Thank Fucking God
I love to read. I could read books all day long and never get bored. A book has to be really bad for me to quit reading it. I mean make my eyeballs bleed, make my brain hurt bad. I just finished a book that almost made me quit reading. It's so bad I'm not even going to write it's name down so you don't read it just to see if it's really as bad as I'm saying. Just trust me, it was so bad I thought about throwing it away when I was done with it. It was set on a big plantation about 20 years before the Civil War. There were three main problems, and two of them were dialog.
First of all, some of the characters were slaves, and there was a lot of 'Oh, Massah, don' beat dis po' chile' and other early Ebonic variations. Drove me crazy. Maybe people really talked like that, but I don't want to read it. The other problem was the N word. God, if I had a nickel for every time that lady wrote nigger I'd at least be able to afford a Happy Meal. Maybe Mom can clear this up, but I didn't think back in those days they used that word all that much. Oh, and every now and then the author must have used a thesaurus because out of nowhere there would be a word that belonged in the SAT test instead of a novel, like avuncular or lubricity. What?
The main problem was just the story itself sucked in my opinion. A wealthy family torn apart by greed and lust, wouldn't be so bad. I could live with that basic theme. I could write that basic theme. What I didn't like was I was expecting it to be a romance novel, and it wasn't. There was the usual saccharine innocent young couple gazing into each other's eyes, but almost all of the lust was a bunch of slave owners getting it on with their beautiful young slave girls, cruel whipping scene optional but usually included or threatened. Even when the guys were with their wives they were usually disappointed because they thought a good whipping was just what their wives needed, or if they were with what they kept calling their bed wenches they kept fantasizing that they were really showing their wives who's boss.
Yuck.
So as soon as I finished that book I had to read another one to get the nasty residue out of my brain. Happily, the next book I read was actually really good. Night Watch by Suzanne Brockmann. I don't usually go for the whole An Officer and a Gentleman, ooh look there's a man in uniform theme, and if I did the man in uniform would probably be a policeman or fireman, not a soldier. Not that I have anything against soldiers. They do look damn fine in those uniforms, and you know a soldier has to be in pretty good physical shape, no spare tire or couch potato ass or anything. Maybe it's just because I grew up watching Emergency! and Adam 12. The only military series I can think of is MASH, and I don't think that show made anybody want to go join the Army.
Ruth, I wish you had given us the name of that book so I would know not to get it. But I probably wouldn't be reading that kind of book anyway, because I hate those GWTW wannabes anyway.
ReplyDeleteAs for the use of the word "nigger," you are right. Growing up in a Jim Crow town in southern Oklahoma, I didn't hear it all that much--and then generally from men (you know what they're like)or from ignorant white trash of either sex. And even then it was generally not used maliciously or pejoratively, but casually and descriptively as in "nigger janitor," "nigger school," or "down in niggertown." In retrospect, it was thoughtless but not generally mean-spirited.
We were encouraged to use the more polite term "colored," especially in referring to those who were "a credit to their race." I never heard anyone referred to as black until much later, when ex-colored people adopted it as a point of pride. Very confusing, but I learned to say "black" and and have stuck to that. I'm too old and set in my ways to switch once again and say "African-American." Enough already.
As a kid I think the only time I actually used the word "nigger" was when eating niggertoes at Christmas or zapping someone with a niggershooter. We had never heard of Brazil nuts, and a slingshot was something David used in the Bible and in all the pictures it didn't look at all like a niggershooter. Oddly enough, when I used those two words I didn't even think about why they were called that. It was just what they were named.
Times have sure changed. Now you can say "fuck" in public and nobody cares, but you dare not say "nigger" or report that someone else (Michael Richards, for instance) has. You have to say, with a gasp--"Omigod! He said the "n-word!"
Well, f-word to that!
Mom
Okay, the name was Storm Over Windhaven, by some French chick. Sucked ass.
ReplyDeleteref: N-wordshooter. It was such a common phenomena that this town (waco, tx) actually had a "niggershooter" ordinance well into the 1960s. That was the title and it read something like, " It is unlawful to discharge a slung shot, or a catapult otherwise known as a niggershooter any where in the city of waco." The whammo corporation came along with the "wrist rocket" that would lob marbles or ball bearings at pretty effective velocity and had the advantage of being more culturally inclusive.
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