Stuck in the middle

As I read “Sweetness “ by Toni Morrison there is a word that keeps standing out to me “mulatto”. In every single one of my English classes, this word has come out some way or somehow. This word is always correlated with a person always be lost within themselves or a person being unhappy with their life. A mulatto is a person who is a person of mixed white and black ancestry, especially a person with one white and one black parent. Once you learn what this word means you somehow begin to understand why people feel this type of way and why back then it was really somehow hard to be them. You begin somehow to find a correlation among all of them.

The first time I came across this word is when we were studying Langston Hughes. Hughes was an important African American writer during the Renaissance. He himself was a mulatto child. When reading his work you always had that sense of lostness or someone who was conflicted within himself. Some African Americans even tried to say that he was writing more towards the whites then his own people. A famous poem of him is even named “Mulatto”. In this poem, he writes about biracial children.  In this poem, Hughes throughout the poem states that he is neither white nor black because one doesn’t accept as well as the other. Giving us a sense of being lost.

 The second time that I heard this word was in a literature text Quicksand by Nella Larsen. In this novel, we are presented with a biracial character named Helga who throughout the whole book navigates all over the country and world to find herself. She gets lost in between being white and black. She neither wanted to be too white or too black. So this book takes us through her journey. A journey where she is trying to her true self and happiness. But she couldn’t find it. She stated 

 “Night fell, while Helga Crane in the rushing swiftness of a roaring elevated train sat numb. It was as if all the bogies and goblins that had beset her unloved, unloving, and unhappy childhood had come to life with tenfold power to hurt and frighten”.

When I came to this quote I was brought back to” Sweetness” by Toni Morison. In a way, I feel like because Luna’s mother was being like this to her, she herself will someone feel this way. She will forever question why her mother treated her this way and why she looked like this and not her mother. But in a way, I feel like to can’t blame her mother for the way she treated her daughter because I feel like her mother herself being a mulatto didn’t know who she was and what she stands for. She herself was a lost soul. Like how can you raise someone to love and accept yourself if you yourself don’t know that. I mean she even told the story about her mother passing as a white person. 

The way the mother prepared her daughter to face the world she would live in reminded me of this book called “The Hate you Give” by Angie Thomas. In this book, you have an African- American family who lives in a community where they are always surrounded by gangs and violence. His father taught his children at a young age the rights they have as Americans and what to do if they get stopped by a policeman. It is a good book of racial profiling and the injustice you seem to get just by the way you look. 

In a way I wan to see Sweetness as a mother who wants to show and protect her daughter from a target she has on her back the second she is born.