Jitney<\/a>,\u201d a character named Fielding, who up until that point has been a sort of comic character we don\u2019t learn a lot about, talks at length about the big heartbreak of his life\u2014he tells a group of people waiting in the Jitney station the story of how he lost the woman he loved and never got over it.<\/p>\nWhen I was in \u201cJitney,\u201d I used to sneak around to the wings to watch Anthony Chisholm do that speech. He told me he had played the role something like twenty-four times. But when I watched him, every single time he did it, it was as if it was happening for the first time. It\u2019s a remarkable moment because it shows something that is possible only because the other people in the station are holding space for him. You really understand that his vulnerability can be made legible only by the fact that there are witnesses to it. That\u2019s just one of the unique and beautiful ways that community shows up in Wilson\u2019s work.<\/p>\n
The Souls of Black Folk<\/p>\n
by W. E. B. Du Bois<\/p>\n
I think I found this book in a used bookstore when I was in college. I bought a copy and started reading it without really having the context to know what I was reading. One chapter I\u2019ve been thinking about is \u201cOf the Meaning of Progress,\u201d in which Du Bois recounts teaching in Tennessee and talks about encountering a young Black woman named Josie.<\/p>\n
Josie tells Du Bois about her community, which would really love to have a school. When he sets one up, she\u2019s clearly the brightest student in the class, by far, but, like many of the other students, there are a lot of things on her plate, like taking care of her siblings. Du Bois\u2019s portrait of her points to the limitations that are produced by segregation and racism and how, despite those things, this young girl is still striving.<\/p>\n
When Du Bois comes back years later, he learns that Josie has died. The book doesn\u2019t tell you exactly how, but it does say that Josie had spent the years in between his visits toiling away, and that one of her brothers was imprisoned. Du Bois describes her death with a beautiful line. At the end, he says, \u201cJosie crept to her mother like a hurt child, and slept\u2014and sleeps.\u201d Her death exemplifies this loss of brilliance and possibility. Despite the fact that Josie was held in a community, and that she and the people around her tried to make things different, these forces still acted on her life in a way that made it impossible for her to flourish.<\/p>\n
Home<\/p>\n
by Toni Morrison<\/p>\n
\u201cHome\u201d is not very long, but it\u2019s stunning. It follows a man named Frank Money who grew up in Lotus, Georgia, with his sister, Cee. I don\u2019t want to give too much away, but, basically, Frank ends up leaving Georgia\u2014he joins the Army and takes this long journey on which he sees all these horrible things\u2014and then one day he gets a letter saying that his baby sister is ill and that he needs to come home.<\/p>\n
The beginning of the novel paints a picture of Lotus as a place where life is not possible for Black people. The fact that Frank thinks fighting in the Army is a better choice than his own home tells you a lot about what the place was. But when he returns, his entire perspective changes. Morrison describes him encountering the women in the neighborhood and feeling a kind of love from them that he maybe never really knew before.<\/p>\n
When Frank eventually finds his sister, he wants to go in and see her right away, but the women of the community who have been caring for her tell him he has to wait. So he sits outside for so long, waiting and waiting. Meanwhile, these women who haven\u2019t really been prominent in the story up to that point\u2014they\u2019ve always been there, but you don\u2019t really know much about them\u2014they suddenly become central. The way you see how the community of women care for one another, that really touches me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s about to be a very busy season for the actor Andr\u00e9 Holland. His latest film, \u201cLove, Brooklyn,\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":52291,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1022,39025,171,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-180579","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-disable-inline-signup-unit","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-united-states","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115102545594071375","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180579\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}