TCNJ

25 WINTER 2020 truths. We talk in the introduction about this idea of what it means to live in a moment people are calling "post- truth." I do feel that's where some of the secret-telling came from in the book. Gay [The poet] Audre Lorde talks about this a lot in her writing — that our silence will not save us. We certainly see that exemplified by everything Toni Morrison did. And she was always radical in her truth-telling. What for each of you is the most radical truth that you share in this book? Brown-Glaude I get very angry at mothers of white sons because they don't have to experience the fear I feel raising my son. Jackson Thinking about mental illness in my family and all the other names we had given to it, in part, because there wasn't necessarily treatment available for the things we were experiencing and also because of real fear about what it meant to be black and experiencing mental illness. I grew up in rural Alabama in a community where there was a lot of segregation and poverty, and we grew up working class. I had stories my mother would tell me as jokes, like the time her brother tried to kill her with an axe, but it wasn't a joke. Humor was her way of coming to terms with it. The Bluest Eye really made me think about that. I'm not understanding because in my mind black women and girls, they don't go crazy. You get stronger — Gay We're not allowed to go crazy. Jackson We're not allowed to go crazy, exactly. You're supposed to be like a Maya Angelou poem or something. cont. on page 26 { B O O K E X C E R P T } WHY BLACK FOLKS GO CRAZY I was 18 when a boyfriend lent me The Bluest Eye. I devoured all of its strange familiarity: the host of characters who were black like me, the Dick and Jane reading primer that I had learned to read with, the separate white world by which everything in my black one was judged inferior. I had never read a book in which every character who mattered was black. I read quickly, hungrily. But when I reached the final pages, I got lost. I could not make sense of what was happening. Obviously, Pecola's eyes had not turned blue. So why would she think they were blue? Couldn't she see her own brown eyes in the mirror? And who was she talking to? My boyfriend picked me up soon after I had finished the book. "What did you think of the ending?" he asked. I was too embarrassed to admit that I didn't understand. "But the ending? The ending?" he kept saying. Finally, I admitted that not only did I not understand the ending, but I also wasn't even sure if you could call that an ending. "She went crazy," he said. —Cassandra Jackson LAUREN H. ADAMS In WTSR's studio, the book club laughs at what Gay says on Skype.

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