Reading Notes

"There are in this world blessed souls, whose sorrows all spring up into joys for others; whose earthly hopes laid in the grave with many tears, are the seed from which spring healing flowers and balm for the desolate and the distressed." The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin, p. 96.

How beautiful is that? I'll bet I read that sentence twenty times before I continued the chapter. I am loving Uncle Tom's Cabin, even if it is difficult to read. It is difficult for me to read because I have such a hard time wrapping my brain around the concept of slavery and the belief that slave-owning was a perfectly acceptable way of life. People justified it with passages from the Bible. Families were blithely torn apart. Children were sold away from their mothers and that was okay. People believed that black people didn't have feelings the way white people did. Yeah. I have a really hard time grasping that.

I'm listening to Richard Wright's Native Son also. Native Son is the story Bigger Thomas, a young black man in 1930's Chicago. It is interesting to compare the literary form of the slave experience and the free but pre-Civil Rights black experience side-by-side. So much is different, but so much is the same -- the anger and hatred of some black people and the acquiescence of others to their situation, the prejudice and hypocrisy of some whites and the true sympathy and assistance of others. The people that I find the most frustrating are the ones who think they're sympathetic and helpful but really are only perpetuating the belief system. For example, the sobbing slave owner pledges to someday buy back the slave that is being sold to a creditor because they don't want the slave treated badly any longer than necessary. The rich white girl talks about how black people should be treated with respect, but she goes on to treat her family's black driver like a favorite pet or a newly discovered species.

I have enormous respect for those who fought for their rights -- men, women, minorities, all of them. I can't imagine living in the world of Uncle Tom or Bigger Thomas.