was a French speaker as I read this book, as it had a ton of untranslated French in it.

• Perhaps a bit of bouillon? At one point, Mrs. Pontellier is looking tired, and someone offers her a cup of bouillon, and I just about dropped my book. My grandmother when she wasn't feeling well used to ask for 'just a bit of bouillon', and I legitimately thought this was just one of her things. Turns out, the whole world used to ask for bouillon!

• Old Madame Pontellier - I loved this line below about Edna's children and their grandmother, because it made me think of my mom and G, and I think she shares the same sentiments.

She was hungry for them - even a little fierce in her attachment. She did not want them to be wholly 'children of the pavement', she always said when begging to have them for a space. She wished them to know the country, with its streams, its fields, its woods, its freedom, so delicious to the young. She wished them to taste something of the life their father had lived and known and loved when he, too, was a little child.

• There was the whistle of a railway train somewhere in the distance, and the midnight bells were ringing. This one is just a personal note - I love hearing trains at night, and I love that I can hear them at home in the country and here in the city, depending on the level of overall city noise. I think my afterlife would always have a midnight bell and train in the distance.

Mrs. Edna Pontellier

Since she is really the center of this work, I wanted to give you a few lines to give you a sense of her. 

In appearance...

• She was rather handsome than beautiful. I don't know if this is a compliment or a dig?

As a parent...

• In short, Mrs. Pontellier was not a mother-woman.

• She was fond of her children in an uneven, impulsive way. She would sometimes gather them passionately to her heart; she would sometimes forget them...Their absence was a sort of relief, though she did not admit this, even to herself. It seemed to free her of a responsibility which she had blindly assumed and for which Fate had not fitted her. I loved the exploration of this. I mean, certainly has dark ramifications for the children concerned, but I think it's under-explored to see mothers who didn't really intend to be, or don't feel it fits them completely.

As a wife...

• The acme of bliss, which would have been a marriage with the tragedian, was not for her in this world. As the devoted wife of a man who worshiped her, she felt she would take her place with a certain dignity in the world of reality, closing the portals forever behind her upon the realm of romance and dreams. There was such sadness in this line.

• When Madame Ratignolle says it's a pity Mr. Pontellier doesn't stay at home in the evening, and Edna replies: "Oh! dear no!,' said Edna, with a blank look in her eyes. 'What should I do if he stayed home? We wouldn't have anything to say to each other.' !! 

As a music enthusiast...

• It was not the first time she had heard an artist at the piano. Perhaps it was the first time she was ready, perhaps the first time her being was tempered to take an impress of the abiding truth. Ooh, I loved this line, it gave me chills. Totally reminded me of the way Proust talks about music and music appreciation.

As a lover...

• It was so much more natural to have him stay when he was not absolutely required to leave her. There was such poignancy in the relationship with Robert, which was really quite chaste on the whole, but also deeply intimate.

• Robert's going had some way taken the brightness, the color, the meaning out of everything. The conditions of her life were in no way changed, but her whole existence was dulled, like a faded garment which seems to be no longer worth wearing.

As an individual...

• She was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world. 

• Whatever came, she had resolved never again to belong to another than herself. I loved this.

A doctor's opinion

Some people in this novel were less thrilled about Edna's awakening. For example, Mr. Pontellier. I really enjoyed this moment when he consulted the family doctor about Edna's "strange behavior" which included things like taking the streetcar and arriving home late at night, and paying no attention to household chores. 

• Woman, my dear friend, is a very peculiar and delicate organism... And when ordinary fellows like you and me attempt to cope with their idiosyncrasies the result is bungling. Most women are moody and whimsical. OH YES, you know us women and how whimsical and moody we are. 

On ennui

Part of the beauty in this novel for me is this fine line between female independence, existential exploration, losing or finding oneself in love, and depression, and the uncertainty of where or what is driving this 'awakening'. Here are some of the lines that capture this feeling:

• An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole being with a vague anguish. It was like a shadow, like a mist passing across her soul's summer day. It was strange and unfamiliar; it was a mood.

• The beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such a beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult!

• She had all her life long been accustomed to harbor thoughts and emotions which never voiced themselves.

• There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why, -when it did not seem worth while to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation. This is admittedly a very dark line, but I liked the visceral nature of it, and how it reminded me of The Bell Jar, but also when Proust says things like, 'I was only unhappy for a day at a time.' 

• 'The years that are gone seem like dreams - if one might go on sleeping and dreaming - but to wake up and find - oh! well! perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one's life.' This is one of the central questions of the novel. Is it better to wake and find oneself in a sort of nightmare, or to stay sleeping and dreaming? 

On the sea

The way that Chopin writes about the water is so lovely. Here are some lines I loved.

• The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation.

• She turned her face seaward to gather in an impression of space and solitude, which the vast expanse of water, meeting and melting with the moonlit sky, conveyed to her excited fancy. As she swam she seemed to be reaching out for the unlimited in which to lose herself.

Things I did not enjoy

While I really enjoyed this book on the whole, I'd like to take a moment to tell you about the bits I did not like. 

• References to 'the quadroon' - there were no meaningful Black characters in this novel, and they were frequently referred to like this, by the 'proportion of their blackness'. I know this is representative of the time that Chopin inhabited, but it felt awful.

• I couldn't help but reflect that there was not a huge gap between this novel and Black Boy in terms of timeline, so when I read the scenes of Edna's party and the Black folks working it, I thought of Richard going hungry behind the smiling white faces. 

• The few times that Black people were mentioned, it was for things like this: A little black girl sat on the floor, and with her hands worked the treadle of the machine. Madame Lebrun is sewing and a little Black girl is literally on the floor pushing the machine. 

• Comments about 'the Mexican people' as treacherous, their women as promiscuous - this came up as a theme several times. Obviously racist and ignorant.

Words that were new to me (many of which are actually French but a bit obscure)

befurbelowed - ornamented with frills

friandises - candies, sweet things

houri - a beautiful young woman, especially one of the virgin companions of the faithful in the Muslim Paradise

lateen - a triangular sail on a long yard at an angle of 45° to the mast

peignoir - a woman's light dressing gown or negligee

pirogue - a long, narrow canoe made from a single tree trunk, especially in Central America and the Caribbean

tabouret - a low stool or small table

Referents and Reverberations

• I don't know if it was a particular scene as much as it was an overall feeling, but I got real echoes and reverberations of The Age of Innocence as I read this. I suppose The Age of Innocence is actually the echo, since it was published about 20 years later. ;)

• There's a parrot in the opening scene, which reminded me of Dr. Urbino's parrot in Love in the Time of Cholera. It also reminded me of some ridiculous TikToks I've been watching that feature a yellow parrot that keeps saying to itself "Good Girl!" when it's obviously misbehaving. :)

• This exchange:

Edna: How long will you be gone? 
Robert: Forever, perhaps. I don't know. It depends upon a good many things.
Edna: Well, in case it shouldn't be forever, how long will it be?
Robert: I don't know.

reminded me of A Farewell to Arms, and this scene: (I'm not sure why.)

 "What is it, darling?"
"It's all right, Cat. Would you like to get dressed right away and go in a boat to Switzerland?"
"Would you?"
"No. I'd like to go back to bed."
"What is it about?"
"The barman says they are going to arrest me in the morning."
"Is the barman crazy?"
"No."
"Then please hurry, darling, and get dressed so we can start."

• The Ratignolles' soirées musicales reminded me of Proust, and the parties at the Verdurins and the musical accompaniments.

Lines I Particularly Liked

• The sun was low in the west, and the breeze soft and languorous that came up from the south, charged with the seductive odor of the sea.

• Her glance wandered from his face away toward the Gulf, whose sonorous murmur reached her like a loving but imperative entreaty.

• She was flushed and felt intoxicated with the sound of her own voice and the unaccustomed taste of candor. It muddled her like wine, or like a first breath of freedom. This was one of my favorite lines.

• The night sat lightly upon the sea and the land. There was no weight of darkness; there were no shadows. The white light of the moon had fallen upon the world like the mystery and the softness of sleep.

• It was very pleasant to stay there under the orange trees, while the sun dipped lower and lower, turning the western sky to flaming copper and gold. The shadows lengthened and crept out like stealthy, grotesque monsters across the grass.

• All the mystery and witchery of the night seemed to have gathered there amid the perfumes and the dusky and tortuous outlines of flowers and foliage. She was seeking herself and finding herself in just such sweet, half-darkness which met her moods. God, I love this line.

• The future was a mystery which she never attempted to penetrate.

Well, my dear blobbies, I must away to another fictional experience, this time I'll look for sanctuary in Faulkner, I think (hagh). I'll leave you with a few lines I enjoyed. 

(1) The children were sent to bed. Some went submissively; others with shrieks and protests as they were dragged away. They had been permitted to sit up till after the ice-cream, which naturally marked the limit of human indulgence. Naturally. ;)

(2) The stillest hour of the night had come, the hour before dawn, when the world seems to hold its breath. My favorite time of day.

and (3) this exchange between Edna and Arobin about Mademoiselle Reisz, a quirky and talented pianist and friend: 

     

"'She says queer things sometimes in a bantering way that you don't notice at the time and you find yourself thinking about afterward.'  

 

'For instance?' 

 

'Well, for instance, when I left her to-day, she put her arms around me and felt my shoulder blades, to see if my wings were strong, she said. 'The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth.' Whither would you soar?'"

Perhaps our dear Edna did not remember to check on the strength of her wings in the end. So blobbies, if you plan on soaring above the plain of tradition and prejudice, don't forget to check your wings! And of course - don't let your arms get tired! ;)

Keep each other safe, keep faith, and have a wonderful evening, dear blobbies!

What quality of will must a Negro possess to live and die with dignity in a country that denied his humanity?

 Black Boy by Richard Wright

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary

Black Boy is a poignant, often painful, brutally honest look at growing up as a young Black man in the Jim Crow South in the early 20th century. Wright takes us nearly all the way from infancy to his early twenties, and we follow him from place to place as his family (and later mostly his mother) looks for work and stability in a hostile world. We spend time in Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, and later Chicago, and briefly New York City. While Wright is constantly surrounded by some family member, from a younger brother to various aunts and uncles and grandparents, his father leaves his mother early on in his youth, which makes the family income a constant struggle. Coupled with the existing state of poverty that his family finds themselves in, Wright spends a significant portion of his youth starving or scheming ways to get food. He bounces from place to place, his mother eventually falls ill (no doubt in some part due to the stress), and points out that he doesn't complete a single full year of schooling without a move until somewhere around 9th grade, I think. 

Despite having to work from a very young age to support his family, Wright manages to get to and through high school, and graduates first in his class. He has few options outside of teaching Black children, and though he wishes to go to college, it is not open to him. He decides to leave the South and moves first to Memphis and then Chicago, eventually saving enough money to bring his mother and brother along. He scrapes by, but things are always excruciatingly difficult, and as he develops his racial consciousness, he finds himself isolated both from whites and from his peers because he believes in racial equality and that Blacks should have rights, respect, jobs, education, etc. He struggles to keep jobs because they are always for whites and always involve degradation, whether implicit, explicit, or both. 

He eventually joins a Communist group which provides him with a community of more like-minded individuals, but he is still one of the few Black people in the group, and finds himself more and more at odds with them because he is branded an 'intellectual', which is counter to their worker mentality. He is eventually forced out of the group, and finds himself desirous of departing from them anyway, as he wants to devote himself to writing. While this is revolutionary for a Black man at the time, Wright carves out the space, time, and energy to practice writing and draft novels. We leave him contemplating the futility of this effort, but determined to write just the same.

Spoiler Over: Continue Here

Dear readers, 

It has been TOO LONG, I know. Many of you have probably forgotten about this blob, or wondered if I was, in fact, ever going to blob again. Well here I am! It took me a while because once again I got caught up reading a set of books I created for a book bingo, but I finally made it to this novel. It was definitely a tough read. Painful to hear and wear and share Wright's incredibly uphill battle of adolescence, and to wonder how much of the system and circumstances in this country have really changed for Black men since then. This is only the second Wright novel I've read - Native Son was on the blob list as well. I'd like to read more, though I would want to space them out, only because the content is so harrowing to navigate through. 

That said, there were many parts that resonated with me, so I'll share those with you now, and you can decide if and when you choose to explore this work for yourself. As usual, there's no particular order to them. 

On school and learning
Already my personality was lopsided; my knowledge of feeling was far greater than my knowledge of fact. I loved this line. It's painful, because it points out how much living he has been asked and forced to do before he is educated, but beautiful in its poignancy.

On selling papers but not reading them
For a while, Richard learns that he can get papers to read by selling them, much to his delight, as books are hard for him to come by. His friend says: 

'Hurry up and start selling 'em,' he urged me. 'I'd like to talk to you about the stories.' Which I thought was super endearing. The stories are in the magazine sections, and these are all that Richard reads, as he peddles the papers out to his community. One day, an older Black man finally points out to Richard that he's selling Klan propaganda; horrified, Richard reads the papers he's been selling and not reading, and realizes he has to stop immediately. This was such an intense and heartbreaking moment.

On writing

Richard, like many protagonists in writers' somewhat fictionalized autobiographies, is coming to being as a writer. Here are some of my favorite lines of his about writing. 

• Nobody can tell me how or what to write.

• My writing was my way of seeing, my way of living, my way of feeling; and who could change his sight, his notion of direction, his senses?

• 'You'll have to prove your revolutionary loyalty.'
  'That's what I'm trying to do through writing.'
  'That's not the way to do it,' he said. 'You must act.' This tension was so beautifully explored, and felt so absurd and nonsensical. And yet, also so real - how many presidential candidates have been deemed 'too intellectual'? But I love that Wright's is a writing revolution, even if others can't see it.

Lines I loved

• Were we all so mad that we could not detect a madman when we saw one? This is in reference to the fact that a new Communist Party member who has recently wreaked havoc on the group turns out to be an escapee from an insane asylum. 

• 'Comrade Nealson,' I said, 'a writer who hasn't written anything worth-while is a most doubtful person. Now, I'm in that category. Yet I think I can write. I don't want to ask for special favors, but I'm in the midst of a book which I hope to complete in six months or so. Let me convince myself that I'm wrong about my hankering to write and then I'll be with you all the way.' I loved this exchange because it's very similar to how I feel as an aspiring/early writer. 

• Writing had to be done in loneliness and Communism had declared war upon human loneliness.

• Well, I would wait, day and night, until I knew what to say.

• On going north and joining the Communists: I had fled men who did not like the color of my skin, and now I was among men who did not like the tone of my thoughts.

On being Black in America

Whenever I thought of the essential bleakness of black life in America, I knew that Negroes had never been allowed to catch the full spirit of Western civilization, that they somehow lived in it but not of it.

On hunger

Hunger is (sadly) a recurring them throughout the novel. What I loved was not that Richard was so often hungry, but how beautifully he captured this state of being. Here's one of my favorite scenes. 

When supper was over I saw that there were many biscuits piled high upon the bread platter, an astonishing and unbelievable sight to me. Though the biscuits were right before my eyes, and though there was more flour in the kitchen, I was apprehensive lest there be no bread for breakfast in the morning. I was afraid that somehow the biscuits might disappear during the night, while I was sleeping. I did not want to wake up in the morning, as I had done so often in the past, feeling hungry and knowing that there was no food in the house. So, surreptitiously, I took some of the biscuits from the platter and slipped them into my pocket, not to eat, but to keep as a bulwark against any possible attack of hunger. Even after I had got used to seeing the table loaded with food at each meal, I still stole bread and put it into my pockets.

I won't list every other way that hungerness and starvation are captured, but I will say that this topic included: Serving food to whites that Black folks were not allowed to eat themselves, eating leftovers from white lunch deliveries, living at an orphanage where they got only stale bread with molasses twice a day, and failing the postal exam because he weighed only 110 pounds as a young adult.

On fear

Another theme throughout the novel is the fear with which Richard lives his life as a Black boy in southern America. Again, while this is not something I celebrate, the way Wright describes it is painfully epic: 

When his uncle is lynched by white men for 'doing too well' at his business: 

There was no funeral. There was no music. There was no period of mourning. There were no flowers. There were only silence, quiet weeping, whispers, and fear. I did not know when or where Uncle Hoskins was buried. Aunt Maggie was not even allowed to see his body nor was she able to claim any of his assets. Uncle Hoskins had simply been plucked from our midst and we, figuratively, had fallen on our faces to avoid looking into that white-hot face of terror that we knew loomed somewhere above us. This was as close as white terror had ever come to me and my mind reeled. Why had we not fought back, I asked my mother, and the fear that was in her made her slap me into silence.

When Richard hears of other young men in his acquaintance being murdered by white men: The penalty of death awaited me if I made a false move and I wondered if it was worth-while to make any move at all. The things that influenced my conduct as a Negro did not have to happen to me directly; I needed but to hear of them to feel their full effects in the deepest layers of my consciousness. Indeed, the white brutality that I had not seen was a more effective control of my behavior than that which I knew.

And later, this exchange with his Black friend: 'Do you want to get killed?' he asked me. 

'Hell, no!'

'Then, for God's sake, learn how to live in the South!'

On social awkwardness

Poor Richard is bounced so many places within his family and the larger world as a boy, and whether his discomfort with social interaction is related to this or not is unclear, but it was adorable and hard to watch him try to navigate new homes. 

'Good morning, Richard,' Aunt Jody said. 

'Oh, good morning,' I mumbled, wishing that I had thought to say it first. 

'Don't people say good morning where you come from?' she asked.

'Yes, ma'am.'

'I thought they did,' she said pointedly. This reminded me of when my host dad in France always used to say 'Bon soir' or 'Bonjour' when he saw me, and somehow I always chose the wrong one. 

On learning whiteness protocol

Part of what makes this book and Richard as a person so incredible is that he stands outside the norm, and then shouts it from the rooftops. While this is revolutionary and stunning, it's also really hard for Richard. 

I knew what was wrong with me, but I could not correct it. The words and actions of white people were baffling signs to me. I was living in a culture and not a civilization and I could learn how that culture worked only by living with it. Misreading the reactions of whites around me made me say and do the wrong things. In my dealing with whites I was conscious of the entirety of my relations with them, and they were conscious only of what was happening at a given moment. I had to keep remembering what others took for granted; I had to think out what others felt. I had begun coping with the white world too late. I could not make subservience an automatic part of my behavior.

On battles on the home front

One of the most difficult parts of reading this book for me was how often Richard is beaten by members of his own family. I recognize that discipline in Black families is a super complex subject, and one in which I generally don't have the right to weigh in on, but it was really hard to read how often his mother, or his aunt, or his grandmother, or his uncle, or his father, wanted to beat him with a switch. I thought this line captured some of the chaotic nature of this: 

There were more violent quarrels in our deeply religious home than in the home of a gangster, a burglar, or a prostitute, a fact which I used to hint gently to Granny and which did my cause no good. Granny bore the standard for God, but she was always fighting. The peace that passes understanding never dwelt with us. I, too, fought; but I fought because I felt I had to keep from being crushed, to fend off continuous attack.

The sunken place

As Richard gets older, he struggles with watching how his own race responds to the white world. This reflection reminded me of the sunken place in Get Out: 

I began to marvel at how smoothly the black boys acted out the roles that the white race had mapped out for them. Most of them were not conscious of living a special, separate, stunted way of life. Yet I knew that in some period of their growing up - a period that they had no doubt forgotten - there had been developed in them a delicate, sensitive, controlling mechanism that shut off their minds and emotions from all that the white race had said was taboo. Although they lived in an America where in theory there existed equality of opportunity, they knew unerringly what to aspire to and what not to aspire to. Had a black boy announced that he aspired to be a writer, he would have been unhesitatingly called crazy by his pals.

On games

Richard, on watching other boys play craps at work: 

Gambling had never appealed to me. I could not conceive of any game holding more risks than the life I was living. Man, this line gets me. 

On talking to southern white men

Code-switching and navigating racially charged conversation is, I'm sure, still extremely prevalent for Black folks, but it was part of literally every interaction for Richard. I loved this line from an exchange with a southern white man, because it made it clear how many landmines there were all around Wright conversationally: 

Was this a trap? He had mentioned a tabooed subject and I wanted to wait until I knew what he meant. Among the topics that southern white men did not like to discuss with Negroes were the following: American white women; the Ku Klux Klan; France, and how Negro soldiers fared while there; Frenchwomen; Jack Johnson; the entire northern part of the United states; the Civil War; Abraham Lincoln; U.S. Grant; General Sherman; Catholics; the Pope; Jews; the Republican party; slavery; social equality; Communism; Socialism; the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution; or any topic calling for positive knowledge or manly self-assertion on the part of the Negro. The most accepted topics were sex and religion.

On empathy

I've written on this blog before about how much I love that books and reading instill empathy in readers. I thought Wright's exploration of this was fascinating and challenging:

As dawn broke I ate my pork and beans, feeling dopey, sleepy. I went to work, but the mood of the book would not die; it lingered, coloring everything I saw, heard, did. I now felt that I knew what the white men were feeling. Merely because I had read a book that had spoken of how they lived and thought, I identified myself with that book. I felt vaguely guilty. Would I, filled with bookish notions, act in a manner that would make the whites dislike me. 

On the difficulty of getting books to read

Richard has to work SO HARD to get books in his hands (he ends up getting a white co-worker to share his library card, but still has to fake notes and pretend he's getting books for the man) but I love the way he describes reading: 

Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days. But I could not conquer my sense of guilt, my feeling that the white men around me knew that I was changing, that I had begun to regard them differently.

Crossovers

As I've said many times before on this blog, I never cease to be amazed at how each book touches or intersects with my life somehow, no matter how seemingly disparate our worlds are. This book was no exception, whether it was Richard's response to his deeply religious upbringing and school companions, to the books he reads (he reads Stein's Three Lives, which I just read for this blog), or the way he feels about writing, I felt a lot of kinship with Richard. I think the most intense example of this for me was when he read Proust, which my blobbist readers will know I have a deep affection for after having read it for this blog:  

I spent my nights reading Proust's A Remembrance of Things Past, admiring the lucid, subtle but strong prose, stupefied by its dazzling magic, awed by the vast, delicate, intricate, and psychological structure of the Frenchman's epic of death and decadence. But it crushed me with hopelessness, for I wanted to write of the people in my environment with an equal thoroughness, and the burning example before my eyes made me feel that I never could. Richard, I think many have likely already said this, but you absolutely have done that. You have given your people that same thoroughness, and you are your own burning example for us to live up to.

Referents & Reverberations

I like to call out places where this work speaks to works that came before or after, at least in my head. 

There were several places and times when Richard had to fight his family or his environment so hard to be able to read, and these reminded me of both Proust as a young boy and Scout, in To Kill a Mockingbird. 

These moments from this work: 

• On talking to a woman, Ella, and eventually getting her to read him some of Bluebeard and His Seven Wives - 'Your grandmother wouldn't like it if I talked to you about novels.'

• On the helpfulness of his grandmother's illiteracy because her religious nature makes her wary of all books: Oh, boy, how lucky it was for me that Granny could not read!

• My excessive reading puzzled Aunt Maggie; she sensed my fiercely indrawn nature and she did not like it. Being of an open, talkative disposition, she declared that I was going about the business of living wrongly, that reading books would not help me at all. 

Reminded me of these moments: 

• In To Kill a Mockingbird, when Scout gets in trouble for reading too much at school, and reflects: Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

• And in Remembrance of Things Past, when the young boy's great aunt comments: What! still amusing yourself with a book? It isn't Sunday, you know! because she thinks reading is only appropriate on a day of rest.

The other book this novel reminded me of, which obviously came after it, was The Autobiography of Malcolm X. This interaction in Black Boy: 

'Well, I want to be a writer,' I mumbled, unsure of myself; I had not planned to tell her that, but she had made me feel so utterly wrong and of no account that I needed to bolster myself.

'A what?' she demanded. 

'A writer,' I mumbled.

'For what?'

'To write stories,' I mumbled defensively. 

'You'll never be a writer,' she said. 'Who on earth put such ideas into your n* head?' 

'Nobody,' I said.

'I didn't think anybody ever would,' she declared indignantly.'

Reminded me of this moment in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, when Malcolm tells his favorite teacher he wants to be a lawyer: 

You've got to be realistic about being a n*. A lawyer - that's no realistic goal for a n*. You need to think about something you can be. You're good with your hands - making things. Everybody admires your carpentry shop work. Why don't you plan on carpentry?

The difference in time was maybe 40 years, but how many Black children (and Black boys, in particular) are still being told by their largely white teachers that they can't be what they want to be? We all bear the responsibility of breaking this narrative.

Lines in the running for title of this blog

• How could I ever learn this strange world of white people?

• Was I always to hang on the fringes of life?

• Could a Negro ever live halfway like a human being in this goddamn country?

Whew. Well I know this has been a lengthy post, but I hope you have enjoyed it! I'll leave you with three final thoughts from Mr. Wright. 

(1) I think his reflections on America are SO spot-on, and particularly relevant and telling as we look back at the last few years. Here's a somewhat condensed version of this, underlining my own.

I feel that for white America to understand the significance of the problem of the Negro will take a bigger and tougher America than any we have yet known. I feel that America's past is too shallow, her national character too superficially optimistic, her very morality too suffused with color hate for her to accomplish so vast and complex a task...Therefore if, within the confines of its present culture, the nation ever seeks to purge itself of its color hate, it will find itself at war with itself, convulsed by a spasm of emotional and moral confusion...Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness. Am I damning my native land? No; for I, too, share these faults of character! And I really do not think that America, adolescent and cocksure, a stranger to suffering and travail, an enemy of passion and sacrifice, is ready to probe into its most fundamental beliefs.

(2) I love that Richard is so willing and so desperate to fight for the right to write, even when society is trying so hard to exclude him from the space. Here's how he ends the novel: 

I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human.

(3) And last, but not least, I'll leave you with this exchange between Richard and his classmates after his fiction story is published in a paper, which so brilliantly typifies the idea that writers don't write because they want to or they're told to, they write because they HAVE to. 

'Did you really write that story?' they asked me. 

'Yes.'

'Why?'

'Because I wanted to.'

'Where did you get it from?'

'I made it up.'

'You didn't. You copied it out of a book.'

'If I had, no one would publish it.'

'But what are they publishing it for?'

'So people can read it.'

'Who told you to do that?'

'Nobody.'

'Then why did you do it?'

'Because I wanted to.'

So write because you must, read because it makes us feel each other's lives in a way that is not otherwise possible or plausible, and if you're in a country that celebrates it, enjoy this day of Labor which we celebrate with time off. I really will try not to take so long to blob on the next book, I promise! Stay safe, keep faith, and good night.