The fact that many whites are stuck in the past is illustrated at Strawberry where we see some hideous incidents of prejudice. Cassie and Big Ma get the worst spot for selling their goods and when Cassie asks why they can’t park near the back she is told ““them’s white folks’ wagons” said Big Ma gruffly as if that explained everything”. Also in Strawberry Cassie goes to the Barnett store where Mr Barnett is very dismissive of the “little nigger” and is slow to serve her, but he lets a white child skip the queue. Almost immediately after she leaves the store Cassie knocks down Lillian Jean who in a very overt display of racial discrimination tells Cassie to move her “nasty little self” and then when Cassie protests she is assaulted by Mr Simms and has to choose between apologizing and getting her arm broken. All the incidents in Strawberry go to show that even though the law was meant to have changed since the days of slavery, the people hadn’t changed and for blacks living in 1930 Mississippi, white men’s attitudes would mean that it would be a long time before they would be treated as equals and some of them may still be waiting, even today.
We are also told by Mr Morrison that during the attack he and his sisters had been at home all year because there “warn’t hardly no work”, it is clear from this that neither he nor any of his siblings were fortunate enough to go to school. Nevertheless, this is not hard to understand as half a century after Mr Morrison’s tale the Great Faith Elementary school is only “four weather beaten houses on stilts” and one teacher has to teach two classes, and with “320 students” and “7 teachers” that is about 45 children/teacher. And it in these overcrowded buildings that the books first moment of real drama occurs as little man refuses his book, because accepting it would mean accepting that he was a “nigra” and only deserved “very poor” conditioned books. Reading the book now, we feel that this is very unfair but even the Miss Crocker who is black herself seems to think this is fair saying “that’s what you are” and Cassie notices this saying, “Miss Crocker did not even know what I was talking about.”
But perhaps the most shocking thing about Mr Morrison’s story is that black men were accused of molesting a white woman. They fled but were chased down and burnt, this story is exactly the same as that of John Henry and old man Berry. John Henry was accused of being “the nigga Sallie Ann said was flirtin’ with her” he is then chased to old man Berry’s house. There a fight ensues, Berry gets set on fire and we are left to read about the results of this crime in the horrific scenes at the end Chapter 4 where we see a man who has “ no hair” and who makes “inhumane guttural wheezing”. This striking comparison between life in a 1870s shanty town and life in a civilized town many years later a stark but all too shocking.
In conclusion, using the extract and the novel I have learnt that life in 1930s Mississippi had hardly progressed in the two generations since the civil war: Racism was still prevalent and accepted and the blacks were still treated as subordinates of the whites not equals.
