Reading Part One
As I think about this past weekend with Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez, I think about my experience as a Black man today in America, and I have to just sigh. Professor Verdelle, whose class I'm reading the book for, always tells us to keep in mind that fiction is just that – fiction. But as I read Wench I forget that, and the story just depresses and depresses and depresses until I'm sitting in a mall, waiting to punch the clock at work, face full of enough despair to fuel sixty-five Drake albums.
Wench is the stories of four slave women - Lizzie, Mawu, Reenie, and Sweet - as they spend their summers at Tawawa House, a resort in Ohio, one of the freed states. Each woman has their kinks and curves in their personalities, but they're sisterhood is something amazing. They're in it for thick and thin.
The storytelling in the book is magnificent and the elements of the story are so captivating. I find myself rooting for all the girls; however, at this point, I feel an extreme disdain for Lizzie. While I understand her condition, I hate the betrayal to the women. But! I must stop with the victim blaming, because the true monsters of the story are the slavemasters themselves. The ways they physically, psychologically, sexually, and emotionally abuse them were insidious. The hate I had for them consumed me, and it reflected in my attitude towards the white men I helped today. While I composed myself professionally, I imagined many of them as the slaveholders. When I picked the book up, going on my lunch break, the connection made reading even worse. There was an older man in particular who came to ask about the Microsoft Band. I'd just come back from break, and wasn't fully recovered. Thinking about the story of Drayle's two sons, I wondered how so much evil could rest in a single person, let alone a group of them!
The Lone Chocolate Chip
The book stayed on my mind throughout the rest of my shift. It was around 8:20PM and I started a search, just to see the demographics on the board of directors at many popular stores in the mall. A strong proponent of small and black-owned businesses, I looked at Microsoft, Urban Outfitters, Nike, Apple, and a few other places. Cocoa-colored folks weren't abundant in my findings, and I just wanted to sigh. Meanwhile, cocoa-colored folks, mostly young teenagers (13-16) were spending money at these companies.
Yes, Jeremy, white men still rule the world.