Farish Street, Jackson, Mississippi (English Edition) [Kindle-editie] beoordelingen het boek quotes

Farish StreetJackson, MississippiI invite you to experience a voice not yet published, that of a little White girl growing up in Jim Crow Mississippi. Her name is Lulabelle. And although she is enamored of the other race that shares her world and decries their treatment at the hands of her own, she is destined to suffer one of the harshest backlashes of the White Supremacy dictate of her time and place. Original in presentation and woven in the vivid colors of Mississippi colloquialisms, Lula’s story paints the culture of the Deep South in the mid 20th century. Most Whites are not sympathetic to the plight of the Black population, yet joining Black voice commentary on that bleak plight is the voice of a White child.Farish Street begins as a first time visit with the ambiance of a White child’s segregated Jackson. Young Lula is introduced to racial indoctrination at her Grandmother B.’s home. Soon she realizes that she can absolutely tell which relatives don’t like the other race ‘one little bit’ by how they say ‘Nigg-raahs’ and how they illustrate when they talk about them, “They dip their faces down in that sour look – kinda like it’s rev’rent but sorta like somethin’ smells bad too. Some of ‘em call grown Black folks boy and girl steada their names! The meanest ones call ‘em niggers, but that’s not a word allowed at our house – no sir-EE!” Soon then Farish Street becomes a walk with young Lula down the paths and through the kitchens of the small farms and towns of rural Mississippi. Taste cold clabber biscuits and pickled McNair peaches. Watch the cousins romping over the acres of Grandmother H.’s farm. Fall in love with the Black sharecropper standing down off the porch of the big house waiting for his can of bacon grease. When the day’s work is complete he will return to the small, tumble down shack where he and his family of seven live. The next morning as Lula and his daughter are playing tag, her mother swoops down on her and scolds her harshly for daring to play with a White child, and both girls feel terrible.Preparing to return home to Jackson, Lula realizes that she can take something from the country with her! “I can call ‘em Black folk in Jackson too,“ she says to herself with enthusiasm, “’cause it sounds so much nicer than that ole nasty Negro word they always say! ‘Sides, it seems like the adult Black folk are some kind of friends with the White folk down in the country, ev'n if they can’t sit down with us and eat the food they growed and picked!!” With her eyes truly opened at her Daddy’s small men’s clothing store on Farish Street, the Black population’s segregated shopping street, Lula skips down the street intent on her mission to drop the dime her Daddy gave her into the tin cup the blind, legless Black folk man holds out as he sits to beg on a wooden platform. Coming back to her Daddy’s store she walks over the brown sputum speckled sidewalk and looks down at the old pool hall, “They kill one of them in there every Saturday night,” her Daddy had said. At closing time an older Black folk lady clad in dirty clothes is painstakingly counting out enough pennies to buy a handkerchief. Lula says. “Farish Street is all the Black folk have, ‘cause if they shop on Cap’tol Street and need to go to the bathroom, they can’t – ev’n if they have to go real bad!” The tragedy of Farish Street is introduced in the pictures Lula paints of the different locations. The build to the climax is intensified with Lula’s increasing awareness of the terrible deeds of the white culture. On the way home from Farish Street one afternoon she asks her Mother. ‘Are they maybe gonna kill us all someday?” “Why Lula, who is going to kill us all?” “The Black folk,” “What would make you say such a thing?” “It’s ‘cause the White folk treat them so mean. And I wanna be gone before they start.”But Lula doesn’t leave Mississippi, and a Black folk man started by killing her Daddy.