Audiobook of Sweetness by Toni Morrison( The New Yorker)

Ria Dhara

0:00

Audiobooks

107

Description

This book speaks of the collective experiences of the African-American people and the trauma that has reverberated throughout the generations born hundreds of years after the American civil war.
The recording consists of the first two paragraphs of this book and I have kept it as crude as possible

Language

English

Accents

British (General)

Transcript

Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
sweetness by Toni Morrison. It's not my fault, so you can blame me. I didn't do it and have no idea how it happened. It didn't take more than an hour after they pulled her out from between my legs. For me to realise something was wrong really long. She was so black. She's scared. Midnight black. So then is black. I'm light skinned with good hair, what we call high yellow. And so is Nolan's father and nobody in my family and rare near the colour Thai stick. Close as I can think of. Yet I don't go with the skin. It's different straight but curly, like the hair on those naked tribes in Australia. You might think she's a toe back, but it threw back to what you should have seen my grandmother. She passed for white, married a white man and never said another word to anyone of her Children. And later she got for my mother and my aunt. She sent right back unopened. Finally, they got the message of no message and let her be. Almost all military types and quad rooms did that back in the day that the right kind of hair that is. Can you imagine how many white folks have ***** blood hiding in their wings? Guys, 20%. I heard my own mother, Lula Mae could have passed easy, but see, Joe's not. She told me the price. She paid for the decision when she and my father went to the courthouse to get married. There were two Bibles and they had to put their hands on the one reason for Negroes. The other one was for white people's hands. The Bible. Can you beat it? My mother was a housekeeper already. Quite couple. They had every mean she cooked and insisted she scrubbed the bags while they sat in the tub. And God knows what the intimate things that matter do, but no touching of the same Bible. Some of you probably think it's a bad idea to group ourselves according to skin colour in Shoshone clubs, neighbourhoods, churches, sororities, even coloured schools. But how else can we hold on to a little dignity? How else can we avoid being spit on in a drugstore, elbowed at the bus stop, having to work in the cutter to let whites at this whole sidewalk being charged a nickel a D crosses for a paperback that's free to white shoppers, let alone of the name calling. I heard about all of that and much, much more. But because of my mother's skin colour, she wasn't stuff I'm trying on. Hats are using the ladies' room in the department stores, and my father could try on shoes in the front. Part of the show starts not in the back room, though neither one of them could let them so stream from a coloured only fountain, even if they were dying of toast.