''History is just one long string of atrocities.”
So says narrator John Washington and he ought to know. After all, he is a professor of history and, more importantly, a true scholar of history. Even more importantly that his profession and his passion, however, is his own history. The novel is about John’s return to home and investigation into long-unanswered questions about his family history; about their lives and especially their deaths. That investigation becomes a personal invitation to understand the true depth of his metaphorical observation which he knowingly follows up by suggesting that one could even “say history is atrocious.”
“A man with no say is an animal.”
Fire is the say. This is advice given to a young boy by a black man living in a time and in a place where the KKK aren’t just a bunch of clowns in sheets. The advice the man gives the boy is to learn to make a fire. Because fire gives you say. Because fire can destroy everything else that gives a man say. It is the ultimate say.
The Smell of Anger
In the midst of one of the most horrifying passages in the book, the reader learns that anger has a smell. The character supply the information even rhetorically says most people probably don’t think anger has a smell before agreeing that it does. And then he provides the information. Anger...
“smells like hot iron, only it’s jest a shade softern than that, just a touch more fleshy.”
Burying Moses
Moses Washington is the father of the protagonist and it is his death and the mysterious circumstances surrounding his final resting place that nags at his son John and forces the boy to confront history on a person level. Something he is not really keen to do. Moses Washington was a bootlegger and blackmailer of rich white people and a larger than life figure just in general terms. As for the when he died, well, people who were there say
“It was hotter than hell on the day they buried Moses Washington.”
Planes, Trains and Automobile Toilets
“America is a classed society, regardless of the naïve beliefs of deluded egalitarians, the frenzied efforts of misguided liberals, the grand pronouncements of brain-damaged politicians.”
This assertion is made and then supported with evidence that is surprising and unexpected to say the least. For the next five or six pages—maybe more—the narrator draws upon the variable divergences in toileting facilities within American transportation to prove, once and for all time, that America is very much a system based on class division.
