Racism Begins to Enter the Stage

            Up to this point in the book, Toni Morrison had used the narrator and the characters in order to make discrete insights about her views or racism and segregation. However, in this section of the book, the implications start being much greater and much more explicit. This can be seen when the narrator states, “And forty years ago Fairfield was farm country with a county cemetery too tiny for anybody to care whether its dead were white or black” (p. 123). This shows the importance that race has on how an individual is viewed, either dead or alive. Milkman once again appears practically as the main character of the novel and is the one that has some of the strongest opinions about racism, along with Guitar. Another important point to mention is the fact that Morrison wants to point out that even in the smallest and most remote towns of the country, African-Americans are being segregated from the rest of the community.

            “Why couldn’t anybody in his whole family just be normal?” (p. 123). I found it very interesting to observe the way in which Morrison is able to discuss two very different topics on the same page. In the first paragraphs, she discusses segregation and racism in Fairfield, and in the last few paragraphs she switches to discussing Milkman’s family problems. These sudden transitions are usually very harmful to the flow of the text, since they interrupt the chain of thought that the reader is having and switch to another idea. However, Morrison is able to link the two distinct topics in a very effective way. This allows her to provide some historical and thematic insight on racism without losing the essence of the novel and its plot. Racism begins to enter the novel not as a secondary them, but as one of the main themes.