The Power of Words Theme Analysis

Cleopatra reached instinctively for one of the few coloured packets in the cheese section of the refrigerator. Bordeaux caught his young wife’s hand mid-air, recoiling in shock. In giant blue lettering, the word coon leered at them.

Again, those beasts of doubt, waking and turning, deep in my mother’s gut. What have we done? What have we done?!

Carlita Allen leaned towards me. ‘You,’ she whispered loudly, ‘are brown.’

It wasn’t as if I hadn’t realized this very obvious difference between our family and almost all of the other people we knew. My skin colour was simply a concrete matter of fact, much like the sky was blue. Carlita was right: I was brown. But until that very moment, holding my mother’s hand under the mulberry tree’s enormous fan-like leaves, it never occurred to me that being brown, rather than the pale pinkish of most of my friends and neighbors, was in any way relevant to anything.

My hand grew sweaty in Carlita’s as we walked side by side up the path towards the preschool buildings. I felt like I would burst with the unfairness of it—as if the air around me was pushing hard into my skin, bearing down. When we reached the classroom door, I dropped Carlita’s hand and looked back at her mother. Mrs Allen was still standing halfway up the front path, staring in our direction.

Inside the empty girl’s toilet block, I re-read my Student of the Week album then tore a jagged line between Jennifer’s words and the other comments. I read Jennifer’s words out loud to myself once, then twice, then four more times. I had never had anything written about me before, except for my kindergarten school reports and things the doctor wrote down in her folder when I was sick. The things Jennifer wrote were solid things now. She had grabbed them from the air when I spoke to the class, and listened to them. She had made them real.

But the scene at the bike park just kept looping in my head. Her silence. The way they’d suddenly disappeared. I knew they were scared. I knew they were just kids. But so were we. My friend’s silence hurt more than the names we’d been called—more than seeing my brother’s bloody, grazed knee.

Slavery felt like a shameful thing to be descended from. As if it somehow made me less of a person. These people, chained, beaten, stolen, made to work for no money. These people, who had their babies sold away from them. These people, worked to death in the fields like I saw in American movies. I was them. I was these people, and they were me. I felt like I’d discovered an awful secret, something I should never speak of. I wondered if all of the people who called me and my family names and treated us badly did it because they knew. Because they knew we weren’t actual people, knew what we had once been.

As I read on, I became more and more uncomfortable. The Aboriginal characters in the book I’d been given were cheerful and simple-minded. Sarah, the matriarch of the Cleveland family, treated her son’s Indigenous wife with contempt, declaring the marriage was not real and referring to her grandchildren as blackmoor half-breeds. The tight-chested feeling started to creep in. The walls of my bedroom felt like they were slowly caving in on me. I felt the anger, throbbing again.

I sat down on my bed. Perhaps it hadn’t been that bad. Perhaps I had been oversensitive. Perhaps I’d expected too much. Maybe if I’d been tougher—more resilient—behaved differently. I would have to behave differently in high school, if the teasing started again. Teasing. That was all it had been. Just a bit of teasing. It didn’t seem so serious now, in hindsight. I would be tougher next time. I would ignore it. I was older, and I wouldn’t let it get to me the way it had before.

Whenever a friend passed me a note, whenever I saw a folded piece of paper, whenever the zip on my backpack was partly undone when I returned to it after a class, my stomach would flip and turn. My mind would conjure the precision-folded lined paper with the target drawn in the centre, the vile red lettering.

This is how it haunts us.

This is how it stalks.

‘You keep doing this,’ the man said, shaking a finger at me. ‘You were the best speaker here.’ Then the two of them turned and made their way through the throng of well-wishers towards the photographer waiting at the other end of the hall to do a photo shoot for the local paper.

‘I like your hand. The way the brown on the back of your hand meets the white of your palm, on the edge there. It looks…cute. Like a paw or something. Like a possum paw.’

It was there, all of a sudden, out of nowhere. Walking home with my boyfriend, when I least expected it. The dry tongue. The nakedness. The can’t-think freeze.

[…]

I was Patch again. Seven years old, standing in the line for tunnel ball. You look like my dog. He’s got white and brown patches all over him too. Fetch, Patch! Go fetch, doggy!