Gender and Racism Theme Analysis

I’m still haunted by dreams of the time we lived on Mr. Carter’s plantation. Lots of Negroes lived on his place. Like Mama and Daddy they were all farmers. We all lived in rotten two-room shacks. But ours stood out from the others because it was up on the hill with Mr. Carter’s big white house, overlooking the farms and the other shacks below.

She treated me just like I was one of her friends and I never thought of our color difference when I was with her, except when she paid me.

As they sang… I had chills all over my body and I was overcome by a sudden fear. The faces of the whites had written on them some strange yearning. The Negroes looked sad…. I got a feeling that there existed some kind of sympathetic relationship between the older Negroes and whites that the younger people didn’t quite get or understand.

A Negro man had a hard road to travel when looking for employment. A Negro woman, however, could always go out and earn a dollar a day because whites always needed a cook, a baby-sitter, or someone to do housecleaning.

“Just do your work like you don’t know nothing,” she said. “That boy’s a lot better off in heaven than he is here.”

I was fifteen years old when I began to hate people. I hated the white men who murdered Emmett Till and I hated all the other whites who were responsible for the countless murders Mrs. Rice had told me about and those I vaguely remembered from childhood. But I also hated Negroes. I hated them for not standing up and doing something about the murders. In fact, I think I had a stronger resentment towards Negroes for letting whites kill them than towards the whites.

I looked so good that it became somewhat of a problem. Whenever I was in town white men would stare me into the ground.

[Emma] didn’t blame Wilbert for shooting her. She placed the blame where it rightfully belonged, that is, upon the whites in Woodville and how they had set things up to make it almost impossible for the Negro men to earn a living.