by Maxine Tynes
The Poet
- wrote about racial injustices
- not on Wikipedia!
- born in 1949
- African-American
Thoughts
-the narrator wants to show the child that it's okay
- innocence
- we (humans) create racism; it's thoughts
- we put ideas into the next generation's heads through the innocence of the child
- when the mother hushed the child and wouldn't let the child touch or talk about the narrator
- then the child associated her as bad
- "lost/ in the silence and the fear that motherlove surrounds you in"
- the child was curious but not given answers so he/she became frightened
- the author feels partly responsible for racism (?)
- she believes that if she showed the child that she really wasn't that much different that he/she would know it's okay
- "your fingers dipped in the/ brown skin magic of my neck" - as if she's a different recipe - magical and thick - positive view
- dipping your fingers into magic, some magic could come off onto you - difference between curiosity and racism
- the child is curious which makes her mother embarrassed
- when I was a lot younger, I saw a black woman at a restaurant and
yelled out, "Look Mommy!" Which my mother still tells me about today -
it was not because of racism, it was curiosity, coming from a small
town of white people
- the narrator understands that the child is curious and doesn't mind
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