Kind, Kindness, and Discrimination Theme Analysis

A lot of people were leery of our looks. Though with Pa working the coal, his mostly pale-blue skin didn’t bother folks as much when all miners came out of the hole looking the same.

But I didn’t have coal to disguise me in black or white Kentucky. Didn’t have myself an escape until I’d gotten the precious book route. In those old dark-treed pockets, my young patrons would glimpse me riding my packhorse, toting a pannier full of books, and they’d light a smile and call out “Younder comes Book Woman…Book Woman’s here!” And I’d forget all about my peculiarity, and why I had it, and what it meant for me.

“Sorry Bluet. It got busted some when Willie had hisself a fit and threw it outside. I’m glad you’re back ’cause he lit at me good for not being able to read him his own loan. Said a colored shouldn’t be able to read better than me. Real sorry…” She latched on to my hand and laid the apology with a firm grip. I looked down at us bound together like that, tried to draw back, but Angeline squeezed tighter and whispered, “Hain’t no harm. Our hands don’t care they’re different colors. Feels nice jus’ the same, huh?”

It did. But Mr. Moffit didn’t like folks who weren’t his color. He used to demand that I stay put in the yard.

Weren’t no such spirit, just a man sly-eyeing me. He didn’t fool me none with his pasty-white face. Darkly he was, filled to the brim with the blackness inside…

It was preacher man Vester Frazier, my dead husband’s cousin … He’d been coming for me a good while, and more boldly since I’d been left widowed.

He’d done the same to others like me: Michael McKinney, the three-nippled midget who rode his goat cart bare-chested across the hills, a boy with pink eyes and hair the color of a white lamb, the seven-year-old Melungeon girl who had fit that tonic and herbs couldn’t quiet…And there were the godless, those who’d never found a church, and a few ungodly others Vester Frazier and his followers thought the devil had given those peculiarities to. The odd markings with no names.

Lovett’s Ridge was a spectacle, and soon I relaxed a little and soaked it up. Layers of dark-blue mountains stacked in the distance, at every turn their cuts rolling, deepening, then lightening to shades of blue-greens from the day’s passing clouds. The air blew fresh and breezy. Scents of apple blossoms lifted from a nearby tree, and honeysuckle clung to a crumbling split-rail fence as swallowtails and fat-legged bees flitted above the old timbers and dipped for nectar.

I looked down, knowing my place, knowing I was the one they were really afraid of, detested the most.

It was difficult enough being colored, much less being my odd, ugly color and the last of my kind. Somehow, folks like Harriett and Eula made it worse, made sure their color, any color was better than mine. I was an affliction on their kind and mankind. And I was to stay put, and exactly where they wanted to keep me put. Beneath them. Always and alone.

“You know the rules. Blues and Coloreds outside,” Eula said, shaking her head, darting her nervous eyes between Queenie and me. “We can’t have you using the indoor facilities. We wouldn’t want to chance passing on a … Well, we just can’t have it!”

“I’m sorry the nurses were rough with you, Bluet,” he said, “but it was important—very—and we’ll learn soon about your family’s blood and how we can fix it—fix you, my dear.”

I felt a spark of anger slip behind my eyes, prompting a headache. What I wanted most was to be okay as a Blue. I never understood why other people thought my color, any color, needed fixing.

[…]

Fix. Again, the chilling word caught in my throat, and I suddenly wished Mama had fixed my birth with some of her bitter herbs. Then I would’ve never had to suffer this horrid curse of the blueness. Still Doc said it would be wonderful, and I couldn’t help but wonder what my and Pa’s life would be like if we were fixed.

Winnie clasped her hands. “If only we could get more outreach programs up here. If only they could send a block of cheese with every book, a loaf of bread.” She tilted her head to the sky as if telling it to God.

I wished it too. Their hunger for books could teach them of a better life free of the hunger, but without food they’d never live long enough to have the strength to find it.

“Just one damn block of cheese,” Winnie scratched out in a whisper.

I thought of the cheese Doc promised. If I could bargain with him for more food, I could give it to the schoolchildren.

“I feel the same as before, Doc.” But I turned back to the mirror and know’d I wasn’t, nor would ever be. I brushed my hand slowly over my face, poked my lips that had colored a pretty pink, my cheeks a soft rose. Normal. I peered again at the stranger looking back at me, then looked at Doc, questioning.

“Modern medicine,” he exclaimed.

“I’m a stranger.” I stared at my reflection.

“A right pretty stranger at that,” Doc commented. I gazed back to the glass and inspected closer.

Pretty. Could it be? My neck looked white, like linen that matched my hands. I raised a palm and lightly braced it at the base of my neck. A tear rolled off my cheek, then another and several more, splashing onto my white hand. I was white, and that pretty white stranger was me. Me.

But Pa weren’t listening to me or the doc, and a few minutes later, I flew out the door to relieve my stomach same as last night.

Finished, I crept back inside. Pa gawked at me, alarmed. “Daughter, are you hurt?”

Doc shook his head. “No. It’s temporary, Elijah. Like the drug.”

“Temporary? Then it’s a vanity, not a cure,” Pa snapped.

I winced.

“She should feel better directly. It’s just a little discomfort that’ll right itself, Bluet,” the doc said with sympathy in his voice.

“Prideful,” Pa grumbled. “Dangerous.”

“It’s a safe cure,” Doc insisted. “And Bluet’s strong.”

Pa scowled. “Belladonna cures ails too, and it’ll turn mean an’ slay the strongest.”

“Oh my,” she said. “So pretty, and the prettiest li’l daisy I’ve ever seen. Isn’t that right, Samuel?” She jiggled him up and down on her hip. The baby squealed with delight, poked a finger into his drooling mouth, and grinned at me. “Yessir, our Bluet’s a looker, and one the boys are gonna want to hook,” she told him teasingly. “And look at you, Samuel, already a’flirtin.’”

Harriett walked out of the ladies’ room.

“Uh-huh. One pretty lady,” Birdie said.

Harriett’s heel landed beside me. She leaned her head dangerously close to min. “A pig in lipstick is still a stinking pig,” she spat, her wet hiss spinning in the air as she swept past me to her desk.

I turned. Her red eyes bored into mine. And I held them, locked, and lifted my chin two-man tall, snatching back some of the humankind that had been stolen.

I’d been foolish. Reached the worse. The drug had not redeemed me. I didn’t belong at this bright, happy gathering with these lively folks and bubbly chatter. I belonged in darker places where darker thoughts kept me put, where sunlight, a cheerful voice, or a warm touch never reached me. Weren’t no pill ever going to change that.

I threw the cake into a bush and mounted Junia, glancing once more at the crowd. Across the street, Jackson talked to a group of smiling men and women. He lifted his head my way, raised a hand, and called out, “Cussy Mary…”

I couldn’t bear for him to see my disgrace, see me for who I really was—who I’d become in their eyes. “Ghee!” I kneed the mule hard, and she raced off toward our dark, dead holler.

“Where’s my manners? I hope you get to feeling pert soon, ma’am. I miss seeing my bonny Picasso.” He grinned.

I stared at him blankly, and he added, “Picasso’s painting of the pretty blue lady, the Woman with a Helmet of Hair that I’d seen in one of the magazines you brought us? You remind me of her. Your fine color. My woman always said God saved that best color for His home.” He pointed a finger up to a patch of blue sky parting the gray clouds. “Guess He must’ve had Himself a little bit left over.”

Astonished, I could feel my face warm. No one, not a soul, ever said that my old color was fine. The best.

I touched the baby’s hand, my own eyes filling, my mind grappling with losses, the unbearable pain of loneliness. Nary a townsfolk, not one God-fearing soul, had welcomed me or mine into town, their churches, or homes in all my nineteen years on this earth. Instead, every hard Kentucky second they’d filled us with an emptiness from their hate and scorn. It was as if the Blues weren’t allowed to breathe the very same air their loving God had given them, not worthy of the tiniest spoonful He’d given to the smallest forest critter. I was nothing in their world. A nothingness to them. And I looked into Angeline’s dying eyes and saw my truths, and the truths that would be her daughter’s. Know’d that without love, in the end, her babe would have no one, nothing, and would be fated to die alone in her own aching embrace.

I gasped. It had never happened here, but I’d read about the laws in the city newsprints and know’d they were being enforced in other places. Folks were charged and thrown in jail for courting someone not like themselves, for taking another color to their marriage beds. It was an ugly law that let mere folk lord over different-type folks, decide who a person could or couldn’t love.

[…]

Sheriff shifted and squared his shoulders. “The law clearly states that marrying a colored person destroys the very moral supremacy of our Godly people and is damning and destructive to our social peace.”

“I’m taking my wife and daughter home,” Jackson told the sheriff.

“You listen to me, Lovett. You think you can jus’ waltz back in to Kaintuck with your highfalutin ways and soil the good people. No, sir, this ain’t the west!” Sheriff’s face heated with a fury.