'More rich and beautiful cities, more temples adorned with golden Images, more sepulchers filled with treasure' awaited the English in America, thought Raleigh. He believed that the English conquest would come to possess cities more 'shining' than anything found by Cort e' s in Mexico or Pizarro in Peru.
Greg Grandin, quoting Sir Walter Raleigh, America, Am e' rica: A New History of the New World
The Indigenous and the Africans, existed since the beginning of humanity, but for the arrival of the Spanish and the Portuguese and the shimmering and shinning of gold-- in Peru. In Mexico. In Africa, along the West coast. Greed was precedent, and, as bell hooks noted, "greed" is what manufactured hate. As Faulkner would say, it's not about love.
As a result of this unfortunate past, for all of us, she didn't know how to love. Sethe, her mother, tried to explain the concept to her and her sister, Denver. She tried to explain how it was love.
You, reader of Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize winner, Beloved, may not agree. Beloved is born of love. The child is born of love, but it's the memory of the arrival of death on four horses-- and her murder-- that haunts her mother, the house at 124 Bluestone, and the community of free blacks after 28 days of what they believed to be bliss.
But the crisis remained. It had always been there. Waiting.
Even when the crawling-already-girl's parents, Halle and Sethe, loved one another and were allowed to marry, the crisis was there. How many other enslaved black men and women escaped the brutal systemic breeding of blacks for profit?
Sethe had to explain love because after 28 days of "healing, ease and real-talk," it's not that the past returned. Instead, it never left. It was always always! Like a spiteful child, it insisted on having attention draw toward it, regardless of the effort of blacks and whites, victims and perpetrators, to ignore its existence. So, after 28 days of "knowing the names of forty, fifty other Negroes, their views, habits, where they had been and what done; of feeling their fun and sorrow along with her own, which made it better," after 28 days of love and freedom, the four horsemen came. When these white men left, the once "free" black community let the love turn to suspicion. All around the former enslaved blacks in Ohio was something shimmering and glittering. But it didn't look anything like love.
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